Izzy was there in the front row, flanked by her squad of ninja killer girlfriends, all of whom seemed to think I was the world’s worst person because I was breaking up with her by fleeing the planet. That’s how one of them put it on Twitter. Fleeing the planet.
Jeez.
I smiled down at Izzy and even though she had tears in her eyes and tried to look mad at me, she smiled. Nobody smiles like Izzy. It’s everything every corny love song and poem ever said. Sunshine and magic. No wonder her face was on more news feeds than mine.
But then the speeches were over and the applause faded out. A screen dropped from the rafters with a hiss and they dimmed the lights until it was just me and the screen and absolute silence.
“Hi,” I said. “Thanks for coming out.”
They went nuts. I probably could have said “penguin farts” and gotten the same reaction. That’s when I saw the signs. Well, pictures on sticks. Big red disks. Some were painted; some were done in Magic Marker. A few were laser printouts of photos.
Mars.
Hundreds of them, dancing in the dark, lit by cell-phone lights. It was like the whole night sky was filled with nothing but the planet Mars. Here and there I began to see something else. Flashes of white and silver. Spaceships. Some were the Huginn, the ship my family would be on, and our sister ship, the Muninn. But there were all kinds of ships bobbing up and down. The starship Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, TIE fighters, Death Stars, flying saucers.
Some of the kids banged their spaceships into the red planets around them. Making a joke. Silly colonists going to crash into the ugly red planet. Ha-ha. A bunch of kids had their hands up to ask questions even though I hadn’t started my talk yet, and some of them just yelled things out.
The principal stood so straight and stiff she looked ten feet tall, and the expression on her face scared everyone into shutting up.
“I appreciate your enthusiasm,” she said in a way that meant she clearly didn’t, “and I’m sure we all want to hear what Mr. Hart has to say. But we will do it in a quiet and dignified manner as befits James Madison Memorial High School.”
I caught sight of Herc in the second row, laughing as he mouthed the words Mr. Hart.
A row ahead of him, Izzy’s girls gave me the same squint-eyed glare as always. Izzy smiled at me, though, and touched her fingertips to a necklace I’d given her last year. It wasn’t expensive and it was kind of corny—half a heart, which fit perfectly with the one I wore on a silver chain under my shirt. I touched my shirt over the other half of the heart, to show her I understood. She nodded, still smiling.
Funny how a smile can be beautiful and heartbroken and loving and angry all at the same time.
The room was silent now, so I took my cell phone out of my pocket and connected the Bluetooth to the projector, accessed the mission presentation, and tapped a key. The empty silver screen suddenly turned black, and within seconds stars began appearing. Slow, the way they do when the sun is down but there’s still reflected glow hiding the lights. Venus climbed high into the western sky, and Jupiter, too, but not as bright. Saturn hung in the south-southeast. And then the camera panned. It was clearly video from one of the space stations. The curved edge of a planet crept into the right side of the screen. Growing, getting bigger, changing from arc to circle as Earth came into view. Swirls of white clouds, brown landmasses, the green of the big rain forests, and the ten thousand shades of blue of the oceans. The screen had multiple layers for a no-glasses 3-D view, and what the audience saw was a world. Our world. Not distorted by flatness, but massive and round, ripe as a blueberry. It seemed to move outward from the screen and fill the whole auditorium with an image so high-res that you could see the rolling waves on the ocean, the shift and swirl of clouds.
I said, “This is where we live. Earth. This is where our life began.”
The image shifted again as the moon crept out from behind it. Much smaller, gray and white and black, pocked with craters from a billion meteors, its dusty coat making it look older than our home world.
I said, “In 1969 three men left Earth and traveled 233,884 miles through space. Two of those men landed on the moon.”
The image tightened focus and showed a CGI re-creation of Apollo 11’s clunky and awkward lunar module settling down in the Sea of Tranquility. The CGI gave way to actual footage of a foot in a clunky white boot stepping down into soft dust. An audio clip replayed Armstrong’s historic words, “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I said, “Neil Armstrong was the first human being to leave his footprint on another world. Think about that. No one else in the history of . . . well, history is going to be able to say that. Imagine how scared he was. Imagine what it took for him to even agree to go, let alone to step out of the lander and put his foot on the surface of the moon.” I paused. “I think about that all the time. I have ever since I was little. Thinking about it used to make me cry. Go ahead and laugh, but it’s true.”
Actually, no one was laughing. The room was absolutely silent.
There was a collage of images now showing Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin placing the American flag on the moon, then other astronauts driving in a moon buggy, and then other missions, including the first Chinese moon landing. This montage ended with a high-def picture of the moon colony base.
“Almost a year ago Chinese astronauts established a base on the moon, making them the first people to colonize a world other than Earth.”
The focus tightened to show the layout of the colony—a big domed structure surrounded by ten smaller habitats, all of them linked by corridors.
“Right now there are more than fifty active space programs around the globe, ranging from NASA here in the States to other government-funded programs to private groups. Some of them are involved in projects to mine asteroids for raw materials. Some are working to build more and better space stations. Within fifteen years there will be six new moon colonies, including an American colony. But the moon is a place to build a base, mine raw materials, and use as a way station to other places. You can’t turn the moon into the next home for the human race. It’s a dead world. There’s no atmosphere, no water ice, and you couldn’t terraform it—which means you can’t use any kind of science or technology to make it into a mini-Earth. Maybe in a thousand years, but not now. Not with what we know.”
Behind me the image changed. The camera began pulling away from the moon, away from Earth, moving fast so they dwindled in size, becoming small, smaller, and then burning as dots no brighter than the millions of stars scattered across the black screen.
“You see those stars?” I asked, still following the script. “Many of them are actually whole galaxies composed of hundreds of millions of stars and maybe ten times as many exoplanets. Worlds so far away we’ll never see them, never visit them. There could be life there, civilizations, cultures. But we’ll probably never know. It’s too far away for us to go and for them to come here.”
One point of light began to dominate the sky, growing brighter as the camera moved toward it. The brighter it got, the more the color changed from the blue-white of a star to the rust-colored red of a familiar world.
“This is Mars,” I said. “This is the only planet we know of right now—the only planet we can reach—where people will be able to live.”
I went through the sales pitch for Mars One. I’d heard this stuff a zillion times, and maybe some of the other kids in the audience had read it online or heard about it from the teachers, but even so, everyone was paying attention. Except for the amplified sound of my own voice the big auditorium was dead silent.
I told them that in November, less than two months from now, forty people in two spaceships would take off for Mars. Those ships would be in space for seven months, and then the colonists would descend to the surface in special landers. Habitats would be waiting for us, sent by earlier rockets and assembled by robots. We’d take up residence and from that point on we’d be Martians. We’d live there for the
rest of our lives. We’d be the first human beings to set foot on another planet.
I explained that Mars One was an international nonprofit organization that was funded by donations from all over the world. Billions of dollars. The project had kicked off in May 2012, and in 2013 they’d opened it up to volunteers. If anyone expected there to be a shortage of people willing to do this, they were wrong. Thousands and thousands of people applied. Most were cut during the screening rounds. Too old, too fat, too skinny, too sick, too locked up in politics, too crazy, too eager, too emotionally unstable, too antisocial, too social, too indifferent. It’s a long list.
People were also cut for reasons that seemed weird until mission doctors explained it. One former basketball player was cut because he had a kidney stone once. That was a big no-no because in micro-g, bones lose mass as calcium is leeched out of them. That increases the risk of kidney stones by a lot, and they’re bad enough on Earth. In space a kidney stone could be fatal.
I shifted gears back to how, by 2015, they had the list carved down to one hundred candidates. This Mars 100 went into intense training to build their fitness and health, to sharpen their minds, deepen their knowledge, expand their imaginations, balance their emotions, and hone their judgment. The idea was to send four people up in the first ship, with plenty of supplies being sent before and after. Then twenty-four months later another ship would bring four more people. And on and on. Building the colony slowly. Reducing the overall risk by keeping the number of colonists down.
Then things changed. There were new studies released that seemed to prove that four people could never make it work. There were more risks associated with a small group, including a lack of manpower if worst-case scenarios required muscle and hands on deck to mine for resources, do emergency repairs on the habitat, or hunt for water sources. So they redesigned the ship to take eight. Then it was twelve. Then twenty.
And then the Keppleburg-Lansky Study was released. That was this massive, multifaceted psychological and sociological study on the potential negative effects of “nongenerational dynamics.” What that means is that people would work harder at survival if they were trying to keep their families alive. It meant that there would be a higher quality of life. Or, as Herc once described it to one of the other kids in school, “If you don’t have someone to do this stuff for, you’re gonna go bongos.”
It was the Keppleburg-Lansky Study that opened the door for select families to volunteer for the mission. There was a list of restrictions a mile long. Had to be couples with only one child, and it had to be families where everyone wanted to go. If anyone from a candidate family backed out, then the whole family was cut. That was only fair, and in a weird way it helped people think more deeply about their decisions. I know my family did. We talked about it so many times, and we went through it with psychologists, family friends, even neighbors. This wasn’t the time for a rash decision. Or, as Dad put it, not the time for a sentimental decision. No one went just because the rest of the family was going, and no one was being pressured into it.
Does that mean we didn’t have doubts? Of course we did, we’re not insane. There were a lot of times I wanted to bail. Even got as far as talking it over with my folks. They said it was my choice. They could have been mean about it, they could have laid guilt trips on me or pressured me, but they didn’t. Just the opposite. They gave me every possible out.
But Mars, man . . . it was out there waiting. And corny as it sounds, it was calling to me.
When I told my folks I was definitely going, we all got a little weepy, and then we got the giggles. Not sure what was funny, but we totally lost it for like a day. First Dad would start laughing and Mom would try to get him to stop, then I’d lose it, and so would she. Next time it was her. Or me.
I went over a lot of this with everyone in the assembly. I could tell from their faces that most of them thought I was totally nuts. Not saying they were wrong.
But . . . I did want to go. And I told them that.
They believed me.
I looked at the faces of the two people in that room who meant the most to me—Izzy and Herc—and I could tell that they believed me too.
Silence fell again and I stood there for a moment, awkward and unsure of what to do next. So I said, “Any questions?”
Everyone started yelling at once.
Chapter 6
* * *
The questions came hard and fast and I answered as many as I could.
A tenth grader whose name I didn’t know asked, “There’s no air on Mars. How are you going to breathe?”
“Good question,” I said, because it really was. “Water and compressed air are actually heavier than you’d think and it would take way too much fuel to bring enough for all of the colonists for two years. We’ll have enough to get us set up, but our first priority is to build habitats that are also processing plants and labs. They’ll not only keep us safe, but it’s how we’re going to produce breathable air and drinkable water. There’s plenty of water ice on Mars and mining that water is the key to people being able to live there.”
“What if there’s not enough?” asked another kid.
“There’s enough,” I said with more confidence than I felt. Cerberus, our Mars rover, had absolutely proved that there was water ice on Mars, but we were warned that we would need to actually be there to prove that we could mine it, melt and purify it, draw oxygen from it through electrolysis, and filter large quantities for drinking, hygiene, cooking, cleaning, and about a thousand other uses. “There’s also water ice in the regolith, which is what they call the Martian soil. We’ll extract it, and we’ll get nitrogen and argon from the air.” I explained that the air humans breathe isn’t pure oxygen but a mix of gasses. The rover’s sensors found the presence of the gasses we needed to make a breathable mix in the thin Martian atmosphere.
A girl from my homeroom asked, “Tris, I keep reading about all the radiation. Won’t you all get cancer?”
“That’s not the plan,” I said. “And that’s another reason we need the water, because our habitats and space suits are designed to use water as radiation shielding.”
“I heard you were going to live in caves,” said a kid from my gym class. He said it like an accusation, though.
“Sure. Caves will protect us against radiation too. And from temperature shifts. But first we have to find good ones.”
“What’s a bad cave like?” asked a girl I didn’t know.
“Too shallow, not enough flat ground, unstable rocks. We want a shelter not an adventure.” That line was cribbed from one of our training sessions, but it got a laugh, so I stole it.
“What about terrorists?” asked someone from the back, and that stilled the room for a moment. “What if those Neo-Luddite guys try to blow up your spaceships?”
I took a moment deciding what to say, and I could feel the weight of everyone staring at me. Our mission PR people didn’t want us to talk about the Neo-Luddites at all, but I couldn’t just blow him off.
“Look,” I said, “if you’re asking me if I’m scared of the Neo-Luddites doing something, then sure. Who isn’t? We all are. But if you’re asking if I think they will do something . . . then no. I really don’t. We have great security and we have—”
Herc cut me off by yelling at the top of his lungs: “Mama Hart will kick their ass!”
Everyone burst out laughing and then began applauding. Everyone knew what my mom was like. I saw one of the teachers pushing through the crowd toward Herc, eyes shooting laser beams. Herc was going to log some detention time for that, but knowing him, he’d think it was worth it.
There were more questions after it all settled down. Questions about the ships, about why Mars is red (iron oxide), if there are canals (no), are there people (not as far as we could tell and probably not), if there’s anything alive there (we hoped to find bacteria or something), about the geology (Olympus Mons is the largest volcano in the solar system and the second-highest known mountain), h
ow long the days are (24 hours, 39 minutes, 35.244 seconds), how long the Martian year is (687 Earth days), would I be able to see Earth from Mars (yes, it would be a small white dot), about why we were going (we were running out of room on Earth), about the technology (it was badass), about everything from what we were going to eat to how we take a dump in zero g. Sometimes the questions got even more personal—like about how I could leave Earth, how I could leave my friends, about religion, about Izzy. I passed on some questions and got booed by a few bozos, but I answered as much as I could for as long as I could. But it was clear that I was going to crash long before they ran out of questions.
Finally the principal stepped up and did her air-patting thing until the room went quiet again. She held up a stapled sheaf of papers and said it was a timeline I’d created so everyone would understand how the Mars One thing worked. “The entire file will be on the school website, so make sure to download.”
I was beat, sweating, trembling a little. Izzy looked like she wanted to drag me off the stage and run away with me to hide. Sounded good to me.
Then Herc shouted out a question and it froze the room. “Tristan—are you going to forget us?”
It felt like a punch to the heart, and from the look on Herc’s face it was obvious his question surprised him, too. Everyone looked at me, wanting an answer. No . . . they needed one, and at that moment I couldn’t explain why.
I needed that same answer.