“Why look out the window when we can go out and see for ourselves?” he said. “Get your suits ready, gang, it’s time to go outside and play. Get a move on; in six weeks we’ll have to go home, and we’ve got a full schedule before we go.”
With the lander resting at a pronounced tilt, the ladder splayed out at a cockeyed angle. Climbing down was not really difficult, but it was a challenge to descend gracefully. To hell with it, Radkowski thought, and jumped, landing off balance in a puff of dust.
As mission commander, it was his task to say some immortal words for the watching cameras. He had his lines memorized, extemporaneous words to be remembered forever, written for him by a team of public relations experts: I take this step for all humankind. In the name of all the peoples of Earth, we return to Mars in the spirit of scientific endeavor, with the eternal courage of human adventure and bringing with us the voice of peace among all men.
Stumbling up onto his feet to stand on the red sands of Mars, with Ryan Martin shooting him on high-definition television out the window of the lander, John Radkowski uttered the immortal words of the third expedition to Mars. He said, “Holy shit, I just can’t believe I’m really here.”
The sand had a hard, crunchy surface, and crackled underfoot as if he were walking on a thin crust of frost. Beneath the crust, the surface under his feet had the consistency of packed flour. Tiny puffs of rusty dust billowed away from his feet every time he raised a foot, and within a minute, his boots and the bottom half of his suit had been lightly spraypainted in ochre. He felt light. They had maintained half of Earths gravity by the tether during the seven-month journey on the Quijote; the Mars gravity was noticeably lighter, and despite the eighteen months of training in Mars-simulation tanks on Earth, he felt as if he were buoyed up by invisible floats.
As he’d figured, Don Quijote had landed on the slope of one of the small ridges, and sat at a precarious tilt. Fortunately the ship had never been intended to take off from Mars, and in a day they would move their living quarters out of the cramped Quijote and into the inflatable habitat that had been landed on Mars with Dulcinea.
Behind him, his Brazilian colleague Estrela Conselheiro hopped down the ladder. She bounced on the ground, bounded into the air, and stretched her arms overhead as if worshiping the sun. “Oh, it is magnificent, is it not? Magnificent!”
Much better words than his own, Radkowski reluctantly admitted to himself.
Behind Estrela, Tana Jackson came down. “Yikes!” she said. “That’s one bodacious step.” She looked around, and caught her breath. “My god, it’s magnificent,” she said.
Finally Chamlong Limpigomolchai jumped down, negotiating the jump without any comment. Once on the surface, he pivoted slowly around to look in all directions in silence. The other two crew members, Ryan Martin and Trevor Whitman, stayed behind in the lander; they would only leave Quijote and come down to the surface when Estrela, Tana, and Chamlong rotated back to the ship.
It was everything he had wanted, what he had struggled and worked and lived for. The rust-encrusted, ridged terrain, the distant buttes barely visible through the cinnamon haze on the horizon, and Dulcinea, their ticket back to Earth, sitting ready for them, no more than a fifteen-minute walk away—he had seen it a hundred times in his dreams.
So why was he suddenly depressed?
John Radkowski had no tools for analyzing his mood. Self-inspection had never been encouraged in the astronaut corps; the main purpose of the many counselors and psychologists, according to the gossip, was to weed out the weak sisters from the active duty roster. Focus on the task, get the job done, don’t complain; that had been the motto of the people that Radkowski had worked and trained with for years. Now, suddenly, his entire future seemed to be an anticlimax; even the remainder of the six-week stay on Mars and the flight back to Earth, featuring a swingby and gravity boost from the planet Venus, seemed to him like nothing but tedium. He had been focused on reaching Mars for so long, he had never set personal goals for beyond the moment. His life, as he knew it, was over, and he had not even the faintest inkling of what would lie beyond.
A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, he thought. I’ve grasped my dreams. What do I do now?
2
Trevor
The kid who called himself Trevor Whitman stood pressed to the viewport, looking eagerly out at the surface of Mars. With half of his attention he was scanning the landscape for signs of…He had no idea, really: an alien artifact, maybe, or footprints of dinosaurs or the imprint of fossilized ferns in an overlooked rock. None of these, of course, were things they had any expectation of finding on Mars, but if nobody looked for such things, they could be right on top of them, and nobody would notice.
But with most of his attention he was not looking at anything in particular, just drinking in the sight of Mars. After seven months crammed into the tiny crew cabin, it felt good to focus his eyes on something in the distance. In the background he could hear the radio communications from the astronauts on the surface. The surface fines are more cohesive than we’d expected. Sounded like Captain Radkowski’s voice. Looks like there is some amount of salt cementing the panicles together. It is clogging up the treads on my boots, but so far no problems with traction. Definitely Radkowski; nobody else would be so concerned with the picky details like that. He tuned it out. Ryan Martin was communications officer, if anything happened—not that anything was likely to—Ryan could cope with it.
Mars, finally Mars. He watched Estrela bound across the surface, leaping and pirouetting with the grace of a dancer, and he felt a gnawing jealousy. He itched to get out on the surface, and it seemed unfair that he had to wait before it would be his turn down.
At eighteen, Trevor had yet to learn patience.
It was simply not fair.
After what had to be an hour, Chamlong Limpigomolchai came back up the hatch, and Trevor waited impatiently as the airlock cycled with the painstaking chug, chug, gurgle of the roughing pumps. The lock opened, and Chamlong’s helmeted face appeared. His suit was dusted with a light powder of ochre dust. The dust tickled Trevor’s nose like bursting bubbles of some metallic champagne.
Chamlong pulled off his helmet. He had a grin the size of Texas. He had brought with him a halt dozen rocks.
“I figured you’d be in a hurry to get outside, not so?” Chamlong said. “So I came back in to let you get a chance to go.”
“Thanks, Cham,” Trevor said. “I really appreciate it. How was it?” For the whole journey, the Thai astronaut had been his favorite friend among the adults, and his simple friendliness counted for a big reason why. The rest of the adults too often just ignored him, or gave him orders.
“Oh, kid, you will not believe how much excellent it is to get outside again, and just stretch,” Chamlong said. “I tell you, get out there, see for yourself.”
“You got it,” Trevor said. “Give me a suit inspection, okay?” The suit inspection had been drilled into them by Captain Radkowski in every one of the hundreds of practice runs for surface operations during the mission. Never leave the spacecraft until you have had somebody else go through the checklist on your suit. Never. It had seemed like overcaution to Trevor—nobody would skip a vital step on a suit. That would not just be stupid, it would be suicide. But when he’d said that, Radkowski had only given him a look like he was a child, and started out with another of his rambling astronaut stories, this one about some buddy of his who had skipped the checklist, went through a hatch with a purge valve that had been clipped open for an inspection and almost got himself killed. Actually, Trevor liked to hear Radkowski’s astronaut stories—and he made himself a mental note never to clip open a purge valve—but when they were just a way to pound home some simpleminded moral like “always take care,” they sometimes got a bit tiring. While Chamlong gave him his inspection, he thought only, Mars, I’m finally going out. Mars, I’m finally going out. Mars, I’m finally…