“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Estrela said. “Where?”
“The landing site of the Agamemnon.”
10
Trevor’s Winning Ticket
All that summer before the Mars lottery, Brandon and Trevor spent together in Arizona. A ten-million-dollar consolation prize might have been a big temptation to some other boy, but for Brandon and his brother, there was only one prize: the trip to Mars.
They both knew that, even if they won, they would still have to make the final crew selection cut. It would mean nothing if they won the lottery, and then at the final cut, the mission commander—
Brandon and Trevor studied the fine print of the lottery like they had studied for no other exam in their lives. And there was a lot of fine print. The mission commander, as they discovered, had the final decision in the choice of crew. Trevor could win the lottery, and pass all the health screenings, and go through all the training—and if the mission commander said out, he would be out. There would be no appeal.
The expedition had already named the mission commander, some old-fart war hero, name of Radkowski. It was the mission commander that they would have to impress, and it looked from the dossier that this would be difficult. He was a hardnose, or so it seemed, one of those types who did everything by the book and expected everybody else to do likewise. Lots of flights to the space station, including one that they couldn’t get any information on. Apparently he had done something, broken some rule or other, something to do with the leak on the failed Russian Mirusha space station. It had apparently earned him some sort of reprimand. But they couldn’t find any details.
They spent the summer working to make sure that their credentials were so solid that he would say yes. Brandon finished his Eagle scout work, the sort of thing that would impress an Air Force guy. They worked out in the gym together and practiced rock climbing, and survival skills, backpacking for days in the desert.
They followed the first lottery drawing on an ancient television; the cabin in Arizona was too primitive to have the bandwidth for a good VR connection. They knew the odds, but still, with the number of tickets that they had bought between them, it just felt impossible that they could fail to be chosen. At first with hope, and then with disappointment, and then with rising glee, they watched the winner be drawn, and then accept the second place prize instead.
“This is it, Brandon,” Trevor said. “This one is us. For certain.”
They both concentrated. It was going to be one them. It had to be one of them. But which one?
They called out the winning ticket number, and then an instant later, checked the name against the data bank. It was some lawyer in Cincinnati.
“Oh, man, Brandon,” Trevor said, when his description and picture were flashed across the world. “Look at that fat slob! Just look at him! How could he win, and we don’t?”
“It sure doesn’t seem fair,” Brandon said. “Don’t seem fair.”
“All that money,” Trevor said. “And what did we get? Nothing. Not a damn thing.”
That night they got drunk on beer stolen from Brandon’s mother’s refrigerator.
“No sense staying inside and moping, boys,” Brandon’s mother said the next day. “Moping isn’t going to do you any good. You boys get outside, go play. Climb your rocks or something.”
She had no idea how they felt, Brandon thought. No possible idea.
Trevor looked at him. “You want to go climb?”
Brandon shrugged. “Might as well.”
Trevor went out to get the gear and bring the car around, so Brandon took the time to log in to the outside world and check the news.
The lawyer had washed out, for undisclosed reasons. Because he’s a fat slob, Brandon thought. He’d never make it to Mars. The news was just breaking on the television and VR channels. They had made a third drawing. The ticket number was posted on the net: 11A26B7.
The insides suddenly dissolved away from Brandon. They hadn’t yet checked the database and announced the winner’s name, but they didn’t have to. He felt numb, like he wasn’t really present in his body, as if there were a sudden void where his body should have been, or as if he had been suddenly glued in place. He sat down.
He knew that number. All the tickets they had bought had been 11A series. That tagged the sale to eastern Arizona.
And 26B7 was his brother, Trevor Whitman.
11
The Long Walk
Ryan told them to leave everything that they didn’t absolutely need behind with the rockhopper. Even so, the pile of stuff to be taken with them was enormous. The trailer towed behind the dirt-rover bulged out, three times the size of the dirt-rover itself. The vehicle looked like an ant attempting to pull an enormous beetle behind it.
And so they began to walk. On foot, the land seemed a lot less flat. In a few minutes the rockhopper was hidden behind the folds of the terrain. When they crested a small ridge, a mile farther along, Brandon looked back and saw it. It was almost on the horizon. It looked like a toy, abandoned in the sand, the only patch of a color anything other than red in the entire landscape. He knew that they would never see it again and wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything worth saying.
Ryan looked back at him. “Come on, Trevor,” he said. “We’ve got to keep the pace up.”
He looked back at it one more time, then turned forward to the long road ahead.
A day later, the dirt-rover failed. They were on foot.
They went through the pile again and cut it down by ten percent. It was still too much to carry. There were too many things that they needed: The inertial navigation system, for one. Repair parts for the suits. Vacuum-sealed ration bricks. Electrolyte-balance liquid for the suits’ drinking bottles. The habitat bubble. They went through the list again.
“What if we backpack some of the load?” Tana said.
Ryan thought about it. “We might be able to carry thirty, maybe forty kilograms,” he said. “The life-support packs are already twenty kilograms, so that’s not much extra.”
“We could carry more than that,” Tana said. “I’ve backpacked more than that on Earth.”
“Maybe. But we don’t dare let the load slow us down. Better to travel light and travel fast.”
“The gravity is lower than Earth.”
Ryan nodded. “Low, but not that low. But it will help some.”
“It will help a lot,” Tana said.
“I figure we should target fifty kilometers per day,” Ryan said. “I’m counting on the low gravity helping a lot.”
“Thirty miles a day,” Tana said. “Should be doable.”
“If we’re not overloaded, yes. Barring another accident, it will be twelve days to reach the Agamemnon.”
12
The Fall
Brandon didn’t tell Trevor. Nor his mother, nor anybody else, but especially not Trevor.
Later, he couldn’t precisely articulate why he didn’t tell. Perhaps he wanted one more day together with Trevor, climbing rocks with his twin brother, before Trevor suddenly became the most famous boy in the world and they were ripped apart by the pressure of training for the mission. Brandon knew that, no matter how Trevor said that they would always be brothers, things would be different, and Trevor would never have time for him again.
It wasn’t much of a rock, really; just a small sandstone wall five miles outside of town that they sometimes liked to go practice on. It was barely thirty feet at the highest pinnacle.
It wasn’t technical climbing at all, just something for them to do to keep their bodies active, while Trevor tried to forget that they had not been selected to go to Mars, and Brandon tried to think of what he should say to his brother. You’re going to Mars, asshole, he thought. You don’t even know it.