Reentry Window, Page 3

  # # #

  The light that penetrated his eyelids seemed ashen, the color of a distant, smoldering fire. He felt himself still in his suit, in what he sensed was a supine position, a hard surface beneath him. The ship? Had he crashed? He could breathe; oxygen was plentiful in his helmet.

  Still in my suit. Still breathing. Okay, Brett, move. Move.

  Carefully he shifted his legs, one at a time. Then his arms, wiggling his fingers inside his gloves.

  I can move, he thought.

  He rolled slowly over, planting himself on his hands and knees, feeling something there under his hand. A rock?

  Open your eyes.

  He cracked his lids apart, a boorish, gauzy flare of reddish-pink light striking him. He squinted, allowing his pupils to adjust. Gradually the dust and rocks of the surface of Mars resolved in front of him. Right there under his hands.

  Impossible. The ship… Where’s the ship?

  Brett stood and centered himself. He turned slowly around, taking in the rock-rimmed horizon. There, a hundred yards off, was the lander—and miraculously, it appeared to be intact. But how did he get all the way out here? How did he survive? He couldn’t remember anything after the sound and the feeling of immense heaviness.

  “Epoch One, do you copy?”

  Nothing.

  “Epoch One, I’ve reached the surface somehow. Do you copy me? Martin? Deb? Epoch One?”

  There was no reply, just the sound of his erratic breathing. And it dawned on him that something must have happened to them. The anomaly, perhaps? Did it really matter? He was alone. Alone on the surface of another planet. It felt wholly ironic: he’d dreamt of this moment nearly his entire life—the first man on Mars—and now, he’d trade it with someone else in a heartbeat if it meant he could be back home on Earth.

  Brett looked skyward, into the orange-red haze of the atmosphere. And there he saw something moving very fast above him: a small, dark form. Falling. What was it? Too far away to see. Meteor? But suddenly it sprouted what looked like a parachute, and then a piece of it fell away. It slowed dramatically, small descent engines igniting beneath its rounded hull. A vehicle. Not Brett’s. Most certainly not Epoch One. And before he could blink, the form had vanished behind a distant serrated rim, forged of jagged Martian rocks and soil.

  “Houston, this is Brett Lockwood of the crew of Epoch One. I’m sending this via my low-gain antenna, hoping you’ll pick me up via Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or Mars Global Surveyor on the DSN. I’m on the surface of Mars. Lander is intact, it seems. I’ve lost contact with Epoch One. I can’t reach anyone. Please respond.”

  He’d have to wait for a reply, which would be twenty minutes later. If he even got one. Could anyone hear him? The silence that draped him was suffocating. Finally, he spoke.

  “I can’t believe what I’m about to say—can’t believe this is really happening. Something’s landed here on Mars. Just a half mile from my current position. I watched it decelerate, so I’m certain it’s not a meteor. It looked like a parachute deployed, and a piece of it fell away—maybe a heat shield. I don’t know what to make of this. There were no other flights scheduled but ours. No way it’s from Earth. No way.”

  In the lesser gravity of Mars, Brett made his way quickly toward the ridge where the strange thing had disappeared.

  “I’m walking in the direction of the object now,” he said. “Should be able to make that ridge in fifteen minutes or so. I have no idea if I’ve landed in my target ellipse. The terrain doesn’t look anything like it should. Geology is all wrong. I’ve got no way to know for sure where I am. This is crazy.”

  After what seemed like an eternity, he reached the base of the ridge. It sloped upward at a benign angle. He could make it to the top, if he was careful to mind all the rocks. If he were to puncture his suit on a sharp stone, he’d be dead quickly. Mind the rocks.

  “Made it to the ridge. I’m going to climb it and take a look. See what’s on the other side,” he said to no one but himself.

  Brett ascended the slope cautiously, as loose stones around him gave way, rolling gently away from him. The soil was very soft, powdery, lightly coating the outside of his suit, staining it brick red. When he crested the rim he spotted the mysterious object, and crouched very low.

  There it was. Fifty yards out. The talcum-fine Martian dust was hanging over it like a veil, obscuring finer details that might have helped him identify what he was seeing. Behind the lingering Martian haze, the object appeared as a mottled, dark form—squat and mechanical. He thought about the implications of what he was staring at, the magnitude of the moment he was experiencing.

  “I have a visual on the object now, although it’s… I can’t believe I’m seeing this. It’s obscured by a ring of dust hanging in the air, not dissipating. I’d have to move closer to get any sense of what this thing might actually be. But the question is… should I? Whatever this is, it’s not from Earth, so the only conclusion to draw is that it’s alien. Crazy. Probably unmanned, but I can’t assume that. I can’t assume anything. I don’t know what to think anymore. I don’t understand what’s happening here.”

  Brett heard a soft alarm. On his wrist panel he saw the words INCOMING SIGNAL, followed by an audio waveform that unspooled across the display. He listened closely as, for the first time since landing on the surface, he heard another person’s voice. A voice he didn’t recognize.

  “This is Dr. Hunter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. We don’t understand your message. We don’t know anything about a Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or Mars Global Surveyor. We don’t know anything about Epoch One. We detected your signal via Viking One’s high-gain antenna and the Deep Space Network.”

  Brett held very still then, trapped in a motionless crouch.

  “Wait—did you say Viking One?”

  It was a beat later when he realized they wouldn’t hear him, at least not for another ten minutes. He’d answered on sheer instinct, as anyone would do in a conversation—listen and respond in real time. But out here there was no such thing as real time. No such thing. A chill hit him then, in the very center of his chest. Time. What time was it? His display read 12:25:03 UT (Universal Time), converted to local Mars time as 16:45.

  Brett drew on his memory. History. Viking 1 had landed… when was it… July 20, 1976 at 11:53 UT. It was now 12:25 UT, and he’d seen this thing fall some thirty minutes ago.

  No, he thought. No, Brett. You’re losing it down here. Probably effects of long-term space travel. Delusions, perhaps? A psychological break—my God—what was happening? And which was more bizarre: that he was experiencing some sort of psychotic episode on the surface of another planet, or that the thing sixty yards away from him was a spacecraft that had landed here over seventy years ago?

  He reasoned quickly: if by some crazy coincidence he had landed near the Viking 1 site, the craft itself would still be here—so not all that strange. But he knew that after decades in the sub-zero cold of Mars, Viking 1 had been destroyed. Orbiter images from the past forty years had shown the landing site and the spacecraft both covered in dust, its long robotic sampling arm disengaged from the rest of the craft, canted on its side near the foot of the lander. Viking 1 was a derelict.

  The strange dust that had been obscuring the object finally thinned. There was no mistaking it now. The view was clear. There it was: Viking 1—in perfect health—unmolested by the punishing temperatures and suffocating soil of Mars. A phantom reborn into existence, now as real, as new as it had been on July 20, 1976.

  “Epoch One, do you copy?”

  No answer.

  “Martin, do you copy?”

  Dead moments bled together.

  “Debra? William? Kate? Do you copy?”

  His heart thudded painfully against the inside of his chest.

  “Epoch One—does anyone copy me?”

  He turned his gaze into the expanse of the Martian sky, a vast, rust-colored void. Epoch One was gone. Or, more precisely, he was gone
. They’d lost him the moment he’d penetrated the core of the anomaly—a corridor back through time. A reentry window.

  And he imagined all of them calling his name on the radio, desperate for the sound of his voice.

  “Epoch One. Martin, Deb… all of you… if you can hear me… if by some miracle you can hear me… I’m alive. I can’t explain what’s happened here. But if this is what I think it is, then I’m about to make history.”

  Brett decided there was only one thing to do. Because he was dreadfully sure he would never make it back to Epoch 1. Epoch 1 no longer existed. There would be no rendezvous. No rescue. No such thing. This was going to be the only way to prove he existed at all.

  Further radio communication was no good. Dr. Hunter at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would just think he was some whacko that had hacked the channel in order to play a clever prank. The alternative conclusion would be unimaginable. But if they saw it with their own eyes…

  The cameras on Viking 1 were meant to capture still images intermittently over long periods of time. There was no video capability. No live feed from the spacecraft. There was no way to tell if or when the cameras were active. It could be hours before they took another image. And that’s all he had left now. Hours. Carefully, he stood upright and climbed over the rim, walking directly toward the first human spacecraft to land on the surface of Mars.

  # # #

  “First color images are coming back! We’ve got color images coming down now!”

  Everyone in the mission support area at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory crowded around their TVs to watch. It had been some twelve hours since Viking had landed on the surface of Mars and sent back its first images. Despite the fact that they were black and white, they had managed to awe the entire world. But the first color images would be beyond compare, and the anticipation was electric, as though a million volts were in the air around them.

  The image bloomed on the TV screens with a startling suddenness, the reddish, butterscotch tint of the ground, rocks and horizon immediately obvious. Wild applause broke out in the room, along with roars and cheers. There were long embraces, firm handshakes, and tears of joy. Then, strangely, all the noise began to dim, as one by one, everyone noticed something in the image. Something…

  “Whoa… what is that? What are we seeing there?”

  Dr. David Williams, the Mars mission director, pushed through his colleagues and slipped on his glasses to purchase a better look at the image. A reporter with NBC News tried to shoulder his way toward the TV monitor.

  “Dr. Williams? Dr. Williams, can you tell us what we’re looking at? Are those… footprints?”

  Someone nearby scoffed, hastily edging the reporter out of the way and toward the exit. “That’s absurd. These images have to be carefully analyzed. You’re in no position to say what we’re actually seeing here.”

  And suddenly all the voices overlapped in the mission support area of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, July 21, 1976.

  “Those are boot prints! Look at the shape—”

  “—yes, yes, look… left, right, left, right, leading off—”

  “—over that rim! Life! My God, there’s life on Mars—”

  Someone else shouted, “We don’t know that! We can’t say that for certain, so don’t print that! Are you listening? Don’t print that!”

  One of the flight technicians approached Dr. Williams quietly and asked, “Sir, what do you think? Is this evidence of life on Mars?”

  Dr. Williams never turned his head from the screen. Never blinked. He simply pulled his glasses off the bridge of his nose and replied, “I don’t yet know what it is. But I’m certain of one thing: we’re all going to spend the rest of our lives trying to figure it out. It’s a new age we’re stepping into. A brand new age. The space program will never be the same.”