I was 32 years old when I decided to volunteer for a Mars mission.
By then, Mars had been substantially terraformed. The atmosphere was breathable and much of the planet was covered in moss, grass, or even trees.
Financially, I was in a bit of a hole, and I thought a Mars trip could get me out of it. I first got the idea when my friend Petra introduced me to some astronauts she happened to know. By coincidence they happened to be at a bar where we were enjoying a quiet drink. They invited us to sit with them.
Honestly, I’m not very sociable and I would rather have carried on just talking to Petra, but once they began to talk about their work I realised there was an opportunity to be had there.
People went to stay on Mars for two years at a time. The pay was pretty good, and you could save more or less all of it, because everyone ate together in a primitive canteen and there weren’t any shops. If I spent two years there I’d come back 80,000 credits richer.
80,000 credits would get me out of my problems. As things were, I was seriously thinking of buying a tent and trying to live in that. Being stuck on Mars with a bunch of people I didn’t know, wasn’t really appealing, but it would probably be better than living in a tent.
The work seemed to mainly involve taking readings at various locations and repairing machinery. I have some basic qualifications in electronics, so I would be eligible for a stint on Mars.
The astronauts themselves seemed a jolly enough bunch. They all had beards—apparently shaving on Mars was considered unnecessary for some reason—and they all seemed pretty knowledgeable.
There weren’t any women among them. They government had been trying endlessly to get women to go to Mars, but without much success. The few who did go came back with reports of rather primitive conditions, and an unsettlingly-male atmosphere.
I had no living relatives that I was actually in touch with aside from my grandfather. He spent his time in an isolated cottage in the countryside, tinkering with scientific apparatus. I visited him every few months. I would miss him, but hopefully he’d still be alive when I got back.
My grandfather was as thin as a rake and completely obsessed with science. In his youth he’d enjoyed a promising career as an academic, but that had somehow fizzled out and he’d ended up practically a hermit.
The last time I visited him before I left, he advised me not to go.
“There’s really nothing there.” he said. “It’s like Siberia but worse. The weather’s terrible and you’ll spend most of your time holed up in a tiny room, if you even get your own room. Anyway, rockets are a primitive and dangerous technology.”
“We get our own rooms.” I told him.
“Well, that’s something.” he said. “Look, Mars colonisation will happen eventually, but not with current technology. We’ve tried to do it too early. We should be waiting till something better comes along than rockets.”
“Such as?”
He tapped the side of his nose knowingly.
“I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you.” he said, laughing.
I loved my grandfather, but he did have a habit of getting weirdly cryptic, which was quite annoying. It didn’t help that he hardly talked to anyone apart from me. Lack of socialisation was only making him weirder as the years passed.
“Surely you’d have to admit that the terraforming has been an astonishing success?”
“A bit of moss. A few trees for show.” he said, shaking his head.
“It’s got a breathable atmosphere!” I protested.
“So they claim.” he said.
“What, you don’t believe them?”
He got up to make a cup of tea, and he clapped me on the back.
“You’ll be able to tell me yourself in a couple of years,” he said. “if you’re mad enough to go through with it and you refuse to listen to my advice.”
Two weeks later I was sitting strapped into a seat perched on top of a rocket, together with three other people, my heart beating uncomfortably fast with anxiety. About one in a thousand of those rockets simply blew up before reaching space.
As for the three other volunteers, there was Aron, who was originally from Hungary but had lived for many years in the UK, Noah, who was English, and, surprisingly, Sofia from Italy.
Noah was a seasoned astronaut, used to leading expeditions. Aron was a civilian volunteer like myself, and understood seemingly everything about computers. Sofia was another volunteer, and had a doctorate in plant biology, which, needless to say, could be very useful on Mars.
When the rocket ignited I felt a tremendous force on my back. In videos it looks like rockets accelerate very slowly, but from nearly the outset I felt as though I was being crushed.
“Deep breaths, everyone.” said Noah through the intercom.
At every moment I felt as though I might be about to die. Lots of people already had, during ascent, after all.
It was nearly eight minutes before the pressure lightened up, and I felt an enormous sense of relief.
Soon the pressure disappeared completely and we were weightless. I’d say that was fun, but it wasn’t. We were trapped in a small capsule anyway, until we docked with the space station, so we couldn’t just float freely around. We docked three hours later.
Onboard the space station there were already three astronauts who were shortly returning home, after having spent two years on Mars. They were: Ronan Whitlock, Felix Trevellick and David Harrington.
David looked sick as a pike. I asked him what Mars had been like. I gathered this had been his first trip there.
“Imagine Milton Keynes but even worse and with less traffic.” he said dryly.
Apart from that, I couldn’t get much out of him.
Twelve hours later we were in the interplanetary module heading towards Mars, a steady acceleration providing three-quarters of Earth’s gravity.
It took only a week to get to Mars, thanks to the extraordinary speeds we reached. Noah was pretty busy the whole time. The rest of us didn’t really have much to do. They kept us busy with silly tasks like wading through computer courses about Mars.
When we finally stepped out onto the Martian surface, shaky and nauseated from the journey down through the atmosphere, I finally felt as though I had made the right decision and it had all been worth it.
Thanks to the vast quantities of nitrogen brought over from Titan, the sky was a beautiful deep blue, and the green plains extended almost as far as the eye could see, ending in vast mountains. The gravity is only a third of what we experience on Earth; there was no way of fixing that, and I felt as light as a feather.
We would have to take pills all the time we were there and do special exercises to prevent bone mineral loss, but I felt like that was going to be a small price to pay for being able to walk practically without effort, and jump three times as high as on the Earth. I found I could sort of skip along the surface as though half-able to fly, my feet no longer dragged downwards by gravity to quite the usual degree.
However, the accommodation was a let-down. I’d have to give that two stars at best. The Mars base was hardly better than an ugly ramshackle tin hut.
“It’s not always going to be like this.” said Noah, gesturing at the blue sky. “There’s weather here that no human can stand without shelter.”
“It’s beautiful.” said Sofia, which was unusual for her, because she’d been pretty down-to-Earth and serious for the whole of the past week.
Aron said, “Looks like Mongolia. Interesting.”
I’ve never been to Mongolia but I suppose it must be flat and grassy.
In the base itself were three other residents, who were due to go home in a year. Mateo Rossi was American, in spite of the Italian name, and specialised in food production. Luke Watson was another fellow Englishman and a mechanic. He had the typical demeanour of the mechanic. If you’ve met any, you know what I mean. You could tell he was a mechanic just by looking at him. He was the kind of person you need to have around if anything mechanical is going to break down.
Theo Andersson was actually Dutch and had overall responsibility for managing the base. I liked him immediately. He was tall as God and had that fair-minded practical demeanour that’s often found in Dutch people.
The annoying thing was, we had one guy called Theo and another guy called Mateo, which would end up meaning that whenever you shouted for one of them, the other guy would think you wanted him. I suppose whoever plans these things didn’t think of that. It was to turn out that there were quite a lot of things they hadn’t thought of.
The base itself was surprisingly primitive. Or maybe that’s the wrong word: it was only primitive from the perspective of conventional architecture. It had been designed by scientists, after all, with little interest in aesthetics. It was made of the latest materials but the ceilings were too low and it was impossible to escape the feeling of being stuck in a massive box.
They set me to work repairing a bunch of things that had gone wrong, but it was a bit of a farce. I hadn’t got half the tools and parts that I needed. As time went by it gradually dawned on me what was going on there.
The Mars base was basically a government project. Politicians and civil servants had decided how to dole out the cash that was spent on it. They’d hired people to go there without really properly having a clear idea of what those people were supposed to do. That was what I eventually surmised, anyway.
For a while things went according to plan. We all carried out our tasks, although I spent a lot of time just reading, since there wasn’t really enough to keep me busy. We surveyed the surrounding area a lot, taking soil and air samples and checking the weather. I enjoyed that the most, since it was a chance to get outside.
Unfortunately there was only about an hour every day when it was actually nice to be outdoors. The rest of the time it was either too cold, or too hot, but mostly, too cold. At night temperatures often went down to -20 °C.
Those of us who had people they wanted to talk with on the Earth, which was everyone except me—my grandfather was too unsociable to put the effort in—talked to them via a satellite link. The signal from Earth took more or less ten minutes to reach us, and ten minutes to get back to Earth from our end, so usually the conversation basically consisted of voice messages that people would pick up later on, unless they were particularly anxious to try to have an actual conversation under those circumstances, with 20-minute gaps between every statement and every reply.
The communication link often went down, and sometimes for two days at a time. Once it went down for three days.
“They can send people to Mars but they can’t manage to send a radio signal.” Aron complained bitterly, on one such occasion.
“They have to deal with all kinds of practical difficulties.” said Noah. “Solar storms, bad atmospheric conditions here on Mars, all kinds of things.”
“No, the problem is they give jobs to whoever they think deserves a job,” said Mateo, “instead of who can actually do the job.”
We were sitting in the canteen at the time. There was just one big table in there but it had a big window, from which we could observe the vast grassy plain, and an automated mechanism kept the window immaculately clean. I actually liked the canteen more than any other room in the station. Someone had actually put some effort into it.
We’d been there a year without any particular drama, keeping our heads down and doing our jobs, when the communication link failed again. At first this excited no particular attention, since it was always dropping out, but when three days passed and it still wasn’t working, people began to get edgy.
Theo was unexpectedly angry about it.
“This is absolutely unacceptable.” he said. “Some of us have family we need to stay in touch with. I have a wife and children. Noah, you too, yes? And Sofia, your brother is ill. The least they can do is try to keep the damn bloody thing working.”
“I’m not sure I would have volunteered if I’d know communication would be this poor.” said Sofia quietly. “They told me I’d be able to send messages every day.”
“It’s completely rubbish.” Luke agreed, except he didn’t say ‘rubbish’. He used other language which I won’t repeat. “Probably come back up tomorrow. Nothing I can do at this end.”
“What if it doesn’t?” said Mateo.
No-one said anything in reply. I don’t know why, but we all had a bad feeling about this particular failure.
Maybe it was because news from the Earth had been unsettled over the past month or two. Things weren’t going well. Old disputes between nations were boiling up. People seemed angry, even though all the people we spoke with were under strict instructions not to cause alarm, and all of them had undergone at least two sessions with a government psychologist before they were allowed access to a communications terminal.
When the fourth day rolled around we became highly unsettled. We’d never gone that long without a comms link before. Even so, we were sure the problem would be resolved. Three of us were even due to return to the Earth, so we were expecting people to tell us when and where the landing of the ship that was supposed to take them home would happen.
But the days rolled by, and days turned into weeks, and we couldn’t get so much as a peep out of the satellite link.
“Couldn’t we set up a satellite dish so we can at least hear radio broadcasts from the Earth?” said Mateo.
Noah shook his head.
“The signals are way too weak by the time they get here. The problem is they spread out. We’d need a vast supercooled dish to have any hope of receiving anything. It’s way beyond what we could build with what we’ve got.”
By the time a month had gone by with no word from the Earth, we knew something was very seriously wrong.
“War.” said Luke. “There’s got to have been a war. Otherwise they would have fixed it.”
“Let’s not speculate.” said Sofia.
“We probably should speculate.” said Theo. “If there has been a war, we need to make appropriate preparations.”
“Preparations for what?” said Mateo.
“For staying here a very long time.” said Theo.
Really we had everything we needed to survive on Mars. It wasn’t like we absolutely had to go back to the Earth, but no-one actually wanted to stay there permanently, least of all me.
Our situation was fast becoming like that of some group of sailors or explorers in the old times, marooned on a remote island. At least there were no diseases on Mars, and we wouldn’t run out of water or food.
And then, one dark night when the temperature was down to -22°C, just about the worst thing possible happened: a gigantic storm hit. We stood watching it in the canteen.
“Could the glass break?” said Sofia.
“Nope.” said Theo.
“What about if a rock hits it?” said Mateo.
“Not even then.” said Theo, but he didn’t sound as sure as we would have all liked him to be.
“He’s right.” said Luke. “Reinforced isospheroplex. Nothing’s getting through this.”
We stood watching for a bit, then Sofia said, “The crops are getting torn up.”
“What can we do about it?” said Noah.
“I don’t know.” she replied. “We should have set up a wind break.”
“We should close all the cloches, maybe.” said Theo.
“Will they withstand the wind?” Sofia asked.
“For sure.” said Theo.
“We’d better do it, then.” said Sofia.
“I’m on it.” said Luke, and he went off to activate the motors that automatically opened and closed the cloches.
When he came back, he was pale and worried.
“Power’s down.” he said. “I think it’s the relay between the power station and the barn.”
The barn was actually just a name we gave for the high-tech enclosure where all the stuff was stored that monitored the crops. The power station was a nuclear fusion facility located just under a kilometre from the base, to reduce radiation exposure in the event of anything going wrong.
“You can’t go out there.” said Theo.
“Someone will have to.” said Noah. “Otherwise we’ll starve.”
We wrangled about it for some minutes, and finally it was decided that Sofia and Luke would go out and try to fix the problem. Luke because he was the best person for fixing the power relay, and Sofia because she wanted to check on the condition of the crops.
They set off in our big utility vehicle. We watched as the eight-wheeled car, heavy as a tank, drove slowly through the wind and rain.
The storm was incredible. Our instruments were showing gusts of up to 130 km/h, enough to overturn a van, but well within the tolerance of the utility vehicle.
The horizon was shot with spectacular flashes of lightning with a reddish tinge to them, like vertical columns of pure electricity, scarcely branched, presumably destroying whatever they hit, if there was anything there to destroy.
Noah talked to Sofia and Luke on a two-way radio which crackled continuously due to the electrical storm.
“We’re at the barn.” Luke said eventually. “It’s damaged.”
“How?” said Noah.
The reply was garbled, but it seemed like Luke said something had hit it.
Fifteen anxious minutes later, the radio crackled into life again, and he said there was nothing he could do, and they were going to inspect the crops.
“Just leave it.” said Noah. “It’s not worth the risk.”
Whatever Luke’s reply was, we couldn’t make it out. Noah repeated the message, but then we only heard static.
Around a quarter of an hour later we observed the utility vehicle speeding through the wind and rain at far above the regulation maximum speed. With the low gravity, at that speed the vehicle seemed to skim over the planet surface. It leaped spectacularly into the air before coming down again, sometimes visibly being blown to one side during the leap, rather resembling a badly-animated car in an ancient TV series.
We ran to the vehicle bay.
The vehicle bay had a kind of thing resembling an airlock that was purely designed to protect us from extreme weather while giving us easy access to the utility vehicle, or whatever we were using at the time; the vehicle would park inside, the outer door would close and an equally-large inner door would open. We all gathered around the inner door, waiting to find out what was going on.
Luke stumbled out of the vehicle half-hysterical, holding Sofia in his arms.
“I think she’s dead!” he cried.
Sofia was covered in blood.
Theo shouted “Get a stretcher!” at Mateo, and Noah said to Luke “What happened?”
Luke was barely coherent, and mumbled something about a rock hitting her.
We laid her out on the floor while we were waiting for Mateo, and it was clear that she was, in fact, dead. She had no pulse, and part of the side of her head was caved in.
Luke wasn’t prone to hysterics; he seemed the sort of man you’d be able to rely on in an emergency, but he was sobbing and pulling at his hair. We just assumed he had never experienced anything like this before and he’d been caught off-guard. Certainly Sofia’s death and appearance were shocking. We were all horrified.
Mateo arrived with a stretcher and two medical robots, who took her to the medical bay. A full-body scan confirmed almost immediately what we already knew: she was past saving.
Then Luke, who was inconsolable, also collapsed. We took him too to the medical bay, where the scanner found a tiny piece of rock lodged in his brain, having penetrated the back of his skull. It was as if he’d been shot.
He began to have a fit in the scanner, and he died a few minutes later. The medical robots weren’t able to save him.
Sofia must have been hit by debris from somewhere, hurled at her by the storm. Luke’s death was harder to explain.
“There must have been some kind of explosion in the barn, when his back was turned.” Theo suggested.
“Then there’d be metal in his brain instead of gravel.” Mateo protested.
“A rock must have got blasted to bits.” said Theo. “Or the explosion threw up a bunch of gravel.”
It was clearly the only explanation. We sat glumly trying to process the whole thing.
“I still can’t make contact with the Earth.” said Noah. “Everything’s down.”
“Something’s happened on the Earth.” said Aron. “War. Or a plague. Something very bad. It’s the only explanation.”
“If there’s been a global war, they should be sending more people here, so we can repopulate the planet later on.” said Mateo.
Aron laughed.
“Repopulate the planet? We’ll be lucky if we get out of this alive ourselves.”
“He has a point.” said Theo. “This planet was never meant for human beings. Without Earth support, our time here is going to be limited.”
Noah shook his head in disagreement.
“We need to check the crop situation. There are only four mouths to feed now. We can probably survive indefinitely.”
Aron laughed sarcastically.
Outside the window, the storm was still raging, showers of hail and pebbles periodically battering the glass. The mechanism that was supposed to keep the window clean had failed, and the glass was becoming covered in muddy filth.
The storm abated two days later, but then the temperatures outside plummeted down to -25 °C.
“No point looking at the crops now.” said Mateo despondently. “They can’t survive this.”
“We’ve still got the protein tanks and all the indoor stuff.” said Noah.
“So, looks like we’re eating nothing but garbage for at least six months.” said Theo. “Not the end of the world.”
We went to look at the crops. With a brisk wind it felt colder than -25, but nothing we couldn’t handle. They were frozen solid, obviously. We had a robot dig down into the ground and found even the root crops had frozen solid.
We tried cooking them and the swedes and carrots were fine but the potatoes were disgusting and turned to mush. We weren’t desperate enough to eat them.
We were getting used to not being in contact with the Earth, and the food situation seemed OK. The deaths of Sofia and Luke were horrible, but we all knew the risks when we volunteered. On the whole our situation didn’t seem too awful. It was simply a matter of waiting for the engineers on Earth to fix the comms link, which we were sure they would do, once whatever had caused the problem had blown over.
From Mars, the Earth looks like a tiny circle in the sky. It’s the second-brightest thing after the sun. Noah was always watching it on the computer screens, trying to figure out what might be going on down there. We had a large telescope trained on it, following its course through the sky every night. One day, a few weeks after our tragic accident, he came back from the observatory room with a very distressing announcement.
“I saw something.” he said. “Something big. Three of them.”
He was pale and shaking.
“What?” said Theo.
“I think they were nuclear explosions.” said Noah.
We raced to the observatory and began arguing over the best way to enhance the images, but Noah demonstrated very well that he really knew the most about it, and produced magnified and enhanced images of all three objects.
We stared at them, in shock.
“Two on the USA.” said Mateo, horrified. “Right over Washington. My wife lives there.” Then he corrected himself. “Ex-wife. With our kids.”
“One right over Moscow.” said Theo. “There’s not much doubt, speaking frankly.”
As we watched, more began to appear. Little puffs of smoke on the picture of the Earth on the main screen, which in reality must each have been dozens of kilometres wide.
Everywhere was getting hit. London. Beijing. Berlin. Tehran. Everywhere.
“No wonder they’ve not been in touch.” said Noah.
“They’ve got more important things to think about than us.” said Theo.
“They’ll send more people here.” said Mateo. “They have to. This is the only safe place.”
“In the middle of a nuclear war?” said Theo sceptically.
“Yeah, maybe not.” said Noah.
I tried to make a joke.
“Well, it’s not all bad.” I said. “I was quite behind with my tax payments.”
That went down a like a lead balloon. No-one laughed. Then I realised that everyone had probably lost people they loved, and I felt like a callous fool. The fact is I was in a state of shock, just like everyone else, and I have a bad habit of saying stupid things at such times.
The reality of the situation hadn’t fully sunk in but I was mentally calculating how long I might have to spend on Mars, or whether I’d even ever see the Earth again, and wondering how I’d cope with it all. On balance I felt that it was better than being in prison, or being marooned completely alone on a desert island, but not much better.
We spent the next day and a half pacing about, nervously watching the screens. The nuclear blasts, if that’s what they were, subsided after three hours, and no further ones appeared, but it was a full thirty-six hours before any of us could get to sleep.
After that everyone’s mood was pretty black, and we hardly spoke to each other, even when eating together.
I tried to suggest that we should make a plan with regard to food, but Theo just said, kindly enough, “Not now. Leave it for a while.” and that was that.
Then Mateo disappeared.
After a bit of investigation, we realised he’d taken the utility vehicle and he’d disabled the transponder. We sent out a couple of autonomous probes to look for him. After twenty minutes we located the vehicle. It was stationary, nearly thirty kilometres out.
“I’m going after him in the caterpillar.” said Noah.
“It’s too risky.” said Theo. “Send a drone or a robot.”
“A robot’s no good if he’s suicidal.” said Noah.
“You think he’s suicidal?” said Theo.
“His family’s probably dead and he’s just gone off into the middle of nowhere by himself.” said Noah. “I’d say the odds are pretty high.”
“It’s too far away for the caterpillar.” I said, but Noah was already on his way.
“It’ll take a while but we’ve no choice.” he said, over his shoulder.
I went to the canteen to take a look outside. The window was covered in grime but not so much that it was impossible to see through it. Outside a thick layer of snow lay on the ground and the temperature out there was -26 °C.
Soon I saw the caterpillar, bravely rolling over the snow on its tracks. The top speed of that thing was 15 km/h.
Noah reached Mateo over two hours later. Mateo had cut his own throat.
“Come back in the utility vehicle.” said Theo.
“I can’t.” said Noah.
“Why not? It’s much safer.”
There was a silence on the other end of the radio, then Noah said, “There’s blood everywhere.”
Theo, exasperated and thinking only of safety, said, “Just clean it up!”
“I’m not doing it.” said Noah adamantly, and after that he didn’t answer the radio.
We watched his progress on the computers. The caterpillar began to slowly crawl back towards us. Then, suddenly, it stopped.
“Noah, what’s happened?” said Theo on the radio, and finally Noah replied.
“I don’t know.” he said. “There was a noise like something snapping and it just stopped.”
“Are the tracks still on?”
“Yeah, but the engine’s gone wrong. It’s just spinning without driving anything.”
Theo cursed.
“Can you repair it?”
“I wouldn’t know where to begin. Do you have any suggestions?”
“What do you think?” Theo said to me.
“I have no idea.” I said.
“Noah, you’ll have to walk back. You’re 20 kilometres out. It’s doable. We’ll send a drone to bring you some supplies. Don’t go anywhere till the drone reaches you.”
There was some swearing on the other end of the radio, but he said, “OK.”
We loaded a drone with anything we thought he might need. In theory the drone could even have carried Noah himself. With the lower gravity and the thick atmosphere resulting from terraforming, Mars was the ideal place for anything with rotors. The problem was, the drone wasn’t intended for carrying people and we honestly thought he would be safer walking.
We were wrong.
For about six kilometres he progressed steadily towards us, complaining about the deep snow, but otherwise fine. Then his transponder signal suddenly vanished, and we could no longer reach him on the radio.
“I don’t understand it.” said Theo.
“Could he have fallen into something? I mean, like a crevasse.”
“It’s possible.” said Theo. “I don’t know any more about it than you do.”
“We’ll have to go and search for him.”
“Negative. Leave it to the drones.”
We scanned the whole area thoroughly and, for hours on end, could see no trace of him. He seemed to have simply disappeared.
Then, eventually, Theo noticed a sort of dimple in the snow.
There was no radio signal and no thermal trace. We tried ground-penetrating radar, and that revealed a huge crack in the surface, already covered in snow.
“He might still be alive.” I said. “I can go and see if I can find him.”
“No.” said Theo. “I’m going to try crashing the drone through the snow.”
“You’ll probably lose it, I would think.”
“It’s better than risking our own necks.” said Theo.
He took the drone up five metres and then had it plummet towards the crevasse. It broke clean through the snow quite successfully, into a vast dark cavity below. And there, we saw Noah. Or rather, what was left of him. His neck lay at a horrible angle and his right arm was completely smashed. He was clearly dead.
“Bloody Mateo.” said Theo. “This is his fault.”
“He wasn’t in his right mind.” I said.
“Yeah.” said Theo.
For nearly two months it was just the two of us in there. We got along well enough and tried not to think too much about our dead colleagues, or about what was happening on the Earth. These thoughts were there, all the time, in the back of our minds, but we didn’t talk about them. I strenuously avoided thinking about them and I’m sure Theo did the same thing.
I don’t believe every problem can be solved by talking. The fact was that our situation was pretty bad; that couldn’t be helped, and thinking things over or discussing the situation would only have brought it uncomfortably into the forefront of our minds. I found that once I started worrying about things, it was hard to stop. Better not to begin in the first place.
We had to keep up our daily duties, or we would quickly get into an even worse situation. Food had to be grown and things had to be maintained. Repairs had to be made. The only way to keep going was to suspend all unpleasant thought, bury it in the backs of our minds, and quietly hope that the people on Earth would sort their problems out and remember us. If not, well, the months would turn into years and the years into decades, with only each other for company.
Theo was older than me so eventually he would probably die first, and then I’d enjoy my old age alone on Mars. But, as I’ve said, I tried not to think about what may or may not happen.
And then, just about the worst thing happened that could possibly happen at that point, short of one or both of us dying. Our electricity supply died.
I know electronics but I’m not a nuclear technician. I did my best to figure out what had happened. Theo knew a lot about managing an off-planet base and he investigated whatever he could investigate.
“It’s got to be the reactor.” I said. “I don’t think this is a sensor problem.”
“We have to go and fix it.” said Theo.
“It’s freezing out there and neither of us knows how to fix a reactor.”
We looked out of the filthy window at the endless landscape of snow and ice, which still hadn’t melted. In fact, the snow had only got deeper.
“I can see if there’s anything else I can do.” said Theo. “Most likely the weather will warm up a bit in a couple of weeks. We can last that long on battery power. You keep at it too.”
That was our biggest mistake. We should have gone and looked at the reactor before our batteries all ran out. By the time we were about ready to go, we were almost out of power, and then another storm struck.
For three days we watched helplessly as everything ran completely out of power. By the time the storm lifted, we had no heating and temperatures were plummeting even further. We had to wear thick suits just to survive outside for any time at all.
The worst of it was, by then even our navigational devices were out of power.
“It’s only a kilometre.” I said. “It’ll be fine.”
“Tomorrow morning.” said Theo. “Either we fix it, or we die.”
The next morning we set off. The sky was a brilliant blue and the snow hard underfoot. We’d made it about halfway when yet another storm came in out of nowhere. One minute we could see the reactor building clearly a short distance away; the next, it vanished in a swirling mass of snow.
Compasses don’t work on Mars and nothing electronic was working.
“It’ll be OK as long as we keep heading in the same direction.” said Theo, but I could see he was scared.
Under normal operation the reactor did a great job of shielding dangerous radiation. We’d be able to shelter inside the reactor building if it was intact.
We walked in what we thought was the right direction, but after a quarter of an hour there was still no sign of it.
“We must have passed it.” I said.
“Another ten minutes.” said Theo. “If we don’t find it then, we’ll turn back.”
After a further ten minutes there was still no sign of it.
“We’ll go back to the base.” said Theo.
Our tracks in the snow were rapidly becoming covered by more snow. We both knew the situation was desperate.
For hours we wandered around, getting colder and colder. We had no idea where we’d gone wrong.
“We’re going to die out here!” I shouted, above the noise of the storm.
“The base has to be here somewhere.” shouted Theo in reply.
I don’t know how long we wandered around for. We couldn’t decide whether we’d gone too far, or not far enough, whether we’d gone too far left or too far right. All directions appeared the same, and which one we chose became a matter of arbitrary instinct based on nothing useful.
The sun was beginning to set when we found it. On a short rocky incline stood a metal cylinder, and all around it the snow had melted, leaving a sort of crater in which it stood. It bore no markings; neither of nation nor flag, nor warning signs of any kind.
“It’s warm!” shouted Theo. “We can warm ourselves up!”
I hung back, frightened.
“What if it’s radioactive?” I said.
“It’s either this or we’ll die out here.” he replied.
“Let’s carry on looking for the base.”
“I can’t.” he said. “I’m too bloody damn cold. You’re young, you can cope with it better.”
He pressed himself against the cylinder.
He begged me to come and join him for my own sake, arguing that while whatever was inside probably was radioactive—otherwise how could the warmth be explained—the casing probably shielded the worst of the radiation.
That thing gave me the creeps. I was cold, bitterly cold, but I refused to go near it. Instead, I began to try to heap up snow with my gloved frozen hands, to create a windbreak. After an hour of effort I’d made almost half an igloo, but with no roof. Then it got too dark to see anything. What little light there was came from the Earth and the stars, and that was barely enough to see my hand in front of my face.
I settled down into my snow shelter, shivering.
“You’ll die if you sleep there!” shouted Theo.
“I’m not going to sleep!” I shouted in reply.
But I was exhausted; neither of us had slept properly in days, and in spite of my intentions and the extreme cold, I did somehow fall asleep.
The next thing I remember was a strange light forming in front of me: white, but slightly blueish, and hazy. I didn’t know if I was awake or asleep, alive or dead. If alive, then it seemed the sun was rising and it was already somewhat light, but I had no idea what this blueish thing was. The storm had abated somewhat, to be replaced with a thick freezing fog that gave the landscape a ghostly appearance, or at least what little I thought I could see of it.
Then I thought I saw a figure moving in the blue haze. I tried to focus on it. The idea came to me that probably I was dying, or dead; this was a near-death experience, of the kind I once used to read about. The form slowly resolved into the figure of my grandfather. So he was dead too; he was waiting to welcome me to the afterlife.
The figure stepped forwards and grasped my arms, dragging me to my feet and pulling me forwards into the light. Then an intense warmth seemed to suffuse my whole body, and I realised I was lying on the floor in my grandfather’s laboratory.
“You’re alive!” he exclaimed.
I sat up, groggily.
“How did I get here?” I said.
“A portal!” he said, jubilantly. “I’ve cracked it! An interplanetary portal! This is the future of space travel, not rockets. Looks like I found you only just in time. You’re half-frozen!”
I flexed my fingers. They were extremely cold and stiff, but not actually frozen. The high-tech gloves had at least protected me from that.
I wondered vaguely if I was hallucinating. Perhaps this was just the last gasp of a dying brain. Then I remembered something.
“Theo!” I almost shouted. “Theo’s still out there! You have to help him.”
My grandfather shook his head sadly.
He pressed some buttons on a remote and in front of me, looking at the glowing blueish portal from the other side, so to speak, I saw a horrific sight. It was Theo, lying half propped-up against a rock, a short distance from the cylinder.
The radiation had cooked him like a lobster. He was bright red, and frozen stiff, with blood-soaked icicles hanging from his face.
“Oh, God!” I exclaimed.
I recovered quickly, at least physically. It turned out that, although my grandfather had indeed transported me 358 million kilometres from Mars to his laboratory, his laboratory was no longer in England. His initial use of the portal technology, when he had first got it functioning well enough to transport a person a few thousand miles and hadn’t even been sure that he wouldn’t get mangled in the process, had been to transport himself and a bunch of equipment and supplies to somewhere in Brazil. We were deep in the rainforest, far enough away from civilisation to be comparatively safe from nuclear weapons.
He had built a facility out there that looked not unlike our Mars base, except the interior was rather less stark and the ceiling a little higher.
That was six months ago. Since then we have rescued over a hundred people, and we will rescue many more. I even managed to find Petra. She was living in a primitive bunker and on the verge of starvation.
We’re building a new civilisation out here in the forest, until such time as the rest of the world stops fighting and may once again become inhabitable.
