Geoffrey Landis - Mars Crossing

In a few moments they had climbed up to reach him.

Brandon was sitting on the top of the fractured mesa, his back against a low wall. His body was covered with a fine layer of dust, and at first it looked like just a different shape of stone.

“You found him!” Tana came up beside him. “Is he okay?” She reached out and shook his shoulder. “Trevor! Trevor, are you okay?”

Brandon leaned over, and slowly toppled onto his side.

“I think we’re too late,” Ryan said. He knelt down, brushed the dust away from Brandon’s faceplate, and peered inside, trying to see. Brandon’s eyes were open, looking at nothing.

Tana was trying to take a pulse, a nearly hopeless task through the stiff suit fabric. Ryan checked Brandon’s suit pack. The life-support system said it all. The oxygen traction was too low to breathe; the carbon dioxide level up to nearly twenty percent, well above the poison level. He checked the electronic readout. Brandon had not drawn a breath for seventeen hours.

Estrela had reached them now. “How is he?” she whispered.

Tana shook her head.

Estrela knelt down across from Ryan and reached down to the body. She unclipped something from the suit, looked at it, handed it to Ryan.

It was Brandon’s emergency beacon. Ryan examined it, turned it over. Nothing visible seemed to be wrong with it. The thermal battery was unused. It was disconnected from the beacon. Had Brandon taken it apart, trying to fix it? The beacon was supposed to be unbreakable. He replaced the battery connections, broke the arming seal, and pulled the activation tab. The thermal battery grew warm in his hands, and a red light started flashing in his suit indicator panel, showing the direction and strength of the emergency signal.

The beacon was working perfectly. So why hadn’t Brandon used it?

Ryan looked up, and for the first time focused on the wall behind Brandon. There was writing there, crudely incised into the soft sandstone. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE. I DID IT. 2010-2028. Underneath, in smaller letters, it said, SO LONG, STOMPERS. He knew he was going to die, Ryan thought.

But that didn’t explain it, he realized. The inscription didn’t make any sense. Why would Trevor Whitman sign the name Brandon Weber? Why had he demanded to be called Brandon at all? Why were the dates 2010-2028? The last date was correct, but Trevor had been born in 2007. What did he mean, he did it?

He looked at it. There was only one answer. Ryan Martin didn’t like it, but it seemed to stare him in the face. Trevor Whitman was not, had never been, the person he said he was.

Once back in the hobbit habitat, they went through Brandon’s things.

Brandon Weber, Tana thought. Not Trevor Whitman. All this time he had deceived them.

It had taken only a few minutes to find where Brandon had written down the password to unlock his communications. Brandon had saved just a tiny clip of his incoming mail, but it was enough. The boy who stared out of the picture looked just like Brandon.

Ho, Brand. Man, I hope you’re having a ball up here. I can walk on the leg now, but it still hurts some, mostly when it rains. I wish I stayed back in Arizona. Oh, man, I wish I could have made it. I just hate you, you know that? Nah, don’t worry, I’m not going to tell our secret. Hey, I hope you’ve got into the pants of that Brazilian babe by now, she’s hot. Do good stuff out there, okay? Kill ’em for me. Trevor signing off.

The picture of the two of them together, geared up in climbing harness, was uncanny, a mirror of the same person twice, one slightly older, one slightly younger.

It took an hour of sleuthing through Brandon’s effects to piece together the story. When she found out about Trevor’s climbing accident, Tana gave out a long, low whistle. Wow.

She called to Estrela. Estrela looked up at her, questioning.

“Climbing accident,” Tana said. “Broken rope. And Brandon Weber gets what he wanted. Sound familiar?”

Estrela nodded.

Tana was remembering something now. She was remembering how many times she had seen Brandon alone with Commander Radkowski. He was begging, she realized, pleading with Radkowski to pick him when it came time to choose who would go home on the Brazilian ship.

Radkowski hadn’t made a choice. It wouldn’t be like him to choose before he had to. But Tana wondered if maybe he’d said something that Brandon had interpreted to mean that he had made the selection, and Brandon wasn’t it.

When a ship sinks, sometimes people would kill to get on the lifeboat.

A climbing accident. A broken rope.

And once again, Brandon got what he wanted.

It was all clear to her now. She’d thought that the broken rope was suspicious. It had been Brandon.

And now Brandon was dead.

The fossils that Brandon had found on his last night were magnificent. Tana stood in front of them and marveled. How had he managed to find it? Was this what he was looking for? Was this what he had died to find?

The fossil his body had been found next to looked as if it were the complete organism, or possibly a casting of the complete organism, permineralized by a more durable material. It looked as though it were carved from onyx.

The organism itself looked something like a medusa, or perhaps some branching plant, with sinuous branches or tentacles radiating out from a cylindrical body. Was it an animal or a plant, Tana wondered? Or, on Mars, was there even a difference?

She took out the rock hammer and began, carefully, to chip around the edges. “You want to give me some help in excising this specimen?” she said.

Ryan, standing behind her, said nothing.

She looked up, slightly annoyed. “Come on! It’ll go faster if you give me a hand here.”

“There’s no point in it, Tana,” he said softly. “We can’t take them with us. I’m sorry.”

“Ryan, you don’t understand.” She put down the hammer and looked directly at him. “This is the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century. Life existed on Mars. This proves it. Even if we don’t return ourselves, we have to preserve these. We have to! This is why we’re here.” She picked up the hammer again and began to chip at the stone, using sharp, clean blows now that she had defined the edges. “This is more important than any of us.”

“Like the Scott expedition,” Ryan said.

Tana put down the hammer and looked up. “What?”

“Antarctica,” Ryan said. “They were the second to reach the south pole. When they got there, they found Amundsen’s abandoned camps, and discovered that they had missed being first by thirty-four days. It must have been a crushing disappointment. But it was a scientific expedition. On the way, they found fossils in the mountains near the south pole. Fossils, almost at the south pole! At the time, it must have been quite an important scientific find. They were perilously low on supplies, fighting frostbite and blizzards and ferocious winds. They were dying slowly of vitamin deficiency, but they collected fifty pounds of rocks from those mountains and dragged the samples behind them for over a thousand kilometers on foot, because they thought that the scientific samples would make their expedition a success, even though they failed to reach the pole first.”

“And?” Tana asked.

“And they died,” Ryan said. “Every one of them.”

Tana was silent for a moment. “It was the fossils?” she said.

Ryan shrugged. “If they hadn’t tried to carry rocks with them, useless dead weight, would they have made it? Who can say? But I can tell this: It didn’t help.”

Tana dropped the rock hammer and sighed.

“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “We leave the fossils.”