Mars Crossing

1 Fossil Hunters

They all clustered around the base of the cliff, looking at the layer of shale with his fossil embedded in it, examining his find. He felt inordinately proud. He had found it! Everybody else had stopped looking, but he had kept on. He, Brandon, had found fossils of life on Mars.

“It’s a great find, Trevor,” Ryan said, and he almost couldn’t help from dancing at the praise. “You’ve got sharp eyes.”

He ran fingers over it once again, feeling its surface, hoping that from tactile sense alone some message from the distant past would be transmitted through his fingertips. But the gloves were too thick, or perhaps no message was there to be sent.

It looked like nothing more than a six-inch length of some ordinary, dark brown garden hose that had somehow gotten glued into the rock. But that was impossible, of course. There were no garden hoses on Mars.

“Estrela,” Ryan said. “You’re the rock expert here. What do you think?”

“Me?” Estrela seemed startled to be asked. She seemed worn out, he suddenly thought. He was surprised how haggard Estrela looked. The pain of her arm must be wearing on her, he thought. Perhaps Tana needed to prescribe a stronger painkiller. “Clearly a fossil,” Estrela said. “I think.”

“What do you mean, you think?” Ryan pressed. “What is it?”

“Let me think.” Estrela’s voice was distant, a little weary. “This whole stratum was under the ocean,” she said. “We’re below the salt layer here, right? These are sedimentary layerings from the ocean floor. This one”—she touched the smooth blue rock layer—“is siltstone. Dried and compressed mud. This one here”—she touched another layer—“is a sandstone. This must have been a very shallow layer here. The layer with the fossil is a conglomerate; lots of different sediments pressed together. It’s right above the shale layer; more layered mud. Santa Luzia, shales often have a high carbon content. We’ve got to get the mass-spec here, look for organics.”

“But what is it?” Ryan repeated. “Is it a fossil, or not?”

“Truthful? I don’t know.” Estrela shrugged, and even through the helmet, he could see from her expression that the gesture must have been painful. “The only way to tell would be to see if there are more.”

Ryan shook his head. “We can’t. Time.” He looked at the others and repeated, “Really, we can’t. We’re spending too long as it is. You know how tight our supplies are; we’ve been almost ten days on the road so far, and we aren’t even a third of the way to the waypoint. Trevor may have found a fossil, but—”

They like me, Brandon thought. It was now or never. He interrupted. “Say,” he said, hesitantly. “Commander Ryan? I was, like, wondering. Would you do something? Like, a favor, you know?”

“Of course, Trevor,” Tana said, without thinking. “Anything. You name it.”

Ryan was slightly slower in replying. “I suppose that depends what, Trevor,” he said.

There was a big lump in his throat, he could barely squeak out his name. “Brandon,” he said.

“What?”

He took a deep breath. The air was cold, dry, metallic. “Brandon, not Trevor. Call me Brandon, okay?”

“Brandon? But your name’s Trevor. Isn’t it?”

“Oh, yeah, sure, my name is Trevor. Yeah. But Brandon is, like, a nickname, okay? I like it better. So could you call me Brandon?” He looked down and kicked a rock. It sailed off down the slope, bounced twice, and skidded downward in a tiny avalanche of dust.

Tana looked at Ryan. Ryan gave a minute shrug. “Sure, why not? From now on, you’re Brandon.” He looked around at them. “But we still have to get everybody up this cliff, anchor some cables, and get the rockhopper winched up. And it’s halfway into the afternoon, and we don’t have much time.

“So, let’s get moving now, shall we?”

2 Directions

Brandon Weber had an absolute sense of direction. He never questioned it, never thought about it, but no matter where they were, or how many twisty turns they had made in the wilderness, his built-in compass always knew which way was north.

He never bothered to think how extraordinary this was. After all, his brother Trevor had it too.

One time in high school he, along with a bunch of his high school buddies, had decided to go explore a cave. They weren’t organized or anything—Rip, one of his friends, had heard from another friend about a cave that somebody had found over in New Mexico. Kaipo, another one of his friends, had a car, and they drove out to explore it before the authorities found out about it and closed it up.

When he was younger, Brandon had often gone out exploring and rock climbing with his brother Trevor, but Trevor was a junior in high school now, and was busy being too cool to hang around much with his little brother. Brandon didn’t even invite him on this one. He’d tell Trevor about it later. This would be an adventure for him.

It was an awesome and claustrophobic experience. The mouth, hidden behind boulders on the side of a cliff, was an irregular hole barely large enough to wriggle through. It opened out into a large chamber. Just enough sunlight came in through the narrow opening to show that the floor held the charred logs of burned-out campfires and the shards of several dozen beer bottles. “Hey, we should have brought some beer,” Rip said. Shining their flashlights up, they saw the rock walls were covered with spray-painted names and dates. The oldest, “Dave” and “QT,” were written in charcoal. Dave and QT, whoever they were, must have been the first to discoverer the cave. At least their signatures, dated 2015, ten years ago, were the earliest dates on the wall.

Out of five of them, two had refused to venture any further into the cave than the distance that they could see the light from the mouth. The remaining three Brandon, Rip, and Kaipo—squeezed through a vertical cleft between two boulders at the back and into the real darkness. Only a few names were painted here, in smaller letters. In twenty feet, the passage had turned enough times that, with their flashlights off, it was pitch dark. “A maze of twisty, narrow passages, all alike,” Kaipo said.

It would have been smart of them to have brought a GPS, or even a compass, but they had not originally intended to go far into the cave. But none of the three of them wanted to be the one who suggested turning back. Instead, at each branching they marked their path on the walls with a piece of chalk that Rip had had the foresight to bring.

Carlsbad was only a hundred miles or so further on; they had all hoped that the unnamed cave they were exploring might have wonders to rival its vast chambers and arching pillars. But this one seemed to be a labyrinth of rough passages, branching and winding in all directions, only rarely opening into cramped, dome-ceilinged rooms. Sometimes they had to crawl on their bellies, and they never quite dared to stand fully upright. But when one passage came to a blind end, they always found a branch that went on, that might go on to open out into some large chamber just ahead.

After several hours, Kaipo admitted what they had all been thinking: That’s enough. Their flashlight beams were growing yellow, and by unspoken agreement they were already beginning to conserve, never shining more than one light at a time. They had better get back while they still had enough light in them to pick out the chalk marks. Rip quickly agreed, and the two of them turned and shone their flashlights back the way they’d come.

“Hey, why are you going that way?” Brandon had asked.

“The chalk marks, you dimwit,” Kaipo said.

“But—” He started to point, and then suddenly realized that it was senseless for him to point when none of them were shining their flashlights in his direction. “The entrance is just a little way over here,” he concluded.

“No way,” Kaipo said. “We’re miles away from the entrance by now.”

“You’re lost, Brandon,” Rip said.

“The hell I am.”

In the end, he convinced them to follow him a little way farther, probably for no other reason than that they wanted to gloat over him when he failed to get to the entrance. A hundred feet farther, they came into the chamber with the graffiti.

It had seemed no big deal to him. Over several hours, and several miles underground, through twisting passages, Brandon had always known unerringly where he was. On the surface of the Earth, for his entire seventeen years of life, Brandon’s sense of direction had never failed him, not even for a moment.

That was why Mars was such a shock.

3 At the Top

In fact, it had taken longer than expected to climb the cliff. Once at the top, it was their task to raise the rockhopper up, but the winching operation was slow and painstaking, and the sun touched the horizon with the rock-hopper less than halfway up. Rather than risk damaging it against an unseen protuberance, Ryan called a halt.

“Can we just leave it there, dangling like that?” Brandon asked.

“Sure, it’ll be fine,” Ryan said.

Brandon was still dubious. “What if the wind picks up over the night?”

“At this atmospheric pressure? Don’t worry about it. It would take a hurricane just to get it to budge.”

“What about earthquakes?”

Ryan laughed. “It will be fine, Trevor. Don’t worry.”

“Brandon,” he said.

“Oh, yeah. Right. I forgot. It will be fine, Brandon. Just fine. Don’t worry.”

As usual, in the morning Brandon was the first one up, and started the day by suiting up and walking around the campsite while the others were still getting up. This time Ryan didn’t even bother to remind him not to forget the suit checklist, and so Brandon was the first one to look down. The rover was covered by a fine white fuzz. He looked down at it in horror, for a moment too startled to speak. Then he keyed on his radio. “Ryan, come quick,” he called. “The rockhopper—it’s covered with mold!”

Ryan was checking the winch.

The rockhopper was easy to spot; it gleamed brilliantly white, almost bloody in the red morning sunlight. Fine, fuzzy tendrils seemed to grow out of it and reach up the invisible line of the superfiber cable. Ryan walked cautiously to the cliff edge and looked down. For a moment Ryan seemed disconcerted. Then he laughed. He went back to the winch.

“Well?” Brandon said. “What is it?”

“Frost,” Ryan said. “Only frost. No big deal.”

“Frost?” Brandon sounded doubtful. “Frost on Mars?”

Ryan spoke us he continued checking the winch. “The rover cooled down more than the rocks. Lower heat capacity. Suspended in the air—I expect it reached minus one-fifty, easy. Water condensed out on it. That’s all.”

“But I thought Mars was dry.”

“Yep, it’s pretty dry,” Ryan agreed. “But there’s still a little water in the atmosphere. More at lower altitudes. No surprise that it would condense on the rover.”

By the time they had winched it to the top of the cliff, the frost had sublimed away from the rockhopper. The frost bath had failed to clean it, though; it was still coated with a layer of yellowish dust.

They headed north and west. The ground they drove across was rocky, with a fine soil packing all the cracks and packed into the angles between rocks. Brandon saw Tana, driving the dirt-rover ahead, fighting to keep the dirt-rover under control on the smooth rock.

In the cabin of the rockhopper they still wore the chest-carapaces of their suits, but they all had their helmets and gloves off. It was beginning to smell rank, like the inside of a gym locker; they spent too much time in their suits.

Brandon clutched his fossil, rubbing the tips of his fingers over the smooth stone. Back at the bottom of the cliffs, Estrela had given him her rock hammer. Commander Ryan had complained that they didn’t have time to collect specimens, but if Ryan had found it himself, Brandon expected that he would have found the time. So while they had worked on setting up the winch, Brandon had carefully chipped it out of the rock to bring with them.

With his bare fingers, he could feel a lot more. It had fine, almost invisible ripples on the surface, like the pebbly skin of a lizard. It was relaxing to rub it.

Estrela was being quiet. She hadn’t been talking much since the accident, Brandon realized. She held her left arm awkwardly, bracing it with her right. He wondered if her arm still hurt.

“Hey, Estrela,” Brandon said. “How you doing?”

She turned to him. Her eyes had red rims, he suddenly noticed. His own eyes hurt just looking at her.

“Lousy.” Estrela’s voice was no louder than a whisper. “Go away. Leave me alone.”

In the rover there was no place to go. He wanted to ask Commander Ryan whether he had thought about who he would put on the rocket back to Earth, but decided to wait until he was alone with the commander instead of asking in front of Estrela. He thought about trying to sing a song in his head, but the landscape was too cold, too discordant. There was no way he could reconcile it to music. So instead he just watched the ground disappear under them, mile after mile after mile of endless yellow desert stone.

4 Experiencing Mars

Yellow stone desert, stretching endlessly away in all directions.

But after your eyes got used to the shades of rust and gold, Tana thought, the subtle differences in shade and the true complexity of the landscape emerged. On the ground they were now traversing, a thin plate of sandstone had been laid down over an immense flow of solidified lava. She could now readily distinguish the dark, almost magenta shades of the underlying lava in the places where the sandstone had been broken away, the lighter yellowish orange of the sandstone, and the lighter yet shade of the wind-deposited dust layer. Boulders were scattered across the landscape like children’s toys, spewed out by eruptions of immense volcanoes invisible far over the horizon. In places the sandstone had buckled up to stand in angled walls like the dorsal scales of a buried dragon.

It was tricky to drive the dirt-rover across, but interesting. The landscape was fantastic, always changing, always different. Tana suddenly regretted that she was not a geologist; she had a million questions about the landscape. She passed a column standing vertically in the desert, a black obelisk pointing a hundred feet into the sky. What was it, she wondered? The solidified core of a dead volcano, she guessed. Perhaps it had been buried, and the softer material on the outside eroded away by ten million years of sand-laced winds. She thought about calling back to the rockhopper on the radio and asking Estrela, but Estrela had not been very forthcoming, answering earlier questions only with uninformative monosyllables. Certainly she had spoken with none of the puppyish enthusiasm for rocks and landforms of the geologists that had briefed them.

So Tana stayed silent. It was, in its way, better. She could be moved by what she saw, with no barriers of language between her and the landscape, no need to communicate her feelings with others.

With all its inhuman majesty, its cold distances, its flat and unaccented sky, Tana loved Mars.

5 The Twins

Brandon Weber was nine years old before he discovered that he had an identical twin brother who was three years older than he was.

His parents, back when they had been married, had been unable to have children. In the early 2000s, this had been no big challenge. The fertility specialists they visited had advised in-vitro fertilization; their medical insurance paid the bill. An egg was harvested from his mother, Allison. A sample of sperm had been gathered from his father, examined under a microscope, and a single healthy spermatozoon was selected. By micro-manipulation, the sperm cell was injected through the outer cellular wall of the egg to fertilize it.

And then the technician watched. It took the technician three times to get one to successfully fertilize. When the ovum divided, and divided again, it was clear that the fertilization had succeeded. The four cells had been carefully separated, and each one allowed to divide to the blastocyst stage. One of these was sacrificed to microdissection, to verify that the chromosomes held no abnormalities. No Down’s syndrome chromosomes, no cystic fibrosis, no less-than-perfect babies would be good enough for Ted and Allison Whitman.

One egg had been implanted back into Allison Whitman’s uterus.

And the two others had been perfused and frozen, to serve as backups. If Allison Whitman failed to become pregnant on the first egg, there would be two more tries. As it happened, the backups were unnecessary; Allison got pregnant on the first try.

Ted Whitman, as it turned out, also had a backup plan: He had told his girlfriend Frissa that he had had a vasectomy and that “precautions” would be unnecessary. Now Frissa, too, was pregnant.

In the divorce settlement, Ted held out for custody of the newborn, and in order to get it, he ended up paying off Allison with a good chunk of his accumulated wealth. He had been getting tired of her anyway, and he didn’t really need the money. Me named the kid Trevor, close enough to his own name of Ted to satisfy his vanity, and got a court order canceling all of Allison’s visitation privileges. The last thing that he wanted was some ex hanging around with a claim on his child.

Allison moved back to western Colorado, where her family was from, and took back her maiden name. Unlike Ted—who went through two more wives before eventually giving up on marriage—she never remarried. Once was enough for her. Between the divorce settlement and her job as a private tutor in American history on the Internet, she was pretty well off. But it did occur to her, after a few years on her own, that she would like her own child. An inquiry to the fertility clinic revealed that the remaining fertilized eggs were still there, still waiting in the freezer, and by the peculiarities of Arizona law, were legally her property.

The result was Brandon Weber.

When Ted Whitman died, of a coronary at age fifty-two, his family—a mother and two unmarried sisters—asked to keep custody of Trevor. With Ted’s inability to hold onto a wife, they had been doing most of the raising of Trevor anyway. In due course a lawyer visited Allison to ask whether she was planning to sue for her rights. It was then that nine-year-old Brandon unexpectedly discovered that he had an older twin brother. The news to Ted Whitman’s family that Ted had a second son, one that they had never heard of, proved to be equally unexpected.

The lawyers turned out to be unnecessary; Allison had always liked Ted’s sisters, and they discovered that they had a lot in common, not the least of which was Ted. They got along fine. It was only Ted himself that she had had problems with.

6 Rockhopper

Another day of insanely boring driving over flat, uninteresting territory.

Brandon had to keep on checking the position of the sun to verify that they were driving toward the north. His sense of direction told him that they were driving east, then a moment later that they had doubled back around south, and then that they were driving due west. They were approaching the Martian equator now, and at noon the sun was very near directly overhead. At this time he had to just trust the rockhopper’s inertial navigation system on faith. He didn’t like it.

Estrela had withdrawn into herself. She said nothing for hours, often not bothering to reply when spoken to. Tana had gone weird. She was talking about the Mars landscape as if it were still exciting, just as if the scenery that they saw today was any different from what they saw yesterday or, for that matter, at the landing site. Only Commander Ryan seemed sane to Brandon, and he seemed to have a fixed, unchangeable mission: to put in as many miles on the road as possible.

Everybody was hoarse, everybody’s eyes were red and itching.

The rockhopper was showing wear; on the second day out of the canyon, red warning lights flashed in the cockpit of the rockhopper. The front left wheel had seized up.

Ryan examined it. The wheel was frozen, and he pulled it off to examine it. He traced the problem to abrasion due to grit leaking through the seal and into the bearing. It was far beyond any possible repair—the friction of the wheel seizing up had melted parts of the bearing, and then when it froze, twisted it into scrap. Feedback circuitry on the drive motor should have shut it off when the motor current increased; instead, it had burned out the motor as well.

There was nothing Ryan could do about it, and there no spare. He picked up the useless wheel, and hurled it as far away from the rockhopper as he could. It careened off of a rock and spun to a stop in a sand drift.

“Shouldn’t we save it?” Brandon asked. “What if we need it later?”

“For what?” Ryan said. “Nothing here can fix it, that’s for sure. It’s just dead weight.”

He cannibalized the motor and the wheel from the middle left side and moved it to the front to replace the one that had frozen. “This one isn’t in mint condition either, but it should do,” he said. It was fortunate that the six-wheeled rockhopper had a lot of redundancy; the wheels were designed to be independent and interchangeable precisely so that the loss of any one of them would not cripple the rover.

“Can you fix the seals?”

Ryan shook his head. “They just weren’t made for this much constant use. Okay, we’re ready to roll. Let’s go.”

They switched drivers. Tana, who’d had the last shift running scout on the dirt-rover, dismounted to take over driving the rockhopper.

As Tana walked toward him, Brandon noticed something odd. Through the dusty faceplate of the helmet, it was hard to tell, but he inspected her again, carefully; it wasn’t an illusion. “You’re blond,” he said.

“What?” Tana laughed. “Not by a long shot, boy.”

He peered through the faceplate of her helmet. She looked funny; the light hair stood out in stark contrast to her dark skin. “That’s what’s different. You’re a blond.”

“No way, guy.”

“Yes! Really.” Brandon looked around. There was nothing like a mirror anywhere around. Finally he went to the rockhopper. He scrubbed the dust off of one of the windows until he could see his own reflection, and invited Tana over to look. “Look.”

Tana looked at her reflection for a long time. Her hair, although not exactly golden, had turned to a light shade of brown, like wheat. “You’re right. There aren’t any mirrors around, or I would have noticed it.” She turned and looked at Brandon. “You’re blond, too. Take a look at yourself. And, come to think of it, so is Estrela. I’ve been thinking that she was doing something to her hair—it was just so gradual that I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. She used to have dark black hair.”

“What is it?” Brandon whispered.

“Peroxides in the soil,” she said. “It’s a natural bleach. No matter how we try to keep the dust out, we can’t help getting a little exposure to the soil every time we put on and take off our suits. We’re all getting a peroxide job.”

Suddenly Brandon put it together. “That’s why our eyes are so itchy all the time.”

“Yours too? I thought it was just me. Yeah, that’s probably it.”

“What do we do about it?”

“Aren’t blonds supposed to have more fun? So, let’s have some fun.” She laughed. “The dust sure isn’t going to go away, I can tell you that. So we’d better learn to adapt.” Tana looked at Brandon. “Say, are you all right? You look a little run-down.”

“I’m fine,” Brandon said. I’m stuck on Mars with psychotics, he thought. Half of us aren’t going to make it back. And there’s nothing to do, nothing to distract us. I’m going to go nuts. “Fine, fine, fine, fine.”

7 Brothers’ Pact

At first meeting, Brandon hated his newfound brother Trevor. They fought like cats, backs arched, hissing at each other and threatening to scratch. “No use bitching about it, Branny,” his mother told him. “Like it or no, he’s going to stay your brother.” And so every vacation, every summer, every holiday they were together.

But it was eerie how similar they were. Trevor liked the same virtual reality world that Brandon did, Dirt City Blue. He loved history and hated algebra, like Brandon did, and had a crush on the same virtual actor, Tiffany Li, the one that all the other kids thought was flat-chested and ugly. Brandon could quote a single word from the lyrics of a stomp song, and Trevor would know what song it was. He would complete the quote and toss a single word back, and just like he could read Trevor’s mind, Brandon always knew which song Trevor was thinking of, even if it was a stupid dumb word like “love” or “night” or even, once, “the.”

Despite the difference in their ages, they looked so much alike that sometimes when Trevor was visiting Colorado, people would think he was Brandon, and when Brandon went down to Arizona, people would talk to him as though he were Trevor, especially when he wore some of Trevor’s outgrown clothes.

Trevor was a shade more obedient, Brandon just a little more rebellious toward authority, and Brandon’s mother considered Trevor a good influence on him. Trevor was a Scout, and knew about rock climbing, something Brandon had always wanted to do. So Trevor taught him, and after that every summer they would go out rock climbing.

And when the announcement came out about the expedition to Mars, they both looked at each other. Trevor was twenty now, a junior at Arizona State. They didn’t see each other as often—Brandon was just applying to colleges—but when they did, they still instantly clicked together, as if they’d never been separated.

“You’re thinking what I’m thinking,” Trevor said. It was a statement, nut a question.

“Yeah.”

“Too young.”

“Yeah.”

Trevor thought about it for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

“Great!” Brandon broke into an enormous grin. He didn’t need to ask what Trevor was talking about; as always, they were thinking the same way. “Thanks a lot!”

Tickets to the Mars lottery were a thousand dollars. They bought thirty tickets each.

Brandon reached his hand over his head, and Trevor clasped it. “Brothers forever!” Their words were spoken so nearly simultaneously that, had there been anybody else there, they would have thought it was a single voice.

It hadn’t occurred to Brandon to doubt Trevor for even a moment; his single word—okay—was as good as a vow. The problem had been simple: Brandon was too young for the Mars lottery. Trevor would be twenty-one by the time the tickets were drawn, but Brandon would barely be turning eighteen. The rules were clear: If your ticket won the lottery, if you were over twenty-one and could pass the health screening, you got a slot on the Mars crew. If you were too young, or too old, or couldn’t pass the health exam, you had to take an alternative prize.

Brandon was too young to go to Mars But Brandon could pass for Trevor; he’d done it dozens of times.

What Trevor had agreed to, with barely a moment’s contemplation, was a substitution. If Brandon won the lottery, he could take Trevor’s identification. They were genetically identical; the identity tests would show a perfect five-sigma identity match to Trevor Whitman.

Brandon Weber could become Trevor Whitman, and take the trip to Mars.

8 Over the Line

The next day was no better. The horizon dropped away on their right, and they found themselves paralleling the rim of another enormous chasm. “Gangis Chasma,” Ryan announced. “The orbital views show some large landslides from the rim. They’re over on the north side, but I don’t know if we can trust how stable the rim is.” He was beginning to lose his voice and continued in almost a whisper. “We’d best not venture too close.”

Brandon wanted to ask how serious the danger really was—Mars had been around for billions of years, was it really likely that there would be a landslide at the exact moment they were passing by? But by now all of their throats hurt, and nobody talked more than necessary. They kept moving.

And the following day a second wheel of the rockhopper jammed and had to be pulled off and junked.

The part that Brandon liked most was when he had a shift driving the dirt-rover. They all traded off on the dirt-rover, except for Estrela, who still had one arm in a sling. It allowed him to be alone, to play his music in his head and remind himself of what it would be like when he got back home. Home seemed farther and farther away, though, and it was hard for him to remember what it had been like. It seemed as though he’d been here, driving across Mars, for forever, and the idea that he would return home seemed like something far away and unobtainable.

Driving as the trailbreaker, it was his task to find the easiest route, and it was quite a while before he realized that, for several hours now, the gentle valley that they had been following was the path of a long dried-up riverbed. Once he realized it, it was easy enough to spot. The ancient river had cut into the rock on either side, exposing the strata in parallel stripes of the darker rock. When they stopped for a break, and to trade off drivers, Brandon walked to the embankment to examine the rock in more detail.

To his disappointment, it was not the sandstone or shale they had seen in the canyon, but apparently some volcanic rock.

No place to look for more fossils.

The closer they got to the equator, the stronger the wind blew. The rockhopper had been designed for a scientific exploration and had a science instrumentation panel set in a position in front of the copilot’s seat. Brandon happened to glance at the science panel, and saw that the record of wind gusts was hitting a hundred kilometers per hour. He mentally converted—

“That’s over sixty miles an hour,” he said out loud.

Ryan glanced over at the panel. “Yep,” he said. He didn’t seem surprised.

“But that’s, like, almost hurricane speed.”

Ryan shook his head. “Not on Mars.”

It was true. The next time they stopped, he stood out in the wind with his arms outstretched. He could feel the breeze, but barely. The sand didn’t move.

In another day they approached the equator itself.

“Shouldn’t there be some sort of ceremony?” Brandon asked.

“Like what, exactly?” Ryan said.

“I don’t know. Champagne?”

“Yeah, you wish.”

“Well, something, then. At least we could stop and look at it,” Brandon said.

“Why? How’s it going to look any different than any other spot? It’s just an imaginary line—there’s nothing to see.”

“I don’t know. Just because.”

Ryan checked the time, and the readout from the laser-gyro navigation system. “We should reach the equator in about twenty minutes, if we keep up our average rate. Well, it’s nearly time to stop somewhere for the change of shift anyway. If you really insist, then we’ll stop at the equator.” He radioed ahead with instructions to Tana, who was piloting the dirt-rover, to stop and meet them for the change of shift.

The land was rough where they stopped, low broken hills and loose rock. At Brandon’s insistence, Ryan found a spot where sand had accumulated in a small hollow, checked the navigation, and drew a line in the dirt. “Okay,” he said. “There it is.”

“Are you sure?” Brandon asked.

“As best I can figure it.”

Brandon stood just south of the line, and with great ceremony stepped over it. Then he stepped back. “One,” he said.

“In olden times, sailors used to pierce their ears the first time they crossed the equator,” Tana said. “You want we should pierce yours?”

“Already pierced,” he said. He stepped over the line again, and back, and then did it again. “Two. Three.”

“We could do it again,” Tana said.

“Already pierced again,” he said, stepping across the line again. “And again. Five. Six.”

“What the heck are you doing?”

“Nine. Ten.” Brandon kept on stepping back and forth over the line. He looked up at Tana. “Setting a record, what do you think? Most equator crossings on Mars.” He gave up on stepping, and started to hop from one foot to the other, each foot coming down on the opposite side of the line. “Fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen eighteen nineteen twenty.”

“Shit,” Tana said. “I don’t believe it.”

Ryan shook his head. “Well, at least he’s getting rid of his excess energy,” he said.

After a few minutes, Brandon stopped.

“That’s it?” Ryan asked.

“I think so. A hundred and twenty. You think that record will last?”

Ryan nodded. To every direction, the landscape was barren, sterile rock. Nobody was here. Nobody had ever been here before, and if the expedition failed to reach the return rocket, probably no humans would ever return. “Yes,” he said. “I expect it will last quite a while.”

9 Breakdown

The riverbed they had been following had merged into another, larger riverbed, and other riverbeds had joined it, until it was the dry course of some enormous river, a Mississippi of Mars. Under the ubiquitous dust, the riverbed seemed to be made of some form of dried mud, smoother than the surrounding terrain. It flowed in approximately the right direction, and so they drove along it, grateful for the highway.

Until four days later, without warning, the rockhopper broke down.

This time there was nothing they could fix. The entire right side had completely frozen, and there were simply no longer enough parts to cannibalize to repair it.

“We’re dead,” Brandon said. “We’re dead.”

Ryan was working on the dirt-rover. He had taken off one of the rockhopper wheels and was disassembling two aluminum beams from the wheel-frame truss of the rockhopper to use for a makeshift trailer that could be pulled by the dirt-rover. “No.”

The riverbed they were following had widened out until it was a broad, flat plain. There was nothing to see from horizon to horizon in either direction except pale yellow-orange dust. The rockhopper lay on its side, where it had tipped and skidded to a halt, the pressurized cabin crumpled in on one side. The unbreakable carbide window hadn’t shattered, but it had buckled free of its frame and was half-embedded in the sand where it had hit. They were all clustered around Ryan, working on the dirt-rover as if there were some way that, by continuing to work, he could put off the inevitable.

“Don’t lie, I can read a map,” Brandon said. “It’s over three thousand miles to the pole.”

“It is too far,” Estrela added. “Even if we were athletes.”

Ryan pressed down on the wheel, looked at the amount of flex in the joint, and lashed three more wraps of superfiber around it. “So we go to plan B.” He looked up at Brandon. “It’s been obvious that we were going to have to make a change in plans for days. This just makes it official.”

“What?” said Brandon.

“What is this plan B?” Estrela said.

“You never talked about any plan B,” Tana said.

“Six hundred kilometers,” Ryan said. “Six hundred kilometers to go.”

“You are crazy,” Estrela said.

“I can’t do kilometers in my head,” Brandon said. “How far in miles?”

“About four hundred,” Ryan said. “A little less.”

“You’re completely crazy,” Estrela said. “We can’t get to the pole in six hundred kilometers.”

“We’re not going for the pole,” Ryan said. “Acidalia. What we have to do now is get to Acidalia.”

“Acidalia?” Estrela asked.

Tana replied for him. It was obvious to her now. “Acidalia Planitia. Of course, the Acidalia rim. Where else could we go?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Estrela said. “Where?”

“The landing site of the Agamemnon.”

10 Trevor’s Winning Ticket

All that summer before the Mars lottery, Brandon and Trevor spent together in Arizona. A ten-million-dollar consolation prize might have been a big temptation to some other boy, but for Brandon and his brother, there was only one prize: the trip to Mars.

They both knew that, even if they won, they would still have to make the final crew selection cut. It would mean nothing if they won the lottery, and then at the final cut, the mission commander—

Brandon and Trevor studied the fine print of the lottery like they had studied for no other exam in their lives. And there was a lot of fine print. The mission commander, as they discovered, had the final decision in the choice of crew. Trevor could win the lottery, and pass all the health screenings, and go through all the training—and if the mission commander said out, he would be out. There would be no appeal.

The expedition had already named the mission commander, some old-fart war hero, name of Radkowski. It was the mission commander that they would have to impress, and it looked from the dossier that this would be difficult. He was a hardnose, or so it seemed, one of those types who did everything by the book and expected everybody else to do likewise. Lots of flights to the space station, including one that they couldn’t get any information on. Apparently he had done something, broken some rule or other, something to do with the leak on the failed Russian Mirusha space station. It had apparently earned him some sort of reprimand. But they couldn’t find any details.

They spent the summer working to make sure that their credentials were so solid that he would say yes. Brandon finished his Eagle scout work, the sort of thing that would impress an Air Force guy. They worked out in the gym together and practiced rock climbing, and survival skills, backpacking for days in the desert.

They followed the first lottery drawing on an ancient television; the cabin in Arizona was too primitive to have the bandwidth for a good VR connection. They knew the odds, but still, with the number of tickets that they had bought between them, it just felt impossible that they could fail to be chosen. At first with hope, and then with disappointment, and then with rising glee, they watched the winner be drawn, and then accept the second place prize instead.

“This is it, Brandon,” Trevor said. “This one is us. For certain.”

They both concentrated. It was going to be one them. It had to be one of them. But which one?

They called out the winning ticket number, and then an instant later, checked the name against the data bank. It was some lawyer in Cincinnati.

“Oh, man, Brandon,” Trevor said, when his description and picture were flashed across the world. “Look at that fat slob! Just look at him! How could he win, and we don’t?”

“It sure doesn’t seem fair,” Brandon said. “Don’t seem fair.”

“All that money,” Trevor said. “And what did we get? Nothing. Not a damn thing.”

That night they got drunk on beer stolen from Brandon’s mother’s refrigerator.

“No sense staying inside and moping, boys,” Brandon’s mother said the next day. “Moping isn’t going to do you any good. You boys get outside, go play. Climb your rocks or something.”

She had no idea how they felt, Brandon thought. No possible idea.

Trevor looked at him. “You want to go climb?”

Brandon shrugged. “Might as well.”

Trevor went out to get the gear and bring the car around, so Brandon took the time to log in to the outside world and check the news.

The lawyer had washed out, for undisclosed reasons. Because he’s a fat slob, Brandon thought. He’d never make it to Mars. The news was just breaking on the television and VR channels. They had made a third drawing. The ticket number was posted on the net: 11A26B7.

The insides suddenly dissolved away from Brandon. They hadn’t yet checked the database and announced the winner’s name, but they didn’t have to. He felt numb, like he wasn’t really present in his body, as if there were a sudden void where his body should have been, or as if he had been suddenly glued in place. He sat down.

He knew that number. All the tickets they had bought had been 11A series. That tagged the sale to eastern Arizona.

And 26B7 was his brother, Trevor Whitman.

11 The Long Walk

Ryan told them to leave everything that they didn’t absolutely need behind with the rockhopper. Even so, the pile of stuff to be taken with them was enormous. The trailer towed behind the dirt-rover bulged out, three times the size of the dirt-rover itself. The vehicle looked like an ant attempting to pull an enormous beetle behind it.

And so they began to walk. On foot, the land seemed a lot less flat. In a few minutes the rockhopper was hidden behind the folds of the terrain. When they crested a small ridge, a mile farther along, Brandon looked back and saw it. It was almost on the horizon. It looked like a toy, abandoned in the sand, the only patch of a color anything other than red in the entire landscape. He knew that they would never see it again and wanted to say something, but couldn’t think of anything worth saying.

Ryan looked back at him. “Come on, Trevor,” he said. “We’ve got to keep the pace up.”

He looked back at it one more time, then turned forward to the long road ahead.

A day later, the dirt-rover failed. They were on foot.

They went through the pile again and cut it down by ten percent. It was still too much to carry. There were too many things that they needed: The inertial navigation system, for one. Repair parts for the suits. Vacuum-sealed ration bricks. Electrolyte-balance liquid for the suits’ drinking bottles. The habitat bubble. They went through the list again.

“What if we backpack some of the load?” Tana said.

Ryan thought about it. “We might be able to carry thirty, maybe forty kilograms,” he said. “The life-support packs are already twenty kilograms, so that’s not much extra.”

“We could carry more than that,” Tana said. “I’ve backpacked more than that on Earth.”

“Maybe. But we don’t dare let the load slow us down. Better to travel light and travel fast.”

“The gravity is lower than Earth.”

Ryan nodded. “Low, but not that low. But it will help some.”

“It will help a lot,” Tana said.

“I figure we should target fifty kilometers per day,” Ryan said. “I’m counting on the low gravity helping a lot.”

“Thirty miles a day,” Tana said. “Should be doable.”

“If we’re not overloaded, yes. Barring another accident, it will be twelve days to reach the Agamemnon.”

12 The Fall

Brandon didn’t tell Trevor. Nor his mother, nor anybody else, but especially not Trevor.

Later, he couldn’t precisely articulate why he didn’t tell. Perhaps he wanted one more day together with Trevor, climbing rocks with his twin brother, before Trevor suddenly became the most famous boy in the world and they were ripped apart by the pressure of training for the mission. Brandon knew that, no matter how Trevor said that they would always be brothers, things would be different, and Trevor would never have time for him again.

It wasn’t much of a rock, really; just a small sandstone wall five miles outside of town that they sometimes liked to go practice on. It was barely thirty feet at the highest pinnacle.

It wasn’t technical climbing at all, just something for them to do to keep their bodies active, while Trevor tried to forget that they had not been selected to go to Mars, and Brandon tried to think of what he should say to his brother. You’re going to Mars, asshole, he thought. You don’t even know it.

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.

Brandon looked up. The rest of the group was looking at him. The tornado was retreating, staggering like a drunkard off toward the horizon.

“It’s a dust devil,” Ryan said gently. “We’ve been seeing them for an hour or so.”

“That one came right over us,” Tana said. “I could feel it when it passed.”

“They’re not dangerous?” Brandon felt incredibly stupid. Dust devils. He had been afraid of a dust devil.

“Don’t think so. Must be a wind of a couple of hundred kilometers an hour, maybe.” Ryan shrugged. “But with the thin atmosphere, it’s no big deal.”

“They’re pretty, though,” Tana said. “Break the monotony.”

What had made it hard to see was the fact that the dust devils were precisely the same shade as the sky, only a tiny bit darker. Now that he knew how to look, they were easy to spot. By the afternoon there were two, sometimes even three dust devils visible at any one time. Brandon wondered if this was natural, or if something was wrong. He could remember that the briefings had talked about dust devils, but were there supposed to be this many? But after his embarrassing dive to cover, he didn’t want to ask.

15 The Luckiest Boy in the World

The radio and the television and the VR stations had all converged at the front of the house. Brandon slipped into the back and quickly changed into Trevor’s favorite orange silk shirt, then put on the turquoise bolo that Trevor had gotten as a gift. Checking in the mirror, he was surprised at how much like Trevor he looked.

“I’m Trevor Whitman,” he said, testing it out. “I’m Trevor Whitman. I am Trevor Whitman.”

It was surprisingly easy to step into Trevor’s place. The instant that the announcement had been made public, Trevor’s life had changed completely, even before he went off to Houston to train. It was a surprise, really, how few people really had to know.

Brandon had been a virgin when the lottery had selected Trevor Whitman as the boy who won the trip to Mars. Not that he would ever possibly have admitted to it. But being the most famous boy in the world has its advantages, and Brandon took them. He could walk into a coffeehouse or a cabaret and say, “I’m Trevor Whitman, I’m going to Mars,” and half a dozen girls would tell him that they found him “fascinating” and wanted to know him better. He figured that if a girl wanted to know him for no other reason than the fact that he was famous, well, that meant that he had every right to take advantage. And he did. The first one, he was nervous, certain that she was going to tell him, hey, you’re too young, you can’t be Trevor Whitman. But after the first few, it was easy.

It was fun to be famous.

16 Geology Lessons

Her mind would wander. Sometimes Estrela imagined that her brother was with her. It had been decades since Gilberto had left her. She had not thought about him for years, nor about the streets of Rio. And yet she could bring him forth perfectly in her mind, just as he had been, wiry and street smart and still larger than her. “Hey, moça,” he might say. “These North Americans, you’re in some rich company, aren’t you?” He would give her a sly look, and she knew that he would be thinking, What did they have that he could grab? Yeah, that would be just like Gilberto, always on the lookout. “Better stay alert, moça, they don’t care about you. You’re fat, you lost your reflexes, haven’t you? Don’t think you’re like them. They look at us, they don’t even see us, they just see filth in the street. They’ll kill you and not even laugh when you’re gone.”

That’s not true, she wanted to tell him.

And sometimes she would imagine João walking beside her. She would call him up in her mind, and she would think of how he might comment on the rocks as they passed.

“Hold up a moment, look at that one. Look, that’s a layer of limestone. See how it weathers differently? There were ocean deposits here, I’m sure of it.”

“I don’t care about limestone,” she would tell him, but not aloud. Her throat hurt too much for her to say anything aloud. “Go away.” It felt bitter and yet also sweet for her to see him again, even if he was dead. Even when she ignored him.

But for a moment she would be happy, showing off for João, identifying rocks and landforms for him. “That’s gabbro,” she might say, trying to sound completely confident.

“Close. Andesite, I’d say. What’s that outcrop there?”

She looked at it. A rounded ridge, with an abrupt scarp at one end. “Anticline?” she imagined saying. “Dip and scarp.”

João shook his head, almost in pity at her ignorance. “Sheepback rock, I’d say,” he said. “There was a glacier here once, I’d bet on it.”

But João was gone.

They stopped for a break, and to Estrela’s complete surprise, Tana pulled her over and wanted to talk. They had been walking in silence for so long that it came as a surprise.

“Say, Estrela, you want to know something?”

Tana didn’t wait for Estrela to answer.

“Even with the chance that we won’t make it home,” Tana said, “you know, I’m still glad I came. This is the adventure that most people will never make in a lifetime; if it means my life, this is the price that we always knew we might have to pay. Sometimes I still can’t believe how lucky we are. Even with everything that’s happened—we’re on Mars. Nobody else can say that.”

Tana fell silent, staring off into the distance.

She is crazy, Estrela thought. She is completely crazy.

17 Devils in the Sand

The next day they saw the first dust devil at ten in the morning. Brandon watched two of them dance together like mating birds, circling each other, approaching in toward each other warily and then suddenly darting away, finally twisting around each other and then merging together into a single column that marched off over the horizon and vanished.

More followed. By noon there were a dozen at once.

When one passed directly over him, Brandon closed his eyes, but nothing happened. He could feel the wind as it passed, but it was a feeble push, barely enough to be noticeable by Earth standards. He was afraid that the scouring sand would sandblast his helmet, but when he mentioned that, Ryan quickly put him straight.

“What’s getting picked up is dust, not sand,” he said. “It’s fine particles. More like talcum powder than grit. It’s harmless. If you want to worry about grit, worry about the stuff we kick up walking, not about the stuff in the air.”

“It’s gotten noticeably dimmer,” Tana said.

Ryan looked up. The sky was a deep pale yellow. The sun was, in fact, dimmer. He could almost look directly at it without blinking. “Yeah.”

“Think it’s a dust storm?”

“Wrong season.” Ryan thought about it. “Not the season for a planetary dust storm, anyway. Maybe a local storm.” He thought about it some more. “That makes sense. We’re right about at the subsolar point; we’re getting maximum solar heating right about now. The heat is making a lot of thermals. I guess it’s not surprising it might pick up some dust. In fact, I bet this is how the dust gets into the atmosphere in the first place.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“Not that I can see.” Ryan pointed forward. “Let’s keep moving.”

They had made fifty kilometers the first day of walking; fifty-five the second. Over sixty miles, Brandon calculated. No wonder his legs were aching. But that was sixty miles closer to the abandoned base at Acidalia, where Ryan hoped they could find supplies.

And then what, Brandon wondered? What it they did find supplies? Would there be enough to get them to the pole?

As the sun set and their eyes adjusted to the dusk, they noticed an odd phenomenon. The bases of the dust devils were surrounded by pale sheets of blue flame.

“I don’t believe it,” Brandon said. “They’re on fire.”

All of them stared. The pale fire brightened and flickered. Sometimes it wrapped around and then in a flash coiled all the way up the dust devil, a column of light disappearing into the heavens. For a moment it would vanish, and then flicker back to life, a blue glow dancing at the base of the column of dust.

“Plasma discharge,” Ryan said.

“What?”

“Static electricity,” he said. “The wind blowing over the dust must generate an electric potential. Like, like rubbing over a carpet on a dry day. Something like lightning, but the pressure is too low for an arc. They’re natural fluorescent lights.”

“Is it dangerous?”

“I don’t know.” Ryan pointed ahead. “But I think we’re about to find out.”

Brandon stepped back involuntarily as the dust devil raced forward. It seemed fixated on Ryan, and enveloped him. For a moment it hovered over him, dust swirling all around. Ryan began to glow, first with blue light from his fingertips, then the blue glow jumping to his helmet, his backpack, and then for a moment he was entirely outlined in blue fire.

“Ryan!” came Tana’s voice over the radio. “Are you okay?”

For an answer there was only a burst of static. And then, almost reluctantly, the dust devil peeled away. The sheet of pale fire clung to Ryan for an instant and then faded.

Ryan looked down, then up, and then his voice came across the radio. “Testing, one, two. You hear me?”

“Coming through fine,” Tana said.

Ryan flexed his fingers, and then laughed. “Well. I guess that answers your question.”

Ryan’s suit, a moment ago covered with a film of brick-colored dust, was as clean as if it had been through the laundry.

“Still,” he said. “I think that maybe it’s time we should get inside.”

18 The Storm

The next day they were in the middle of a fully developed dust storm. There were no more dust devils; now the dust was all around them.

The landscape was odd. It was dimmer than before, lit by a soft, indirect light that was easy on the eyes. The sun was a fuzzy bright patch in the yellow sky. It was the exact color of the gravy on the creamed chicken that the high school cafeteria served, Brandon thought. Babyshit yellow, that was what the kids called it.

Brandon wondered what the kids back at his school were doing right now. He looked at the clock, but then realized that it wouldn’t help him; it was set for Martian time, for a twenty-four-hour-and-thirty-nine-minute Martian sol, not for an Earth day. He could ask Ryan—Ryan always seemed to be able to calculate that kind of stuff in his head—but what would be the point?

The training they had done on Earth before the flight had told him all about Martian dust storms. Mostly they talked about the global dust storms, storms that covered the entire planet for months at a time. But now that he thought about it, he remembered that they had told him about smaller dust storms too. How long did they last, a week?

“How bad is it going to get?” he asked Ryan.

Ryan lifted his wrist and made a measurement of the sun. His wrist carried a tiny sensor designed for a spot check of the illumination for virtual reality photography. He looked at the reading and then did some calculation in his head. “I’d say that this is about the peak of it,” he said. “Optical depth right now is about as high as it’s ever measured.”

“This is it?” Brandon was incredulous. “This is a great Martian sandstorm?”

“Sand? No.” Ryan shook his head. “It’s not a sand storm. I don’t even know if Mars has sandstorms. I doubt it. It’s just dust. And, yes, this is as bad as it gets.”

This wasn’t had. Above him, he could see the occasional flicker of blue light across the sky. It flashed in sheets, like an aurora, darting in silent splendor from horizon to horizon. It was like walking on a slightly hazy day, like a Los Angeles smog. The air seemed clear around them, but their shadows were blurred. Rocks far away in the distance were a little less sharp, and the horizon was blurred. Mountains in the distance were indistinct, blending smoothly into the yellow of the sky.

“This is a dust storm?” he said. “Heck, I’ve been through worse than this on Earth.”

Ryan shrugged. “Guess they’re a bit overrated,” he said.

19 Walkabout

The morning was Brandon’s time alone, the only time, really, that he could be by himself. He had never needed much sleep, and the adults just took too long to get moving in the morning.

The others had at last come to accept the fact that he wanted to go out exploring first thing in the morning, and let him. Mostly he didn’t even really explore, just found a rock to sit behind, where he was out of sight of the others, where he could look out in the distance, pretend he wasn’t locked up inside a tiny awful suit, pretend that his friends and his music and his virtual reality were just around the corner, and that in just a few moments he would go inside, and everything would be there.

But mostly he just wanted some time to be by himself. When he had wanted to join the Mars expedition, nobody had ever warned him that going to Mars would take away his privacy. On the whole expedition, he was never far away from the others. Even when he jerked off, it had to be in a hurry, something quick and furtive in the tiny bathroom cubicle, and he was sure that half of the others were talking behind his back while he was in there, asking just exactly what he was doing that was taking so long.

Being out on Mars in the morning was simply a chance to be alone.

The dust storm was still going, but he was used to it now and hardly noticed. One side of the habitat was covered with a fine layer of dust; it was peculiar how it had deposited on just one side. The downwind side.

The terrain he walked over still looked like sand, but the sand was cemented together, firm as concrete. Indurated soil. The phrase came back to him from the hours of geology briefings. Martian duricrust.

He didn’t feel like sitting, so he picked the most interesting landmark, a miniature butte perhaps half a mile away, and climbed up to the top. It was smaller than it looked, only about twenty feet high.

From the flat top, he could see other buttes, all seeming to be the same height, twenty feet or so above the ground. It was just like the southwest, he thought. He knew this territory. The original surface had been higher, where he was standing, and over the millennia, the winds had eroded down the surface, leaving slightly harder rock, like what he was standing on, behind to stand up above.

It must have been dust storms just like the one that was happening now that did it. So much for Ryan’s confident prediction that the dust was too fine a powder to erode anything. But then, he thought, it may have taken millions of years to erode. Billions, even. Even pretty fine dust might be able to carve down rock over a billion years.

Still, the dust storm was somewhat of a disappointment. He had pictured a storm like something from one of the songs, howling winds and sand: “the naked whip of a vengeful god / that cleanses flesh to alabaster bone.” He had pictured coming out of a tent and finding themselves buried. Something a little more than a smoggy day with heat lightning.

Looking back the way he had come, he could see the habitat. They had picked the bottom of a gentle dip in the ground to put up the bubble, and inside it he could see the shadows of the other three Mars-nauts just beginning to stir about. They weren’t even breakfasting yet, he thought. Slowpokes.

He thought about giving them a call on the radio, just to check in, but decided they just might ask him to come back in and help deflate the habitat. It would be ages before they would be ready to move on, and he didn’t feel like coming back yet.

He scrambled down the edge of the miniature butte and walked over to climb the next one.

There was still plenty of time to explore.

20 Morning Call

The habitat was deflated and packed away. Tana and Estrela were suited up, as was Ryan, and they were ready to go.

“Ryan Martin to Brandon,” Ryan broadcast, once again. “Calling Brandon. Calling Brandon. Come in.”

Where the hell was Brandon?

“Possibly his suit radio is malfunctioning,” Tana said. “Maybe he hears you, but can’t respond.”

If his radio had failed, it didn’t seem likely that he wouldn’t return immediately, but maybe he had found something interesting. “Brandon, we’re not receiving you. If you’re hearing this, return immediately. Brandon, return immediately.”

In the worst case, even if his radio had completely failed, he would trigger his emergency beacon, which ran from a separate thermal battery, completely separated from the rest of the systems. The suit could fail completely and the emergency beacon would work.

But where was he?

The wind and the settling dust had thoroughly erased his footprints. Ryan had no guess even which direction to look. He had vanished without a trace.

“Brandon, come home,” Ryan broadcast. “Brandon, we’re here. Brandon, come home.”

There was no answer.

21 Coming Home Late

Brandon Weber wasn’t worried, not yet. He had been waiting for the call for him to return to the campsite, and enjoying the chance to walk during their delay. He mildly wondered what the others were doing that was taking them so long to get moving, and wandered a little farther than he had planned.

He checked the time, and with a shock realized that it was after nine. Where the heck were they doing? Where was that radio call, anyway?

He toggled his radio. “Brandon, ah, Whitman, checking in. What’s up, guys?”

No answer. He toggled his radio again, and then with a sinking feeling noticed that the red light didn’t come on.

Uh-oh. The suit radio wasn’t working. No wonder they hadn’t called; they’d probably been calling for an hour and were going to be as mad as hell.

He toggled it a couple more times. Was it was possible that it was the light that had failed, not the radio? “Hello, camp. Brandon here? Are you there?”

Nothing.

“Uh, I’m coming back. Wait for me, okay?”

They were going to be pissed.

A radio check was part of the space-suit checkout, but nobody else had been around when he went through the check list. He couldn’t recall if the red light had come on or not.

It didn’t matter now. He had better get back to camp, pronto.

They were going to be mad as hell.

22 Missing

Ryan started the search by climbing to the top of one of the mesa formations nearby. From that height, he could see much farther, but no Brandon.

The dust storm was continuing at full vigor, but the suspended dust barely impeded his visibility. The wind had completely vanished, and there was no trace of motion anywhere to be seen. The sky was flat, as uniform as if it had been spray-painted onto smooth plaster no more than an arm’s length away.

From up here the horizon must be four or five kilometers away, but it was only slightly blurred from the dust. Brandon was nowhere in sight. The countryside was like a maze, Ryan thought. There were almost a hundred of the little mesas in view, and lots of places he couldn’t see. Brandon could be behind any one of them.

He tried the radio again. “Brandon! Come in, Brandon!”

It was impossible that he could be lost. He had an inertial compass. And, if he got completely lost, why didn’t he trigger his emergency beacon?

“Brandon! Report immediately! Brandon!”

23 Walk

For the last hour, Brandon had been thinking, with rising uneasiness, the habitat must be just behind that next butte. No, it’s the next one. The next one.

At last he stopped. It couldn’t be this far. He must have, somehow, walked past it.

Okay, don’t panic.

For the tenth time since realizing that he was due back at the habitat, he scrambled up one of the little buttes and looked around. For miles around, nothing.

Don’t panic, don’t panic.

The dust was like a smooth brick dome over his head, circumscribing the world.

He must have gone too far. It was easy to get confused here. All of the little buttes looked so much alike. He should have paid more attention to the landscape. Don’t panic, it will be okay.

He must have gone right past, somehow missed seeing it. Okay, he wasn’t lost. He’d have to backtrack. He still had his sense of direction. He looked up at the sun, but it was little help, just a slightly brighter patch of sunlight almost directly overhead.

Maybe he should to trigger his emergency beacon, he thought. It wasn’t an emergency, not really, but the others would be worried. If he triggered his beacon it would show them that he was all right.

And it would give them a radio signal to locate him.

No, it wasn’t really an emergency, but it would be prudent to be safe, he thought. They wouldn’t blame him for being cautious, would they? The emergency beacon was mounted at the back of his suit, where his hip pocket would be, if it had a pocket. The thermal battery required that you break a seal, then pull a trigger tab that mixed the chemicals that reacted to power the signal.

He could feel the emergency beacon, right where it was supposed to be, but he couldn’t find the trigger tab. He twisted around to look. The socket that should have held the battery was empty. Don’t panic, don’t panic. Brandon Weber began to run.

24 Search Parties

They searched all day, fanning out in widening spirals away from the base. Over and over Tana or Estrela saw what they thought were footprints, that on close examination turned out to be just weathered depressions in the rock. The hardpan soil did not take tracks, or if it had, the wind and the gently settling dust had erased them. And dust had settled over everything, erasing contrast, making the rocks almost indistinguishable from the soil or the sky.

After they had searched for a kilometer in every direction from the dome, they searched again, this time more meticulously, checking each notch between rocks, every narrow cleft, every crack, fracture, or ravine where Brandon might be lying injured or unconscious.

He was nowhere to be found.

By nightfall they realized that Brandon was not coming back.

25 Sense of Where You Are

By nightfall Brandon realized he was not going to find his way back.

He had been walking for hours. He remembered running blindly and screaming, only coming to his senses when he tripped over a fracture in the sandstone. His sense of direction, always infallible on Earth, had betrayed him. He had no idea where the others were, one mile away or a hundred, or even whether they had decided he was gone and left without him.

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.

When a ship sinks, sometimes people would kill to get on the lifeboat.

A climbing accident. A broken rope.

And once again, Brandon got what he wanted.

It was all clear to her now. She’d thought that the broken rope was suspicious. It had been Brandon.

And now Brandon was dead.

28 Scott’s Fossils

The fossils that Brandon had found on his last night were magnificent. Tana stood in front of them and marveled. How had he managed to find it? Was this what he was looking for? Was this what he had died to find?

The fossil his body had been found next to looked as if it were the complete organism, or possibly a casting of the complete organism, permineralized by a more durable material. It looked as though it were carved from onyx.

The organism itself looked something like a medusa, or perhaps some branching plant, with sinuous branches or tentacles radiating out from a cylindrical body. Was it an animal or a plant, Tana wondered? Or, on Mars, was there even a difference?

She took out the rock hammer and began, carefully, to chip around the edges. “You want to give me some help in excising this specimen?” she said.

Ryan, standing behind her, said nothing.

She looked up, slightly annoyed. “Come on! It’ll go faster if you give me a hand here.”

“There’s no point in it, Tana,” he said softly. “We can’t take them with us. I’m sorry.”

“Ryan, you don’t understand.” She put down the hammer and looked directly at him. “This is the greatest discovery of the twenty-first century. Life existed on Mars. This proves it. Even if we don’t return ourselves, we have to preserve these. We have to! This is why we’re here.” She picked up the hammer again and began to chip at the stone, using sharp, clean blows now that she had defined the edges. “This is more important than any of us.”

“Like the Scott expedition,” Ryan said.

Tana put down the hammer and looked up. “What?”

“Antarctica,” Ryan said. “They were the second to reach the south pole. When they got there, they found Amundsen’s abandoned camps, and discovered that they had missed being first by thirty-four days. It must have been a crushing disappointment. But it was a scientific expedition. On the way, they found fossils in the mountains near the south pole. Fossils, almost at the south pole! At the time, it must have been quite an important scientific find. They were perilously low on supplies, fighting frostbite and blizzards and ferocious winds. They were dying slowly of vitamin deficiency, but they collected fifty pounds of rocks from those mountains and dragged the samples behind them for over a thousand kilometers on foot, because they thought that the scientific samples would make their expedition a success, even though they failed to reach the pole first.”

“And?” Tana asked.

“And they died,” Ryan said. “Every one of them.”

Tana was silent for a moment. “It was the fossils?” she said.

Ryan shrugged. “If they hadn’t tried to carry rocks with them, useless dead weight, would they have made it? Who can say? But I can tell this: It didn’t help.”

Tana dropped the rock hammer and sighed.

“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “We leave the fossils.”

Ryan had brought one rock with him, the small fossil that Brandon had found that day at the wall of the Valles Marineris. The fist-shaped rock seemed small and tawdry next to the large fossils of the fault wall, but it was the one Brandon had found.

They had left Brandon’s body propped up where he had died, leaning against the wall and sightlessly staring toward the eastern horizon. Ryan leaned down, placed the little fossil in Brandon’s right hand, and closed his left hand over it. “Trevor—Brandon—whoever you are,” he said. “I guess it’s too late now to really even know. Goodbye, Brandon.”

He paused. “Wherever you are—good luck.”

When they returned to the habitat for the night, Ryan gathered them together to talk about their plans. It was frightening to see how few the expedition had become. We knew people were going to die, he thought. We knew it, and yet, when it happens, we still can’t quite get a grip on it. Chamlong, and then John, and now Trevor, gone. He knew that Trevor—Brandon, he should think of him as Brandon now—had deceived all of them, that he must have killed Radkowski, but somehow he still couldn’t quite believe it. He lied right from the beginning, he thought. He deceived all of us.

What secrets did the others have?

Ryan had liked him. The betrayal was somehow worse for that. And now he’s dead, too.

“We can’t afford any more accidents,” he said. “The expedition is already dangerously small. We can’t lose anybody else; we can’t make any mistakes. From here, we travel light and last, no sidetracks, no exploration, no sight-seeing, just speed. No more wandering. We make a straight-line dash for the Agamemnon site.

“We leave behind everything that we don’t absolutely need. Agamemnon was the Cadillac of expeditions. They had everything, and they abandoned it at the site, for the most part completely unused. We’ll resupply there.”

“Showers,” Tana said.

“Decent food,” Estrela whispered.

“All that,” Ryan said. “All that, and one thing, the most important thing of all.

“Agamemnon brought an airplane.”