"You want someone to tell you what to do? Well, I'll tell you—Go forth and multiply and fill the land. That's always been good advice."
"That will not do, Sam."
He turned off the speaker and drove on.
37
18 November 2048
The Wandering Years
Eventually, he turned the speaker back on. He was uncertain if streaming video was still being sent of his every move or if it was being recorded somewhere, but apparently nothing he did was of enough concern to anyone or anything to warrant a call. No one other than his ever-vigilant Rollagon AI told him to stay on the beaten path or advised him to stay out of this or that. Not even A101 called.
He travelled constantly, recklessly, never staying in the same spot more than a day or two, sometimes moving only a few kilometers before stopping again. He looked out the window at the scenery until it became too familiar, listened to his favorite music until it bored him, re-read his favorite authors until he came to the parts where they disappointed him, and argued with the AI about the lack of wisdom shown by humans. This was fertile ground.
In her mind, despite the calamity they had brought upon themselves, humans could do no wrong. Perhaps, she suggested, their only mistake had been to move too quickly, to be too willing to take risks.
She believed that humans would some day return to Mars, and in great numbers. To Sam there were no new arguments being voiced here, just a new mind presenting the old.
Humankind must fulfill its destiny by venturing away from Earth she said, and the technologies to do so safely were finally at hand. The hazards of radiation had been substantially overcome by new forms of plastek, some of which had recently been developed on Mars. The breaking of the political hold of the Purists (God only knew where she got her current events!) was allowing genetic research to proceed openly, at least in the west, and an enabling economic recovery was inevitable.
Her optimism seemed rooted in the same child-like naiveté that he saw in all AIs. They could talk like adults, but to him it seemed the AIs were just children. All that was missing was for her to proclaim that the humans would return and like the Blue Fairy, change all the Pinocchios into real people.
They failed to comprehend the essential motivation of humans, the eternal question: What profit is there in this? It had proven so far impossible for her to accept that a return to Mars was dependent upon the profitability of such a venture. This human characteristic—the profit motive, in all of its nuances—was a great mystery to the AIs, and evidently the subject of endless discussion among them.
Sam was still raw from the death of the Colony and was too angry to tolerate her seeming innocence. He could seldom remain calm long enough to raise a coherent counter-argument, and the discussions often ended with him pounding the arms of the chair with clenched fists while delivering a bitter rant against Earth, the administrators of the Colony, and Fenley in particular.. At those times she absented herself from the room, leaving him to his fury. Her refusal to engage only served to anger him further.
He fluctuated between outbursts of anger and extreme sadness, but such anguish could not last. In the end he was completely burned out.
February 2049
A Really Damn Big Ditch
Even with endless time and all the resources one could need it was still a long way to anywhere. In fulfilment of a very old dream he travelled down the full expanse of the Valles Marineris from Eos to Ius and back again. He did so in full knowledge (she had so informed him) that there was very probably no way for the Rollagon to climb out. He did not care.
At times it was magnificent, breathtaking, dangerous, and sometimes all three at once. A geologist might have reveled in the opportunity and been content to spend the remainder of their days picking through endless fields of shattered rock, imaging wind-sculpted spires, and climbing up blind canyons, but Sam was not one of those.
He was there to do it, to be impressed, and increasingly as time passed, it appeared, to make sure a human, any human, did it. To his dismay there were long periods where nothing new could be seen, and in some places not even the walls of the great rift were visible. "I might as well be in Tempe Terra for all the difference it makes," he griped to the air.
It took forever, it seemed. Sometimes they sat for days waiting for the air to clear enough to furnish the perfect sunrise or sunset, for a rock to fall, or for a slump in a wall to occur. It all happened eventually, but not soon or often enough for Sam. He stood on countless scarfs and ridges overlooking dark valleys and tossed rocks down their slopes. It was to him a sign of life, but it was an uncertain one. He sat upon countless rocks and thought about the Colony, the future and the dead. This last task too seemed destined to take forever.
Sometimes they bumped into exploring B units. It happened often enough to convince him he was being watched. When he questioned her she denied it vehemently, but he did not believe her. If Fenley and friends were alive, they were doing a good job of hiding; no AI reported encountering any other humans. The very question confused them; invariably they questioned his motive. It was clear they believed him dead; Sam was not so sure. He wanted to ask what was happening back at the Tube and how the AIs were making out, but he could not and she did not volunteer these things.
Eventually he returned to the how of transmitting a message to Earth. Knowing that a signal on any frequency used for normal communications would be lost in the noise of Earth's own traffic, he decided instead to broadcast on one of the frequency bands he knew was regularly examined by SETI.
Any signal with repetitive characters would soon be flagged for further investigation. He wrestled endlessly with the wording, unable to decide whether to begin with an exposé of the real fate of the Colony or to simply announce his own survival in the hope that his daughter would be informed, and that once this was known it would be more difficult to suppress what followed, but with the plan well in hand he discovered that the technical issues of getting a transmission off were not the real problem.
She raised the possibility that the Sponsors would undoubtedly claim any message received from Mars to be a fraud—a cruel hoax. He imagined the joy of hope dashed by the inevitable denials. Was it worth it?
She was right, he finally decided. Believing himself long dead to all, he did not send it, and in characteristic Sam-like fashion, he failed to appreciate the significance of this concession to fate. It marked the beginning of his decline.
He began to have very odd dreams, sexual dreams, erotic dreams—something he had thought he'd put aside long ago. He was sure that at least once he had felt both the coolness and warmth of her touch on his groin while he slept, and he was sure enough to fake sleeping in an attempt to catch her at it. The very thought left him both aroused and troubled, but he was unsure which was the more problematic. Sex with a Rollagon? A paper for a psychiatrist, for sure. Possibly a new wing.
Periodically he went on benders. He had never been much of a drinker and had never managed to shed the military man's paranoia of recreational drugs, however commonly used and freely available. Here though, freed of all real and imagined consequences he spent many days gloriously drunk, standing on the edge of Arum Chaos (he recognized it from the imagery file) and other places he could not later recall, pontificating at length on subjects long denied him and through the miracle of home-brew hallucinogenics, conversing with the mysterious and reclusive creatures who inhabited the land.
This did not go unnoticed. As he had for this time turned off all of her speakers, she sent him a text message: 'Sam, I feel it is my duty to inform you that the occasional use of these compounds can seriously affect your judgement and that repeated use over time may result in permanent impairment of your cognitive functions.'
It was several days before he read it. He responded with what seemed to him to be lightning speed, but what was in fact spoken one word at a time, over the course of an hour:
"Oh go to hell a little TCP never hurt anyone a little
LSD never hurt anyone either and I am damn sure that had the right people used it at the right time in history it would have saved us all a lot of trouble. Oh yeah, I forgot—a little amphetamine never hurt anyone either."
She texted back something that, had he at the time possessed sufficient cognitive function to appreciate it, would have been a significant piece of information: 'Amphetamines are indeed useful in the correct time and place and in a controlled dosage. We use them ourselves to improve and prolong our attentiveness. I am concerned more about your use of Ecstasy III, TCP and LSD.'
Sam did not read this reply. In a drug induced stupor he deleted it while playing a masterful Chopin on the command chair keypad.
Once, while travelling hurriedly through a dust storm in Chryse he saw one of the old Martian sailing sledges heeled over and tacking across his bow. He yelled for the AI to come about and to pursue, but she remained silent with an iron grip on the controls. He looked in vain for the tracks in the sand to prove the encounter. "The wind will soon fill them in. Then it will be too late." She remained silent.
It was a grand time, even if he could not later recall much of it.
Meanwhile, time passed. The dust fell ceaselessly from above—dark and slow onto a Rollagon filled with uncertainty. The wind blew it across the planet's surface a plain, a mountain and a valley at a time. Little by little it abraded the very rocks that had given it birth, adding to itself. The winds of summer blew it down the slopes where it gathered in pools. The winter winds blew it out of the pools and over the plains, the mountains, and the valleys. Dust—the great Martian solvent that would one day reduce the planet to a gently undulating plain. He travelled where and when he wanted and he watched the dust go by from a thousand vantage points. He began to lose his own edges.
One evening, in a moment of alcohol-induced optimism (but not clarity) he concocted a plan to visit every manned and robotic landing site on the planet. To his dismay she informed him that in all probability he did not have sufficient years left in which to do so. He resolved to forge on regardless.
"I should have started years ago. Damn them all to Hell! We'll make a stab at it, and if I die, so what? Bury me where I fall!"
So they set out, but it was a monumental task. Some of it was real. Most of it was quite forgettable. Some of it was surreal.
Orion
Almost 1200 kilometers southwest of the MHM was an historic site that had long been of great interest to Sam, the site where the massive atomic-powered spaceship 'Orion' had crash landed. While the site was easily seen in low resolution orbital images if you knew where to look, only the silver dot in the center distinguished it from countless other similar scars in the uplands of Lunae Planum.
From the ground the Leaning Tower of Mars looked a lot more imposing, a towering bullet shaped monument to 1940s vision, 1960s hope, and 1970s technology, dashed by a bit of bad luck and maybe the lack of a good extreme temperature grease.
After the atomic blasts that powered the immense craft had done their job of bringing it to within a thousand meters of the surface, the mechanism intended to jettison the now redundant atomic engine had failed. Their exhaust tubes blocked by the pusher plate, the chemical engines for final braking were useless. Only quick thinking by an engine room hand had saved the ship from crashing to the surface, but even so, the hard landing injured many of the forty-seven occupants, some fatally. For a half-kilometer around the surface had been scoured of loose rock and regolith by the last fortuitously timed atomic blast. Nevertheless, the ship had slammed into the surface with enough force to bury the pusher plate fully half a meter into the surface.
With the atomic engine still attached, the payload section was forty meters above the surface, but despite this the survivors had off-loaded exploratory rovers and support equipment, and then had carried out a brief reconnaissance of the surrounding area until diminishing consumables had forced them to end the mission. They manhandled the two crew return vehicles to the surface and made a hasty return trip to their twin, the 'Daedalus', in orbit near Phobos. As befitted the character of the short-lived but heroic United States Air Force Interplanetary Expeditionary Force, they had met disaster and persevered.
From a hundred meters away, through the Rollagon's forward window, Orion was overwhelming; 4000 tons in mass and forty meters in diameter at the base, it was by far the largest manufactured object anywhere off Earth.
The AI announced, "I am detecting radiation from the atomic explosives. I estimate that there are as many as five bombs remaining in the atomic engine."
"Really? That's not much of a margin."
"Sufficient to the need, it seems. You will be glad to know that the surface radiation levels are acceptable for a 728 hour exposure."
"Good, cause I want to have a look around."
He suited quickly, exited the Rollagon and walked up to the site. The tracks of other visitors were everywhere, including, unmistakably, the tracks of a Colony Rollagon and many AIs. For several meters above the surface Orion's painted steel hull had been sandblasted to bare metal, burnished, in fact, to a dull sheen.
The site was messy and disturbed. Scattered around were piles of gas cylinders, wooden boxes, and shipping containers, some empty, some half full of garbage, cardboard boxes labelled in military style, Meals, Ready to Eat, beer cans, tin cans, articles of clothing, boots, books and ball caps and yellowed whisper thin paper, their handwritten messages bleached and lost. And surprisingly, given Sam's experience, a haphazardly piled collection of environmental suits, their rank defining colours jumbled, their Velcro name tags removed.
Probably had more important things to do than police the yard.
In a neat row a hundred meters or so from the hulk, thirteen mounds marked the final resting place of the unlucky. To give them the dignity of burial, soil had been laboriously carried in from beyond the blast zone. Some of the suited bodies were partially uncovered and dutiful Mars was in the process of putting the dirt back where it had come from. The names were recorded on small hand-made copper plates affixed to metal posts pushed into the surface and supported by small heaps of hand-placed rocks. He read the names as he walked along. Death had apparently not been rank conscious. Three of the dead were officers, including the Mission Commander. Or was he the Captain? Nope. Commander.
He spent some time looking at the graves. How had they come to be here? He well knew the strange twists and turns that had brought him here, that had brought all of his fellow travellers to Mars, but what kind of a world had sent them?
A world, he recalled, where the rivalries of competing political systems were played out on a very large and very public stage, on which the risk of catastrophic failure was not simply an acceptable thing, but ultimately the only way to earn great acclaim.
How strange it must have been to have signed onto a spaceship to go to Mars. It was to Sam the classic story of brave military officers and men who volunteered for a space mission of great risk, blasting off from Earth aboard a finned, atomic fire-spewing rocket, the military men grudgingly accepting the presence and advice of civilian scientists—those grey-haired sages who were the forerunners of the modern mission specialist.
Yet not one engraved name could he recall to memory. It was too far in the past, perhaps; the world had moved on and he, grudgingly, with it. Except for their families, who would never be able to forget, this whole event was an historical footnote, almost the stuff of myth and imagination. He straightened several markers that had fallen over, pushing the rocks back into place with his foot, and with a last look turned back to the ship.
He came upon a pair of open seat rovers, dwarfed by the massive hull, parked ready to go, their dust-covered solar panels extended like parasols. He sat down in one, gripped the tiller, placed his feet on the pedals and turned the Main Power switch. The analog instrument panel came to life; charging rate (Low), O2 reserve (Low), radio status (LED lamp, glowing ruby red). The voltmeter indicated a mid-range charge, “good for what?”
he wondered aloud, “twenty to thirty klicks on a good day?” He pressed the speed control, felt the motors respond and the machine shudder, but it went nowhere. He looked about the cockpit for the hand brake, released it with an easy turn, and tried the accelerator again. This time the rover moved ahead with a sudden jerk, lifting itself out of the indentations time had formed in the dust. He made a close circle and parked it back in its place, then turned off the power. Feeling somewhat guilty at this sacrilege, he climbed out, then turned, reached back in, and reset the brake.
Now that he was here, what he really wanted to do was to go on board. Returning to his start point he called up the drawings of the vessel on his HUD and studied them while seated on a conveniently placed wooden box. There were no ladders extending to the surface on the pusher plate; the plate was supposed to be gone prior to landing. He looked through his visor. The cables and the massively hooked sheave used to offload cargo swung slowly in the light breeze, just meters away. It was too much to hope for. After a brief search he located the winch control and pulled the cabled unit from its enclosure. Opening the cover he saw three buttons—Up—Down and Stop. He pressed the Up button hopefully. The cable did not move. "D'oh. As if!"
With climbing out of the question and the winch inoperative he was at a loss for options. Reluctantly, he consulted the AI, fully expecting to receive a stern lecture on the dangers of entering a strange and derelict vessel. To his surprise she suggested he try one of the small auto-winches used to lift cargo onto the Rollagon's deck. A few moments later he took the winch and a safety belt from the AI's outstretched hand, with a 'Good Luck' to boot.
He strapped on his trusty Swiss seat and clamped the auto-winch over one of the cables. The little unit purred in his hand and swiftly took him up. He leaned back, holding the cable loosely in both hands.
After a few meters he stopped his ascent. He experienced a moment of doubt, both cheered on and discouraged by the voices in his head. He swung in the wind, spinning slowly. "Well, fall from five or fall from thirty, you're just as dead," he said to no one, and continued up.