They couldn't leave Abdul Qawi behind so Asya bolted a makeshift fold-down seat into the rover near its airlock. The rover was arranged with seating for a driver and a passenger side by side at the front, and two double bench seats facing each other behind that. But Asya had already removed the forward-facing bench seat to make room for the extra supplies they would take along. "Medical supplies, rations for two months, our spare generator and field survival equipment," she told them as they crowded into the rover two hours before leaving, as the violet-grey dawn began tinting the eastern horizon. The stack of cases reached the ceiling of the rover.
Marco asked why they would take these, when the rover already carried similar gear by default.
"If we find those people over there, we cannot bring them all back at one time. We take this as precaution."
"But you don't really believe we will find anyone, do you?" asked Don. It was dawning on him, as she shook her head emphatically, that their commander was investing her energy in this trip because she relished the challenge. She thrived on this. It was the closest she could come to spaceflight without leaving the ground. In fact she was the closest thing to cheerful since the landing.
Over their hurried breakfast in the wardroom, Asya had more to say. Around mouthfuls of granola bar and dried fruit she urged them to alertness. "This is the most dangerous day we have since we land," she said, emphasizing her phrases with her free hand chopping at the tabletop. "Is not just a nice drive in the desert, not just a field trip." She went through the key procedures and emergency routines, then drilled them until they recited the lists in unison.
Don nodded. This codifying of life-or-death actions did nothing to shake him. Rather, he was all the more eager to get moving. It was so much like the Mexico
Later they sealed the hatch, checked the seals, detached the rover from the Hab, and were ready. Don shifted on the bench and fastened the lap strap. Asya had appointed Annika as first driver, with Don and Marco taking turns later. The rover moved off with a low hum and the distant sound of tires over gravel, carried up to them through the vehicle's titanium alloy structure.
Annika reached up and adjusted the swivel range of the ceiling cam. "I ought to feel like the whole world is watching," she chuckled, "but honestly, it's just us. That's all so far away now." Don nodded. It didn't seem possible that several billion pairs of eyes and ears would be witnessing their expedition. It wasn't so much that this was an ordinary day – it wasn't – but to him, each of them seemed so ordinary, real people, not celebrities. They were just doing their jobs.
Marco settled himself more comfortably into the navigator's seat, loosening one of his straps a little. "The heading is one-fifty on the map, but we should go more north at first because of the bumps."
"What bumps?" asked Don.
"Those bumps," he replied, waving ahead at some mounds about five hundred metres distant. "I know there's a scientific name for them, so I left that for you. I walked halfway out there the other day, after finishing the solar field checklist. They look like big piles of dust."
Don squinted over Marco's shoulder, then picked up the field glasses. "Barchan shapes. See the aeolian crest. Light silicates, covered in a layer of fines."
Annika adjusted the steering back towards Marco's 'bumps'. "Oh! Dunes! Can we climb them?"
"No!" barked Asya. "No play today. Be adults." She glared around at them all.
"I was joking, really," said Annika. "Maybe another day."
Don checked on A.Q. and swapped seats with him after half an hour so the Yemeni could have a better view. Also, he thought, so I can get away from that Russian woman. It was good to have the original Anastasiya Komarova back, but that took them back to the bad old days of the trans-Mars voyage. He sat and brooded, peering out of the small port in the rear airlock at the slow dust cloud stretching out behind them. Why did he have to be so anti-social? Why couldn't he find a way to break the barriers instead of building them? After a while he noticed that Asya and Abdul Qawi were talking, comparing homelands, trying to outdo the other with tales of corruption, or organised crime, or wild mountain men, or bad driving, or historic battles. Don couldn’t face joining in that conversation. The very thought of the extreme news he could cite from his homeland sapped his strength.
"So what do you all really think?" asked Annika. Don realised she had just reached up and switched off the ceiling cam with one hand without taking her eyes off the terrain ahead. "What do you think we're going to find?"
Asya retorted without a pause for thought. "If they live, they made some stupid mistake. There is no failure mode fits the evidence. Human error. Very dead, or very stupid." She threw in a few Russian curse words for emphasis. Don found that her words had tensed him up, and he tried in vain to squeeze the stress and unexpected defensive anger out of his shoulders. He forced himself to say nothing.
Marco elaborated at length on the possible failure modes. "The craziest thing," he added, "is how there is no real sign of life from orbital photos. Just a few details of movement in the first fifty days, then nothing. No rocks arranged in S.O.S., no sign of meteor strike. There was that dust storm for a few weeks, and then one morning their rover's disappeared." He shrugged. "I have no conclusion. We need more evidence."
Annika said something similar, trying to convince them that the human factors were the most difficult to parse. "You have six human beings, selected as carefully as we were, trained probably more than we were – no offence, A.Q. – but we all assume therefore that they could make no mistake or suffer any kind of stress or breakdowns. I say that is the most likely explanation. Team dynamics or human error, like the Commander says."
They sat silently, chewing that over. Their own interpersonal issues came to Don's mind. How close were they to imploding? Would a third expedition need to come looking for them?
"And you, Professor?" Asya asked, with a smirk. "You are expert with life on Mars. Do they live, or no?"
He gave her a one-sided smile. It was pointless to vent his anger at her. He was too tired to fight. "I have no idea why they stopped communicating, but I am pretty certain – say ninety percent – that they survived at least the first few months. Probably until now. Call it gut instinct. Maybe one or two of them perished somewhere in the rover. Maybe they were trying to reach our pre-landed Hab supplies. But what caused the problem? I have no clue. Probably an electronic failure. In the communications system, or the power, despite what Marco says about their indestructible RTG."
That restarted the debate about failure modes, systems reliability and whether the technical calculations meant anything when there were human beings involved. Eventually Annika announced that she was switching the cam back on, and they quietened down.
They swapped seats then, and Don took the navigator's position. He watched Marco's fearless driving nervously out of the corner of his eye. Don didn't need to give Marco any directions – the Brazilian seemed to have the whole local map imprinted in his head. Sooner than he had expected, they reached the wide gap between the big rocky outcrops which marked the exit from the ghostly crater in which Jamal had landed. The hills came closer, two to four hundred metres in height, close enough for Don to make out fist-sized rocks through the field glasses. Some rises and cliffs towered over them. Other stretches were rolling waves of rock. His field of view swung and dipped with the damped movement of the wheels over stones and with Marco's edgy swerves. But he could still make out details. He heard himself muttering, "Basaltic glass. Sulfates. Plagioclase. Hmm. Not much olivine. Ancient water deposition? Because of the sea?" When he put down the field glasses he saw that all the others were trying not to stare at him.
Asya wasn't even trying. "So, Professor, you like this place? This desert?" She snorted to herself and turned away.
"Actually, yeah. We're driving across the ancient sea floor. Can we get out and have a look around?"
"No! We get out at the other place." They had stowed their Mars suits in the rover's lockers, and it would take a while of contortions and elbowing each other to don them.
They were making good time. They had covered some twenty-eight kilometres in fifty minutes. There were only a few places where Marco had to back out of a tight spot between towering boulders and try again elsewhere, or skirt along the edge of a gully-like depression to find a good crossing point. The rover hummed along. Don checked the battery level: barely ten percent down. That was good. "So we packed the spare battery packs for the rover?" he asked nobody in particular.
Marco glanced around at Asya. She looked away. "No," she said. "No room this time." Don weighed that up. Taking the spare battery was standard operating procedure and it was Abdul Qawi who had drilled this into them back in training. "When the battery fails, we can walk home," she finished, with so much cheer in her voice that Don almost laughed. Abdul Qawi gave no reaction at all. Now, at his own request, he sat on the add-on fold-down seat, somehow arranging himself cross-legged and making it look comfortable, and leaned back with his eyes closed.
Don's turn at driving came next, and he took them eastwards, between the partly-defined walls of the crater on their left and the end of the low hills on their right. The crater had a diameter of around seven kilometres. Marco wanted to name it 'Francesca' after his mother. Everyone but A.Q. chipped in with the names of their own mothers, and there was a ribald discord on the subject.
Then the rover was racing over the flat land towards the landing site. Visibility was good, and at thirty kmh there was plenty of time to avoid the occasional hazard. "Is that it?" said Don, seeing a smudge near the horizon that could have been a very large boulder.
Annika, next to him, snatched up the field glasses. "Yes," she stage-whispered after a moment, "that's it. That's their lander."
They reached the site less than half an hour after that. Smaug stood on a wide, level area and bore the dejected look of a back-room museum exhibit that nobody had viewed or dusted for a decade. The ground was still noticeably blasted in a radial pattern all around it. The flexible ladder still extended from the hatch in the upper half of the spacecraft, and the hatch was closed.
They stopped the rover thirty metres away and looked out. The NewSpace Hab and ISRU tent were visible a few hundred metres away to the northeast.
"Marco, come with me to look at the Dragon," said Asya. They suited up and egressed through the hatch. Don and Annika watched them pointing out the footprints all around, then climbing up the hatch and vanishing inside Smaug. They reported back: no signs of life. All systems shut down. They copied data from the flight computer's hard drive, as NewSpace had requested.
Meanwhile Don and Annika chatted with Abdul Qawi, who would start talking morosely to himself in Arabic if they didn't engage him in conversation. "I know about this," he said, pointing out at the NewSpace lander. They waited for more. "But I forget," he finished lamely.
When the two Marswalkers came back inside, Don drove onwards to the Hab. "I see some rover tracks out here," Asya remarked. It was true. The Smaug crew seemed to have driven over to their lander at least once. But it wasn't easy to follow the tracks, because in that area was plenty of exposed bedrock.
They drove away. "Surely we'll find some evidence over at the Hab," Don said. "And look, the ISRU tent really has gone." They knew this from the satellite photos, but now they could see it for themselves. He shuddered. ISRU meant oxygen meant life. What had happened here?
As Don drove closer to the NewSpace Hab, the feeling grew on him that it didn't look quite right. It had the shape of a tall can, slightly tapered at the top. The windows were dark. Dust had settled. In fact, the dust coated the Hab all over, like a fresh coat of paint. But that wasn't it. Some angle or detail was different from the photos they had studied. "Hey man," muttered Marco, "what's up with that? Where's the-"
Don slowed the rover to a stop about ten metres from the Hab. Now it was obvious. A chill pressed down on him. "The door. The hatch. It's gone," he said. A sudden vision of explosive depressurisation flashed through his mind before he could think. Limbs thrashing, mouths split open. Julia!
Asya leaned over his shoulder. "The complete airlock assembly was taken apart and moved," she said firmly. She glanced over at Marco. "Let's go see."
- + - + - + -
Asya and I are still suited, so we exit together – we can just squeeze both of us into the airlock by getting very personal about it, and we trained to do this - and we begin to explore around the Hab first. Lots of tracks. Boot prints and rover trails. A few pieces of this and that, a bolt with its thread stripped, the cap of a bottle, a half-metre length of electrical cord with its insulation slit open. I make a note of them. My breathing drowns out what Asya's saying about the cables. Oh, there are no cables or service lines. They have gone. Apart from that, the outside of the Hab is basically intact, a bit dusty, just no airlock. We keep reporting back. Annika has our voice comms relayed into the rover.
I walk right up to the Hab. The dust coating it is a fine pale yellow. I reach out one gloved finger and a tiny spark jumps the gap. I rub a mark on the Hab's hull. "Static buildup," I report. "So it's true, the dust does get charged up. This thing should be earthed. Or… marsed. Grounded." Nobody comments.
Then we tread into the entrance where the airlock used to be. There's dust on all the surfaces here too, but not so much. Feels like I'm stepping on doubtful ice. I don't want to break anything. And whenever I turn around I expect to find a dead body or a live crew member. "Nothing in here. Man, look at this! No suits, no tanks!" I'm in the suit-up room just inside. Asya moves past me and up the tight staircase to the second floor, the living quarters. "All rations and tools gone," she reported. "No personal effects here. Except-" She mutters something to herself. I wonder what she's found.
Don's preparing for Marswalk, I hear. Annika checks his suit most carefully. She's staying inside with Abdul Qawi. She takes the next shift out here. By the time Don gets out, we have finished our first inspection of the Hab. Now he is retracing our steps to confirm what we found, or rather what we didn't find.
It's like there's been a house sale, you know, like 'We're moving to Sao Paulo
Here's Don, taking one careful step at a time. I don't envy him, with all the journalistic attention focussed on his reaction when he finds that his wife is dead, or when he meets her alive. Either way, the media wins.
His eyes meet mine. They're wide, looking frightened, but I know it's just the suspense. Mine probably look the same. His heart must be beating double time. He dares not say what he's thinking, but it seems obvious to all of us.
SSI asks him to narrate what he sees. "Everywhere we look, there's clear evidence of a careful, in-depth and complete evacuation of the Hab. I didn't find any sign of hurry, apart from one or two broken wall struts where a missing appliance has been forcibly removed." He points one gloved finger at the ceiling, where the long, thin ductwork has been pried open, and we realise with a shock that even the electrical wiring has vanished. We've already noted that the water pipes and pumps are gone. "Hey, that reminds me. It's on our to-do list," he says to the rest of us. "We saw the solar array out there still, but what about their RTG? Think they took that too?"
"Yes, we look for that next," replies Asya. She is changing places with Annika. "I drive to RTG site, check rad counter. Then I drive in circles around Hab, searching for vehicle tracks." Her tone is so utterly professional. There's no trace of her scorn for the missing crew now.
Don finishes his tour of the Hab and ends his transmission. We meet in the denuded entrance and look out at the long, flat view. I'm thinking there are not many places to hide out there. The rover pulls slowly away, and I see Annika starting to walk around the site, eyes to the ground. I doubt she will find much, but who knows?
Don makes a two-finger wave at me, back and forth, our sign for a private chat. We switch channels. "How you doin', Marco?" he asks.
"Me? I'm just great. Look, we found out something big today."
"Do you think this means they're alive?"
I take a breath and think of my options. I want to know how well he is doing, first. His poker face doesn't give me any clues. "So let's think it through. What probably happened? For some reason they decided to move house. But where to? Did they build one somewhere else?"
"They have the basic construction gear, right? They planned to make bricks from the dirt, as I remember. They can make polythenes, they have those two big 3-D printers, and the robot rover with the drill and scoop."
"And it has a little blade. Yeah, they could build a pretty neat basic building with all that. Any idea why, though?"
Don takes a few steps, turns and looks up at the shell which was once a Hab. "Nope. Did this thing spring a leak? Did they find something in their site survey they didn't like?"
We talk some more, and we bring Annika and Asya into the conversation. Annika's been looking through the Smaug's personnel files on and off since we launched, and she has some theories. We see her approaching us. She's drawn a blank on her foot search.
"Commander Sable is the foundation of the team," she says. "He's rock solid. But there were some signs that he and Leo Fortuyn had some relational issues."
Asya interjects, "You mean they hate each other? They fight?" I can't help sniggering at her bluntness.
"No, I wouldn't say that. Sable is Mister Straight. He's as close to perfect as you can get as an astronaut and a leader. Strong but fair. But Fortuyn has a huge ego, son of a billionaire, selected over the heads of experienced astronauts, all that, so he has some things to prove. I mean, his qualifications in Space Systems Mechanics and ISRU Engineering are world class, but this is his first expedition further than once in LEO."
That reminds me. "Yeah, I heard the NewSpace crew selection process got compromised after that take-over by the investment group. That's sick."
"No, no," Annika says, "they kept to the highest standards, or so they claimed. It was a pretty transparent process."
"Transparent? You mean, like that trick with a mirror?" That's Asya again. She's almost driven a one kilometre circle around the base and hasn't yet reported any clear tracks leading away.
Annika plows onwards. "There's Ju Leung, the first to walk on Mars. She's deep. Born in communist China
"You think she could be a… a mole? A sleeper?" This is Don.
"Hmm. Unlikely. I'm just wondering how she will deal with her new life here. How well she'll cope if she can't share herself, deep down."
"And wasn't there that argument with Aubert, the pilot?" I recall only the sketchiest details of a documentary on the NewSpace crew. We met them just once, briefly.
"She maybe didn't get on well with Aubert. But nothing showed above ground, you know? Apart from that one time on television."
We chat on about Dior Aubert, second officer of the mission, the multi-talented astronaut pilot, biologist and doctor. She and Sable seem the most stable of a rock-steady crew. Hung Song the construction technologist, geologist and backup mechanical engineer has the least remarkable personality. "He seems to go along with what everyone else says," comments Annika. "Is that what they call a good team player?"
Asya brings the rover rolling back into the Hab site in a double vortex of fine dust. "The RTG site does not trigger our counter. They took that too. They needed the power. There are no easy tracks to follow. I think we are finished for today."
"Whoa, hold on," Don says. "They have to be around here somewhere. Could we do a wider search?"
"They do not have to be. Maybe many kilos. The orbital photos showed nothing for twenty kay." Asya suddenly sounds a little weary. "Our time is nearly up. We go back to base."
She's right. A proper search could take several hours, and we don't really have that long.
I walk around a little. There is one vehicle track leading east, which could have been the trip to pick up the RTG. There are many tracks leading north or west, but they disappear onto the bedrock, which is wide enough that I have no idea where they go. The hills are visible that way. Perhaps they found a better site. But how far did they go? And why didn't they leave a clear message here?
- + - + - + -
Now we're back at base. Abdul Qawi wasn't doing so well on the way back, and I'm sitting with him in the wardroom. He's curled up on a chair, sipping a weak hot apple cider. He's not saying anything now, but he couldn't stand being with us all in the rover for so many hours. He's the only one who didn't go Marswalking.
I try talking to him about the next team, who are eighteen months from their launch date. There are two Arabs on the team, a husband and wife, plus one Indian and a Brit. We know them all well, but I want to remind A.Q. that we will have more company. We need to build the base up, I tell him, and get that underground living quarters ready, the place we're already calling the Bunker. I think if he has a challenge, he will pull through.
But A.Q. doesn't answer. He peers at me now and again, but mostly he seems lost in his own head. I had high hopes that he was through the worst of it.
So I start rambling, trying to keep hold of him. Mustn't let him slip away. As I talk about Brazil
I pause for breath, and he speaks. "Marco, you like Mars?" he asks.
My mouth hangs open for a few seconds while my mind spins. What? His grasp of English has slipped since his scrape with death, and it sounds more like Mazz.
"I ask you because you not look happy. Maybe nervous. Maybe tired of this place."
Eventually I collect myself and say how I feel good about living here, about the team showing stress fractures, but not critical ones, about the design of the Hab machines that keep us alive and which for sure are going to break sometime.
"Yes, yes," he says, uncurling and sitting up, alert now. "But you like Mars? The planet?"
Mars. I gaze through the window at the rocky terrain. "I see Mars as a place to build," I reply, at long last. "I know enough of the geology to feel what's in the rocks, and how we can break them apart or dig the ground. Not like Don, though. To him, the planet is an open book waiting to be read." I keep gazing, not looking at A.Q. The horizon, the dusty line all around, beyond which is the rest of the planet, all empty and waiting. The sky, so dust-bleak and pale, neither blue nor black nor red. The slightly shrunken sun, agent of death, from whose breath we must protect ourselves, from which we hide as much as possible.
"What I don't like is the emptiness," I go on. "Not the fact that there are no people except us – that's okay – but the deadness. Not even sterile, like the Moon is sterile, but look: this place used to have an ocean, and air of some kind. Maybe plants and animals. Maybe! But it all died. Its magnetic core cooled and the sun stripped off its atmosphere, atom by atom. We're living in a kind of graveyard. And that creeps up on me, when I'm out there sometimes. We keep as busy as we can, because we don't like to stop and think. We don't like to feel this place for what it is. Or maybe it's just me.
"When I was younger, or back before launch, I could keep going and stay happy; because I felt a kind of life inside of me, pushing back at the badness and the death. I went to a funeral at Satish Dhawan, with Don, and I felt despair that a good friend was gone. But the next day I carried on and that guy was a good memory. But here, somehow, that doesn't work anymore. It's draining me."
I look straight into Abdul Qawi's eyes. He's fully alive and his intelligent gaze surprises me. I need to know that this is the real him. "You nearly died. Now you're recovering, right? You're gonna be fine?"
He nods. "I think that. I not afraid of death. Some day I afraid of the life." He smiled. "What you are afraid of?"
Hey, he's so sharp today you could slice almonds on him. I think about his question, handling it like a prickly pear. "Fear of failure, of course, of letting the side down. But I'm worried that this is all meaningless, what we're doing. I used to have it all put together, all connected: God, my family, me, the world, history, the human race. One big happy universe." The thought of those long-gone days chokes me up. Life used to make sense. There are drops of salty water in my eyes. "I don't know really why I'm here. I know: the mission, building, all that. But then what? Why me? Humanists say we make our own destiny, but if they're honest it's just in their heads. Make-believe destiny. That's not for me."
A.Q. looks painfully shocked. "You not believe in the God?"
I try to smile. "I used to. I still do, kinda. Like, he's probably out there, like maybe out in the Andromeda galaxy or somewhere, but so what? That doesn't help."
He says nothing. We sit there, listening to the creak and chug and whir of the Hab. We can hear Annika moving around down there somewhere, setting up her seed beds. I'm sure I can hear Asya snoring and Don tapping his keys. Outside the sky is still colourless and unfocussed.
"God, he is not far," A.Q. says quietly, at last. "The Koran says he is close than your…" He taps his neck, just off-centre. "Your blood, your vein. He knows your thought." Then he stands up slowly and stretches. He suddenly looks haggard, and I'm going to ask him what's wrong. Instead, he stumbles out. I hear him making his way to his bunk room. The door closes and I can hear muffled sounds of movement for a while, and a dim groan, then quiet.
He is not far. A line from one of my dad's sermons flashes back at me: If God seems far away, guess who moved? But that was long ago, when I was little more than a child.
What am I left with? The sky, the planet may be dead, but I'm still alive. At least I have the team. At least I have the mission. That's one place to start.
- + - +
- + -
Read on... Falling Apart
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