And the following day a second wheel of the rockhopper jammed and had to be pulled off and junked.
The part that Brandon liked most was when he had a shift driving the dirt-rover. They all traded off on the dirt-rover, except for Estrela, who still had one arm in a sling. It allowed him to be alone, to play his music in his head and remind himself of what it would be like when he got back home. Home seemed farther and farther away, though, and it was hard for him to remember what it had been like. It seemed as though he’d been here, driving across Mars, for forever, and the idea that he would return home seemed like something far away and unobtainable.
Driving as the trailbreaker, it was his task to find the easiest route, and it was quite a while before he realized that, for several hours now, the gentle valley that they had been following was the path of a long dried-up riverbed. Once he realized it, it was easy enough to spot. The ancient river had cut into the rock on either side, exposing the strata in parallel stripes of the darker rock. When they stopped for a break, and to trade off drivers, Brandon walked to the embankment to examine the rock in more detail.
To his disappointment, it was not the sandstone or shale they had seen in the canyon, but apparently some volcanic rock.
No place to look for more fossils.
The closer they got to the equator, the stronger the wind blew. The rockhopper had been designed for a scientific exploration and had a science instrumentation panel set in a position in front of the copilot’s seat. Brandon happened to glance at the science panel, and saw that the record of wind gusts was hitting a hundred kilometers per hour. He mentally converted—
“That’s over sixty miles an hour,” he said out loud.
Ryan glanced over at the panel. “Yep,” he said. He didn’t seem surprised.
“But that’s, like, almost hurricane speed.”
Ryan shook his head. “Not on Mars.”
It was true. The next time they stopped, he stood out in the wind with his arms outstretched. He could feel the breeze, but barely. The sand didn’t move.
In another day they approached the equator itself.
“Shouldn’t there be some sort of ceremony?” Brandon asked.
“Like what, exactly?” Ryan said.
“I don’t know. Champagne?”
“Yeah, you wish.”
“Well, something, then. At least we could stop and look at it,” Brandon said.
“Why? How’s it going to look any different than any other spot? It’s just an imaginary line—there’s nothing to see.”
“I don’t know. Just because.”
Ryan checked the time, and the readout from the laser-gyro navigation system. “We should reach the equator in about twenty minutes, if we keep up our average rate. Well, it’s nearly time to stop somewhere for the change of shift anyway. If you really insist, then we’ll stop at the equator.” He radioed ahead with instructions to Tana, who was piloting the dirt-rover, to stop and meet them for the change of shift.
The land was rough where they stopped, low broken hills and loose rock. At Brandon’s insistence, Ryan found a spot where sand had accumulated in a small hollow, checked the navigation, and drew a line in the dirt. “Okay,” he said. “There it is.”
“Are you sure?” Brandon asked.
“As best I can figure it.”
Brandon stood just south of the line, and with great ceremony stepped over it. Then he stepped back. “One,” he said.
“In olden times, sailors used to pierce their ears the first time they crossed the equator,” Tana said. “You want we should pierce yours?”
“Already pierced,” he said. He stepped over the line again, and back, and then did it again. “Two. Three.”
“We could do it again,” Tana said.
“Already pierced again,” he said, stepping across the line again. “And again. Five. Six.”
“What the heck are you doing?”
“Nine. Ten.” Brandon kept on stepping back and forth over the line. He looked up at Tana. “Setting a record, what do you think? Most equator crossings on Mars.” He gave up on stepping, and started to hop from one foot to the other, each foot coming down on the opposite side of the line. “Fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty.”
“Shit,” Tana said. “I don’t believe it.”
Ryan shook his head. “Well, at least he’s getting rid of his excess energy,” he said.
After a few minutes, Brandon stopped.
“That’s it?” Ryan asked.
“I think so. A hundred and twenty. You think that record will last?”
Ryan nodded. To every direction, the landscape was barren, sterile rock. Nobody was here. Nobody had ever been here before, and if the expedition failed to reach the return rocket, probably no humans would ever return. “Yes,” he said. “I expect it will last quite a while.”
9
Breakdown
The riverbed they had been following had merged into another, larger riverbed, and other riverbeds had joined it, until it was the dry course of some enormous river, a Mississippi of Mars. Under the ubiquitous dust, the riverbed seemed to be made of some form of dried mud, smoother than the surrounding terrain. It flowed in approximately the right direction, and so they drove along it, grateful for the highway.
Until four days later, without warning, the rockhopper broke down.
This time there was nothing they could fix. The entire right side had completely frozen, and there were simply no longer enough parts to cannibalize to repair it.
“We’re dead,” Brandon said. “We’re dead.”
Ryan was working on the dirt-rover. He had taken off one of the rockhopper wheels and was disassembling two aluminum beams from the wheel-frame truss of the rockhopper to use for a makeshift trailer that could be pulled by the dirt-rover. “No.”
The riverbed they were following had widened out until it was a broad, flat plain. There was nothing to see from horizon to horizon in either direction except pale yellow-orange dust. The rockhopper lay on its side, where it had tipped and skidded to a halt, the pressurized cabin crumpled in on one side. The unbreakable carbide window hadn’t shattered, but it had buckled free of its frame and was half-embedded in the sand where it had hit. They were all clustered around Ryan, working on the dirt-rover as if there were some way that, by continuing to work, he could put off the inevitable.
“Don’t lie, I can read a map,” Brandon said. “It’s over three thousand miles to the pole.”
“It is too far,” Estrela added. “Even if we were athletes.”
Ryan pressed down on the wheel, looked at the amount of flex in the joint, and lashed three more wraps of superfiber around it. “So we go to plan B.” He looked up at Brandon. “It’s been obvious that we were going to have to make a change in plans for days. This just makes it official.”
“What?” said Brandon.
“What is this plan B?” Estrela said.
“You never talked about any plan B,” Tana said.
“Six hundred kilometers,” Ryan said. “Six hundred kilometers to go.”
“You are crazy,” Estrela said.
“I can’t do kilometers in my head,” Brandon said. “How far in miles?”
“About four hundred,” Ryan said. “A little less.”
“You’re completely crazy,” Estrela said. “We can’t get to the pole in six hundred kilometers.”
“We’re not going for the pole,” Ryan said. “Acidalia. What we have to do now is get to Acidalia.”
“Acidalia?” Estrela asked.
Tana replied for him. It was obvious to her now. “Acidalia Planitia. Of course, the Acidalia rim. Where else could we go?”