The First Mars Mission by Robert F. Young

Author:Robert F. Young [Young, Robert F.]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T18:12:49.687000+00:00

Rocks. Everywhere you looked, rocks.

Mars had come to be associated with rocks. The relatively small ones photographed by Viking landers I and II; the two big ones in the sky called moons.

Standing in the wan sunlight beneath the oddly bright sky, Larry wondered if Hardesty, the astronaut stationed by the landing module training the television camera on him (the one mounted on the module had failed to pass the final series of equipment tests), was as disappointed with the landing site as he was.

NASA's choice of the site had been altruistically motivated, but it did the planet an injustice. Mariner 9 Mars, as it had come to be called, was a far cry from the romantic Mars postulated by the late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century astronomers, but it was fascinating in its own right. East of where Larry stood, well below the horizon, Hecates Tholus, Albor Tholus and Elysium Mons brooded above the broad bulge in the Martian crust known as Elysium. On the opposite hemisphere, just south of the equator, stretched the awesome complex of canyons known as Valles Marineris. Northwest of the complex lay the massive Tharsis Ridge and the shield volcanoes Arsia Mons, Pavonis Mons and Ascraeus Mons, giants in their own right; while farther yet to the north and west the mightiest of them all, Olympus Mons, rose almost fifteen miles into the Martian sky.

But it was the Isidis Region that had got the nod from NASA. Prosaic it might be, but it had posed a minimum of risk and proffered a maximum of safety. NASA had decided as long as a year and a half ago that if man were to walk on Mars, here was where he would walk first. Only Owens, the third astronaut, orbiting the command module, was seeing the planet as it should be seen; alternately viewing its two "faces" —the young one and the old. In a way, Larry envied him. MISSION CONTROL: "Everything okay, Commander Reed?"

LARRY: "Everything's fine. Just getting my bearings." MISSION CONTROL: "You're television's newest star, Larry. The brightest one ever. The eyes of the whole world are on you."

His wife's eyes. His mother's and his father's. The eyes of his twelve-year-old daughter and his ten-year-old son.

Everyone's eyes.

He tried to feel all those eyes, but he couldn't. He felt nothing at all. It was his moment in the sun and he felt nothing.

Fatigue, that was why. Not physical fatigue, although he knew that too, but emotional. The inevitable result of spending month after month in a cramped environment in the constant company of two other human beings and trying not to become paranoid.

He had paused in the midst of his Marswalk not merely to get his bearings but to try to make sense out of the flight of The Martian Queen, out of the Mars he and Chan and Al had seemingly landed on. Now he began moving farther away from the landing module. He had been on camera ever since helping Hardesty plant the metallic flag. The landing site was slightly to the north of the Isidis basin.

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