I should point out that in the days that had intervened, I, for one, continued to track Brandon, using the device that was affixed to his rover. It was at this point that he did seem, at last, to descend into the mouth of the Valles Marineris, that immense geological formation, no doubt in the process exploring for water, life, bacteria, and all the ready-to-be-plundered resources that the mother planet was happy to have shipped back to her. Brandon’s movements, as I conceived of them from the Excelsior, were anything but faint of heart. It was as if, by neutralizing José, he had, indeed, surmounted the biggest of his problems, and was now safely at work on a task ordered directly from the USA. His industry suggested that we might, at some point, have the element of surprise where Brandon was concerned.
Jim wanted to keep it this way. But he still needed to be certain that the ultralight was mission ready, and that he’d be able to land it on the rocky terrain near the canyon without turning it into a pile of scrap. And so he resolved to set off in a southerly direction. A curious way to go, kids, because the south, like the poles, to which we would not have access because of the distance, just didn’t have much to offer, besides some dry ice. Not like the outflow channels at the eastern end of Valles Marineris, where Brandon had lately pitched his camp. Nevertheless, the impact basin nearby, Argyre, also presented, according to geologists on the home planet, the great likelihood of water ice. And any trip to Argyre kept us far away from Brandon.
It was a risk to fly the craft in a direction where none of us could help Jim in the event of difficulty. And NASA would have been the first to advise against it, had we been in a mood to listen to their point of view (since their unpleasant broadcast memorial to José, which had run on the web in the days after his demise). They were no longer telling us what to do and were beginning to recognize, I think, that we had long ago assumed responsibility for ourselves. We offered very little in the way of specifics to Mission Control.
It may have been true that Jim Rose wanted the emptiness and the experience of tundra. The Martian emptiness was more empty than any other emptiness. I made Jim promise to take a video camera, however, in case he resolved some of the scientific problems that were much on our minds.
I met him by the aircraft, and in the new post-sentimental environment occupied by the inhabitants of the Excelsior, I offered him the meal I had packed, which was some repulsive mixture of cream cheese, freeze-dried olive paste, candy bars, and a bottle of water, not something, I suppose, that he would like, with his finicky tastes, but food nonetheless. I advised against eating it all at once.
“And don’t forget the video.”
It was early morning, and he would have the hazy sun on his left as he flew south.
“I won’t. And you’re going to continue to keep an eye on Brandon.”
I nodded, withdrawing slightly. Perhaps I was right to do so. Maybe I knew the burden that Jim carried with him on that trip, in which he became the fulcrum for all that would happen on Mars in the future, the Mars of your generation, the Mars to come. Maybe I knew, likewise, that it wasn’t likely that Brandon was just going to give up harrowing the rest of us. Nor was it the case that M. thanatobacillus, once exposed by José, was going back into its hiding place beneath the surface of the interplanetary imagination.
There was no wind. Jim managed, despite a few remaining boulders on our makeshift runway, to get the ultralight aloft, and because we had left it out for a day or so, there was enough juice in the solar cells for him to make the trip with minimal expenditure of solid fuel. He banked left, out above the dunes, as though surfing on their crests. I don’t know how far off, because distances were lost to me. Then he headed out of my view, bound for the Argyre Basin.
The ultralight was equipped with a camera too, so as long as he was near enough to transmit to the little broadcasting antenna we’d erected on the roof of the Excelsior, he could send back fuzzy real-time footage of the terrain beneath him. Though I had seen Mars from above, as had all of us, it had been some time since the landing, and being elevated enough to look beyond the lip of the horizon was glorious and implicitly hazardous. What looked unvarying at first sight, the ferrous red and battleship gray of the surface, had grown in our time here much more complicated. There were all manner of strange geological formulations passing beneath Jim. I watched until the transmission began to break up, until grids of digital static broke through it and he was gone.
What we now know, kids, is that this was the moment in the wilderness when Jim Rose, free of the shackles of his fellow Martians, had the experience of being one with the new planet. This was the moment. He’d been flying for a couple of hours, as I understand it, before he saw the impact basin beneath him, the collapsed wall on the north side that was said to be the route through which the Argyre emptied its primordial flood upon the lowlands. We now know that Jim piloted his ultralight just south of the collapsed wall, and finding that the land was smoother here than elsewhere — because the Argyre was of a more recent vintage, as far as asteroid strikes go — he set the plane down without incident. Once on the ground, Jim made some kind of feeble and perhaps awkward obeisance in the direction of the planetary spirit of Mars, because this was how he was in those days. He thanked Mars for bringing him to this spot without incident, and then he got a pickax out of the back of the ultralight. Think of it, kids, Jim Rose sweating through his space suit, digging. We had just dug a grave, farther north, you see. Graves were on our minds. My mind, at any rate. We’d dug a grave because we had nothing else to do with José’s body, because there were no vultures to pick him apart, and there was no incinerator, yet, in which to put his body, and, as I’ve said, given the natural refrigeration of the planet Mars, if we had left him out in a crater, it was likely that his body would have remained in a mild state of decomposition for a very long time. So we buried him.
In the process of burying José we did soil tests, as we always did. And this process had not yielded any irrefutable data yet, though Steve had preserved an ambiguous sample of the dirt several feet down and taken it back toward the power plant for more testing. Whatever Steve may or may not have found was completely different from what was at Argyre. At Argyre, kids, there was a bounty in the regolith. The bounty was not even far below the surface. The bounty was there waiting to be harvested, as though the destitute face that Mars presented to the heavens, to the orbiting crafts, to the unmanned missions that had landed here in the past fifteen or twenty years, was completely fraudulent, deliberately so. Jim wasn’t even six feet down when, making use of an electrical coil he’d patched together back at the Excelsior, he melted himself a cup full of water.
Water! That tasteless (or mostly tasteless), odorless (or mostly odorless) fortification that makes up the vast majority of our physique. Call it a long cool drink, call it rehydrating, call it an adulteration, it was the thing that made Earth, the watery planet, what it was, a teeming, complicated celebration of organics. It was the first requirement for life! And here it was! Frozen into the subsoil on Mars in a way in which just about anyone could get to it, if only he were willing to dig. Some of the unmanned Mars missions had come tantalizingly close, but they’d found mere traces of H2O in places where it was inefficient (by reason of landscape) to harvest it, or where it was evaporated quickly. We had set our ships down in just such a landscape. A deserted part of a desert planet.