One Step for Man
Let me start by stating for the record that I never intended it to end like this, and I never wanted to hurt anyone. It’s just that, I guess as my ninth-grade English teacher once put it, my best trait is persistence.
We were halfway to Mars, more than four months from home. I had volunteered to stay awake throughout the voyage. I enjoy the emptiness of space. It’s sort of like being surrounded by the nothingness of transcendental meditation without the need to utter some ridiculous mantra, like repeating the word “cucumber” until the syllables lose their meaning.
I wrote and exercised, but mostly I just stared out into it. I like how big the universe is. It’s comforting to know that the universe is so unimaginably large, wrapping me up in its black safety blanket.
And that desire to look at the stars indeed gave me the opportunity that part of me now regrets. Most of me, however, sees my actions in a time of crisis to have been the right choice. Ethics, after all, are not black and white like the void and the stars. Maybe that’s why I love to stare at the sky. It’s simple.
But when that asteroid crashed into the side of the spacecraft, I knew I had to do something. I just didn’t know what at the time.
The crash startled me, I saw sparks outside the window, but there were no warning lights. Whatever we had hit, it crashed into us hard enough to dislodge the sensors near the impact area. Imagine that the sharpest meat cleaver in the history of the world slices off your hand, cleanly and instantly severing the nerve endings. You wouldn’t even notice it was gone unless you looked at it.
In cases of emergency, Lt. Ellen Exley was the first to be woken up. She was the mission’s first mate and initial handler of any situation. And before you say anything, Ellen always had my utmost respect. More than that, even. She was the best of all of us. Of that, I’m certain.
So like the mission book said, I woke her, gave her time to come out of her post-stasis funk and drink a cup of coffee, and then told her what happened. We looked over the ship’s diagnostics and checked them against where we should have been at this point in the mission. Whatever it was, she said, it was big.
We suited up and went outside long enough to see flaps of metal slapping against the side of the ship where the crater was gouged. Air was leaking, so we stopped the flow of it to the area. We sealed it off, but we had already lost a lot of our supply to the void.
The two of us returned to the navigation room and looked at the mission chart for a long time. In silence, I watched her debate in her head. I knew what she was going to say before she told me. She had always been a conservative officer—no NASA mission leader gets a commission without being a very conservative decision-maker—and I was not surprised when she suggested that we had to turn back. I was surprised, however, to find that I had a crescent wrench in my hand and, when she turned to tape her message, split open her head with it—at the base of the skull, the soft spot that covers the medulla. No premeditation. I just did it.
There’s nothing quite like seeing blood float in zero gravity. Globs of red molasses, colliding, coalescing. It doesn’t move like a fluid, much less something that came from a living being.
I was not surprised when she suggested that we had to turn back. I was surprised, however, to find that I had a crescent wrench in my hand.
Again, let me stress that I had not planned on killing her. Something, an idea not yet fleshed out, had pulled the trigger.
With Ellen, at least.
The rest of the crew … well, that’s a different story.
After I stared for a while at the limp mass of Lt. Exley that was my handiwork, I had to make a tough decision. Was I going to tell NASA and turn back? Or was I to continue to Mars? I debated for a long time, nearly an hour, fighting with myself, but really my involuntary actions with the wrench had made up my mind. Now I began the hard work of assuring myself that it was the right thing to do. If I turned back, I would not see Mars and never would. Another mission to the red planet would probably never take off in my lifetime—not after what happened with Ellen. And me? I would be in jail, wouldn’t I? Even a plea of insanity wouldn’t save me. The public bloodlust would be too loud for even the most dense of politicians and judges to withstand.
So, it was off to Mars.
First, there were preparations. A transmitter aboard ship sends the status of all systems back to Earth twice a day. A package of all of the ship’s data was automatically collected and collated and beamed backwards. I’m awake on the ship to catch things in real time, that’s what I volunteered for; if something happened to me, this was the mission’s backup SOS.
If something drastic occurs, like a collision with an asteroid, a message is sent immediately. Since the sensor array monitoring the hull in that area had been knocked out, no message was sent, so the main computer had the data about what happened, but hadn’t dispatched anything back to base. In a few hours, however, the central computer would do a ship-wide diagnostic and report that that section of the hull had “disappeared.” Also, so would have all of Ellen’s vital signs. So, I had to work quickly.
I found the sensor logs in the ship’s main database and programmed a section from the week before, a few days worth, to loop. It was quite easy, actually. Being the only person awake onboard ship for a thousand-plus hours alone allowed me to get extremely comfortable with my metallic surroundings, and I knew almost every inch of it. Copy the records and upload them to the routing CPU where the main sensor conduit collects its data for that section of the hull. Program it to loop, set the date and time, and let it go. The only way someone would find out is if they were extremely lucky and noticed that the values for that fairly insignificant section of the ship were exactly the same every day, or if they were the most anal person in the cosmos. NASA had a lot of those people, and machine learning ran in the background of most of the organization’s systems to help the human operators out, so I was nervous. But my patch should buy me time, if nothing else. And by the time anyone found out, it would almost certainly be too late.
Cleaning up Lt. Exley was more difficult. You can’t really mop up blood in free fall. You have to catch it. Weeks later, I was still finding little spots where it had wandered down the corridors and to different levels. Her body, I bagged and sent on her final mission out the airlock.
Then, it was time to deal with the others. The crew was 12 large: Exley, Captain George Huntley, five planetary scientists (Carter, Milford, Drummond, Coleman, and Shannon), three geologists (Haverford, Biswas, and Linklater), Hans Morgan (the ship’s doctor), and me. I was the crew’s atmospheric sciences expert.
I repeated the same procedure with the cryogenic life-support systems as I had with the sensors, albeit I first studied the data and the system more extensively than I had the more basic hull sensors. I had time; the other crew members were all in stasis and there was no reason for the equipment to wake them for months.
After I collected the data I wanted to use, I ran a few experiments using Exley’s empty cryo tank, and watched the main computer’s reaction to it. First, I bypassed the sensors that read the cryo unit’s life signs. I uploaded the stored data I had prepared to loop, set the date and time, and waited until I was sure that the computer took it for the real deal. After I had Exley back to life and on a four-day life cycle, I started on the others.
I did Morgan first. While we were in training in Texas, I stumbled across a stash of kiddie porn on his laptop while looking for a copy of a disclaimer that we had to sign. That fucker deserved it. I locked the door of the unit and altered the readout of its life-support settings. With it continuing to pump out normal numbers, I turned the unit’s oxygen to zero and its carbon dioxide all the way up. Then I stood and forced myself to watch him suffocate. I did this for all of them. That was the penance for my actions.
As I said, Morgan wasn’t that difficult. Not easy, but not that tough either. But everyone else was rough. Especially Karen Haverford. We went to grad school together, and she married a friend of mine. I’m sorry, Bill. I hope someday you can forgive me.
A few hours later, I was the entire crew. Off to Mars, no turning back.
Maybe ethics is based on being surrounded by people everyday and being forced to live with them. In a universe of one, maybe there is no such thing. Just like the stars, black and white.
There were another few months left to the Red Planet, and for a while I wondered if I was going to make it. Physically, the ship’s tanks had plenty of fuel, and, even with a lot of air lost to the void from when the asteroid hit, I had enough oxygen and food for 10 of me. For the first time in my life, I even watched every game the Yankees played, every inning. And you can actually throw a rising fastball in zero g. (Or at least that’s what it looked like to me.) There’s not much else to do when the nearest human being is millions of miles behind you.
Mentally and emotionally, it was much harder. I just wasn’t sure if what I had done would catch up to me and stop me. But it didn’t.
Sure, I’m a little angry it had to happen this way. But I never stopped; I never turned around. What was done was done. It still hurt, but after months the pain had dulled considerably.
Maybe ethics is based on being surrounded by people everyday and being forced to live with them. In a universe of one, maybe there is no such thing. Just like the stars, black and white.
It took a couple of months before Earth figured out something was wrong. During a routine examination of the ship’s readings of oxygen usage against what they had had planned, they found that we weren’t using enough. They told me they wanted to do a diagnostic of the ship’s sensors, and I hung up and never talked to them again. Eventually, they stopped trying to talk to me too. In a way, I was relieved. I may be a murderer, but I hated lying about it.
A few weeks later, I made it. And what a beautiful reddish-orange globe it is. Pictures do it no justice. Until you have been here, and gaze upon it in all its intense glory—from the migrating polar ice cap to the carved canals—you haven’t been alive. It’s majestic.
The Earth is so soft. Its oceans give her a welcoming, cool, and comforting look.
But Mars …
Mars stares back at you.
It’s hard, forbidding, dead. Its mountains make Earth’s look like children stomping around in their father’s boots. Empty canyons that make Earth’s look youthful. How did ancient people look to this piece of rock and connect it so eloquently to a god of war? It looks war-torn, as though it fought a battle with God and lost, miserably. Prometheus beaten down by Zeus and burned with his own fire.
I loaded a landing ship with a month’s worth of provisions and air, a rover to drive, and sensor equipment to conduct all the tests I could. After all, I was still on a mission.
I never really was much of a pilot. I usually left the flying to others, and for good reason. I had crashed a tiny Cessna back on Earth, and I was about to crash my second airship, albeit something much bigger than a two-seater personal plane. During my final approach to the planet’s surface, I hit some turbulence, not to mention the gravity being a little lighter than I was expecting, and I lost it. I spiraled, dropped, and pulled out just in time to save myself—but not the ship. Most of my instruments still worked, and none of me was broken, so I considered myself lucky.
I still do.
But the moment I hit the Martian ground, the red planet became my home. The lander would clearly never take off again. I don’t know how to fix it and almost certainly don’t have the tools and materials if I did, and there was no one to come get me. The crash had breached some of the air tanks, so I was left with only enough oxygen for about a month, but food and water for a nonexistent return trip of many months. I was stranded on a very dead chunk of rock with a rapidly diminishing amount of time.
Mars stares back at you. It’s hard, forbidding, dead.
I was distraught and sulked around the lander for a few hours, taking inventory of what I had left. I cried. I would never see my family again. Or my friends. I could never apologize to the crew’s family members or to my superiors for what I had done. I had sincerely wanted to go back to Earth, turn myself in, give them a full report, and probably spend the rest of my life in jail. At least then I could die surrounded by the rest of my people. But my story wouldn’t end like that.
As the sun headed toward the horizon, I was wondering what had gotten into me. I thought it a fitting metaphor, my life setting on a desolate alien land. Then the red of the sunset amplified the fury of the landscape, and the planet seemed to alight in a fiery hue.
A Mars sunset makes one on Earth look tame. I was roasting in the depths of hell, surrounded by a fire I had lit myself, and I had never seen anything more beautiful in my life.
After that, I slept soundly. The next morning, I loaded up the rover and explored. What a magnificent land—huge, empty, and all mine. Over the past few weeks, I have explored as much as I could. I mapped a lot of the surface and conducted most of the experiments I had planned to perform before we left the blue planet. I’m sure you’ve received that data by now. I have been more productive in my time here than at any other time in my life.
But that time is running out. I am almost out of air, and in a week I will be but another inanimate ornament on the surface of this dead planet. I might just sit here, by my rover in my makeshift camp, and slowly let the air go out. I may throw myself into one of the massive canyons that litter this scarred world. Or, most likely, I will climb as high as I can on Olympus Mons and, after watching the sunset from the crow’s-nest of this world, pull the oxygen tube from my suit and let the life leave me with the daylight.
Whatever I choose to do, whenever mankind decides to make it back here, be it in one year or a hundred, I’ll be here. Waiting.
Hi reader! This has been a finished short story, intended to be a completely fleshed out tale, unlike my shorter One-Pagers. Read more of my longer, more complete short stories here.