Moons as misshapen lumps of mashed potatoes. Glorified asteroids.
Below:
Big and red and cratered and blown-out like H-bomb test sites. Untamed.
Hostile. Barely touched by anything other than the wear and tear of the inky
black. A few green and blue and bruise-purple patches where we had pumped the
chemicals into the naked air. Just pockets of off color obscuring part of the
rusty surface, like how earth, from space, looked like a cloudy blue marble, scarcely
any land visible.
"Touch
the glass, John. Jesus it's cold."
Ben
buzzed around my ear. He ate an unidentifiable piece of fruit. Leaning on the
glass. Looking away. He was stealing a moment I had waited for my whole
conscious life.
"Fly-by's
taking fucking forever. I say drop down and figure it out in the descent."
I
didn't dignify it with a response. And for whatever reason, I projected that my
regard for the view was clinical, detached. That I didn't want to show my
capacity for succumbing to awe in front of Ben. Ben, who had spent the birth of
all his three daughters at the same bar across the street from the hospital.
Who probably never looked at the night sky except when working. Who had no
thoughts about the dark romance of the Void. The way he sulked through the
accessible parts of M1, he looked like he was stretching his legs on a coach
flight across the Midwest.
"You
know, John, I was talking to some of the mil guys about the origin of the
peanut the other day, and for the life of us we couldn't--"
"Jesus
fucking christ, Ben, shut your fucking mouth for twenty fucking minutes while I
look at Mars. Mars! Right in front of my face! Maybe the most important thing I
have ever seen in the whole of my wasted human life!"
Ben
paced a stretch, caught himself on a wet cough and he kept clearing his throat
like he was working up a fat loogie.
"God,
John, that sounds awfully nihilistic of you. Depressing."
"Ben!
Shut up! Go to the Mess and make yourself a sundae."
"Who
stuck a dick in your beer?"
"Ben!"
"All
right, all right! Gone!"
He
shuffled off. He tossed the eaten hulk of his fruit in the air like a baseball,
up and down and up and down, never failing to find amusement in low gravity.
Alone
in the obs bay. The sun was bright off Mars, and the interior light strips
adjusted and dimmed to nearly nothing. A luminous orb out there in the ether, a
roundness from something as weak and patient as gravity.
My
mind wasn't working the way I wanted it to. I couldn't process the view, same
as how I didn't feel the warm bearhug of god when I looked down at earth. I
tried to force some profundity, tried to squeeze out tears but I couldn't. I
wanted to stay up there, floating. No ship, no suit, no body, a disembodied
presence, more god than anything else I had ever known. Instead I kept thinking
about the landing, how no one knew exactly how we were going to do it, how some
of the cynics on the mil team were putting down bets that we'd fry in entry or
crash and all die, the same black hearts who bet at Trinity that The Bomb would
ignite the atmosphere and snuff out all terrestrial life; the coal-hearted
purity of making a gamble you wouldn't be able to collect if you won. I thought
about the career astronauts who did systems checks on the outer hull of M1,
glorified spacewalks, sitting in an oxygen chamber for four hours before they
went out and hung from a silky tether and inched along like a terrified spider
across billions of dollars of metal and plastic. How they came in and Ben
convinced me to smell their suits, Come on, John, smell the suits! Charred and
smoky, that was the smell of the universe. How did Mars smell? We would
probably spend the first few years out mostly in our surface suits, and we'd
have all the time in the world to inhale that rust dust and infant atmosphere
before we could go out in plain clothes all the time and smell it ourselves. Acclimating
to point-three gravity Down There. How some dipshits in the physics department
thought about planting a mass generator inside the Martian core, like boosting
the gravity to earth levels wouldn't wreck havoc on something that had been
that way since the dawn of geologic, universal, cosmic time. How no one had
ever experienced point-three before and how they thought our bones would hollow
like majestic soaring birds and we'd need wheelchairs to hack it back on earth,
like the long-shift ISS 'nauts who came back and barely managed on canes. And
the pure paranoia of walking across those rocky wastes not cleared by the
dumbbots, how you could twist an ankle, break it, puncture your suit and breath
something so toxic you wouldn't even have time to panic. The first few months
mostly in the livable parts of the ship, waiting for the periodic drops of
heavy gear, building a base like it was earth, building mirrors of our labs and
facilities, eventually a Colony, how many years before we get women pregnant or
bring kids along? Or dogs? Rhesus monkeys? Before you see tourists like you see
on the moon? Before we carve out red circles of dust and play baseball and hit
balls thousands of feet, outfielders making fifteen-foot leaps. Something silly
like Marsball, not baseball. New sports to invent and--
Would
we ever go back…?
A
thought so elementarily silly and so abstract I, for a moment, didn't think
where "back" was. I wanted to chase down Ben to talk shit about
whatever randomness he had on his mind to keep that lingering stomach-pit shame
of pausing what I had back on… well… It was different between Ben and myself.
He never talked about his daughters and his wife. He didn't bring pictures. He
never asked about my boys. Kept his distance about my wife. Never came with me
to the spot. Never even saw the Zone, though it was never much to see. I don't
blame him. That's the history of explorers. No different than the New World.
New World, a New Life. Them's the rules. Farther than anyone had ever gone.
Unknown. Mars as untapped real estate or a fuel station or whatever. Except we
were pretty sure there was no one down there to greet us or hate us; no Indians
to harass us day-in, day-out, to skirt our borders like curious deer, to come
by in late November to drop off leftovers for us starving-to-death settlers.
I
found Ben on the control deck. He and the youngest guy on the crew, a
vaguely-familiar face probably nineteen or so, were taking this wadded-up ball
of paper wrapped with a whole roll of electrical tape, fashioned more or less
as a sphere, tossing it into a garbage can on the far side of the room, over
the heads of some of the guys at work, kind of deliberately pissing them off,
arguing over which parts of the room were worth which points, like how an
underhand toss near the bin was five points and an across-the-room miracle shot
was worth a hundred. They clearly had no indication if or when or how the game
would end.
The
control deck didn't have any windows. All the civ and mil techs had screens
that went over their eyes, views kept private to those onlooking. Through the
stereoscopes were their surrogate visual senses, the nodes covering the hull
wherever there was space enough for a camera the size of a pencil eraser. They
saw the vis spectrum and infra and ultra-v and radio and had their HUD with a
million cluttered things, took a decade of specialized training to understand.
I imagined that leaving their workstations and hypervision and returning to the
blandness of M1 and poor eyesight was the worst comedown in the world.
The
Colonel-Pilot came in from a hatch near the front of the room and
"Attention on deck!" and the mil guys stood crisp and the
Colonel-Pilot told them As You Were.
"Good
news, bad news, gents."
Ben
was still throwing his paper ball. His young opponent elbowed him sharply in
the ribs. We all stood there, waiting.
"The,
uh, good, sir?" asked one of the techs.
"We've
made a good sweep of the landing site, and we're going to make our descent
within the terrestrial day. We're at D-Day minus twenty hours."
He
stood there at parade-rest, waiting for his prompt.
"And
the, uh, bad, sir?"
"Weather
instruments on the surface are crusty from a sandstorm and the Kennedy probe is
getting interference. Solar flare or some nonsense," with the swipe of a
hand, no hideous gasburst from the sun wouldn't wreck his career-highlight day.
"Looks like we'll have to ride the stick all the way to touchdown. But you
boys have landed in hairier conditions. Hooah?"
A
lukewarm chorus.
The
Colonel-Pilot walked to the back of the room, and the guy next to Ben
straightened.
"Sir,
permission to ask a question, sir."
"Go
ahead, corporal."
"Sir,
why not wait until we troubleshoot the instruments? Get one of the old probes to
fix them up? Sir?"
The
Colonel-Pilot stroked his clean-shaven chin, like he was postulating an answer
though he, clearly, already had one.
"We're
near bingo fuel, Intihar. We wait a day and we lose propulsion. Given that
case, if we're lucky, we drift out and stay clear of spacejunk long enough for
a lifeboat, possibly-but-not-probably manned, to come and drag our ass back to
LMO, low Mars orbit, before a second ship arrives. Not so lucky: We get pulled
in and roast in the atmosphere. Uncle Sam doesn't want his shiny new ship to
burn up like used tampons, right?"
"Absolutely,
sir."
The
Colonel-Pilot clapped Intihar hard on the shoulder and left the room. Ben took
the paper ball from Intihar and tossed it successfully into the garbage can.
"Twenty
points. You owe me ten bucks, chief. Pay up!"
"The
fuck, Ben?" I interjected.
"Relax,
John."
"Relax
about a blind landing?"
"Like
they didn't warn us about that possibility a million times? Christ, you really
get my goat sometimes. And besides, John, there's a first time for
everything."
(Chapter 7 coming Wednesday, November 30, 2011.)
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