You’re going to Mars, and I’m not.
Maybe it was the hangover. Maybe they were lax. Maybe Trevor didn’t inspect the equipment well enough. They had been using the same rope for two years and had had more than a few falls; it was due for replacement.
In any case, Trevor shouldn’t have slipped in the first place.
Brandon was on belay, and when Trevor suddenly called out “falling,” he knew what to do. He braced himself, firmed his grip on the rope, got ready for the sudden tension as the rope hissed through the anchor nuts.
The rope caught Trevor in mid-fall, and stretched. Trevor jerked to a stop in midair, windmilling with his arms to stop his tumble. He looks like an idiot, Brandon thought. The rope slacked, bounced, stretched, and suddenly snapped.
The free end whipped upward like an angry snake. Trevor screamed as he fell.
The scream stopped with a sudden thud when he hit the rocky ground below.
For a moment Brandon was paralyzed. “Oh, shit. Oh shit. Hang on, Trevor, I’m coming.” He scrambled down the cliff as fast as he could. He was hyper-aware of his every movement, suddenly afraid of falling. “Hang on, hang on.”
His brother’s crumpled body lay on the ground below, one leg twisted impossibly around, a coil of climbing rope spilled over him like a scribble. Brandon saw one arm move. He was alive.
“Hang on, you’ll be all right. I’m calling an ambulance. Hang on, damn it, hang on!”
It took ten minutes for the ambulance to arrive. On the emergency ride into town, the news of the Mars selection had played. The back of the ambulance was cramped and filled with equipment, but Brandon insisted on riding with Trevor. The paramedic had made only cursory objections.
“Wow,” the paramedic said. He was watching the news with half of his attention, while immobilizing Trevor’s leg with the other. “I don’t know who that Trevor Whitman is, but”—he deftly set an intravenous drip of some clear fluid—“I tell you, he sure is one lucky son of a bitch. Wish I could change places with him.” He looked down at Trevor critically. “Hell, bet you wish you could trade places right now, too.”
Trevor’s leg was broken in five places. Brandon could still see the jagged ends of white bone sticking through the skin. Trevor wasn’t going to Mars. Trevor wasn’t going anywhere but to a hospital bed, and to a long, painful recuperation.
Brandon leaned over and whispered into Trevor’s ear. “You’re Brandon Weber,” he said. “Brandon.”
Trevor’s face was white and covered with sweat. His teeth were clenched tightly together. Brandon couldn’t tell if he had heard him.
“Brandon.” Trevor’s free hand reached out and grabbed him by the shirt. Brandon’s heart jumped. “You’re going to Mars. Make me proud, little brother. Make me proud.”
A broken rope had given Brandon the chance to go to Mars. So, a year later and a hundred million miles away, when Commander Radkowski’s rope broke, Brandon Weber knew what it was like to be the one who watches. Trevor had given his slot to Brandon.
It was cruel to think of it, but Radkowski had been the commander. Trevor knew that when the final moment came, Radkowski would want to go himself. Putting aside sentimentality (and Brandon had never really liked Radkowski), thinking with nothing but cold calculation, Radkowski’s death had opened the door for one of the crew to go back.
13
Survival
Estrela was in a bleak foul depression—a depression that had followed her around for days, like sandpaper rubbing against her brain.
Knives tore at her throat with every breath she took. She sucked down the water bottle in her suit within a few minutes of when she put it on, sometimes before she’d even made it outside of the bubble, and it didn’t help. She couldn’t speak, could barely croak sometimes.
But the others didn’t seem to notice.
She plodded methodically across the surface, not looking at the landscape, trying not to even think. Oh, that would be the best, if only she did not have to think! If only she didn’t know what was happening and could just be mindless, a piece of wood that walked on legs of wood and didn’t have a past or a future.
Sometimes she pretended to herself that she was already dead. But somewhere inside her was a terrified animal, an animal all teeth and claws, a vicious biting thing with beady red eyes that said no, I’m not going to die. Whatever it takes to do it, I am going to survive. Other people die, but not me, never me, never never never me. She wondered that the others didn’t see it, that they didn’t flee in terror, that they somehow continued thinking her a civilized human being, and not a cornered rat-thing.
She was going to survive.
Estrela plodded across the Martian land, not thinking, not feeling, clenching her teeth to keep from paying attention to the pain in her throat and the claws ripping into her heart. All she knew was one thing. She was going to survive.
14
The Broken Lands
The territory became increasingly rough and broken.
As they traveled, the wind began to increase. It was very odd. Brandon could hear the wind, could hear a high-pitched whistling, almost (but not quite) too high to hear, but he could feel nothing. There was a gale blowing outside, and there was no force to it. He spread out his arms, and felt…nothing.
“The subsolar point is moving north,” Ryan said. The northern hemisphere was turning from winter to spring. They were still deep in the Martian tropics, not that far from the equator. On Mars, the tropics still meant weather barely above freezing at noon, and well into the negative numbers during the middle of the night.
At noon the sun was directly overhead. This made him feel completely disoriented. His sense of direction had gone bonzo, and with no shadows he had no clue which way was which.
They were walking across sand today. The terrain was flat enough that, had they still been in the rockhopper, Brandon would have thought that it was perfectly level. On foot, he found how deceptive that was. The land had minute slopes to it, up and slowly down. The rims of craters, Ryan explained. The craters had formed, and eroded, and been buried by sand, and all that was left was the faint change in slope at the buried rim.
It was in the afternoon that Brandon first noticed something moving. At first he caught a glimpse of motion out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned to look, there was nothing there. Your eyes are playing tricks on you, he thought. There’s nothing there. Then, later, he saw it again. This time he refused to turn to look. If I’m going crazy, he said, I don’t want to know.
The third one was too close to ignore. At first he saw the movement, and he looked involuntarily. There was nothing to see. But then he noticed that, even with nothing there, there was a shadow moving across the land.
And then he looked above it, looked at the sky, and saw the twisted rope of sky, a rotating column of a darker shade of yellow curling upward, writhing into the sky. It was—
“Tornado,” he shouted. “Look out!”
It turned and suddenly darted away across the land. Brandon craned his neck back. There was no top to it, not that he could see. It was hard to tell how far away it was, whether it was right next to them or a mile away.
It turned again, and darted right toward them. He threw himself on the ground, spreading himself flat. “It’s coming!” he shouted. “Look out!”
Nobody else moved.
There was no place to take cover. He hugged the ground. A few inches in front of his helmet, two grains of sand started to move. They quivered, danced a few steps to the left, made a tiny circle, and then settled down.