Red Desert - Point of No Return Read online

  I leapt to my feet with surprise and shook his hand with enthusiasm. “It’s really a pleasure to meet you!” I felt a sincere admiration for him and I was quite intimidated to be in his presence.

  We sat and started talking about everything and anything, while we were waiting for our order. He was an affable man and, aware of my tension, he did all he could to put me at ease. He seemed to be hungrier than me given that, when his breakfast arrived, he started tucking into it, causing a pause in our conversation. I swallowed a piece of croissant and drank a sip of tea, before finding the courage to speak.

  “Ms Moore had mentioned something about a project concerning Mars …” I suggested. I waited for him to reply.

  He looked at me from over his coffee mug and, with a sly smile, took his time to set it down. “Doctor Persson, what would you think about becoming one of the first colonisers of a new planet?”

  I stared at him for a second, confused and unable to articulate any sound. I wanted to say ‘Are you kidding?’ but all I managed was a lousy, “I beg your pardon?”

  At that moment I heard my cell phone ring. I cursed under my breath because I had forgotten to silence it. I didn’t know whether to ignore it or not.

  “Is that yours?”

  “I think … so,” I babbled.

  He gestured for me to answer the call, so I took my bag and started searching. Not easy in that confusion. Then I realised I had put it in my coat pocket. I reached in and grabbed it. An unknown number appeared on the display. Puzzled, I tapped the answer icon.

  “Hello?”

  “Anna Persson?” a vaguely familiar voice spoke on the other side of the line.

  “Yes … who’s that?” I asked, even more intrigued.

  “We just met in the street. The accident with your bag … do you remember?”

  I felt a hot sensation pervading from within. The red-haired man; that was where the voice came from. I couldn’t believe it was him. It was some sort of miracle.

  “Are you still there?”

  “Oh, yes!” I hurried to say. “But … how did you get my number?!”

  “I’ve found your planner on the ground. I tried to reach you, but then I lost you in the crowd.” I pictured him smiling. “I didn’t think I would ever see you again … and, instead, I found myself in possession of your name, address, and even your phone number!”

  I started laughing heartily.

  “By the way, my name is Jan-Willem De Wit. But you can call me Jan.”

  I kept on throwing up, even though there was nothing more in my stomach. What the hell had prompted me to become an astronaut? I was a scientist, a researcher who worked at the European Space Agency. I was even paid well. I had never really considered the idea of space travel. It was something I liked to think I might do, while reading a book or watching TV, but the reality was no fun at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Everything alright?” I was worried.

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

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

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

  “I love you, Anna,” he murmured.

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

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

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

  “I’m married.”

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

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

  Many times I wondered what my mother had felt when my father left her. She told me everything when I was just a little girl, but only now did I have a vague understanding of what she meant. I wanted to disappear, die.

  “It’s not like you t
hink,” Jan continued, even though I didn’t intend to listen to him anymore. “I’m separated.”

  I stopped trying to escape and looked him in the eye again. With one sentence he had dragged me down into the abyss, and with another he had raised me up again bringing me back to reality.

  “Pardon …?” I babbled.

  “Legally separated, since today,” he specified, giving a hint of a smile.

  The pleasant feeling of some instants earlier vanished again, as I realised the implications of what he just told me.

  “We’ve been dating, since when? One month? And you’re telling me this only now?!” I was angry and confused. In my mind clouded by romance and sex I had idealised the man in front of me, and now that I confronted reality I felt betrayed. I didn’t know whether to get annoyed with him or myself.

  “I know, you’re right. I should have told you long ago, but I didn’t know how.”

  “You should have told me immediately!” I cried. Outraged, I freed my hands from his grip and turned my head to avoid his eyes.

  “Try to put yourself in my shoes.” He placed a hand on my shoulder. “It isn’t exactly the first thing to say if you want to impress a woman you like.”

  I remained still and listened.

  “Well, even if …” He hesitated. “It would impress certain women.”

  He was trying to be ironic. On another occasion I would have laughed, but now it didn’t seem funny at all. In the end I knew he wasn’t entirely wrong, but I felt that this excuse just wasn’t enough. “An entire month passed,” I repeated. “What were you waiting for? Or perhaps you thought you’d get bored after a couple of days, so it wasn’t important.”

  “No,” he protested with vehemence and this time he forced me to turn to him. “Of course not! It just happened too quickly. I wanted to tell you a hundred times, but it was never the right moment. Then a week passed, ten days, twenty … and suddenly it had become too late.”