He recalled their most memorable encounter, meeting one day in the MHM bar. Dmitri was with Ross and they were both drunk. An almost empty plastic container—vodka no doubt—was between them. Ross introduced Sam to Dmitri and insisted he join them.
"Sit, sit. You are the mysterious stranger, the cowboy who travels alone. Sit and drink with us."
Sam tried to beg off. He was not fond of drunk people. Dmitri grabbed his arm, squeezing it to the point of pain and pulled him down into an empty chair. When he got up to get another tumbler Sam looked at Ross for help, but saw only a half smile and a conspirator's face. Dmitri quickly returned and filled the tumbler to the top, draining the last of the vodka from the container into Sam's cup.
"Drink! Drink, it is good for you. It will kill the parasites in your bowels. We made this ourselves." He punched Ross in the arm. Ross took it without flinching, his eyes focused on Sam throughout. Sam sipped tentatively. It burned his tongue. Dmitri slapped him on the shoulder and roared with laughter.
"You pussy, you! Drink it like a man!"
Sam downed half the vodka in one gulp and instantly regretted it. His gut felt as if he had swallowed molten lead; he was barely able to suppress throwing up. His agony seemed to placate Dmitri, who seized the empty container and disappeared down the hallway. The pain subsided and he felt the warmth spreading throughout his body. In a few minutes he felt it in his head.
Ross continued to look at him fixedly. He was drunk—really drunk—drunker than Sam had ever seen him. "Our own still," he said, pride showing through an alcoholic screen. Dmitri returned with the container full. He poured some into Ross's tumbler and then his own. He turned to Sam and asked him about his work. Sam started to explain about the dish, but before he had even begun Dmitri interrupted him.
"Ross says you were in the military. NATO. I was in the great Red Army! I sat in a stinking tank in Ukraine for two stinking years awaiting the attack of the mighty NATO!" He followed up these pronouncements by punching his fists through the air. The momentum almost caused his chair to topple. "I was a child!"
"Well, I was in the Air Force in Canada, not NATO. I never left the country. I spent my entire career waiting for your bombers to come. We waited, but they never came, and I was pretty young then, too."
"Fucking air force pussies. Drop your bombs and fly home for drinks by five."
"You don't think you could have defeated a NATO attack? The Americans would have used nukes to stop you. They did it to the Chinese in Korea. Before you could have moved ten klicks you'd have been looking for a place to bury your ashes."
Dmitri looked at him for a moment, then rolled his eyes dramatically. "We would have kicked your pansy asses all the way to Paris by noon of the first day!"
Sam started to laugh, but caught himself. Dmitri tried to rise out of his chair, but Martian gravity, and perhaps moreso the vodka, conspired against him. He had the look of one who was severely offended and capable of inflicting serious harm. "By noon, I tell you, we would have been drinking on the Champs Elysee." Sam shook his head, which promptly made the room spin. He raised his arms and brought his cupped hands together with force. "Boom, no more Dmitri. No more tanks. No more rebels."
By supreme effort Dmitri rose out of his chair, reached down and pulled Sam up and into his arms, embracing him in a crushing bear hug. He felt his ribs groan. He expected the worst. Then Dmitri began to laugh, which only served to add to Sam's pain.
The Russan stopped, pulled his head back and looked at Sam from inches away. His face was deeply lined, with age and other factors. His breath smelled of stale alcohol, stale tobacco, and fresh garlic.
"Fucking war! Fucking useless war. Fucking useless army. Fucking lying politicians. They tried to kill us all! But they forgot about one thing."
Then Dmitri began to laugh again, slowly at first, but building until his face was split wide open. Sam did not join in. Dmitri stopped and, still holding Sam in a bear's embrace, sloppily and noisily kissed him on both cheeks.
"I am glad we never killed each other. I am glad we never met until this time. You and I, we are brothers in arms. Fucking useless war, only good to make friends of enemies, when half are dead and all is forgotten. We drink to those not so lucky as ourselves!"
Tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He began to sob. After a few seconds he released Sam and pushed him roughly towards his chair.
Ross raised his tumbler in toast. "To brothers in arms," he declared. Sam looked at the sodden Dmitri. He saw the look, the same look he had seen on too many friends and family, even strangers who had lost loved ones and acquaintances. He had lost his hatred of the Russians long before he had left the military and had never been able to shake free of the guilt. He knew personally no one who had died in the many 'spot wars' of the current century, except by their own carelessness or bad luck, but he could see that Dmitri had, and that at this moment he was grieving for something that Sam would never understand, could never understand, was incapable of understanding. He raised his glass to Dmitri's.
"To brothers in arms."
He could remember nothing much more of that day except having awakened in his own bed, incredibly hung over and reeking of vomit.
And now, Sam thought, Dmitri was truly dead, his blood mixed inseparably with that of old friends, new friends, and enemies.
A Funeral
He arrived at the MHM after four long days of travel. During the return trip he had examined his relationship with each of the dead. He had looked at their photos and at their bios on the Matrix, careful to avoid Louise's. Sadly he found, except for Dmitri, who had been at once less and more than a friend, there were no others with whom he had been on any more than formal terms.
The Colonists were still reeling from the shock of so many deaths. They greeted him with gentle hugs and expressions of sympathy as if he himself had escaped from death. Their grief brought him close to tears, but he could not understand why. Deaths from disease, from old age, and from accidents were to be expected, but not this—not from sightseeing.
They had held off the service until his return, but he wished they hadn't. If there had been no service it would have been possible for him to believe them all still alive—alive and off somewhere exploring the planet. For each of the dead a close friend spoke a few words. Listening to the speakers he realized he hardly knew these people, and least of all, perhaps, Louise. He sat passively through the service, and found himself pondering the many ways in which people could die on Mars. He wondered too if the AIs had held a service for 'Elise'.
During his return to the MHM Sam had prepared and filed a report that avoided placing blame or attributing cause to anything other than bad luck. He was the only human witness, and if his AI had registered a dissenting opinion it had not yet come to light.
The day after the service Sam met briefly with Fenley in the CAO's office. Once Sam was seated Fenley closed the door, sat himself down, and leaned back in his chair. He picked up a metal cylinder shaped like a cigar tube, flattened and jagged at one end, and played with it, rolling it between his fingers. He tossed it on the table and folded his arms. He said nothing for a long time, and then started in. "I read your report, of course. Completely. I don't buy your bad luck argument." He paused. Sam, waiting, said nothing.
"It was stupidity."
"Well…," Sam started, somewhat surprised by this turn. Fenley cut him off with a wave. He spoke through fingers pressed to his mouth.
"I know there's more to it than that, but in the end, Carruthers was a goddamned fool," he said calmly. "His AI was destroyed, but yours gave us vid and data that show he acted recklessly. He went against the advice of his AI, he ignored safety protocols, and he killed himself and some innocent people, not to mention the complete loss of a Rollagon. It was not the first time. We should have jerked his chain a long time ago." Then, as an afterthought, he added, "Can you imagine the damage to our image if it got out that a bunch of drunken senior scientists on a sightseeing tour we
re killed by the actions of an irresponsible cowboy?"
He picked up a pen, examined it closely, then wrote something on a tablet. "I can't say I'll miss him, but there were others who are almost irreplaceable."
He paused and looked Sam straight in the face. "So, publicly, it will be bad luck; just one of the risks of colonizing Mars. Your report, with a few minor alterations, will be released publicly. You can see the final copy if you want. I would appreciate it if you would support it. Speak to Jones."
That could have been the end of it, but Fenley had something else he wanted to say.
"There is no use compounding our mistake. Privately, I can tell you that if it were up to me, I would end all travel by humans except for that necessary to relocate people."
Sam stiffened in his chair. Fenley waved a hand, stifling Sam's response before he could open his mouth. He continued, "The AIs are doing the research, digging the ground, smelling the air, taking the risks, all with no danger to us. It doesn't make good economic sense to use humans to explore Mars. Even once they're here." Fenley signalled receptivity with his arms wide, open hands palm-up.
Sam asked, "Why are we here if not to explore? Why not just continue to do it from Earth? The AIs could receive instructions from Earth just as easily as from here. Exploration is why we came here. We should all be out there, doing the research ourselves."
Fenley sighed audibly and sagged into his chair. He put his arms behind his head and stared at the ceiling, long and hard, eyes fixed. Sam sensed that he was fighting an old battle, or maybe, wishing the gods would grant him the ability to suffer fools gladly. He came forward in his chair, resting his arms on the table, eyes fixed on Sam's face.
"Doctor, you know why we're here and how we got here. Our Sponsors have great expectations of this mission. They want a return on their investments. I have to deliver. Everyone here has to deliver."
Again he paused, and then he shifted gears. "And the fact is, few here share your zeal for exploration. Sightseeing has fallen off a bit since we arrived, hasn't it? There are good reasons. Travel makes people ill. The suits take forever to put on, are very heavy, and in case you hadn't noticed, they smell like stale piss. After a few jaunts outside to satisfy their curiosity most people are content to stay indoors and manage things from a safe distance. For God's sake Sam, we aren't teenagers."
The CAO had one last thing to say. "Your own explorations do serve one useful purpose. People watch the videos and live feeds and read about your travels on the Matrix, here and on Earth. For many here who are too frail, or can't bring themselves to do it personally for some other reason, your travelling fulfills their need to be a part of the colonization of the planet, even if it's just vicariously. It helps morale, but mostly, it sells and it sells big. We need this kind of exposure, but in the end that exposure is not essential. Stay within the limits." Bitter, crunchy words. Fenley emphasized the final point by wagging his finger in Sam's face.
Sam sat for a few seconds contemplating a vitriolic reply, but Fenley had already turned his attention to something else on the desk. They told him to shut up, that he could tell Fenley nothing he didn't already know, that the moment for rebuttal was past and pointless. He'd had dismissive 'you don't understand' hands waved across his face. The debate was over.
In Sam's mind Fenley moved three places to the right and four down, in jerky, stop-motion moves accompanied by 'thunk' sounds, into the pigeonhole he reserved for intransigent bureaucrats and military project managers with no knowledge of anything save their holy 'process'. He stood abruptly, turned on his heel, and left.
It was said that the AIs buried the wreck where it lay without ever opening it. Sam did not see it. Life and death went on. It was more than twenty years before he returned to the place in Shalbatana where a Rollagon and so many others had met their end. When he did return, he was a changed man.
An Apocryphal Historical Perspective on the Exploration of Mars
Over the previous seventy years Mars had been extensively mapped from orbit and for the twenty years prior to the colonists' arrival had played host to a veritable onslaught of autonomous surface rovers launched primarily by the US, China, Russia, and the ESA. The 'Mars Curse,' while not banished, had been unhexed by advanced technology. A string of successes commenced in 2010 that, over time, improved the overall success rate to 78%.
The surface had been extensively surveyed and the sub-surface geology probed from space such that it was possible for anyone with the need or desire to view photos that revealed objects the size of a soccer ball, or to download terrain contour maps accurate to within one meter. But it was a big planet, and so, inevitably, the volume of data being collected came to exceed the human resources available for its analysis, and inevitably the job of exploring and analyzing Mars was left to the machines—but not before humans had made a good stab at it.
There were a number of early manned attempts to reach Mars by small, fast, and generally ill-prepared ships manned by military crews rigorously selected in the prime of life. These initial efforts harkened back to the early competitive days of the space race. The massive atomic powered Orion ships made their first and only extraplanetary flight to Mars in the early seventies before a carefully orchestrated international public relations campaign generated such an uproar over their means of propulsion that they were permanently grounded, and for a long time it was over.
In the cause of political one-upsmanship the Americans and Russians chose the Moon as their battleground. The puny chemical rockets and spacecraft designed for this limited mission set the cause of manned space exploration back for fifty years. The proposals for modest sized, live off-the-land missions put forward in the public forum ran counter to the bigger, faster, heavier process employed by NASA, ESA and RSA. These agencies, with their big business, big government, votes/dollar approach were not amenable to the minimalist approach. They appropriated the ideas espoused by Zubrin, but the fog of bureaucracy and the commensurate project management approach, with its goal of reducing risk to insignificant levels exponentially increased complexity and the resultant cost. Unmanned missions such as Viking, the Russian Mars Series, Pathfinder, Spirit, Beagle were low cost fact-finding missions and failed to inspire the same support as manned missions. Alas, the plans for the terraforming of Mars were relegated to the musings of sci-fi writers.
The USA's 1999 two man York mission reported landing safely and was never heard from again. It was followed by a larger, better equipped four man mission, also American and led by a Captain Williams. They too reported landing safely but mysteriously vanished without a trace. After that an even larger expedition, the international 17-man mission of American John Black blasted off from an Ohio spaceport (conceived by some commercial interests to be the jumping off point for mass migration). In communications with Earth they reported the loss of one man enroute for an undisclosed reason, and then announced a successful landing. The next and last message from them in which they claimed seeing human habitations on the surface was taken as evidence of a serious but undetected malfunction of the life support system.
Russia's hastily conceived and executed six man Kuznetsov mission in 2017 failed to land due to the inability of a supporting spacecraft to achieve the required rendezvous orbit. The crew returned safely to Earth after six months in Mars orbit. Who else but stoic Russians could have withstood two years in a craft so small they had to take turns standing up, eating canned fish and drinking recycled urine? Where else but in the military could people be found with the discipline and fortitude to endure seven months of boredom crammed into a space the size of a VW Microbus, sponge-bathing in their own sweat, crapping into a bag, exercising without leaving their seat and watching endless videos?
The triumphant but frustrated travellers were carried gently from the landing module to waiting convalescent beds. Then, another interminable and intolerable return trip, to be carried from an orbiting shuttle to a waiting hospital bed and extended convalescence.
&nbs
p; The first humans of the new century to set foot on Mars and return were American Air Force Colonel S. Weinbaum, aged thirty-seven, who in 2021 was followed down the steps by his crewmate, a Russian Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, Kai Voskov. For all the effort expended in getting there they spent three weeks examining a space of dirt that those to follow would roll over in half an hour without getting out of their chairs.
The ESA mission two years later did not fare so well. Imaged from orbit, the crash site shows pieces of twisted metal strewn over the plains and a dark smear of a crater—the craft had been the victim of a corroded thruster valve and too much lateral velocity, judging from the moment-to-moment account of the Mission Commander, calmly delivered in precise Spanish, watched and heard by billions.
In any case, only military people and those schooled in the art of government public relations and the hard sell needed apply; people who could be counted upon to say and do the right thing at the critical time; persons highly skilled in the writing of prospectives, of making the pitch to like-minded and similarly schooled clones of themselves in government and transnational commerce, of better, faster, further, higher, sooner payoffs and returns upon strategic investments, aka their research, with better slides and strobe lights and whiter teeth, with hair, darker hair, more hair—company men.
Alas, there were no poets, no artists, no romance or science fiction writers among the first visitors—at least, no full-time ones. There was no room, no value added—no justification. A few returnees sought to pad their incomes and reputations with photographs, paintings and exclusive first person accounts, with varied success.
Successive missions were larger and more ambitious and more expensive until even consortia of the worlds greatest countries were forced to include detested enemies and competitors. After all, three trillion dollars is indeed a large sum, even for Government to swallow. For a time corporate logos were prominent on every surface exposed to the camera's eye, and flags proudly adorned the remaining spaces. There was even an attempt by a cola manufacturer to release a shaped cloud of strontium in the hope of filling the night skies with their name. It worked well, except a malfunction in orientation made it visible only to the Mars vehicle that had released it—fitting punishment. The on-surface duration of these missions ranged from three weeks to six months. Mobility was initially provided by small, wheeled vehicles of limited range, but later missions employed larger rovers, capable of acting as mobile living quarters. Eventually though, everyone returned home, leaving an assortment of discarded equipment in the center of a tiny patch of known in an immense desert of unknown, with many fundamental questions unanswered and a host of others raised.