New World

NEW WORLD - A Short Story

Mars was looking nice today, especially for a planet with hardly any variety in weather. The atmospheric dust floated around in a most pleasant cast of fog over the backdrop of grey and orange. Potholes and hills, black and brown and red, passed outside the side windows of Rover 12 as it sped through the alien landscape.

"You're almost there. Two more minutes," Jansson said from the center console, the computer-transmitted voice intertwining with the hum of the rover's motors in the cadences of machine-speak.

The driver checked the picture on the screen in front of him, a robot-mapped, layered image of the landscape, where the flattened, rocky desert dropped off at an impressive cliff, where the rock wall sloped down to the bottom of a ravine. "How cold is it?" He asked. "Do you have readings back at E?"

"Negative twenty, Rosenthal. It's nice, isn't it?" the other scientist replied.

"It's not exactly Florida," Marcus Rosenthal grinned, "But it's not bad." The rover made a wide turn, then slowed and stopped, pulling up about a hundred yards short of the cliff's edge. He picked up his helmet from the seat beside him and dropped it onto his head. One quarter-turn secured it with a clicking noise. He checked his gloves and boots, then turned on oxygen cycling. "How much time do I have?"

"Four hours and fifty-one minutes until all onboard oxygen is cycled," Jansson replied, from the helmet's earpiece this time. "There are extra tanks on the rover, which I can bring to your location if you need them. If you are returning the same way you came, total oxygen supply allows for thirty-six hours and fifty-one minutes of field research th-"

"Okay, okay, good. Thank you." He yawned, then turned his key in the door lock. As the door slid open, his view of the Martian landscape shifted from the filtered-light, blue-cast picture his window gave to the bright light and winds of the real world. The teasing gusts of natural wind played with the breathable air of the rover as it rushed out to join the atmosphere. Rosenthal hopped down, onto the wheel's rim then onto the rocky ground. Mars was awesome. He loved every minute of his solo journeys, which were few and far-between- mission control didn't like him leaving the base alone, and rarely approved his requests for alone time.

Even then, he couldn't get Jansson off his back. It was practically a high-school crush. Only this time, the girl infatuated with him was a middle-aged biologist, and the high school in question was South Valles Marineris on a warm summer morning.

His destination was a patch of human-planted lichen that had been strategically placed on the bottom of a hole. The hole in question had once been a small crater, but had been widened by water on its way to the Valles proper. All that remained of that water not were ripples on the stone nearby. Marcus reached the cliff's edge and shook off the mental image of him rappelling down the orange stone to the bottom of the canyon. Today's mission was much less exciting than he had hoped. He just had to feed the Gorg.

Marcus looked into the crevice. Gorg grinned back, and the doctor marveled at how much it had grown. The patch of lichen, once just a black speck in the shadows of the test canyon, was now a sprawling expanse of grey, like mold on a sandy red slice of Mars bread. It had a scientific name, too, but it was far too long and, quite frankly, too boring to remember; everyone back at Eberswalde thought Gorg was an excellent name.

The delivery to be made was a capsule of some chemical or other; apparently, a scientific breakthrough. Rosenthal didn't care, he wasn't a biologist. He was supposed to drop it into the mass of creepy moss, record it, and go home.

"Just... in the middle?" He asked. One, two, three... Seven seconds of delay passed before his answer came.

"Maybe off to one side if you can aim that well," the biologist answered.