People of Mars (6 page)

At night, when he took
refuge in his quarters and lay down on his bed, immersed in a
darkness that was interrupted only by the blue LED of the life
support sensor, in those moments his faith wavered, but just for
that brief time between wakefulness and sleep.

He realised he had
fallen asleep only when a noise awoke him. Or was it maybe a dream?
With reluctance, Hassan opened his eyes. A silhouette stood out
against the glow of the LED. It was motionless, beside the bed,
just a couple of steps from him. As he made it out, he started.

“Sshh …”

He swallowed, letting
his heart, hastened by fright, calm down. It was happening again.
He sat up slowly, but he knew the blue light would reveal any move
of his.

Who knew how long she
had been watching him in silence?

He reached out towards
the lamp switch, but another, quicker hand moved to his.

“No, no light.”
Nothing more than a whisper.

That touch, that voice
took his breath away. He stretched out his other hand, grabbed her
by her waist with both, and dragged her to his bed. She followed
him docilely, removed the blanket and climbed on him. In the
half-light, he saw her taking her dressing gown off. She wasn’t
wearing anything else under it. Then he felt her hands running on
his chest, the taste of her mouth, the warmth of her body.

Perhaps he was
dreaming, but he had no desire to wake up.

While he explored her
skin, he could envisage her features illuminated by the sun. The
scent of her hair reminded him the way it fell on her
shoulders.

“I missed you,” he
dared to murmur, but she welcomed him inside her almost at once,
like a stormy sea. And there weren’t any more words, but only
whispers, warmth, humours, pleasure.

He was already falling
into the drowsiness that follows passion, when he perceived her
body withdraw. He tried to stop her, but that skin, beaded with
perspiration, slipped away from him in a moment.

“Anna, wait!”

He reached the switch,
but when the light turned on, she wasn’t there anymore.

4

Walking in the corridor, Hassan was checking on
his
folio
the
acknowledgement of receipt by Houston of his medical reports and of
those concerning the sorties. The message icon was blinking on the
top of the display. The excessive communication delay between Mars
and Earth didn’t allow the crew members to navigate on the global
terrestrial internet in real time, but they could perform deferred
activities, like sending or receiving private messages. Letting his
finger slip on the thin device’s screen, he started browsing his
emails, until he found one from his brother. A stab of nostalgia
grasped his heart as he remembered the family he would never see
again.

In that moment, he heard cheerful chatter coming
from the kitchen. Anna’s voice stood out over the others. A joke, a
laugh. Hassan turned his attention to the origin of the sounds,
foretasting the upcoming challenge, then he folded his
folio
and put it in his pocket. His
brother could wait, for now.

“Here you are!” Dennis
welcomed him energetically. “We were getting worried. You’re
usually the first one to wake up.” There was something out of place
in the commander, but he couldn’t focus on it because his gaze was
drawn elsewhere.

“Do you like it this
way?” Robert said, standing behind Anna’s chair and massaging her
shoulders.

“Oh, yeah, I do,” she
replied, voluptuous, closing her eyes in approval. “You’re
fantastic.”

Hassan tensed up. He
could feel the blood pulsing in his head. He placed a hand on his
temple. The game had started over again, but with different
rules.

“Today you stay,
Dennis will accompany me.” He didn’t understand right away that
Michelle was talking to him, until he concentrated his attention
upon her.

“
What?” So
that
was out of place: Dennis was wearing the clothing for a
sortie.

“I wanna be there,
when we reach the sac, so I can report immediately to Houston,” the
commander said with a wide smile on his face. “It could be the
solution to all our problems.”

Finally Hassan
realised the meaning of those words. “Are you sure?” he asked,
uncertain, meeting Michelle’s darkened gaze. She stepped back and
slightly shook her head, rolling her eyes and twirling a lock of
hair with her right index finger.

That behaviour
wouldn’t have escaped Anna. He could sense her irritated look on
him.

“We can keep in
contact all the time, there’s no need for you to go in person.” He
was insisting a bit too much, but he didn’t care right now.

With an abrupt
gesture, Anna pushed away her plate. The fork tinkling resounded in
the room, breaking the embarrassing silence, followed by the
tapping of her hasty steps as she left.

“I’m perfectly able to
manage this sortie,” Dennis replied, annoyed. “And anyway, until
proven otherwise, I’m the one in charge here. Consider it an
order.”

“Okay.” Hassan raised
both his hands in resignation. “You are the boss.”

“The west Aeolian
turbine has suffered a huge drop in performance compared to the
east one.” Dennis was addressing Robert. “Take advantage of
Hassan’s availability to go out together and see what’s wrong.”

Robert snapped on his
feet, saluting. “Yes, Sir,” he exclaimed, then he burst into coarse
laughter.

What had she done?!
Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The laboratory door
slammed, Anna leant against it. She nervously dried a tear with her
palm.

The previous night,
after seeing Michelle and Hassan together, she allowed her pride to
lead her actions. She hadn’t reasoned. She had wanted to take
control of the situation, flattering herself that she could change
things. And now, she had been humiliated.

After all, she
deserved that. She had always known that that man was venom. So
many times her mother had told her to stay away from those like
him. They make you feel so marvellously wrong that it seems right,
for a few brief moments. Then they use you, they frighten you, and
they throw you away. You are just a woman. She hated him, was
afraid of him, deplored each gesture of his, each word from him,
and yet she couldn’t help but think about him.

‘
What’s wrong with
me?’

Seated on the floor,
with her shoulders against the door, she looked for an answer, as
she watched the long morning light piercing through the glass wall
and reaching her feet. A single brilliant surface, so even, except
for an irregularity, precisely over there under the microscope
counter. In the greenhouse, on the other side of the glass, the
foliage of a plant, shaken by the air from the life support fans,
made the sun rays ripple, revealing a thousand tiny, blue
reflections.

She tilted her head to
one side, intrigued, and then, forgetting all else, crawled toward
the origin of such wonder.

A light layer of red
dust was covering the floor, inside it was a large azure stain,
round and damp. It had to be the remains of the sample dropped by
Robert. It had ended up in a hidden place, and been missed by the
small vacuum cleaner. As she took a close look at it, she noticed
other smaller stains scattered around the big one, some partly
merging, all damp. The azure crystals, which had been evenly
dispersed in the sand the day before, were now all gathered in the
stains, giving them the same colouring.

An intuition made its
way into her thoughts; an incredulous smile escaped her. Then she
stood up.

Step by step he drew
himself level with the roof end facing westward, near the towering
shaft that supported the Aeolian turbine. Usually such a manoeuvre
would’ve taken a few minutes, but today the wind was quite strong
and it made his progress on the ladder slow and uncertain.

The roof had a convex
shape, to prevent the accumulation of dust on its surface, but a
long footbridge ran along its top. It connected the anchoring
points of the two shafts on the external wall of the station and
allowed a person to walk from one to the other without
difficulty.

Once his head reached
it, Robert grabbed the waiting hand. Hassan helped him to climb and
fastened his safety rope to the handrail.

Above him, the
gigantic blades of the turbines were moving, slow and constant,
propelled by the thin Martian air. Such a wind on Earth would’ve
made them work at maximum speed, but Mars’s atmosphere was much
more rarefied, and therefore produced less electricity. Actually,
it was an experimental system, which only contributed a small
amount of power to Station Alpha, mainly supplied by the
photovoltaic panels dispersed on the building and on the area
around it. Its purpose was mostly to evaluate the possible benefits
of using such technology when compared to the efforts for its
maintenance.

“They appear to be
moving at the same speed,” Hassan commented.

Robert was consulting
the readings related to both systems on the augmented reality. The
west turbine was producing 30% less energy. There had to be a
dispersion somewhere, which caused a voltage drop.

“I’m going to check
the connection panel, maybe some terminal got loosened or this
damned microscopic dust has managed to get through, causing an
increase in the resistance.” Even before waiting for a reply from
his colleague, Robert headed towards the turbine, letting his
snap-link run along the safety handrail.

“Okay, meanwhile I’ll
have a look at the other one.”

Pushed by the wind,
Robert reached the turbine shaft. Luckily, the gusts didn’t carry
more dust. Perhaps they would turn out to be useful in facilitating
the cleaning of the contacts. He took a power screwdriver from a
pocket and removed the manual closing device, making sure to put
aside each screw. Under that was another panel which, when under
power, sealed the inside of the box hermetically. He noticed right
away it didn’t appear to adhere to the edges, which showed some
reddish lines due to the dust settled into the gap.

“I knew that …” he
told himself. “The dude who designed that stuff was really a
genius.”

He deactivated the
hermetic seal, which, as was evident, had long since stopped
working properly, and inserted the screwdriver tip into the gap to
use it as a lever.

All of a sudden his
brain was flooded with a loud, high-pitched sound. By instinct, he
drew back and dropped the screwdriver, which tumbled down the roof.
He placed his hand on his helmet, as if he could cover his ears. He
was feeling as if his head was about to explode and he started
screaming, but that sound was so loud that he couldn’t hear his own
voice. An unexpected gust of wind pushed him from behind, making
him lose his balance. In an instant, his feet slipped on the
footbridge and he found himself falling along the curve of the
roof, until he stopped abruptly, held by the safety rope.

“Hassan!” he shouted
into his helmet microphone.

The sound had ceased
and it was replaced by a distant buzz. He thought he could make out
a voice, but he wasn’t sure. His own breath rumbled inside his head
and everything sounded muffled. His arms and his torso were
stretched out on the roof, while his legs dangled down the wall,
shaking panicked, in a useless attempt to find a foothold.

“Hassan, can you hear
me?”

He played around with
the controller on the left wrist of his suit to extend his
transmission to the emergency channel of the station.

“Anna, are you hearing
me?”

No reply.

Robert forced himself
to calm down and glanced at the ground. Just three metres separated
him from it, a little less than ten feet. A dangerous fall on
Earth, but not that much on a planet with a little more than one
third of its gravity. He could unhook from the rope and let himself
slip downwards.

He wasn’t even able to
finish formulating that thought when he felt himself fall again. He
seized the ledge with his hands while the safety rope, dragged by
the unhooked snap-link, fell past him to swing in the air as it
hung from his suit.

“Pressure leak inside
suit, return immediately to the station.” The voice of the helmet
unit resounded in his ears.

There wasn’t much time
left. He had to jump and hope for the best.

While he attempted to
position his legs to cushion his fall, he noticed he couldn’t move
the left one very well. It seemed stuck. With some difficulty, he
tried and looked down. A hem of his suit had slipped deep into a
gap between two adjacent panels that insulated the wall against
radiations. Perhaps while sliding against a sharpened edge, a
microscopic cut had been created. From the values he could read on
the augmented reality, the pressure drop was minimal and the life
support was able to compensate. But, actually, the situation
prevented him from jumping. If he tried it, at best he would get
trapped mid air with his suit stuck in the gap. At worst, it would
tear completely.

Robert was assailed by
a sudden terror.

“Christ, Hassan, where
the fuck are you?!”

How could the
snap-link have unhooked? Hassan had secured it. Why wasn’t he
coming to help him? Was it possible he didn’t realise that
something was happening? Was he really unable to hear him?

His heart was beating
like crazy. An emergency icon was blinking insistently in the
helmet’s augmented reality, warning that he was in a condition of
extreme cardiovascular stress. His right hand fingers hurt, while
he could barely feel those on the left one. It was almost
impossible to hold on with those clumsy gloves. He sensed himself
slipping down. Sweat was dripping on his brow, blurring his
sight.