Outpost by Dan Richards

Author:Dan Richards [Richards, Dan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781786891556
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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I spent an early morning walking round the base alone – without a spacesuit but certainly in my own little bubble – looking at the set-up then tromping further out to explore the terrain, heading for a feature named Phobos Peak, printing a line of inch-deep footprints, stopping every so often to look back at MDRS; porcelain cold in the warming day – the ground drying paler by the second, the red world baking orange pink, magnesium sky flaring on the sheen of my skin. Ahead were hoodoos, balanced rocks, massive boulders sat up on wind-sculpted bases. Meteor eggcups. Mortarboard toadstools. Coral horse skull stones. I thought of my father encountering the polar bear pelvis in the white desert of the Arctic whilst I walked over scalloped drumlin dunes and flaking washboard deltas, my boots crusted in frothy bronze mud setting as clouds of hard pumice around my feet.

As Phobos neared, the sun began to pulse, but hot as the day grew the Mars base behind me always looked frosted. Perhaps it was a lifetime of enigmatic science fiction, the otherworldly loneliness of the desert, but I found myself checking and rechecking to see my ship hadn’t departed home without me in a cloud of tremolo and theremin squall.

But as I walked I found trash and that grounded me. Plastic bottles, wrappers, polystyrene, foam; yes, I knew this planet. I gathered up as much as I could until I couldn’t carry any more. Later I asked Shannon why Mars, Utah was so trashed and she was genuinely sorry and upset.

‘Some of the people who come out here are not respectful. It’s a research station . . . I get so frustrated. A lot of what you’d see as trash are water bottles from a student rover challenge we hold every year. They’re the worst litterers. Of all time. Even though we tell them.’

However, she is fixing it and this last year was different. The competition is run and judged for sixteen hours a day, ‘three days straight, brutal days, and there’s not a lot of extra time to fix stuff. This last time, IKEA were coming to look at the hab as soon as the competition was done so I made the teams clean up and they could do in half a day what it took me a week to collect. But I don’t think there’s the respect for this land that there should be, no.’

She trails off and I’m left with the image of her litter-picking Mars.

I asked Shannon about the deuterium. The actual question now I listen back to my tape isn’t the most pithy but definitely reflects how confused and heartbroken I felt in the moment, talking to this lady, this wonderful enthusiastic Mars Mom figure moderating a Martian test bed to what ultimate end nobody’s yet sure; whose contribution, insight and knowledge may well be ignored or disregarded when big money fires the starting gun for Mars.

This is hard to ask but almost everywhere on this planet has been spoiled and polluted by human activity.

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