I'm a truck driver, Mark thought, ruefully, as he drove the modified rover back and forth. The rover's heater was disabled, and the interior was getting continually colder.
A refrigerated truck driver, at that.
Soon, he was shivering, as the deep Martian cold relentlessly pulled the heat away. Even though the rover was well-insulated, after an hour of it, he was miserable, tracing and retracing the same path back through the dust, the Hab still visible to his left.
He needed to know exactly how much heat the insulation was losing, though; that data was one of the last things he needed for his calculations. He'd have to suffer through one more hour's worth of battery usage, to be able to make a useful comparison with his previous attempt.
Right now, though, he felt like he'd never be warm again.
It was just when he was starting to lose his will to continue, to settle for lesser data, give up early, flip that switch and turn on the heat and get warm, that something odd happened.
His last night in Houston had suddenly sprung to mind. Remembering that ninety-degrees-at-midnight, all-encompassing heat. Mindy. What a night, he thought, grinning, as he spent the next hour shamelessly replaying the events of that evening, in his head. Every bit of it.
Thermodynamically speaking, Mark very much doubted that the memory made much of a difference. But it couldn't be denied, that just thinking about her helped him to forget, for a little while at least, how cold he was.
Houston
January 13, 2036
Hmm, that's interesting, Mindy thought, as she read through the priority request from Dr. Kapoor. An imaging order straight from a department head; it would take immediate priority over the backlog of department work. She'd only seen a handful of them, in her tenure at SatCon.
It was nearly three in the morning, and her shift would be over soon, but she could probably get this one taken care of before it was time to go home.
Those coordinates, though. 31.2… They seemed familiar. Mindy frowned, as she input the data, and then it just clicked. The landing site for Ares III.
Images for the Ares III site. Does the world really need to see this? She certainly knew that she didn't, and the thought of what it would do to Caroline and Richard, to see a satellite image showing their son, dead… But it wasn't her call, to make.
I won't look at them, she thought, feeling her throat constrict, as she adjusted the orbits for the two nearest satellites that could get Kapoor's images, selecting the one that she could get to make a pass over the site in thirty minutes. It was for Dr. Kapoor, so she went ahead and set the other one to take images, too, just in case. Her heart was pounding, but this was her job, so she did it, even as her mind shied away from thinking about what those images might look like.
So they were actually going to have themselves a look, she thought. After all this time. Word around the office was that Ares VI, if it were ever to happen, might reuse the very same site in Acidalia Planitia.
It was hard to imagine Congress even authorizing a sixth Ares mission at this point, with public opinion of the program at an all-time low. But Hermes had been built to last, and naturally NASA wanted to keep using it for its intended purpose as long as possible. They'd pitch ideas for Ares VII and VIII, too, if they could get congressional backing on it.
Watney had been well-liked, though, and his death had resonated strongly with the public. Send robots, instead, was now a common sentiment, when the Ares Program was mentioned in the media. A sixth Ares mission that had the nerve, and the bad taste, to plop itself down on top of Watney's dead body, so that NASA could cheap out and get away with sending fewer pre-supply probes? Are they really serious, she wondered, idly.
Apparently they were.
Montrose from PR was going to have her hands full, spinning that into something that the public would find remotely acceptable. And these requested images were not likely to make her job any easier.
An hour later, when the flashing light indicated that the images were ready, she tried to look away. Honestly, she did.
Seventeen image thumbnails, though, just wouldn't fit on one page. She forwarded the first sixteen, but the leftover one had to be handled in a separate batch, damn it, and she had no choice but to allow it to appear on her workstation for a few seconds while she dealt with it.
Don't look, she thought, don't look, as she dragged the image across to another screen to attach it to the new batch, but it was too late.
She'd looked.
It wasn't so bad. She was surprised.
Nothing awful to see here, she thought, taking a closer look. The site looked just as it had during the surface mission.
She pulled up the rest of the images, after she'd sent them along to Kapoor. Nothing horrible jumped out at her. It was kind of cathartic, actually, she thought, as she gained confidence with each image she looked at. No impaled corpse, no exploded Hab, no flipped-over rovers or… anything bad at all, really.
Just orderly little rows of nice, clean, solar panels, and a normal-looking inflated Hab. That was a nice surprise. Still inflated? After that terrible storm? That was impressive, she thought, beginning to relax. Maybe Kapoor was onto something, with this Let's Reuse the Site idea of his, after all. The two rovers weren't even buried in sand. Both of them were clearly visible, as were the…
What. The. Fuck.
Those white squares, they couldn't be anything else, other than the emergency pop tents from the rovers, but both of them? And not randomly scattered around, either, they were… wait.
And she was halfway out of her chair now, as the solar panels caught her eye again.
Clean?
Orderly little rows?
A sharp cry had issued, unbidden, from her throat, and she backed away from her workstation, shaking her head, disbelieving, as the truth began to settle around her.
Watney hadn't died, at all. Despite what the crew had thought they'd seen. He'd survived.
Dear god.
He was alive. She didn't know how, and she didn't know if he could be contacted, or if he could even be saved, but he was alive.
The tears were still slowly streaming down her cheeks, ten minutes later, as Dr. Kapoor appeared, and looked over her shoulder, in response to the frantic call he'd received.
"Hey," he looked at her, concerned. A crying, emotional, pregnant girl was the last thing he wanted to deal with, this early in the morning. "Watney's body? Is it visible? Was it bad?"
She shook her head, pointing to a section of the image that she'd magnified.
"Pop tents," she identified them for Dr. Kapoor, who looked mystified. "From the rovers."
"Right," he agreed with her, after a moment, "That's odd, I wonder when the crew put those out? It wasn't anywhere in the-"
"They didn't. I've read the official report and all of the crew logs-"
"You have? And they must have done," he argued, "because there they are."
Only about a dozen times, she thought, annoyed. The Watneys had loaned her their copies of the entire mission log to read, ages ago, and the classified reports from each crew member, too. There had been no mention of pop tents.
"Here," Mindy brought up another image. The solar farm. "They're clean, see? Not a single one of them even got tipped over, in that storm that almost toppled the MAV?"
Kapoor froze, as her meaning began to sink in.
"You think Watney's alive?"
Mindy nodded. She stood up, and abruptly sat back down again, still visibly shaking, a bit.
Kapoor waved her in the direction of the door.
"Go home," he ordered, while reaching for the phone. "Take tomorrow off, if you need to," he added, taking in Mindy's pale face and shaking hands. "I'll let Bob know."
She didn't go home.
She drove directly to Hobby Airport, instead, and caught the first outbound flight to Midway. It was just past noon, when she was knocking on the Watney's door.
Richard answered it, and Mindy collapsed into his arms, shakily. She'd been awake for nearly twenty-four hours, and she was an exhausted, nervous wreck.
"Jesus Christ, what's wrong? Caroline," he called. He helped her over to the sofa, and sat next to her, putting a steadying arm around her shoulders.
"They were wrong," she whispered, as he patted her shaking back, as she lost control once more and started to cry.
"What do you mean?" he asked, as Caroline came in, and hurried to Mindy's other side.
"The crew. They were wrong," she repeated, louder this time, sniffling. "He's not dead."
Caroline stared, and backed away from her, her head tilted at an odd angle.
"Are you okay, honey?" she asked, confused. "What are you doing here? Is it the baby, is everything-"
"I said," Mindy repeated, "that he's not dead. Mark is alive. They left him behind, but he's still alive. They were wrong."
It still hadn't sunk in, so she said it again.
"He's been alive all this time," she continued, "with no way to contact anyone, apparently, and…" she trailed off, as Caroline stiffened in shock.
Richard's hand had stopped patting her shoulder, as they both looked to her, for information.
Mindy began again, haltingly, "Early this morning, one of the department heads, the Director of Mars Missions, ordered satellite imagery for the Ares III site." She got out her work phone to pull the pictures up, as she continued, "and I wasn't going to look at them, but I did. I didn't mean to, but I saw one of them, and there was no body." Caroline looked unconvinced. "So I took another look. And there was still no body, not anywhere, and the solar farm was all swept off and clean, and the rovers weren't where the crew left them. And the pop tents," she pointed out the first picture, as Richard and Caroline stared, "the crew never even used those, but there they are, they're both just sitting there, attached to the Hab, which they're not even designed to do, and-"
Caroline was hugging her, suddenly, so hard that it hurt, clutching her. Richard was examining the images, flipping through them. Searching. Scanning.
Mindy realized then, that Caroline was shaking. She looked up, concerned, to see that she wasn't crying; she was laughing.
"That's Mark, for you," she giggled, hysterically, as Richard started to laugh, too. "Isn't it?"
"Late for his own funeral!" Richard burst out, between laughs. "That kid, I swear to god," Mindy stared at them, abashed. Was this just how they dealt with stress? By laughing at the things that scared them to death?
"Well, he did say that he wished he could get a little more surface mission time," Caroline chuckled, looking at the images.
"Gonna get that wish granted, in spades, poor kid," Richard mused, with a grin, settling his arm back around her, squeezing her shoulder.
"What are they gonna do," Mindy wondered, aloud. It had been a recurring question for her, and one for which she didn't think she liked the possible answers.
"They'll have to go get him, I guess," Richard mused. "Gee, that'll take awhile, won't it." A troubled expression fell across his friendly face, as he looked down at his hands.
"Ares IV?" Caroline guessed, and her face fell, as the obvious problem with that solution occurred to her.
There were not enough supplies to see him through; Mark would starve, first.
"They'll have to send a supply probe out to him." Mindy suggested.
"Four years, stranded out there." Richard said, incredulously. He shook his head, lost in thought.
"Can they even get anything to him in time?" Caroline asked.
"They'll make it work." She tried to sound reassuring. But Mindy knew a thing or two about orbital mechanics, and she wasn't at all sure whether it would be possible. This was no time to be sending probes to Mars. The planets were no longer in optimal alignment, and the distance between them would only increase, as they waited to launch a probe that did not, as far as Mindy knew, even exist in the first place. "They'll have to hurry."
Caroline squeezed her again. "They'll get started right away," she said, decisively. "It'll work out."
They spent the next hour talking things out, before Caroline flatly insisted that Mindy get some sleep. She was dead on her feet. She slept away the rest of the afternoon, and was still fast asleep in Mark's former bedroom, when the doorbell rang again, around dinnertime.
Caroline answered the door this time, with a face full of hope and happiness, as she greeted Director Sanders. She was serenity itself, as she calmly listened to what he'd come to tell them. Never letting on for a second that she already knew.