The situation was made even more complicated by the sudden presence in the Tharsis region of a small dust storm. Now, I think I have explained a bit about Martian dust storms. For example, it’s a lot worse trying to take off or land aircraft in them, and that was why our government launched various unmanned explorers over the years. Often, the explorers orbited the planet for months, waiting for the sandstorm season to come to an end. The storms have been hard to photograph, because hunks of rock blowing around are inimical to photosensitive equipment — no matter how compact and solid-state. In fact, our own mission was designed to avoid the worst of the sandstorms that usually occur in Martian autumn. We are supposed to be gone by then. Spring, however, since it is a season with much variation in temperature, can spawn some activity. Which is to say that Mars has weather just like Earth. As a result, we had an idea what we were in for when the sun rose one morning sheathed in a brown-and-orange mist.
The worst of it are the so-called dust devils. It’s not just that the wind whips up, and a lot of Martian detritus blows around, but you also get these tornadoes, with the traditional funnel clouds careening wildly across the Martian wastes, occasionally picking up heavier material, in just the way an earthly tornado would. We have seen from our few orbiting satellites that these dust devils sometimes transport old human space junk and deposit it hundreds of miles away. And you never know exactly which direction the funnel is going to go, either. It bloweth where it listeth.
I told José that we were going to have to get everything that was outside, the laundry line, some of the machine tools, even the ultralight, back into the Excelsior, and then we were going to have to drive over to the greenhouse, to help Laurie and Arnie reinforce the polymer exterior to make sure they didn’t start leaking oxygen or losing temperature. This would kill all the plants. It was a long day securing everything, just like during the Atlantic hurricane season, and just as with a hurricane, we named the storm. We named her April. She was the first named storm on Mars. By the way, Steve and Abu showed up a bit later, and it was true that Steve was not himself. He seemed fainthearted, ghostly, slow to action, slow to respond.
I suppose we should have expected that the storm would prove a harbinger of worse things. Isn’t there always some fell monstrosity that gets thrown up by these weather events? Think what happened with hurricanes of old, even in the past fifteen or twenty years in a period of heightened global hurricane activity. Think of the pressure exerted on coastal development by climatic change. But I guess I am referring more to the symbolic stuff that comes in a storm. If you think symbolically about it, you’d know that Brandon himself was going to turn up, that the storm was Brandon, somehow. The planet was using Brandon to show what it was hiding beneath its layers of sediment. Or at least this was what I thought about it later. Brandon was the interplanetary bringer of war, fighting back against a somewhat puny but determined Mars colony from planet Earth, the other seven of us. If we anthropomorphized the storm, it was maybe because we were waiting for Brandon.
After we helped the others prepare, the three of us shut ourselves into the Excelsior and waited. We had dinner as we did most nights. And then we played cards. José was complaining that he kept losing, and that the two of us were ganging up on him. He said this in a good-natured way, not like the José of old. It occurred to me, because there are idle moments in life when you think about these things, that perhaps the José of old just never would exist again. With a serious head injury, you get these alterations in personality. They’re just rarely this pleasant. But then I made note of an even more interesting hypothesis. What if, kids, José had never injured his head at all? What if José Rodrigues was looking for some graceful way out of the military-industrial straitjacket that NASA had fitted upon him? It was a straitjacket that other Mars mission sociopaths still seemed to feel they needed to wear, but maybe José had had an interplanetary change of heart, a space epiphany. It was possible this new José was the more genuine one. I didn’t say this aloud, not while beating him at cards. There were many more months to live together. Who knew how many?
We prepared for bed. Or at least Jim prepared for bed, because he always went to bed earliest, preferring to wake just as it was light. Like a monk. Jim had been complaining about sleep for some time, had begun relying on a certain sleep preparation, which I believed was going to run out before long. I was worried about him becoming habituated to the medication. He may have begun already, which would account, perhaps in part, for his short temper with me.
For example, he was prone to complaining about how I chewed my food. I had, at some point in my youth, taken to heart advice I’d read that suggested that you should chew every mouthful of food thirty-two times. I had lived some of my life on Earth in a careless way where this kind of advice was concerned. Because of the dearth of food we actually were permitted to consume on the Mars mission, I had begun counting, nearly obsessively, each and every mastication. I almost felt guilty, somehow, if I swallowed before I had chewed the proper number of times. Then, one day, in a whimsical mood, I’d made the mistake of boasting about this to Jim. Since then, he had watched me eat, when he could bring himself to do so, with ever increasing amounts of agitation. Apparently, he had started counting my mastications as well. His other complaint referred to the wounded expression he said I wore each night when he elected to go to sleep and to leave José and me to do as we wished. No wonder he resorted to sleep aids. On the night in question, Jim, perhaps by reason of narcotics, was soon snoring the delightful little rasps that were his nocturnal communication.
An hour or so later, after I had written my nightly bulletin post to Ginger and read a little bit of Marcus Aurelius, I found myself so drowsy that I fell asleep with my cabin suit still on, reading glasses still pinched onto my nose, having failed to brush my teeth, which was something I had started to fail to do, in the past weeks, because of the scurvy that was commencing to afflict me. Once your teeth start becoming loose, who gives a royal shit about them? Unless Arnie was going to give me some of the green peppers he was hiding away, I was just going to lose some of my teeth, and that would be that!
The light went off down in the cargo bay, and then night was upon us. The Martian night, which by virtue of the lack of streetlamps and other light pollutants was of a fearsome intensity. We could hear the wind outside the Excelsior, in our dreamless and lonely states of unconsciousness, and we could hear the sand pelting the sides of the capsule, drifts of it accumulating. Or that is how I’m reconstructing it, since I was already asleep.
A commotion awoke me. A scuffle of some kind. I didn’t know the hour. What difference do particular times make to a Martian colonist? Clocks are for the pointy heads back on Earth. Anyway, it was night and I heard something, and it was kind of quiet at first, but then it seemed a lot louder, a struggle nearly, an altercation. Astronauts pitted against others. Soon I was awake, and I was running, somewhat disoriented, down to the cargo bay, carrying a penlight. Of course I bodily fell down the ladder and landed in a heap on the lower floor. No bones broken. Banged up horribly. I gathered myself up on the way to the light switch.