Danny Goes to Mars Read online

  Almost before he knew it, he and his fellow astronauts were being flown to Florida, where they would spend their final days before liftoff; a space shuttle would carry them to the Burroughs. The President would be there, along with several ambassadors and any other dignitaries who had managed to wangle an invitation. A whole contingent of family and friends were coming in from Indiana to view the launch, which would be covered by camera teams and reporters from just about everywhere. Everything had gone basically without a hitch so far, although they were going to be late taking off for the Burroughs; the shuttle launch had been postponed until October, what with a few small delays on construction and testing. Still, the Mars ship and its systems had passed every test with flying colors, and this had inspired a number of articles contending, basically, that American workers had finally gotten their shit together again. More kids were deciding to take science and math courses in school. There was a rumor that Time magazine had decided early that Dan would have to be their Man of the Year.

  Only one dark spot marred his impending triumph. That creep Garry Trudeau was now depicting him as a feather floating inside a space helmet and referring to him as “the candidate from Mars.”

  The Burroughs wasn't exactly the kind of sleek ship Dan had seen in movies about space. Its frame held two heavily-shielded habitat modules, the lander, and the Mars base assembly. The large metallic bowl that housed the pulse engine was attached to the end of the frame. The whole thing reminded him a little of a giant Tootsie Roll with a big dish at one end, but he felt confident as he floated into the crew's quarters through an open lock. The President and Barbara had wished him well, and Marilyn and the kids had looked so proud of him. If he had known that being courageous was this simple, maybe he would have tried it sooner.

  Inside the large barrel of this habitat, five seats near wall screens had been bolted to what would be the floor during acceleration. He propelled himself toward a seat and strapped himself in without a qualm. The Burroughs circled the Earth, then took off like a dream; Dan, pressed against his seat, watched in awe as the globe on the screen shrank to the size of a marble.

  The ship would take a little while to reach one g, at which point the crew could get up and move around. The Burroughs would continue to accelerate until they were halfway to Mars, at which point it would begin to decelerate. The faster the ship boosted, the more gravity it would have; at least that was how Dan understood the matter. Even though it might have been kind of fun to float around the Burroughs, he had been a bit queasy during the shuttle flight, and was just as happy that they wouldn't have to endure weightlessness during the voyage. He had heard too many stories about space sickness and the effects of weightlessness on gas; he didn't want to puke and fart all the way to Mars.

  Dan had little time to glance at the viewscreens when he finally rose from his seat. The others were already messing around with the computers and setting up experiments and generally doing whatever they were supposed to do; his job now was to monitor any transmissions from Earth.

  He sent back greetings, having rehearsed the words during the last few days. He didn't have anything really eloquent to say about actually being out in space at last, but a lot of astronauts weren't great talkers. When he was about to sign off, the NASA CapCom patched him through to Marilyn.

  She had cut out James J. Kilpatrick's latest column to read to him. The columnist had written: “Lloyd Bentsen once said of the Vice-President, ‘You're no Jack Kennedy.’ This has been verified in a way Senator Bentsen could never have predicted. This man is no Jack Kennedy. Instead, he has donned the mantle of Columbus and the other great explorers of the past.”

  That was the kind of thing that could really make a guy feel great.

  There was little privacy on the Burroughs. What with the shielding, the engine, the Mars lander they would use when they reached their destination, and the base camp assembly that would be sent to the Martian surface if NASA deemed a longer stay worthwhile, there wasn't exactly an abundance of space for the crew in the habitat modules. The next ship, which was already being built, would have the additional luxuries of a recreational module, along with separate sleeping compartments, but NASA had cut a few corners on this one.

  The bathroom, toilet and shower included, was the size of a small closet; their beds, which had to be pulled out from the walls, were in the adjoining module, with no partitions. The whole place smelled like a locker room, maybe because the modules had been part of the Russian space station before being recycled for use in this mission. The food tasted even worse than some of the stuff Dan had eaten in the Deke house at DePauw.

  But their comfort was not entirely overlooked; the Burroughs had a small library of CDs, videodiscs, and books stored on microdot. Within twenty-four hours, Dan and his companions had worked out a schedule so that each of them would have some time alone in the bed compartment to read, listen to music, or take a nap. There was no sense getting on one another's nerves during the voyage, and some solitude would ease any tensions.

  Dan went to the sleeping quarters during his scheduled time on the third day out, meaning to watch one of his favorite movies, Ferris Bueller's Day Off. He could stretch out on one of the beds and still see the screen on the wall in the back. He nodded off just as Ferris Bueller, played by Matthew Broderick, was calling up his friend Cameron on the phone; he woke up to the sounds of “Twist and Shout.” Matthew Broderick was gyrating on a float in the middle of a Chicago parade.

  Dan had missed most of the movie. He must have been more tired than he realized, even though he didn't have as much to do as the rest of the crew. Sergei had said something about doing some medical tests on him. He looked at his watch, set on Eastern Standard Time, which they were keeping aboard ship, and noticed that it was past 8:00 P.M. He stared at the screen, not understanding why the movie was still on until he realized that the player had gone back to the beginning of the disk and started running the film again. It was Ahmed's time to use the compartment now, so why wasn't the Prince here bugging him about it? On top of that, nobody had come to get him for dinner.

  He sat up slowly. A weird feeling came over him, a little like the nervousness he had felt before calling his father about trying to get into the Guard. He got to his feet and climbed the ladder through the passageway that connected this module to the next.

  The hatch at the end of the short passage was open as he came up. His shipmates were slumped over the table where they usually ate, their faces in their trays. Dan crept toward them, wondering if this was some kind of joke. “Okay, guys,” he said, “you can cut it out now.” They were awfully still, and Sergei had written something on the table in Cyrillic letters with his fingers and some gravy. “Okay, you faked me out. Come on.” Dan stopped behind Kiichi and nudged him, then saw that the Japanese had stopped breathing. Very slowly, he moved around the table, taking each person's pulse in turn. The arms were flaccid, the bodies cold.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Oh, my God.” He sank to the floor, covered his face with his hands, and sat there for a long time until a voice called out to him from the com.

  “Houston to Burroughs. Houston to Burroughs." He got up and stumbled toward the com. “Come in, Burroughs." He sat down and turned on the com screen.

  Sallie Werfel, the CapCom, stared out at him from the screen.

  “They're dead,” he blurted out. “They're all dead.” Not until after he had said it did he remember that NASA had planned a live broadcast for that evening. “Oh, my God.”

  Sallie gazed back at him with a big smile on her face; it would take a while for his words to reach her, since signals had to work harder to get through all that space. Then her smile disappeared, and she was suddenly shouting to somebody else before turning to the screen once more.

  “We're off the air,” she said. “All right, what the hell do you mean about—”

  “They're all dead,” he replied. “At the table. Turn on the cameras and take a look. Sergei wrote something next to
his tray, but it's in Russian.”

  Sallie was whispering to a man near her. Some more time passed. “All right, Dan,” she said very quietly. “I want you to stay right where you are for the moment. We've got the cameras on the others now. You're absolutely sure they're, uh, gone.”

  “Yeah.”

  A few more minutes passed. “We're looking at Sergei's message. A couple of our people here know Russian, so we should have a translation in just a little bit. While we're waiting, I want to know exactly what you were doing during the last few hours.”

  “Not much,” he said. “I mean, it was my turn for some private time—we had, like, a schedule for times to be alone, you know? So I went to the other module thinking I'd catch a movie.” He was about to say he had been watching Ferris Bueller's Day Off, but thought better of it. “What I remember is that Ashana was on the treadmill working out, and Sergei and Ahmed were checking some numbers or something. Kiichi was in the can—er, bathroom. I fell asleep, and when I woke up and looked at the time, it was past dinner. Then I came out and—” He swallowed hard. “Oh, my God.” He waited.

  “Take it easy, Dan,” she said finally. “We're opening up a line to the White House right now.”

  An alien, he thought. Some creepy blob thing, the kind of creature they showed in old sci-fi movies, had somehow found its way aboard the ship. He imagined it oozing out to kill his companions during dinner, then concealing itself somewhere aboard the Burroughs to wait for him. Except that it wouldn't find too many places it could hide in the crew's quarters. Maybe the alien was concealed in the Mars lander by now, waiting for him. He shuddered. It couldn't be an alien. There wasn't any way for one to get aboard.

  “We've got a translation,” Sallie was saying. Dan forced his attention back to the screen. “We know what Sergei wrote.” Her eyes glistened; he held his breath. “Not the food. Fever. Feels like flu.”

  “What?” He waited.

  “Flu. Influenza.” She lifted a hand to her temples. “He's telling us it wasn't anything in the food, that it felt as if they were coming down with something.”

  Everything had happened awfully fast. The whole business might be some sort of weird assassination attempt; maybe someone had figured out a way to poison the main module's air system. It was pure chance that he had not been sitting there with the others. But why would anyone want to assassinate him? Only the Democrats had anything to gain from that, and they had so many loose cannons that somebody would have leaked such a plot by now.

  He didn't know whether to be relieved or not when Sallie contacted him an hour later and gave him NASA's hypothesis. They suspected that his comrades had been the victims of an extremely virulent but short-lived virus—virulent because the others had died so quickly, and short-lived because Dan, in the same module breathing the same air, was still alive. They had come up with this explanation after consulting with the Russians, who had admitted that milder viruses had occasionally afflicted their cosmonauts. The closed ecologies of their modules had never been perfect. What that meant was that things could get kind of scuzzy in there.

  The next order of business was to dispose of the bodies. Dan put on his spacesuit and tried not to look at the food-stained faces of his dead comrades as he dragged them one by one into the airlock.

  They deserved a prayer. The only ones he knew were Christian prayers, but maybe Kiichi and Ahmed wouldn't mind, and he suspected Sergei was more religious than he let on. He whispered the Lord's Prayer, and then another he had often used at prayer breakfasts. Too late, he realized that a prayer said at meals might not be the most appropriate thing, given that his companions had died over their chow.

  He looked up from the bodies as the outside door slid slowly open to reveal the blackness of space. His comrades deserved a few more words before he consigned them to the darkness.

  “You guys,” he whispered, “you were some of the best friends I ever had. You were definitely the smartest.”

  It took a while to get the bodies outside. As he watched them drift away from the ship, tears rose to his eyes. He was really going to miss them.

  Sallie contacted Dan an hour before the President was to address the nation and the world. The most important thing now was for Dan to seem in control of himself when it was time for his own broadcast. The NASA scientists were fairly certain that Dan wouldn't suffer the fate of the others; there was only a slight chance that the mysterious virus would reappear to infect him. He didn't find this very consoling, since there had been only a slight chance of such a thing happening in the first place.

  “Do me a favor, Sallie,” Dan said. “If I do kick off, don't let the media have tapes of it or anything. I mean, I don't want Marilyn and my kids watching that stuff on CNN or something.” He waited. The time for round-trip signals was growing longer.

  “You got it, Dano.”

  The President made his announcement, and Dan went on an hour later to show that he was still able to function. He had no prepared speech, but the most important thing was to look calm and not hysterical. He succeeded in that, mostly because he felt too stunned and empty to crack up in front of the hundreds of millions who would be viewing him from Earth.

  Sallie spoke to him after his appearance. Ashana Washington's parents and brother had already retained counsel, and there was talk of massive lawsuits. He might have known that the lawyers would get in on this immediately.

  “The most important thing now,” Sallie said, “is to bring you home as fast as possible. You'll reach your destination four days from now.” She narrowed her eyes. “The Burroughs is already programmed to orbit Mars automatically, so all we have to do is let it swing around and head back to Earth. You can get back in—”

  “I'm not going to land?” he asked, and waited even longer.

  Sallie sat up. “Land?”

  “I want to land, Sallie. Don't you understand? I have to now. The others would have expected me to—I've got to do it for them.” He searched for another phrase. “It means they won't have died in vain. I can do it—you can program the lander, and I can go down to the surface. Maybe I can't do the experiments and stuff they were going to, but I can set up the cameras and bring back soil samples. It wouldn't be right not to try. And if I'm going to die, I might as well die doing something.”

  He waited for his words to reach her. “Dan,” she said at last, “you surprise me.”

  It would probably surprise the hell out of the President, too. “I've got to do it, Sallie.” He frowned, struggling with the effort of all this thinking. “Look, if I land, it'll inspire the world to bigger and better space triumphs. We'll get that bigger space station built and the more advanced ships, too. But if you just bring me back, all the nuts will start whining again about what a waste all this was and how four people died for nothing.” He waited.

  “I'll do what I can, Dan.” She shook her head. “I don't have much to say about this, but I can speak up for you. In the end, though, it's probably going to be up to the President.”

  “Then put me through to him now.”

  He hashed it out with the President in the slow motion of radio delay, listened to the objections, and replied by invoking the memory of his dead comrades. When the President, looking tense and even more hyper than usual, signed off by saying he would have to consult with his advisors, Dan was certain he had won. He felt no surprise when word came twelve hours later that he would be allowed to undertake the landing.

  After all, if the President didn't let him go ahead, it was like admitting publicly that he had put an incompetent without adequate training aboard the Burroughs. The President, having finally salvaged his place in history, wasn't about to go down in the record books as a doofus.

  David Bowie was singing about Major Tom and Ground Control. Kiichi had been a David Bowie fan, so a lot of Bowie's music, everything from his Ziggy Stardust phase up through Tin Machine, was in the Burroughs's music collection. Dan had never been into David Bowie, who struck him as being kind of fruity, b
ut now he felt as if he understood this particular song.

  Sometimes, during his work with the President's Council on Space, Dan had wondered why some early astronauts had gotten kind of flaky after returning to Earth. These were macho test pilot guys, not the kind of men anyone would expect to get mystical or weirded out. But as he moved around the ship, which was usually silent except for the low throbbing hum of the engine and an occasional beep from the consoles, he was beginning to feel a bit odd himself, as if his mind had somehow moved outside of his body.

  He had never thought all that much about God. He had, of course, never doubted that God was out there going about His business; he had simply never thought about the Lord that much, except when he was in church or saying a prayer. When he was a boy, he had imagined a God something like his grandfather Pulliam, an angry old man ready to smite all those liberal Democrats, Communists, and other forces of darkness. Later on, when he was older and more mature, God had seemed more like a sort of basketball coach or golf pro.

  Now, when he gazed at the image of Mars on his screen, a rust-red dot surrounded by blackness, he had the strangest feeling that he had never really understood the Lord at all. God had created all this, the planets and the space between them and the stars that were so far away he could not even comprehend the distance. God, in some ways, was a lot like the NASA computers, but there was even more to Him than that. Dan wasn't quite sure how to put it; things like that were hard to explain. He supposed that was what it meant to be mystical—having weird feelings you couldn't quite put into words. And faith was believing what no one in his right mind would believe even though it was true.

  NASA kept him busy during his waking hours programming the Mars lander and checking out its systems. After supper, he usually worked on his speech, with some suggestions NASA was passing along from his speechwriters. They had given him another speech earlier, but he couldn't use that one now. With what had happened, this one would have to be really inspiring.