Red Desert - Point of No Return (4 page)

Since I had started my
intensive training in Houston, there hadn’t been a day in which I
hadn’t felt sick. They reassured me by saying it always happened
like that with beginners, but things would improve with time,
eventually. Now that once again I found myself embracing a bowl in
the ladies’ loo, I wasn’t at all convinced.

“Anna, everything
okay?” I heard someone calling me. I replied with a moan. I
couldn’t even speak, but it was sufficient for Michelle to locate
me.

I sat on the floor and
rested my back against the wall. She observed me from the doorway.
Perhaps she had pity on me.

“Come on, darling,
I’ll take you to a lounge so that you can lie down,” Michelle
Francis gently said, while offering me a hand. I reached out and
she pulled me up like I was a child.

She was strong, in her
forties, and at least a couple of spans taller than me. Compared to
her I looked like a woman in miniature. She put an arm around my
shoulders and guided me gently out of the toilet. My face must have
been a mess, but she looked at and talked to me in a reassuring
way, without showing the slightest concern.

She had worked at NASA
for more than ten years, and in addition to being a hugely
experienced astronaut and a geologist, she was the wife of Deputy
Director Francis, and together with Dennis she was one of the
recruiters for the
Isis
mission.

Their task was to
select the other three crew members. These included an aerospace
engineer, able to face technical issues both during the journey and
on site; a surgeon, who took care of everybody’s health; and a
scientist with a biologic or naturalistic education, for the
research to be carried out on Mars. The latter role included the
management of the greenhouse, on which the real chance of an
unlimited stay on the planet depended.

Among the various
purposes of the mission was the one to find out if Mars offered the
conditions for the survival of life forms accustomed to extreme
environments. The thinking was to import them from Earth as part of
a bigger project of planet modification and colonisation. There was
also the hope of finding autochthon microorganisms, in other words
the proof that life could exist outside Earth. The implications of
such a discovery would be enormous and it was that aspect of the
whole mission that had mostly seduced me from the beginning.
Theoretically, since I was specialised in exobiology, I represented
the ideal person for this kind of research.

But the
characteristics they looked for in the candidates were a
combination of perfect technical-scientific competence,
psychological stability, and physical resistance. I might have
beaten my direct competitors with no big effort on the first one,
but there was a lot of work to do on the other two aspects.

I had been subjected
to some psychological tests, which revealed I had some unresolved
issues in my life, but nothing that worried my examiner too much.
There was perplexity since I had a stable relationship, which would
end, if I left. But I wasn’t the only one in such a situation.
Anyway it was a personal choice, and like the others I had
postponed until the moment when I actually found myself shortlisted
within the suitable candidates.

I still had a long way
to go and what worried me most was my physical weakness. Since I
kept fit, everything was alright. In the end, I wouldn’t need those
big muscles to live on Mars, where I would have about one third of
my Earth weight. But my inner ear went haywire, when I had to face
heavy accelerations or decelerations, rotations, or vibrations.
After all, I hated travelling by sea, and even on a plane I stuffed
myself with scopolamine to avoid getting sick. How would my
physical being react once launched into orbit at high speed or,
worse, during the landing on the Martian ground? I didn’t dare
imagine it.

Yet I had embarked on
this enterprise, because nobody had ever proposed anything like it
to me before, and I was certain that somewhere behind it there was
an opportunity I couldn’t ignore. Maybe I wouldn’t be selected and
would remain on Earth, and the experience would turn out useful for
professional growth and to improve myself as a person.

Michelle made me lie
on a couch in the chill-out lounge. She offered me a glass of
water, but I refused it. I was afraid that by introducing anything
into my stomach I would throw up again.

“We have the drill in
the swimming-pool later, are you sure you can make it?”

Oh God, swimming was
the last thing I wanted to do at the moment. If it were up to me, I
would stay still until I was feeling well again. Then I would go
straight back home to Jan’s comforting arms and let him cuddle me
for a while. The idea of it pervaded me with a pleasant feeling of
familiarity. It was the strongest of temptations, but I would
appear even weaker than I was and I didn’t want that to happen.

At last I bit the
bullet and nodded, even if I suspected I wasn’t very
convincing.

Valles Marineris. I’d
wanted to visit that place from the first day we set foot on
Martian ground, but the point where we landed was too distant for
us to get there with the rovers at our disposal. We’d have to wait
for the next launch window to receive the new equipment needed to
expand our exploration area that far. To avoid repeating what had
happened with the previous mission, they had arranged for the
Isis
to land in a flat area distant enough from the canyons,
so that if something were to go wrong she wouldn’t risk crashing
into them.

Thirty years earlier
the
Hera
mission had brought a five-member crew up to an
orbiting station, which had previously been launched from Earth to
welcome the first astronauts destined to set foot on Mars. The Mars
Space Station was a self-sufficient spacecraft, able to draw the
necessary energy for her functioning from the enormous solar arrays
installed on her. She was also equipped with two small shuttles, to
carry the crew to and from the surface.

The launch of
Hera
had been preceded by the sending, during the previous
window, of two habitats which should have landed in two flat areas,
located north and south of Valles Marineris. They were to have
served as starting points for the exploration, being connected to
each other by the same shuttles. The entire mission was to have
lasted ninety days, with the crew returning to the orbiting station
and boarding the
Hera
for the return journey to Earth. The
two habitats, the MSS, and the shuttles were to have remained
there, available for the following mission.

Things didn’t go as
expected from the beginning. Hab One landed without problems on the
Ophir Planum. Hab Two, instead, had a failure while entering the
atmosphere and missed the landing area, ending up inside the
canyon. At over two thousand metres down, and in a place without a
suitable surface that would allow a shuttle to manoeuvre safely, it
was abandoned. The mission was resized, focusing only on the
working habitat. That little accident was considered by many as a
bad omen, but you couldn’t cancel such a big mission for one
incident.

Two years later the
Hera
reached the MSS without significant technical glitches
and docked with her. The crew got on board the station and stayed
long enough to ensure the latter was in the correct position to
reach the area selected for the landing on the planet, a flat
region situated a few tens of kilometres north-east of the canyon
Ophir Chasma.

But when the first
shuttle, carrying four astronauts headed by the mission commander
Jack Diaz, entered the atmosphere, something went wrong.
Communications with the station were disrupted and visual contact
with the spacecraft lost when she entered a huge dust storm, which
was unusual for that time of year. The satellites scanned the area
afterwards, but with no results.

The last astronaut,
who had remained in orbit to control the manoeuvre and should have
followed his crewmates in the second shuttle, had a nervous
breakdown. Since the mission was considered a failure, he was
ordered back to the
Hera
to take the return journey, without
landing on the planet. But he disobeyed, as he intended to remain
in the orbiting station as long as possible, in the hope of
succeeding in making contact with his crewmates. He didn’t want to
accept that the people with whom he had shared everything in the
last few months were dead and he couldn’t do anything to save
them.

When the last day to
abort the mission arrived, his last opportunity to return to Earth,
he recorded a farewell video for his family, and then cut off all
transmissions.

High definition scans,
performed in the following months by satellites, located remains of
the shuttle’s wings and the tail scattered over a vast area in the
depths of Ophir Chasma. She was not far from her last detected
position, which demonstrated that the spacecraft had gone off
course and had crashed just after disappearing from the
instruments.

Nobody could ever
determine what had actually happened, but the disaster in which the
mission ended up caused an abrupt braking in the race to space.
Every subsequent manned project was postponed for an indefinite
period. NASA kept on watching Mars for a while with its many
orbiters. Then other orbiters were sent, as well as exploration
rovers equipped with drones, which allowed samples to be taken at a
distance. The habitat on Ophir Planum discontinued its automatic
communications after seven years for lack of maintenance, thus
becoming useless for any eventual mission.

Another fifteen years
passed until they talked again in concrete terms about sending Man
to Mars. New areas were selected, where new modules would be sent
to establish as many self-sufficient stations able to accommodate
astronauts as possible, but this time indefinitely.

It was much easier and
more convenient to design a one-way craft, a sort of disposable
spaceship. This was how
Isis
was born, as a means to carry
future colonisers to the Red Planet. All without passing through
the MSS, which was now useless, as no return to Earth was planned
for the moment.

The
Isis
reached the planet’s surface without issues. She landed, thanks to
a parachute and airbag system, near the so-called Station Alpha,
situated very far from Valles Marineris to avoid even the slightest
risk of failure.

Everything went
smoothly, clearing the way for Man to set foot on Mars, thirty
years after his previous attempt.

We were walking hand
in hand along a lane in the countryside surrounding Eizeringen, a
small village with a scattering of houses just outside of Brussels,
which was destined to be swallowed by the city in a few years. My
brief stay in Belgium had lasted longer than expected, becoming a
real break from my life. The very same evening of the day in which
Jan and I met, we had our first date. Almost four weeks had passed,
and during that time we had never been apart.

I felt inebriated by
any gesture of his. The sound of his voice, with that guttural
Flemish pronunciation, was the most seductive I had ever heard.
Even though we had never met before that day, I had the feeling
that he had been taken away from me a long time earlier, and now
I’d found him again. With him, every colour was livelier; every
object regarding him became interesting.

I found out he was an
author, a very famous one in Belgium, Holland, and France. It was
immediately clear that he could handle words very well. During our
city tour, he had lingered on each street and square we visited to
tell me the weirdest anecdotes. I listened to him for hours, losing
all sense of time.

That November Sunday,
the sky was so clear it felt almost like spring. The sun shone on
the green lawns and warmed us up a little while we were walking.
However, Jan was strangely quiet. There was a worrisome expression
in his face, as if something was tormenting him.

“Everything alright?”
I was worried.

“Yes,” he replied
almost distracted. He smiled at me, but then turned back to look at
an imprecise point in front of him, as if in search of
something.

I wasn’t sure what to
say. In the end I hadn’t known him that long. I had always seen him
happy and satisfied, but that morning when I woke, I found myself
alone in the bed. Lifting my head, I found him seated on the
armchair, staring at me. I had the impression something had
happened, but when I asked him he denied it and for the rest of the
day he continued to behave in a weird way.

We arrived at a bench
and he sat down, inviting me to do the same. When I was beside him,
he finally raised his gaze from the ground and started peering
straight into my eyes. His expression was so serious that I became
alarmed. I feared that the idyll, which had begun in a split second
and had seemed without end, might stop that very moment.

“I love you, Anna,” he
murmured.

Those unexpected words
ran over me like a violent gust of wind. Caught by an unfamiliar
happiness, I opened my mouth to talk, but I couldn’t. It was
impossible that he really loved me. Too little time had passed; we
were still living in a dream. Anything he felt for me, passion,
attachment, even a glimmer of romance, certainly couldn’t be love.
Not yet.

“But I must tell you
something,” he continued.

I felt my blood
chilling, as an awful feeling reached me.

“I’m married.”

Everything collapsed
in a moment. I lost all perception of where I was, the sounds died
down, and the images around me blurred. I felt like I was falling
with nothing to grab onto.

Before I could reply,
he shook his head and took my hands. “No, wait,” he exclaimed, but
I was already trying to wiggle away from him.