At last, too tired to go on, he climbed to the top of one of the endless maze of buttes. In every direction, nothing but empty Mars. Even the sunset was a disappointment, a slow dimming of the light into brick red haze.
There was a fracture line running down the middle of the butte; one half of it was two feet higher than the other. It made a natural seat. Without any sense of wonder, without even a sense of irony, he reached out and touched it. Embedded in the layered sandstone exposed by the crack, it held a perfectly preserved fossil. It looked like a cluster of shiny black hoses, clumped together at the bottom, branching out into a dozen tentacles at the top. In the same section of rock, he could see others, of every size from tiny ones to one three feet long. There were other fossils too, smaller ones in different shapes, a bewildering variety.
“I name you Mars Life Brandonii,” he said.
There was not much he could do. The suits needed service, he knew. Every night Ryan changed out the oxygen generators. He wasn’t sure quite what was done to make them keep on working, but he knew that the oxygen supply wouldn’t run overnight. He could even remember, with a near-hallucinogenic clarity, the lessons that they had been given about the suit’s life-support systems. The briefing technician had told them that twenty hours was an absolute, complete, do-not-exceed design limit for the suit’s oxygen generation capacity. The technician had chuckled. “Of course, you won’t ever have any reason to put in more than a quarter of that.”
The water recycler had already quit on him, and his throat was dry and hurt like hell.
He was going to die on Mars.
With the geologic hammer that Estrela had given him, he scratched into the stone beside the fossils. It was soft, as easy to carve as soap. BRANDON WEBER WAS HERE, he wrote, and then tried to think of a witty line. He couldn’t. At last he added I DID IT.
It would be his tombstone, he thought. The idea seemed vaguely funny, nothing to be taken seriously. But tombstones need dates, so he added: 2010-2028.
And then, he wrote: SO LONG, STOMPERS.
Brandon Weber sat down, rested against the sandstone ledge, and stared into the dark toward the sunrise he would never live to see.
26
Searching
Estrela had been silent for almost a week. Her throat hurt too much for her to talk. She wanted to say, stop searching, it’s too late, he’s dead. We need go get moving. But she had no voice.
But Ryan was adamant; they wouldn’t abandon one of the crew.
They continued the search the next day.
It was afternoon when Ryan thought he saw something on top of a mesa. It was the same color as the rocks, but the shape was different, and something seemed to be reflecting skylight. One side of the mesa had crumbled away to form an easy ramp to the top. He climbed up to look.
It was Brandon.
“I’ve got him,” he said. “Tana, Estrela, I found him.” They were about five kilometers away from where they had camped. Over the horizon; it was hard to believe that he would have wandered this far. What could he have been thinking?
Tana’s voice over the radio. “Where are you?”
Ryan walked over to the edge and looked around. Estrela and Tana were visible below, only a hundred meters away. “Up above you,” he said. “Look up.”
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.
27
Hard Questions
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.