SOL 497
What the hell was I thinking?
There was still another two hours of driving, and Mark couldn't help rehashing what he'd done with that last daily report he'd sent.
No. Correction; he hadn't sent it anywhere at all, in fact. He'd just left it there! HI MINDY was now spelled out in rocks on the face of Mars, where everyone, absolutely any and every human in existence who cared to look could see it. Forever. A hundred years from now, a thousand, people would be able to see that spot, where that crazy astronaut stuck on Mars had made a ridiculous attempt at flirting with some girl he barely knew. It was an impressively stupid thing for him to have done.
The more he thought about it, the worse it seemed, as he began to consider the media attention that he'd no doubt sent her way. Assuming that the media could figure out who Mindy was. Could they? He really wasn't sure. It was probably too much to hope for that nobody would figure it out.
On one hand, Mindy was not the most common girl's name in the world these days. On the other hand, it wasn't as though there was anything that could possibly link the two of them together.
Right?
Except for... any of the hundreds of people who might have seen them together that night. Or anyone she might have mentioned it to. Or… and he winced, just thinking about it; anyone who might have seen that photo they'd taken, together.
Nobody would figure it out?!
Yeah, right, he thought. He wanted to slam his head down on the dashboard, just thinking about the stupid thing he'd done. If the world didn't know already, they certainly were going to. He'd totally fucking outed her. If she'd thought he was an asshole that night at the bar, what must she be thinking of him right now? He shook his head, ruefully.
Would there be reporters chasing the poor girl around Houston? Harassing her? Late-night comedians making her the butt of their jokes? Slut-shaming her? Making her wish that she'd never met him?
He didn't care one way or the other what people on Earth were saying about him. He'd never stopped to give it very much thought, really. But the thought that people would pick on Mindy, make fun of her; he was angry just thinking about it.
Angry at himself, for putting her in this position.
She never signed up for this.
She's probably really, seriously pissed off, and I don't blame her at all, he thought.
The first thing I do when I get back in regular communications with Earth, he promised himself, I'll send her an apology. A private one.
Sorry, by the way. Didn't mean to tell a few billion people that we slept together. My bad.
He'd have to work on the wording.
Houston
"What did I tell you?" Caroline crowed, laughing as she heard about Mark's message. "Of course he was crazy about you!"
Mindy shook her head, still in disbelief, looking skyward.
She was not even looking forward to dealing with the fallout from this.
Goddamn it, Watney.
From this point forward, the beans had been officially spilled. Irene had done her level best to keep Mindy's name out of the public record, but even Irene was not a fucking magician. All of the Department Heads would remember that she had been pregnant, and given birth during the Iris launch, and they could all do math, because they're all nerds, seriously, and they could totally count backwards from nine, and then…
Oh yeah, she thought. I'm fucked.
"He's been thinking about you all along! What more proof do you need?" Caroline continued, brightly. "Called it!" she gloated.
Ignoring the professional implications for a moment, though… Mindy stopped to ponder what Caroline had just said. He had, apparently. Been thinking about her.
Her feelings for Mark were kind of complicated. One of the main problems with allowing herself to picture any sort of future with the man was that she simply had nothing to go on; had he really liked her, and decided not to pursue because of the bad timing? Or had he been, as she'd originally surmised, looking to enjoy a last-minute fling because it would be a long time until he would have another chance, never to give her another thought?
It was a long and lonely road, from the Hab to the MAV, and he had actually been thinking about her?
He misses me?
Holy shit.
I matter to him?
It had to be true. Her satellites had told her so.
He remembers.
She knew it was silly to attribute his message to anything more than an amusing whim on his part, but still; he hadn't said it to anyone else; he'd said it to her.
"Wow," was all she said. Dazed, she rose from her chair, and headed to the door to leave for work.
"Typical Mark, to tell you about it in such a fashion," Richard observed, dryly. "I suppose the cat's out of the bag, now."
An hour later, Mark had come up with what he thought was a pretty decent note of apology. A rough draft, anyway. He had plenty of time to work on it, after all.
He was just putting the final touches on it, trying to strike the right balance between "I'm sorry, that was an idiotic thing to do", and "Hey, I'd like to see you again. If I should manage to not die in a fiery explosion, could I have your phone number?"
The rover trudged along at its usual unalarming speed, the trailer following along in its wake, as Mark approached the very beginning of the descent into the crater. The surface was not as rocky here; it was smoother and fine powder covered the usual foundation of baked-solid ground. The sand was built up into a crescent shape; a barchan, product of thousands of years of prevailing winds and substrate.
He'd seen a hundred of them on his journey to Schiaparelli; tiny little ones the size of his rover, and giant mega-barchans that resembled flattened mountains, and every size in between. He knew the proper term for a crescent-shaped sand dune, naturally, since he'd studied Cowles when he was doing ecology research for his field work. The father of modern botany and ecology, Cowles had made a quotation, when he was talking about his beloved sand dunes in Indiana, that had always resonated strongly with Mark. Adapt, or die, had been the basic idea.
The penalty for lack of adaptation is certain death.
Adapt or die. You either rolled with the punches, or you might as well just accept it, you were a goner. You'd get mowed down, just like Cowles' sand dunes.
Cowles had also advanced the theory that when any environment was newly colonized, or suffered a disturbance; a new species of flora was introduced, maybe, or wildfire took out a forest, that the environment was forever changed, and would never go back to its original state, no matter how hard you tried to make it happen. If you were a species dependent on that environment, you'd better be prepared to change right along with it.
Mark was pretty sure Cowles hadn't been talking about Mars, but he might as well have been.
Had there ever even been such a perfect example of an untouched environment?
Primary succession, it was called.
Without even realizing he was helping to do it, he'd contributed, more than anyone else, towards a primary succession for an entire planet, hadn't he? From the moment of egress, when the six members of Ares III had set foot on Martian sand, they'd changed it forever. Eventually those changes were going to snowball, changing more and more things about the environment, until it was no longer the Mars that they'd first encountered.
Every little explosion, every drop of hydrazine that he'd converted to water, every molecule of hydrogen that he'd released, the heat and the water, the rock messages, even the piss box that he dumped on the surface every day. Everything he'd done, was doing, and planned to do, on the way to the MAV, and after he got there. All of it, every action, was changing Mars by tiny degrees. Making it into his own version of Mars. It was, quite literally, his own creation.
He didn't immediately notice when the first wheel began to lose traction, it happened so quickly. The wheel sank deep into the soft powder, while the other five wheels tracked along on solid ground. Then, the second wheel rolled into the barchan, right along the edge of the entrance crater. The poorly-distributed weight of the rover made the softly-compacted dune completely give way, and Mark's entire world tilted, as the rover slipped, skidded downhill, and then rolled.
Houston
"Hi, Mindy?" Dr. Kapoor stood in her doorway, shortly after she'd arrived. He peered down at her, closely, over the rims of his glasses.
"Hi to you, too?" Mindy said, breezily, keeping her eyes on the display, as though there were absolutely nothing unusual about yesterday's update from Mars. She almost pulled it off, too, but damn it, her face turned traitor on her, broke rank, and she bit her lip, looking down, and smirked. The expression on Venkat's face was just too fucking much. He looked like he'd swallowed a lit firecracker.
Taking a deep breath, he took his glasses off, and rubbed his temples.
"Dr. Kapoor," Mindy started, "I.." There was simply no getting around it. "I think maybe you ought to know…"
"You think?" he said, dryly. "So you.. and Watney…" his eyes were wide. "All along?" She wondered if he was remembering all of the department head meetings, where she had sat there and listened to many discussions about herself, some of which had been pretty derogatory.
"Afraid so," she replied, with an apologetic smile. "In my defense, I was trying to protect his privacy, as much as my own. I didn't think it was anyone else's business."
"And you two… had a little boy, didn't you?"
"About a year ago," she nodded. "He doesn't know." Even though she'd never showed it to anyone at work before, she found herself pulling up a picture of Henry on her phone, to show Venkat.
He snorted.
"Dead ringer," he grinned. His face became serious, and troubled, after a moment, though. "Mindy," he paused, "there's just not any way to prevent this from going public, I'm afraid."
"Yeah," she sighed. "I know."
Mindy's attention shifted back to her monitor, where the flashing light indicated that one of the satellites had returned a new series of images, as they continued to follow Watney's path towards Schiaparelli.
She frowned at the first one, which seemed to show two rovers. Had they gotten separated, somehow?
What the hell just happened?
"I've got an idea, though," Venkat was saying. "I need to run it past the other directors, first, but-"
"Whoa," she held her hand out, cutting him off and gesturing for him to look.
"What are we looking at?" he quickly pulled a chair over to her workstation and stared at the first image, instantly changing gears, as they both tried desperately to think of some reason, some non-lethal reason that the rovers could look like that. Kapoor took a deep breath, and placed a steadying hand on Mindy's desk.
Black rectangles were scattered all around, the trailer was actually upside-down, and the other rover…
"It rolled," she said, pointing to the furrows and indentions headed down the crater wall. "That sand dune, the one right there, it collapsed and broke off, see?"
Venkat was already dialing.
"It's okay," Mindy reassured Caroline. Richard was holding the baby, as they both stared at her. "I think it's going to be okay."
"How…" Caroline trailed off, looking at the images. "How can he possibly flip them back over again?" she asked, aghast.
"I don't know," she admitted. "But he'll figure it out. He's so close to the MAV now," she was thinking out loud, "that even if things in the trailer get a little thrashed, he'll still make it there okay, as long as the seals on the Rover hold. And they seem to be okay."
"Dead… not dead… Hab breaches… killer dust storms chasing his ass around…" Richard tried to laugh about it, even if Mindy knew him well enough by now that she could see the abject terror in his eyes, too. "I told that kid to dial it back on all the goddamned drama. But no, he's gotta be fucking difficult about it."
"That's our boy," Caroline chimed in, morosely.
A new message in Morse was appearing, late that evening.
ROLLED… FIXING…. NOW
It was hard to tell what Watney was up to, exactly, but he seemed to have some kind of plan in mind, as he attached something-was it rope? to the rover on one side and prepared to use it as leverage to to flip the trailer back over.
They never did figure out where he'd gotten or made such a long length of rope from.
Whatever he'd done, it worked. When MG24 passed over the site again, a few minutes later, there was a small dust cloud, and a now-sunny-side-up trailer.
Moreover, the trailer looked like it was in decent condition, the balloon of Hab canvas still miraculously inflated. Watney spent what remained of the daylight swapping out the trailer hooks from the back of the trailer to the front, apparently. Then he backed the rover up to it and dragged it a few meters along as a test drive, before calling it a night.
The next day, the solar cells were duly stacked and packed and Watney rolled out, after leaving behind another message.
FUN... TIMES…. OMW NOW... STATUS... NORMAL.
"You should have seen this little guy," Caroline said, recounting Henry's attempt at standing on his own, earlier that day. "He almost had it. One small step for Henry, one giant leap for-"
"Don't you go getting any ideas, squirt," Mindy informed her son, as she reached out for him. Richard deposited him into her arms, warm and cuddly. Henry gave her a sleepy, dimpled smile, as he reached out to grab for a lock of her hair. "You are officially banned from ever going to Mars," she informed him, sternly.
He gazed up at her with long-lashed stormy blue eyes.
Richard answered for Henry, in a silly, chirpy little voice.
"But Mom!" he whined. "All my friends are going to Mars!"
Mindy giggled.
"C'mon Mom, Grandma and Grandpa said I could go!" he continued, as Caroline rolled her eyes. "Please?"
"No way, mister," she grinned down at Henry and his facilitator. "You're not going anywhere except to bed."
"Aww, Mom!" he complained, falsetto. He ruffled Henry's downy hair, and patted Mindy on the back of the shoulder in a sort of almost-hug. "G'night, kiddoes," he said.