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< Transcript of Christmas Eve, 2015, Live Broadcast from Mars 1 Basecamp, Galle crater >

(Broadcast opens with Mars 1 mission symbol – a dove settling onto the  red planet with an olive branch clutched in its beak – before screen  clears to show a close-up of a familiar female face, smiling out from  an EVA suit helmet visor, with straggles of blonde hair peeping out  from under the rubber skull cap.  Text caption to screen lower right  identifies camera subject as Mars Mission Commander Beth Lewis.)

(smiling widely) “Greetings, and Happy Christmas to everyone watching  across all the countries and continents of the Earth, from the surface  of Mars..! Well, I say everyone… Mission Control has informed us  that viewing figures for these weekly broadcasts have been falling a  little over the past couple of months, so I hope someone’s watching  this back there. We’re certainly thinking of all of you – not just our  friends and families, though we miss them dearly – as we celebrate Christmas here, half-way across the solar system.

(pause, as Cdr glances down from camera, apparently checking notes)

“I know that you were all expecting a standard mission update, and  that will come, but today we have something a little more… special,  for you. More than half a century ago, long before any of the Mars 1  team were even born, three astronauts, the crew of the Apollo 8  mission, made a special Christmas broadcast to the people of Earth as  they rounded the Moon. They offered, as their gift to the people of  the world, a remarkable view – the whole Earth, rising from behind the  lieless limb of the Moon, a blue and white bauble shining against the  blackness of space. Quoting passages from the Bible, they altered  forever Man’s perception of the Universe, and his place in it.  Tonight, we hope to honour their memory, their vision, with a special broadcast of our own… and we have not one, but two gifts for you,  the people of Earth. But all will be revealed later, for now, let me  give you an update on how things are here on Mars, at the end of Day  56 of Mars 1.”

(camera zooms out from Cdr Lewis’ face, to a wide-angle shot showing   she is standing in front of the MarsHab module. Her spacesuit is  coloured gleaming white, signifying her rank and role.)

(Cdr Lewis sweeps arm across view behind her) “You’ll all be familiar  with this view by now, I’m sure… this is our home, the Hab module,  which we landed inside the crater Galle almost two months ago, thirty  or so kays away from the eastern wall.  If Murray can just tilt the  camera down you’ll see that this area of the crater floor is a rocky  plain, littered with boulders..? (camera view shifts until it is  pointing downwards: the ground is brown and tan-coloured, littered  with rocks and boulders of all shapes and sizes, all different shades  of yellow, orange, caramel and brown. Long, jagged shadows are cast behind every rock) … thanks Murray… but thankfully none of them  were big enough to cause us any trouble when we set down.  During the  day this place is spookily similar to the Arizona desert I think…  just missing the cacti, cattle skulls and rattlesnakes… but at this  time of the day it looks very different, and it’s easy to believe  we’re actually on another planet. Murray, pan the camera up a little,  show them the sky, will you?”

(Camera view changes again; rocks slide out of frame, and Cdr Lewis’  face rushes by before sky comes into view. It is a rich orange colour,  with washes of purple through it)

“That’s great, thank you… You join us, on Mars, just before sunset  on day 56. Look at the colour of that sky..! Beautiful, isn’t it?  During the daytime the sky is various shades of yellow or orange, it  goes through a whole cycle of colours…  peach, banana, apricot,  butterscotch… we’re running out of fruits and deserts to compare the  colours to! And at night, when the Sun has set, the sky is blacker  than black, a huge dome studded with thousands and thousands of  stars… the Milky Way looks like someone has airbrushed it across the  sky, and because there’s less air here, and less wind, the stars don’t twinkle as much as they do on the Earth, they shine like diamonds or  chips of ice…

“But between the two, between the bright day and the dark night, there  is a time, perhaps an hour long, no more, when the sky burns with a  different, richer colour. Look… see how the purple is starting to  come through? Within a few minutes the entire sky will be that colour,  like a huge purple velvet cloak thrown over the world, and over us…  and when that happens we’ll give you the first of our two gifts. Okay  Murray, thank you…”

(camera view shifts again, and Cdr Lewis reappears on screen.  She is  seen to be standing to left of MarsHab, having walked a short distance  aay from it while the camera was aimed at the sky. Another figure can  now be seen behind her, working at a large aerial-type structure  deployed on the rocky surface.)

“As you can see, the spirit of Christmas is not restricted to Earth,  or even to Earth orbit, with all due respect to our friends watching  from the Space Station. We have everything we need to celebrate the  holiday right here… a dehydrated Christmas dinner is waiting inside  for us, in the galley, and the DVD of “Miracle on 34^th Street” is  already cued up in the player. We all packed gifts for each other  before we left Earth and the good people at Mission Control have given  us the whole of tomorrow off, for which we are truly grateful. We even  have a christmas tree, look! (camera zooms in on figure working behind  her: the green-suited astronaut is decorating an umbrella-like  communications array with makeshift baubles and tinsel made from food  wrappers and packaging.)

“And, just in case any of our younger viewers are worried that we’re  too far away for a certain kind, fat gentlemen to leave gifts for,  look… here… recognise him?

(camera shakes slightly, as if the operator is laughing, as a third  figure bounds into view: a red-suited astronaut, whose suit and helmet  have been decorated with white insulation foam to make him resemble a  bearded Father Christmas)

“See? There’s obviously nowhere Santa and Rudolph can’t get to…”  (camera shakes again). “Santa stopped by here on his way to Earth,  before he starts leaving presents for all you good girls and boys…”  (camera shakes again, more violently this time). “Thanks for coming  all this way, Santa!” (camera shows Cdr Lewis shaking hands with  ‘Santa’ before the red-suited astronaut bounces out of frame again.)  “I guess having him here means that, despite what the Mission  Schedulers have been saying under their breath, we have all been  good…”  (camera shakes again, for several moments, and laughter can  be heard off-camera as Cdr Lewis smiles innocently)

“Now, time to tell you about how we all are. (pause)  Everything continues to go well, here on Mars. The Hab you can see behind me is  in good shape, no leaks or faults of any note. She’s looking a bit  dusty now, not that beautiful blue and white colour she was when we  arrived, but we like it this way, she looks more… homely, somehow.  We still haven’t been able to repair that busted refrigeration unit  though – the one that broke the day after we landed, taking a third of  our frozen supplies with it – so we’re looking forward to the arrival  of the re-supply pod in three months, time… and again, on behalf of  the whole team, I’d like to express our sincere gratitude to the men  and women who worked so hard to scramble that out to us. The beers are  on us when we get back.

“The ERV is all fuelled-up and ready to fly. We check it daily, just  to make sure. Hard to believe that we’ll be boarding it in just under  six months and leaving this place… maybe forever.  We try not to  think about that day though; it still feels like we only just got  here, we have so much to do. A lifetime wouldn’t be long enough  here…

“The greenhouse is functioning well, though, to be honest, I have to  say that the plants are surviving rather than flourishing. But Sonia  is confident it’s just a matter of time before she gets the nutrient  levels optimised, and then promises us a fit-for-a-king salad with all  those fresh juicy tomatoes and apples the mission planners promised  us when we signed up for this crazy trip…

“Sonia is loving it here, as is everyone. Everyone has slipped into  their surface roles easily and enthusiastically, I am delighted with,  and proud of, my crew. Tori, our engineer extraordinaire, is having  the time of her life fixing and mending the hundred things which go  wrong each day… the words ‘kid’ and ‘candy store’ spring to mind  when I see her burrowing into a panel, looking for the latest burntout circuit board…  Matteo and Murray, my trusty cameraman for the  night, continue to photograph and record every square centimetre of  our landing site, and tell me that soon they’ll be able to send back a  full virtual reproduction of it for you all to roam around and explore  from the comfort of your own armchairs… Doc Yuri…  who some of you  may have recognised earlier as our Secret Santa… continues to moan  and groan about how little work he has to do, and I suspect that if we  checked his Christmas list we’d find he’d asked for one of us to  break a leg or something, just to give him something to do…” (camera  shakes again)

“As for myself… I’m just living in a dream, day after day. I have  fallen in love with this planet, I truly have. The colours, the  shapes, the textures which surround us… they’re hypnotising, I wake  up each morning impatient to get into my suit and outside, hating the  thought of wasting even a single moment. Every day here is Christmas  Day for me, I swear… Let me show you what I mean… Murray?”

(Cdr Lewis’ face vanishes off screen as camera swings away, panning  left. Screen now shows view of landing area, the interior of Galle  crater.)

“Even in this half-light you can see why this location was chosen as  our LZ. The crater floor ripples and undulates, as if it is covered  with sand dunes… but they’re not dunes. If you look over there,  you’ll see several ranges of cliffs, which are streaked and marked  horizontally with alternating light and dark bands… these, like the  dune features on the floor, are layers of sediment, material laid down  by the flow of water over this area in Mars’ distant past. The Global  Surveyor probe, way back in 2000, was the first to spot features like this, features which proved Mars was once wetter and warmer than it is  now, and MGS’ cameras gave us our first real clue where we should go  to look for life, living or extinct. MGS guided us here, and every  time it dashes across our sky at night, a little, swift spark of  light, we offer it our thanks. Okay, Murray, zoom in on the Tent,  would you?”

(view changes again to show centre of crater floor, where a small,  dome-shaped object can be seen. It appears to be illuminated from  within, and shadows can be seen moving within it. Multiple tracks lead  away from it in all directions, showing where a rover has crisscrossed the crater floor during expeditions to and from the dome.)

“Over there is our field lab, nick-named The Tent. It’s a small, pressurised dome, fitted out with computers and equipment which we use  to study the various rock and mineral specimens gathered from the  area. Some are collected the old-fashioned way,  by hand, either  picked up off the ground or chipped out of the cliffs with hammers…  others are mined from beneath the surface withn the robotic drills…  inside you can see Matteo and Sonia busily working away on our latest  ‘harvest’.

“The scientific challenges we face here on Mars are huge. Six people  with a whole planet, a whole new world to explore… all we can do,  this time, at least, is scratch the surface, and hope and trust that  those who follow in our footsteps will be able to stay longer, do  more, learn more… But each challenge is met with good humour,  resilience and determination, and I say again how proud I am of eah  and every one of my colleagues.  All of you, watching on Earth, should  feel pride in them too.

(camera begins to zoom in, slowly, on Cdr Lewis’ face)

“But we face more than ‘mere’ scientific challenges here on Mars.  There are other challenges too. To live each day surrounded by such  overwhelming natural beauty is a challenge none of us had anticipated,  it is often hard to concentrate on the task at hand. But worse still,  so much worse than any of us had expected, is the challenge of  isolation. True, we have each other, and are a remarkably close team,  almost a family by now… but it’s impossible to forget where we are,  and how far removed we are from those people who matter to us –  especially when there is such a vivid, cruel reminder visible to us.  Which brings me to our first gift…”

(camera zooms closer on Cdr Lewis’ face as she pauses)

“As you will know, if you have been following our broadcasts, since we  arrived here on Mars the Earth has been invisible to us, hidden behind  the Sun. We have communicated with you through a network of relay  satellites, our signal bouncing between them like pool balls between  cushions. Earth has been just a memory for us, a photo on the wall of  the galley, a picture in a National Geographic, or on a website, or in  an email from home… But now we need rely on memories and photographs  no longer, because today Earth emerged from the blinding glare of the  Sun for the first time…”

(camera shows Cdr Lewis nodding, and smiling, before the view changes.  Her face slews out of frame as the camera pans up, then left and  right, searching for something in the darkening sky. Finally it  settles on a lantern-bright, blue-green star flashing just above the  crater wall hills on the horizon.)

“Here, on Mars, this Christmas Eve, as were the Wise Men two thouand  years ago, we are entranced and beckoned by a beautiful star. But our  Christmas Star is not a comet, or supernova, nor is it a close  conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn…  it is the Earth, our  Homeworld, the planet of Mankind, shining like an emerald against the  deep of night…”

(camera zooms in on the ‘star’, defocusing it briefly into a dancing  blur of green and blue light before the image steadies, and the star  is resolved into a tiny, fingernail-thin crescent.)

“This is our first gift to you… a view of the Earth none have ever  seen before, not even the heroic crew of Apollo 8, or the many  missions which followed them into orbit and away from the Earth. We  give you this image, this vision, in the hope that seeing your – our – planet reduced to such a tiny, fragile thing will make you realise  how precious it is. We are not so naive as to believe that a mere  picture on a flickering TV screen will halt the many, terrible wars  raging on Earth’s surface, nor do we believe it will silence a single  gun. But we hope, and pray, that it will make some of you… of us…  stop fighting for a moment, and, looking up at the sky, seek out Mars,  and feel, for themselves, the thread which connects us to you across  the gulf of space. We hope that seeing these pictures you… we…  will realise how fleeting our existence is, and resolve to make better  use of it… Watch now…”

(the camera view shakes slightly as the camera zooms in even more  closely on Earth, showing tantalising detail on the crescent – hints  of white cloud overlaying a land mass which could be Africa, or North  America. There is no time to be sure because moments later the  crescent is blocked by something between it and the camera, and the  camera hurriedly zooms out to show the ‘star’ almost touching the far  mountains. Another moment later it has set behind them, snuffed out  like a candle flame.)

(camera focuses again on Cdr Lewis, in close-up, clearly moved by what  she has just seen, and shown).

“I’ll leave it to each of you, individually, to think about what you  have just witnessed… But… we have a second gift to you, this  historic Christmas Eve, something which we are well aware will  change things, possibly forever.

“We came here  on a quest, a quest for life. Following the dreams of  astronomers like Percival Lowell and Carl Sagan…  following the trail  blazed by spaceprobes such as Mariner, Viking, Pathfinder and  Beagle… following the visions of bold writers like Burroughs,  Bradbury, Clarke and Baxter. We came because for centuries Mars has  called to us across the gulf of space like a siren, beckoning us,  seducing us… We came because of a need to learn if we really are  Alone, not just in this solar systemn, this tiny corner of the  Universe, but in the whole of Creation itself… We came here, to this  crater, because its features and landforms tell us that Mars was once  a warm world, a wet world, a world with rivers and oceans, blue skies  and clouds… a world of rain and rainbows… “

(Cdr Lewis glances towards the ground) “Once, the very place where I  am standing was underwater, the floor of a lake, or perhaps even an  ocean of cool, clear water.  Perhaps, one day, it will be so again, if  the terraformers have their way and make this beautiful Red Mars blue  again. The dream of ‘restoring Mars to life’ is an ancient one, many  insist a noble one too, and there are many that insist that  terraforming this planet is not only our destiny, but our  responsibility, that if we can make it flourish and blossom then we  must, for that is Our Purpose, to spread life wherever we can… That  may well be so, but it is my opinion, and the opinion of all of us  here, that there is no rush, no need for haste. A Mars with oceans and rivers would be beautiful, true, but Mars is beautiful now, today, in  its naked state. However and whenever Mars came to be this way, it was  Nature’s will, and if in some distant time we are able to bring the  waters back then so be it… but for now, let us explore it as it is.  There is no need to drown this lovely world, just because we can.

(camera shows Cdr Lewis holding up a battered paperback book, sealed  in a plastic wallet.)

“As martian environmentalist Ann Clayborne said in ‘Red Mars’, Kim  Stanley Robinson’s epic story of martian exploration – and, coincidentally, the book which is directly responsible for half the  Mars 1 crew applying to join the Space Program in the first place – we  haven’t even seen Mars… at least, not yet. Not properly.”

(camera shows Cdr Lewis lowering the book and handing it to someone  off-camera. She is handed an object which looks like a flat stone,  slightly larger than the paperback just seen)

“It is time to give you our second gift.”

(Cdr Lewis pauses to look at the rock. Camera zooms in on her face,  shows she is smiling broadly, and blinking)

“Today, whilst climbing the wall of the Mutch  slopes, over to the  south west of Basecamp, we – that is, the whole team, collectively; no  indiviual requires or seeks specific credit – found a rock. (Cdr Lewis  holds rock up to camera briefly.) This rock. Hardly surprising, I  know, when the whole of this planet is covered with rocks… but this  rock is the most important rock found in history – more important even  than the Genesis Rock recovered from Taurus Littrow on the Moon, by  the heroic crew of Apollo 17. Let me show you why…”

(camera shows Cdr Lewis reaching up to touch a pad on the side of her  helmet, activating a spotlight mounted on its top. The light beam  shines on the rock in her hand, illuminating it brightly, while  throwing everything else into dark shadow. The camera view flares  briefly before it zooms in on the rock, showing tiny white features  upon its flat face)

“This is what we came all this way to find. These are what we came  to find. This is the discovery that all of human development, perhaps  even evolution itself, has been leading to. These… (pauses)… are  fossils, the fossils of tiny, primitive, native martian lifeforms,  laid down in stone thousands of millions of years ago, when Mars had  oceans and waterfalls. (Cdr Lewis holds up rock closer to the camera,  and the tiny shapes are resolved into delicate spiral-shell structures, and some which resemble miniaturised trilobites).  Here, in  my hand, is the proof we have been seeking – the proof that Mars was  once a living world like Earth, perhaps it was even alive at the same  time as Earth, and, for a blink of a cosmic eye, the Sun was orbited  by not one but two living worlds… Here, in my shaking hand, is  proof that Earth is not unique in the Solar System. One other world  has, or had, life. Life found a way…”

“Of course, we know Mars is dry and dead today – or so we thought.  (pause) Our seismic probes have shown that the ground beneath the lake  floor is not solid, rather it consist of many chambers, like a  honeycomb. Perhaps… just perhaps… some of those chambers contain  traces of water, and in those pools descendants of this primitive life  stubbornly cling on, resisting the planet’s best attempts to  exterminate them.  Believe me, if it is there, we will find it. And if  we find it then we will cherish it and nurture it, and guard it with  our lives as we learn from and about it, because while it may be our destiny to return Mars to life in the future, it is our responsibility  to protect any life which exists here now, and we will allow no harm  to come to it.”

(camera zooms out to show Cdr Lewis flanked on each side by another  Team member, all three are holding hands.)

“This then, is our gift to you – a new, we hope, sense of, and appreciation for, our place in the Universe. We are not alone.  We  never have been. We need never feel alone again, for if life evolved  here, it  evolved – and exists still, today – out there, in the  timeless depths of space.

“We leave you with a thought… and a request, perhaps even a plea.  Look at this stone, and think about the message it contains… and  then turn your back on your TV- or holo-screen, go outside and, if it  is night where you live on the Home Planet, seek out Mars among the  stars which are shining above your village, town or city, and think of  us, as we are thinking of you. This is Commander Beth Lewis, and the  members of Mars 1, wishing you, and all the people of the Good  Earth, a Merry Christmas, and a happy, and peaceful, New Year…”

(camera lingers on trio of smiling astronauts until picture fades and  breaks up…)

 © Stuart Atkinson 2000

Hunters

From:     JenCReed@ChryseBase.Mars.Plan

To:     CalMac@San/Ork/Scotia/Terra.Plan

Date:     Earth/Feb 12, 2062 

Hi Cal,

Your last letter was wonderful, again, Thank You! 🙂 I’m assuming  that as it cut off near the end there, something stopped you  completing it as planned; that’s okay, I’ll just chew my nails  nervously while waiting for part #2!

Since you wrote I’ve been busy too, away from home for a couple of  days on a school trip. I know I never said anything about it last  time; it was a big surprise to me actually, it came out of nowhere, or  I would have warned you I’d be away and out of contact.

So, where have I been? Well, I’ve been almost as far away from Chryse  as I’ve ever been before – out into the Far Outback, on a hunting  expediton! No, nothing to do with Mars Heritage this time sadly,  though I believe my Team (it feels good to be able to talk about My Team now! 🙂  ) is on the shortlist for the next draft to clean-up  the Santa Maria site in a month’s time (cross your fingers for me, you  can imagine just how high prestige a job it is, tidying the landing  site of the first manned expedition to Mars!). No, I got back  yesterday from a field trip up to the crater Lyot, which lies far  north and east of here, in the deep desert of Vasitas Borealis (rough translation: the Great Northern Plain), because the entire senior  class was drafted in to assist a planetary geology field squad on a  Hunt…

… a meteorite hunt.

Mars is an excellent place for collecting meteorites Callum.  We’re  something of a meteorite magnet. Because we’re caught between the Sun  and the asteroid belt we get lots of what the scientists call “debris  infall”; out in the Belt asteroids are colliding and chipping bits off  each other all the time, and those chips of rock and melted globs of  metal are pulled towards the Sun by its gravity. But they have to get  past us first, and many don’t. Meteorites land here all the time, many more than do there on Earth, but the problem is this planet is so huge  (only half Earth’s size, I know, but we have no oceans here  remember, so although we’re only half your size we have an equal area  of land… and no trees or lakes to hide falling starstones! 🙂  )  and its landscape is so rugged that they’re very hard to find. A lot  of the surface is very hard, exposed bedrock, so anything that hits it  either shatters into minute fragments or is vapourised completely.

But there is some softer ground, with dust dunes and wells to cushion  infall, so single meteorites are out there to be found, and often  are, but usually only the big ones – and by “big” I mean bigger than  your hand – are stumbled upon by people outside, just because they stood out from the surface clutter. And you’ve seen the pics, there’s  lots of clutter – there are rocks everywhere, millions upon millions  of them…

So, contrary to popular terrestrial opinion, meteorite hunting here on  Mars isn’t simply a matter of taking a stroll into the desert and  looking at your feet. They’re not everywhere. One Hunter told me  once that looking for a single meteorite on Mars is “like looking for  a bit of hay in a stack of needles”. Just like on Earth, you have to  look for them in a place where they’re more likely to be found,  somewhere where they’ll really stand out against the terrain and occur  in unusually high numbers. You have places like that there – the  blue-white icefields of Antarctica, or the deserts in Africa and  Australia – and we have our equivalents: vast stretches of open desert here in the north; the southern ice cap, though that can be very dusty; the dust-filled interiors of the biggest craters…  they’re all  popular meteorite hunting grounds. I’m sure there are half a dozen  people out there right now, as I write you this letter, looking for  starstones…

Just as I was for a couple of days, up in Vasitas.

If you look at your Mars map – I’m assuming you have one to hand now  every time you read one of my mails? If you haven’t it might be an  idea from now on! I have some travelling to do! – you’ll find Lyot  crater “way up north”, just beneath the dark, polar band (or 30  degrees east, 50 degrees north if you feel like plotting it out  precisely. The crater lies at the western end of a long, narrow flat  plain, and a remote Prospector probe recently flew over it, looking for traces of minerals. It was unsuccesful, but it found something  much better – a new strewn field. (A ‘strewn field’ is what we call an area above which a large meteorite has broken up, scattering pieces  down onto the ground below.) A survey team was despatched a couple of  days later – that’s quite fast for Mars – and they came back beaming from ear to ear, clutching bags stuffed full of meteorites and armed  with fishermen’s tales of how there were too many starstones up there  to count. They asked the Base Commander for help, and she agreed. We  were drafted, and taken up there to act as assistants to the geology  team. Hunter-Gatherers, I suppose… 🙂

Your map will tell you at a glance that Lyot is so far away that travelling there in a rover was simply out of the question, so Commander McNeil gave permission for us to be taken north in a shuttle. We all gathered outside the shuttle bay on the morning of our  departure excited beyond words. We’d been warned that it was going to  be very hard work, and we all realised that, but all we could think of  was one thing: two whole days – and a night! – away from home.  Freedom! There was still an hour to go until sunrise, and wer were all  sleepy and gritty-eyed as we greeted each other with bags slung over  our shoulders, crammed full of all our essentials – music CDs,  players, books, junk food, the usual! 🙂

The first big surprise of the day was finding, when we walked into the  bay, that we would be travelling in an old CK-20.  They’re ugly brutes,  basically just a pair of pyramids linked together by a grid-like mass  of beams and struts, with a crew cabin at the front and an engine  block at the rear, and have been on Mars for years. They’re more than  just shuttles, they’re essentially mobile research stations, which can  fly to any location, set down on the ground and support the work of a small science team for several days. Those two pyramids I mentioned,  both are detachable and have specific uses: the front one is a  passenger cabin, the rear one is a fully-equipped lab, with a cycling  airlock, a couple of work stations. Connect them with a tunnel and you  have everything needed to hold an Outback geek party! 🙂

Seeing the CK-20 sitting on its pad waiting for us, surrounded by  fussing techs and members of the geology team, we all knew were were  in for an “interesting” time… 🙂

Once we’d taken our seats, splitting up into our own little social  groups and cliques, the flight north seemed to pass in a blur. I  grabbed a starboard side window seat so I could enjoy the view, and  while everyone else gabbled and gossiped away around me I pressed my  face to the crysta-glass to enjoy the dawn. Oh, it was beautiful Cal!  With the Sun still some distance below the horizon, the planet beneath  us was still purple as we rose into the air; the sprawling landscape  was painted in shades of plum and indigo, and the eastern horizon was  an undulating scarlet line which cut the world off from a raging  orange and crimson sky, marked here and there with scars of angry red  cloud. Then the sky began to brighten, cycling though purple to  scarlet… pink.. and then the Sun burst over the horizon like a  nuclear fireball, an explosion of golden light which shattered the sky  in a heartbeat, burning away the night’s last lingering clouds and  banishing the stars to oblivion in a moment. As it climbed higher the  Sun’s light rippled over the planet’s surface, rippling towards me  over the craters and hills and mountains, flooding over the land like  a tidal wave of molten gold… then it was past us, there was clear  sky between the Sun and the horizon again. Daybreak on Mars. You have  No Idea.. 🙂

After that excitement we followed a fairly unremarkable flightpath to  Lyot, which tool us over mostly flat, featureless desert, broken here  and there by a few far-scattered mesas and valley or canyon systems,  and after five hours of easy flying we were dropping down towards our  home for the following two days – Lyot crater.

Lyot’s a big crater, spanning five degrees of longtitude and as many  degrees of latitude, an almost percectly circular scar on Mars’ rocky  skin excavated by the impact of an asteroid-sized body millennia ago,  during the Great Bombardment, and as we dropped down towards it, it  seemed to stare up blindly out of the tan-coloured desert floor, like  a grotesque, empty eye socket, dark, deep shadows cast on the desert  behind its sharp-edged western rim wall. Very impressive, like your  Meteor Crater – but enlarged by a factor of ten… 😉

Our landing site – the imaginatively-christened ‘Lyot Strewn Field’ –  lay a little further north and east, so we flew over the northern rim  of the crater as we descended. It was stunning, looking down into that  deep pit, at the mountains, dust dunes and smaller craters within it,  like looking at a grab-bag of Mars’ features, but after a few minutes  it was behind us and we were within sight of the Field. The survey team had left a marker beacon at its centre, to guide us in, and as we  approached we all crowded around the windows to get our first glimpse  of the area. It didn’t look anything special, to be honest, just a  long stretch of pale-coloured desert which disappeared over the  eastern horizon, like the exposed bed of some huge, dried-up  prehistoric martian river. Our pilot told us over the intercom that we  would be landing in a couple of minutes, and asked us to strap  ourselves in in preparation. We did as we were told, and listened to  the engines whining as they were throttled back, braking our descent.  Moments later we landed, with a considerable bump, and the pilot  welcomed us to what we be known, temporarily, as “Lyot Base”. We all  smiled, content in the knowledge that by simply by being there we had pushed the Frontier back just a little further… that kind of thing’s  important to us, probably hard for you to undrstand, but that’s okay.  Maybe when you get here you’ll see what I mean. 🙂

Our pilot had told us during the flight that he would be leaving us  soon after landing – a message had come in from a science team on the  north polar ice cap, asking for help, and he had been ordered to go  and assist – so, following procedures, as always (the only way to  stay alive here)  we all pulled on our helmets and suits and made our  way to the airlock, cycling through it one by one until we were all  standing out on the surface. It felt sooo good to be Out againCal, I  can’t begin to tell you. Just to be outside again, on Mars, with that  huge sky above me and the dust beneath my boots, I felt more alive  than I had done in days. And I could tell the others were happy to be away from Chryse too; they were stomping and bounding around like  idiots, kicking up clouds of cinnamon-coloured dust with their big,  uncontrollable feet as the teachers struggled to rein them in.

But the sound of a warning tone ringing in their helmets brtought the  wanderers to their senses, and joined by our teachers and the geology  team we headed away from the CK, to a patch of bare rock which was the  standard safe distance of 200 metres. Then we turned and looked back  at the shuttle. It was a strangely moving sight, beautiful in an ugly  kind of way. The CK has none of the flowing lines of its descendants,  the sleeker, more passenger-friendly CM and CN models, but it serves its purpose, faithfully and truly, and as I looked at it sitting out  there on the sand I couldn’t help thinking how perfectly at home it  looked…

Then the ground beneath our feet started to tremble and shake, and  watched the shuttle’s superstructure lift slowly up off the desert  floor, like a giant waking from a deep, deep sleep. Then it swung  around to port, until its snub nose was pointing north, then flew  away, leaving us standing out on the sands.  Alone.

No, not quite alone. In the near distance, where there had once been a  shuttle, there now stood two small pyramids, and for a moment I could  almost imagine I was there Callum, on your world, in the middle of the  Egyptian desert staring at the great pyramids of Giza. Only, there was  no Sphinx, and the pyramids before me were not built out of stone, but  metal and glass, and their surfaces were smooth and clean, covered  with mirror-like solar panels to catch the Sun’s light and convert it into electricity, to power our experiments and equipment and keep us  alive; and being constructed so, they reflected perfectly the  surrounding landscape and sky, so that they seemed to vanish and merge  with that landscape if you searched for them after briefly looking  away… beautiful, Cal, no pictures could ever hope to do such a sight  justice… <<sigh>>

Because we had landed a short distance away from the southern boundary  of the strewn-field (not a good idea to land inside it, and have the  pyramid modules actually cover some of the meteorites!) our first task  was to deploy the emergency power generators from the habitation  module  while the so-called ‘grown-ups’ (who were by that time leaping  and bouncing about just as much as us, if not more so!), so we bounced  keenly back over to it, leaving trails of deep footprints in the sand,  and hauled the huge solar-cell-covered sheets out of their storage bays. When they were stretched out over the desert floor we waited for  the red lights on their edges to blink on, confirming they were  collecting sunlight. Eventually they did, releasing us to move on to  more serious matters: the first Hunt!

In our absence the geo-team had checked out the lab and its equipment,  satisfying themeslves that all inside it was wall, and we joined up  with them outside the hab-module. Telling us that we had landed just a  few minutes’ walk away from the boundary, they asked us all to fan out  into a line and advance into the field, slowly, like a search party,  and check for meteorites on the desert floor. The purpose of the first  Hunt was, they stressed, to get us used to the local conditions, to “dip our toes into the water” and learn how to recognise our prey.  Being a desert fox, as you know, I was already familiar with meteorite  ID methods: a typical meteorite is dark, because of its ‘fusion crust’  of melted rock, and they weigh more than surrounding rocks too, being  denser and having some iron content. Stones would be typically rounded  and smooth, metallic meteorites would probably be more irregular in  shape, with pits and hollows and protrusions too.

The final field test was centuries old: if the stone was attracted to  a strong magnet (like the one mounted on the back of my glove) it was  much more likely to have come from Up There. I couldn’t help laughing.  I was raring to go!

The others seemed to be feeling in a light mood too, because by the  time we were all assembled in our line everyone was either laughing or  smiling, and it felt like we were on holiday instead of conducting  serious scientific research. Even the Geo-team joined into the spirit  of things; to signal the start of the search  the  team leader raised  his hand theatrically, like a Roman emperor demanding silence before  the start of a gladiator tournament… then dropped it. With a mixture  of whoops, laughs and cheers we started forwards gingerly, edging into  the strewn field cautiously, like soldiers advancing into enemy  territory.

It felt un-natural to be outside and moving so slowly – I love to  bounce when I’m outside on my own! I can bounce along for miles and  miles and miles..! 🙂  – and I felt like an old woman shuffling and  bumbling along, having to control myself literally every step of the  way. Whenever someone spotted a possible meteorite they called their  name out over the radio, and everyone else had to stop while a Geoteam member bobbled over to check it out. That was annoying and  frustrating at first, but I soon realised how precious those moments  of silence and stillness were; they gave me an opportunity to drink in  the view, to savour my surroundings, and while everyone else fidgeted,  shuffling from one foot to the other, I just let out a deep breath and  Looked…

The deep Outback desert is special Cal, unique, as treasured by native  martians as your islanders treasure their cliffs, beaches and oceans.  Without any mountains, crater walls or volcanoes to clutter the  horizon, standing in the centre of a vast dust desert is a  breathtaking experience. To feel such isolation, such…  insignificance is  so humbling, so centering, I smile just thinking  about it, and ache to do it again. Some people can’t bear it, they  have to fight off previously-unknown agoraphobic feelings and get back  to their lander, rover or whatever, and batter their input senses with structure, shape and form. Me? I could stand there out in the open all  day, gazing up at the never-ending, peach-coloured sky, staring out to  the unreachable horizon, feeling at one with the planet beneath and  around me, part of it…

And the colours, Cal! I can’t begin to do them justice… look closely, and for long enough, and you see that the rocks aren’t just  red, or brown, they’re a million subtle shades, and each one, each one  is an individual in its own right, with its own markings, its own  profile, shape and form… million upon million of them stretching  away to infinity, too many to ever count, too many to ever even see…

Jenna found the first suspect, and called out her name so loudly at  first I wondered if she’d fallen and twisted an ankle or something,  but when I looked around to see where the cry had come from I saw her  jumping up and down very excitedly, summoning the Geo-team over to her  with repeated cries of “I’ve found one! I’ve found one!” Like me,  Jenna has found meteorites before, more than once, and although it’s  quite a rare event we’ve all got kind of used to it by now. But I  could understand why she was so excited by her find; we were a team,  everyone was working together, it felt… different… grander  somehow.  We were suddenly part of something bigger, and important.

No-one had ever been up here before, the ground beneath our feet was  virgin territory, free of bootprints and toe-scuffs –

But poor Jenna had called out too soon. Her meteorite turned out to be  a “meteor-wrong”, just a darker-than-usual piece of impact debris,  catapulted into the area from who knows where over the horizon. She  was gutted, and tossed the rock aside contemptuously, only warming  when the Geo-team leader patted her on the shoulder and congratulated  her on her observational skills in spotting the rock at all. She felt  better after that, and after a brief pause the Hunt resumed.

We walked for two hours, in a line, spread out to my right and left,  scanning the ground carefully, closely, eyes roaming over and between  and around every rock, pebble and boulder while the Sun arched above  us and the shadows behind us lengthened. Each time someone found a  meteorite the line ground to a halt, and a Geo-team member would lope  over to the finder, image the meteorite where it lay, then bag it and  mark the find location with a temporary micro-beacon. Then we’d start  again…

This carried on until eventually it was time to head back, and at a  signal from Geo-leader our line stopped advancing and ground to a  halt. Each of us span around on our heels and re-traced our steps  exactly, so as not to disturb the area. I hadn’t found anything,  unfortunately, but others had, and our haul was an impressive thirteen  meteorites, and a couple of dozen false-alarms (only one of them mine,  I might add); Jenna, happily, found one of the real ones, an eyeball-sized beauty, an oriented beauty, with a rippled fusion crust which was  so beautiful it more than made up for her earlier disappointment, and  I swear she never stopped smiling all the way back to the pyramids.

It was as we were just about to exit the strewn-field that I heard a  plaintive cry through my earphones, and span slowly round to see Kai  looking off somewhere to his right, distracted by… something. No-one  else had heard his call, it seemed, because the Geo-team leader and  his colleagues were already bounding on ahead of us, eager to get the  collected specimens stored safely  before nightfall, and our teachers  seemed to be in just as much of a hurry to get back too, content to  leave us to fend for ourselves. I looked at little Kai and felt his frustration: he had obviously spotted something interesting, but being  the shy, insecure kid he is he couldn’t bring himself to make a fuss  about it. There was no way he was going to call out any louder!

Sensing something was wrong I quickly flashed him a private message  glyph, and as it popped up on the screen which coated the inside of  his helmet visor I saw him turn to face me, puzzled by my demand to  look at me. “What have you seen?” I asked him over a private channel.  He sent back a one-word reply: “meatywrite?” which left me giggling  but excited me at the same time. “Go get!” I glyphed back, but he  shook his head emphatically, horrified by my outrageous suggestion.  What? And risk being seen and punished for disobedience? We were under strict instructions not to wander from our pre-determined search tracks. “Go get!” I re-glyphed, but he shook his head again, “I’ll  take blame if wrong” I told him. That seemed to do the trick; he broke  away from the line and bounced over to the left, eventually stopping  in a cloud of billowing dust before kneeling down in front of a large  boulder, one of the few decent-sized ones on the whole plain. He  reached out his shaking hands, scrambled around beneath the rock, then  stood, examined what was in his trembling hand, then turned and bounded back towards me.

“Look!” he commanded, holding out his find. Lying in the palm of his  grubby, dust-stained gauntlet was a mottled green-black rock, a  meteorite without a doubt. I patted the top of his shoulder to  congratulate him, and was about to tell him how well he’d done when  one of our teacher chaperones appeared, bounding over to us and  clearly angry about something.  Panic-stricken poor Kai stood rooted to  the spot as the teacher scolded him for disobeying instructions, and  even when I defended him, taking the blame he was still condemned for  being disobedient. Taking the meteorite off him the teacher grabbed his arm and swung him around towards the pyramids, pulling him after  her. As he was dragged away Kai looked at me accusingly, and I felt  awful for getting him into trouble, really I did, but the damage had  been done. All I could do was follow them and make sure the Geo-team  leader knew about Kai’s find, and who had been to blame. I also wanted  to make sure the meteorite was handed over to the Geo-team; something  about it had struck me as odd, I couldn’t put my finger on it, but I  knew I wanted to make sure Kai’s discovery was properly credited.

That first Hunt was basically just a rehearsal, a dry run if you like, to get us used to search techniques and procedures, and after going back inside the habitation pyramid for a much-needed lunch we all assembled outside for a second time, eager to build upon our initial success. Jenna seemed particularly eager to be on the prowl again, but poor Kai was sandwiched between two teachers, to deter him from straying off the path again. I tried to get his attention by waving, and even sent him a tiny glyph to ask him to talk to me, but he either didn’t see it or ignored it, and just stared at the ground as the Geo-team leader explained that our second Hunt would be a much more serious affair. We would be stretched out across a wider area, with a bigger gap inbetween each other, and it would be up to us, individually, to locate, record and recover meteorites along our search track through the field.

This time, he warned sternly, sweeping his gaze along the row of reflective visors staring back at him, we were On Our Own.  Everything we collected would be examined back in the lab, and it was absolutely crucial that we made the most of our time by recovering as many meteorites as possible. To motivate us, meteor-wrongs would be tossed onto individual piles outside the lab, forming a row of “Cairns of Shame”. And he’d personally make sure that everyone knew which cairn belonged to which Hunter.

“Oh,” I thought, looking at the sample bag I’d been given to fill, “no pressure then…”!

Then we were on the move, cheering and shouting out encouragement to each other as we bounced over to the boundary.  According to the pre-briefing we’d be entering it this time from a slightly different direction, and our second Hunt would take us across the full width of the field, a trek of more than two kilometres. We’d be shuffling along for almost three hours, and each find we made would make our bags a little heavier, our task a little harder. I felt a little ill at the prospect of all that work being rewarded with public humiliation as all my meteorites ended up as a pile of discarded rocks in the evening twilight…

But all that was forgotten as we assembled on the boundary. A moment’s hesitation and reflection, accompanied by the sound of a dozen people taking deep, calming breaths, and then the leader’s hand dropped again.

With a rousing cheer the Hunt resumed!

But it was very different the second time. On our earlier Hunt we had been able to see the people on either side of us, and had felt part of a group, a team; this time the line was so fragmented, its members so scattered that each of us could have been on our own out in the desert. As I loped along in slow motion I felt like I had been banished from Chryse and left out in the Outback to fend for myself. All I could see were rocks, the desert plain stretching away on all sides, vague hints of rolling hills on the southern horizon, all beneath a vast, breathtakingly-clear sky the colour of honey. I turned slowly to face the pyramids, and gasped when I saw how small they were, reduced in size by the distance between me and them and by the immensity of sky crushing them into the desert.

I couldn’t help it, the urge was too strong; I turned slowly on the spot, arms outstretched, savouring the moment, delighting in my isolation… in that time-frozen moment I was a pharaoh, surveying his lands, alone with his desert – 

Then I stubbed my boot on a rock and came back to Mars with a bump, literally; only my instinctively-outstretched hands prevented me from cracking my visor open like an eggshell as I spiralled down to the ground. Dusting myself off I vowed to concentrate on the task at hand, and, scrambling to my feet – glad that there was no-one nearby to witness my clumsiness – started to search.

I found my first meteorite just a few minutes later. It was only small, about the size of the knuckle in my thumb, an unremarkable piece of dark stone, but it was mine Cal, I’d found it. Smiling I followed the Procedures: I photographed it where it lay, from several angles, then picked it up and, after wrapping it in protective, pre-labelled sheeting, dropped it gently into my collecting bag, making sure to stick a mini-beacon into the ground at the exact point where I had found it before moving on. I found another ten minutes later, a larger one this time, and soon after that my third meteorite was resting in the bag, snuggling up to the others. I felt ten feet tall, and forgot all about the Cairns of Shame; I was sure my finds were genuine starstones, absolutely convinced..!

At the end of my first hour of Hunting I had collected over a dozen meteorites – or rather, suspected meteorites – and was feeling like I owned the whole desert, as if the starstones had fallen from the sky just for me. But the more I found, the more I puzzled over little Kai’s earlier find. None of mine looked like it. Mine were all darker, looked roughly the same (which made sense if they had a common origin, I know) but Kai’s had looked different, it had had that strange green tinge to its blackness… A guilty jolt shot through me. What if Kai’s find wasn’t a meteorite at all? What if was just a discoloured rock?

I’d got him into trouble for nothing –

I heard a triumphant cry over my earphones, and recognised it as having come from Jenna. Obviously she’d found another. Telling myself Kai’s mysterious rock wasn’t my problem – and determined to collect more meteorites than Jenna! – I moved further into the strewn field, continuing my Hunt…

Time passed, silently but for the rasping echoes of my own laboured breathing every time I bent down to examine a suspicious rock…

Without warning a single, pure tone sounded over the radio. I couldn’t believe it! That was the recall signal from the Geo-team leader, telling us we had reached the end of our two hour Hunt. Two hours? I had been so busy, so focussed on searching that I had totally lost track of time, but now I could see that the Sun had crossed the sky and was dropping towards the horizon, out of a darkening sky. 

Then the fatigue hit me. With a vengeance. Moaning as I straightened up out of my stoop, grimacing as the bones of my spine snapped back into place with an audible popping sound, I stood still and took a deep, deep breath, filling my burning lungs with recycled air. Behind me, I knew, was a bread-crumb trail of discarded stones, rejected for being too light, or the wrong colour, or for not responding to the gentle kiss of the magnet mounted on my gauntlet. But my bag was weighed down with several dozen specimens, and I was convinced to my very bone marrow that each and every one of them was a genuine, fallen starstone.

I was exhausted, and the bag felt like it weighed well over a ton, and I knew that I was at least an hour’s trudging walk away from lying down back in the hab-module at the pyramids. But my blood was singing Cal! I can’t remember the last time I was so happy. (Which in itself is probably a little sad, but there you go… 🙂  )

With the Sun dropping slowly towards the far west horizon I turned my back on the strewn-field and headed home. I walked for what seemed like a lifetime, occasionally spotting one of the rocks I’d discarded earlier. Twice I spotted a suspect I’d overlooked the first time, and dropped it into the bag – adding to its already almost-crippling weight – before lurching on my way once more. Eventually, mercifully, the pyramids loomed up ahead of me. The sky was the colour of caramel, the ground streaked with long, jagged shadows. My white suit was glowing bright orange in the light of the setting Sun, looking as if it could burst into flames at any moment, and every bone, every cell in my body ached…

But I didn’t care. Because right then, looking around me I caught my first sight of the others, converging on me from all sides, each one weighed down with their own sample bags, and seeing them stumbling toward me I felt the weariness lift from my shoulders, replaced by a sense of elation which human beings have felt for centuries, for thousands of years at the end of such a long, long day. Without prompting, we all broke into song, celebrating our success.

The Hunters were coming home.

Two hours later, after handing in my rock-packed bag to the Geo-team in the lab pyramid, I fell onto my bunk bed and felt like I could sleep for a thousand years. No such luck. Barely an hour later I was woken by someone shaking my shoulder, and opened my grit-filled eyes to see Jenna standing over me, excitement written all over her face. She told me that everyone had been summoned into the lab for a briefing. My heart sank.  Surely they weren’t sending us out into the strewn-field while it was dark? No, she reassured me as she left me to get dressed, no-one was pulling on suits, we were just to meet in the laboratory and she’d see me there. I pulled on my jumpsuit and made my way to the lab.

I was one of the last to get there, and found everyone packed into the lab shoulder to shoulder. Everyone, that is, except Kai, who was out in front, sandwiched between the two most senior members of the Geoteam and facing the crowd with a look of pure fear in his eyes. He looked like he was facing a firing squad. And it was my fault.

I started to push my way through the group to stand by Kai, but Jenna pulled me back, shaking her head. Something in her eyes told me not to argue, so I hung back, reluctantly, and waited to see what was going to happen. A minute later, when the room was echoing to deafening cheers and applause, I finally reached Kai, and he hugged me so hard I thought I might pop, but it was worth it to see the huge smile on his face.

Who could have guessed that Kai’s little rock would have turned out to be a terrestrial meteorite, only the third piece of Earth ever found on Mars? :-))

Anyway, Kai’s discovery cut the expedition short. We all wanted to stay and Hunt some more, having acquired a taste for it, but the meteorite was needed back at the main Chryse lab, urgently, so instead of embarking on a third Hunt we packed up all our gear and waited for the CK to come back for us. It dropped out of the pink morning sky like a bird of prey, and settled over the twin pyramids so gently we hardly felt its embrace. As we rose into the clear morning sky again I stared out the window, down at the remains of Lyot Base. There wasn’t much to see, just two squares of flattened desert floor, forty metres across, a dozen trails of footprints meandering away to the north…

And lined up beside the flattened squares were a dozen small rock piles. Mine was the second from the right. It wasn’t the smallest, but it wasn’t the biggest either. That was good enough for me. Echoing with the sounds of one last cheer the CK pirouetted round on its manoeuvring thrusters and headed for Chryse. The Hunt was over.

I hope  you can write to me again soon, and let me know what happened after you left the site of that Viking burial boat; I want to know why you were going to the south of the island..!

Write me soon!

Jen

P.S. Just as I was getting ready to send this I heard that Kai’s meteorite has been analysed by the Chryse experts, and it’s definitely from Earth, and it’s the oldest of the three. There’s a wild rumour going around on MarsNet that it’s a piece of debris from the asteroid impact which killed the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago. Ridiculous!

Surely..?

Jen x

Welcome to “Barsoom Tales”…

I’ve decided it really is time I found somewhere new to put my Mars fiction – so here it is! Hope you enjoy it – or, at least, some of it!