“What are you asking?”
“I’m saying that if there’s something on the surface that I don’t know anything about, you would now be in a position to tell me.”
“I remember something about a bacteria, but it’s not very clear.”
“When you do remember, feel free. Don’t forget that we’re in this together. We’re not on Earth anymore, José. We’re Martians, or very soon we will be.”
At this point, just a few hours from our purported landing, Jim Rose finally appeared in the cargo bay. Jim was sweaty, worried, and he had trouble sticking with the conversation for more than a couple of sentences. He kept inspecting unimportant bits of machinery.
“How’s the patient?” he inquired.
“It’s only an issue when I move.”
“Well, look,” Jim said. “I have some instructions from Arnie, and these instructions involve retrofitting the reactor core here in the engineering subroutine so that we can essentially do a bit of an ad hoc X-ray on you, José, using films from some of the botanical experiments. But there’s a more important question than that, at least it’s more important to me, and that concerns our ability to set the craft down tomorrow. That’s what I want to know, José. I want to know if you’re going to be able to help land this ship, because that’s what we’re supposed to do, and we’re landing on the plains not far from the deepest canyon in the entire universe, José, because that’s where you’re supposed to direct us in a series of experiments. I need to know if you’re ready.”
The pressure was enormous, and a man with a broken leg and concussive memory loss was likely to feel ill-equipped to deal with it. Still, José rose to the occasion.
“If I came here to do a job, then I’m going to do that job.”
December 30, 2025
I’m going to leave out the part where we splinted José’s leg, because that’s just blood and guts. I mean, you know what it’s probably like, right? You yank on a guy’s leg, a broken leg, he screams endlessly, and then you watch as he relieves himself inadvertently because of the excruciating pain, and then you try to clean him up a little bit, and you put the inflatable splint on his leg, all the while getting directions from Houston about what to do if for some reason you have to take the leg off. Gangrene is less likely in the space capsule, because we just didn’t bring that many bugs with us out here, and this will also be the case on the surface of the planet, where the ground is mostly sterile. The topsoil is sterile as far down as the unmanned missions have drilled, except at the poles. And so José’s leg was not going to rot on him, and we were not going to take it off.
And this didn’t mean a delayed touchdown. We weren’t going to have to cede the front position to the Geronimo, which we didn’t want to do at all. But I was a little concerned that a delay didn’t even occur to Houston. Maybe the Geronimo was having worse problems than we were. Maybe all three ships were now afflicted with the condition known as Space Panic. If a craft in which the pilot and the first officer were having sex and the science officer had a broken leg (and a spotty memory) was optimal, things must have really been bad elsewhere. We were going down first, that was the plan, and that was that.
And so at 0800, we were set to go.
I recorded another announcement for my family, which is to say for Ginger and Havoc, and then one for my parents, who were in their rest home out in the Southwest, and who kept writing to me asking about the food onboard the Excelsior. Then Jim read a poem he had written for his family, a poem that did rhyme wife with life, and José we sort of left where he was, strapped in down in the cargo bay, declaiming lamentations in Spanglish.
In order to drop out of orbit, all we needed to do was slow ourselves beyond the stable orbiting velocity, which, as you can imagine, is not hard to do. What’s hard to do is to avoid going so fast, upon entry, that you incinerate. Well, there’s also the possibility of careening into a crater somewhere. We had parachutes that were supposed to enable us to slow adequately, after which we were to use thrusters for a smooth touchdown. We’d been trained. We’d done it in simulations. We’d landed similar crafts on Earth.
Did I ever tell you, kids, about Jim Rose’s first wife? I’m guessing at this moment that you don’t know that much about Jim Rose at all. You don’t know how he came to be the captain of the Excelsior; you don’t know much about his early life, beyond his rank and his military record, to which I have alluded. And so: as we prepare to land the Excelsior forty kilometers from the Valles Marineris, assuming we don’t blow it, let me take this opportunity to tell you what I know.
Jim Rose’s first wife, Barbara, was a regular military wife back on a base in Central Asia. This was during the years when Uzbekistan was the focus of our military and our foreign-policy objectives. Barbara, as I understand it, didn’t know exactly what her husband did, which was to pilot into spots where we were not meant to be flying, in order to extract intelligence agents who were not meant to be there in the first place, and bring them back to safety. Barbara was trying to raise youngsters in this harsh and inhospitable environment, in which women were not meant to appear in pants, or without the hijab. These were the kinds of difficulties that a wife undertook for her husband, when he was in covert operations.
Anyway, the story goes that Jim was once out on a mission that involved springing some journalists who’d been taken hostage. These journalists, who’d also abandoned the army detachment with which they were embedded, were considered expendable by the military, but if the enemy was in turn going to use them as bargaining chips, the hostages would then appear in the papers, and that wasn’t good for anyone. Jim’s operation involved storming the village in the mountains where the journalists were held, to free as many as feasible.
There must have been a mole of some kind in the embassy. There must have been a highly placed mole. Because Jim’s first wife, Barbara, was abducted the very day he set off to free the “embeds.” She was out on the street, and she was swiped, in front of the kids, and driven away. It was hours before the State Department knew what had happened. No one had ever heard of the cell that claimed responsibility. It was Jim’s belief, as he later told me, that these groups acted first and came up with their position papers later on. When they had milked a Western hostage for all he or she could provide, the militants would fade into the countryside, retreating into agrarian subculture in the way that the enemy has done for many decades now.
The intelligence operatives who counted Jim among their number worked hard over the next few days to locate Jim’s wife. They overturned every rock around the military base, threatened untold reprisals through contacts, and they firebombed a couple of mosques as a lesson to those who would provoke the American military. Still there was no sign of Barbara Rose. Jim, like the professional that he was, finished his mission, freeing two of the three journalists he’d set out to free, with few civilian casualties. It was not long after that his wife’s body was found in a ditch by a road, not three or four miles from the base. She’d not been violated by her captors, Jim told me, nor tortured, she’d simply been held as long as was feasible—and then murdered.
To this day, Jim blames the murder of Barbara on the kind of work that his colleagues were doing in Central Asia—surgical strikes and tactical disappearances outside of the normal rules of engagement. Jim was a search-and-rescue guy, and he didn’t, or so he said, subject foreign nationals to any kind of extreme interrogation techniques. He was not an interrogator. Yet he came to feel that these kinds of techniques were routine in and around the base. In the time after Asia, he felt that the conduct of the war put him and others in intelligence at risk.
He left the military. With two motherless boys. They’d lost one parent, and he wouldn’t be responsible, he said, for their losing another. He’d had to tell his boys what happened to their mother, while they were still recovering from the trauma of watching her abduction, and he had to, as he put it, restore his credibility with them by finding a line of work that was more honora
ble. When he got back from Asia, he spent a good long time unable to do much. He sat on his parents’ porch in Biloxi and collected combat pay. He couldn’t talk openly about what he’d been doing abroad, and he couldn’t talk about his feelings of remorse. Then, one afternoon, his two sons, his older boys (as distinct from the little ones whelped in the second marriage), came home from school having seen a program about the dawning of the Mars mission. The way Jim tells it, he already knew how lucky he was, when his boys came to him on the porch. “Dad, they are looking for astronauts to go to Mars. The NASA folks are looking. And the two of us have been talking it over. We think you ought to go on down there and volunteer.”
Child is father to the man! Jim Rose, stern, secret operative, wept the tears of the mostly unworthy. “You do? You think I ought to?” There was no stepmother on the scene, not at that time. Not for several years. There was no one to look after those boys if something should happen to him. And yet the boys were more concerned about their father than themselves. Or that’s how the story goes.
Do you see it now? Do you see why I felt like this was a man I too would put ahead of myself? Do you see why I loved this man, in my own ill-defined and Space Panicky way? This was a man of ideals, a man who believed in something, a man whose gentleness was most evident in the tiny little creases at the corners of his eyes, which in my private moments I referred to as the Eye Crinkles, and whose military severity was belied by his strong desire and his occasional outbursts of sentimentality. I think you can see, and I need not say more.
At 0815, the chutes opened, and we went hurtling toward the surface, as we had been instructed to do, swan-diving through cumulus clouds. We had the ventilators on, and Jim was calling out altimeter readings when he had a chance, and we were strapped down, and the sound was a deep, unrepentant roar, as of creation, and we were either going to stop in the way that we were supposed to stop, or it would be the last thing we ever knew, the throbbing of puny man-made aluminum alloy casings when faced with the enigmas of other worlds. Was I scared? You bet I was scared, and you bet I was excited too, because, as I have said, the best astronaut is the one with the least to lose. When the parachutes flowered to slow us, I felt the drag, and there was a grave heaviness to the capsule suddenly, and I didn’t know if the chutes could possibly contain it, the colonialist menace of us. And then the clear skies of a Martian spring opened up before me, and I could see, on the monitors, the canyon, which was one of the topographic features most notable on Mars, even from space, and we hurtled down toward it as though the canyon intended to swallow us, and just when it seemed that the landing could go on no longer (nor be any more dangerous), it did; it went on, and the thrusters fired, and when they did, I allowed myself the first clear thought: We are really going to land on this planet.
All my training said I was never meant to doubt, but I did, and I accepted my doubts. And yet when we felt the thrusters, both Jim and I laughed, because we were about to become legends, whether we wanted to be or not, legends for the good of an idea. The idea that if you use up one planet, there’s another one out there somewhere that you can fuck up.
“Affirmative on ignition,” Jim said.
And we slowed. And we waited. And then we were a thousand meters up, and then those numbers diminished, and I was mindful of the fact that unlike the Earth launch, which was noteworthy for the fact that I had felt like my bowels were going to betray me at any point, I felt nothing but a giddy, thrilling excitement on this end of the mission, as the numbers went down, and the thrumming of combustion slowed us still further, and then, before we knew it, there was a violent report, and the capsule struck something, struck ground, struck dust, volcanic rock, struck something cosmic, ancient, untouched.
We were on Mars. We were on Mars!
On schedule, the engines idled down, and the aerobrake assembly retracted, and a number of solar panels began unfolding themselves on the outside of the Excelsior. It was quiet. It was quiet except for Jim telling Houston, telling America, telling the world what it would not know for a good long while. “Landing as scheduled, Houston, and we didn’t strike any boulders. We seem to be on very sturdy ground. Thanks very much for the coordinates.”
We were on Mars.
“Everyone okay?” Jim called.
“First officer able and accounted for,” I said.
Then there was an enfeebled but no less enthusiastic voice that called from down in the cargo bay, “Science officer okay, but he recommends against Mars landings with broken limbs. Not the most comfortable thing.”
“José,” Jim said, “you’re a champ.”
Protocol required a number of systems tests to certify that the capsule was not, for example, on fire, and also that the hull was intact, especially as the Excelsior was about to begin serving as our Mars base, at least until Steve and Abu, from the Geronimo, began erecting the additional base facility over by the reactor that, fully automated, had begun processing fuel on the surface about six months ago. Additionally, the Pequod was going to be in charge of the greenhouse-construction operation, another two or three kilometers distant. The Geronimo would be landing in the next six hours, and we accepted their congratulations on the new ham radio frequencies that were going to be our most reliable Mars-based communications system from now on, excepting the satellite above us that would make satellite phone communication possible once or twice a day.
We were on Mars! We had done the hard part! And the only thing left to do was go outside and investigate!
Jim and I got busy with the space suits down in the cargo bay. According to the thermometers we had on board, the outdoor temperature (at about 9:30 A.M., Martian time) was about −20 centigrade, though the sun was bright and the air a luminous pink. Everything that you have seen from all the rover missions and the flybys of the past thirty years is true. The soil is bright orange, and the rocks around which it blows are a deep gray. There’s a lot of sulfur around, and some methane in the atmosphere, so the prediction is that Mars actually smells really horrible. We were glad to have helmets and respirators, because even if we were able to take off our gear (which we would be able to do for very brief spells in low elevation as the mission moved toward summer, and even then in danger of frostbite and hypothermia), it would probably smell a lot like the industrial parts of Omaha or Shanghai.
I haven’t even mentioned the exhaustion of suddenly having weight again, right? After three months of weightlessness? It was a good thing that I weighed less than a famine victim here on Mars, because I don’t know if my muscles could have taken much more than the forty or fifty pounds, roughly speaking, that I weighed on the Red Planet. I was wobbly, and I was hallucinating that every heavy piece of equipment that Jim and I had to put on would float, as it had for three months. José was probably the most likely to want weightlessness, to help with his leg. But at least he was still, with his new amnesiac personality, encouraging.
“This gear is like lead,” I said to Jim.
Jim gave me the first sheepish smile of the Martian period of our friendship. “I guess this is how we get back in shape.”
Still, we couldn’t get the outerwear on fast enough. What is it that man loves about a wasteland, kids? What is it about a desolate and empty place that always looks to him like some large-scale merchandising operation? Why is it that nature so abhors a vacuum? My face was glued to the window, to every dune and declivity in the featureless track. As far as the eye could see was only about fifty or sixty kilometers on Mars, but in those sixty kilometers there was a lot of empty mileage. I couldn’t wait to get out there; I couldn’t wait to see it, to walk in it, to kneel in the emptiness, in the mystery, in the millennia of silence and howling gales that was Mars.
It was while José was helping us get the helmets on that Houston appealed to us by radio. It was unclear what was happening on the other end, because the transmission included no voices at all. The transmission resembled the interstellar background radio signals that I sometimes listened to on
the journey here, as if I might be the first to hear the dots and dashes of beings signaling to us from the next galaxy over. But this wasn’t static, this communication from the home planet. It was applause. It was some kind of sustained ovation for us, kids. It was only after a couple minutes of this applause that we finally heard a monotone voice, “Excelsior, you have realized our hopes and our dreams. Over.”
Since training, that particular line was the signal for a fully scripted exchange, one that ended with my footsteps outside the capsule. Jim was meant to say something clever, along the lines of “Roger, Houston. We’ll bring a little of Mars back for you, if you’ll let us through customs,” and Jim looked at the intercom for a long time. José too. The three of us stood there in silence, and I’d like to believe that our purpose was sort of unanimous, if not agreed upon expressly. We were about to go off the reservation. We were about to go native. In the short run, this meant only that Jim began to ignore the script, on which we had both been drilled back in the Everglades. He shut off the intercom. In the Everglades, it was our life, the script. But it wasn’t anymore. Even José knew that something had changed. The trip had changed us. But he didn’t say anything, and I didn’t say anything, and neither did Jim. He gestured at the air lock.
“We’re going to go out for a bit. You okay for an hour or so?”
“I’ve got drill bits to inspect,” José said.
“Maybe you want to check the ramps for the rover. See if all that stuff is working properly. We’ll see you in a little while.”
And then Jim reached for the air lock. The air lock swung back on its hydraulic hinges. And we walked through it, and he closed it behind us. Leaving just the one last hatch. Which I then opened myself.
I guess it is unlikely that you can experience a place you’ve never been as a homecoming. I guess that would be a sentimentality of some kind, and we are not fond of sentimentalities in the space program, only in its marketing. I never thought about Mars as a kid. Growing up, I thought about the things any kid would think about: sports, girls, gangster rap, video games, keeping out undocumented workers, E. coli in the food supply, violent uprisings in faraway places, the color wheel issued by the Department of Homeland Security. Mars was just not part of my landscape. I never dreamed of Mars. Who would?