Old Man in a Spacesuit by Wood Mjke

Author:Wood, Mjke [Wood, Mjke]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Copperbird Press
Published: 2020-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

27

W e put Toby outside.

There. Said it. We can move on. You don’t want details. You don’t want to hear every grisly detail about how we got him into his spacesuit, with his unbending rigor mortis joints. About why we wanted him in a suit, and the stuff that would happen to him if he went out in just his jammies, even though he was already dead. You don’t want the details of all the hysterics, the shouting, the cursing and the tears.

Toby went out. He went into his own cycler orbit, and, short term, he went into an orbit around Aldrin .

“So he’ll stay with Aldrin forever?” said Lana.

“Pretty much,” I said. “If we go for free return.”

“And if we go for Mars?”

“We’d slow down to get into a softer orbit for the lander, then Aldrin fires a long burn, slingshots out of Mars’ orbit again, and resumes its cycler pattern. Toby goes it alone. Orbits Mars forever.”

“I hate both,” said Lana.

“So do I,” said Ifan.

“Then, do we do something about it?”

“I think we should,” said Lana.

The only way we could do something different was if we chose to continue to Mars. We’d take Toby with us, at least partway. We could attach a line and tow him in. He’d keep on going when we fired our rockets to slow us for EDL – that’s the Entry, Descent, Landing phase. He’d become the first person to touch the red planet, only he’d do it head first and at about ten thousand kilometres per hour, so it was good he wouldn’t be able to feel it.

“He’ll be the first human. He’d have liked that,” said Lana.

“Except…” I checked myself. “No, you’re right.” I’d been thinking about the other humans, or bits of humans that had already made the journey. Marsmemorial.com and similar organisations claimed to have been sending bits of people to Mars for years: fingers, toes, hair… Toby wouldn’t be the first human presence, but I didn’t want to spoil the mood so I kept my mouth shut. And Toby would be the first complete human, eventually. The bits that didn’t burn up on the way down would get there first, and the ash, well, I supposed that would reach the surface too, one day.

“So it depends on Darmstadt,” said Ifan. “If they tell us to do a free return, Toby’ll stay with Aldrin forever.”

“And probably so will we,” I said. “We couldn’t survive Earth’s gravity after two years of this. So I’m thinking, if they say we have to come home we say screw it and go for a landing anyway.”

“That has merits. Don’t see how they could stop us,” said Ifan.

“They’ll shout at us. Threaten us,” I said.

“With what?” said Lana. “They haven’t got much in the way of sticks from out there. They can’t override anything remotely because we’ll have ten minutes or so head start because of the comms delay. All we’d have to do is turn the dish away from Earth.”

“They could threaten to pull Lukas and the Geras IV team.

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