Mars Probes by Peter Crowther

Author:Peter Crowther [Crowther, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0756400880
Publisher: DAW Books
Published: 2002-06-02T21:00:00+00:00

I took Jeffrey Carroll’s manuscript home and worked on it for next eight weeks. It was the easiest rewrite job I’d ever done: a little chapter restructuring here, some scene embellishment there. His spelling and punctuation were awful, but nothing a good copyeditor couldn’t have handled. Easiest money I ever made . . .

Except when it came to writing the chapter where he spoke the truth about what happened on Mars. Even after I transcribed our interview and wrote it as straight first-person text, I went through several drafts, trying to find just the right tone. Yet never could I imagine the way he must have felt, all those lonely hours hiking through the Martian night, coming to grips with the fact that Dave Park, a friend whom he thought had betrayed him, had instead tried to protect him.

So much pain. So much courage.

I was almost through with the book and my editor was breathing down my neck when, two weeks before Christmas, Dorothy called to tell me that Jeff had passed away. He had gone upstairs to take a midafternoon nap, and when she went up to wake him for dinner, she discovered he had died in his sleep.

I attended the funeral. Colonel Jeffrey Carroll was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery; the President delivered a brief eulogy, then a Marine Corps honor guard fired a twenty-one gun salute as Navy jets roared across the slate sky in the missing-man formation. I stood in the back of a crowd of nearly five hundred people, none of whom I knew except for Dorothy. I saw her, but she didn’t see me, and I didn’t try to approach her. When it was over, I caught the next flight home.

I finished the book and sent it to the publisher. My editor loved it, and even paid me a, bonus. A Walk Across Mars was published the following summer and became a major bestseller. If you haven’t read it you should, because it’s good and it’s true, and most of the words were his own. Except for the parts I decided to leave out.

So far as I’m concerned, that’s no one’s business. We need heroes. And sometimes, a lie is better than the truth.

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