Houston Memorial Hospital
"He's groggy, but awake for the moment, if you want try again, Dr. Kapoor."
He walked into the hospital room, cautiously. The room seemed unbearably noisy, alight with monitors and medical equipment. The patient was indeed, awake. The blue eyes followed him unsteadily as he approached.
"Watney?"
Mark nodded, even that small effort seemed to exhaust him.
It was impossible. Absolutely impossible, but the astronaut that had starved to death on Mars, the astronaut that had defied the odds and survived so much before permanently losing contact with NASA, was lying before him in the hospital bed. He was overcome, he could barely manage to speak. He tried again.
"Watney, do you know where you are?"
Mark nodded again.
"Houston," he whispered hoarsely. "You don't look happy to see me."
"Happy to see you?" Venkat smiled in spite of himself. "Happy is not the word. Dumbfounded is more like it. Mark, how is this possible? In the two days since you made your reappearance, not one theory has been floated on how you could have possibly built a spaceworthy craft with the available tools and then launched it from Mars with enough supplies to make it home. Impossible." He shook his head again. "How did you do it?"
Mark nodded again, slowly. "Dr. Kapoor," he said quietly, "Don't get the wrong idea. I am completely willing to tell you what happened; all of it. But I need to know," his eyes met Venkat's with a quizzical expression, "are you going to be required to share what I say with the world, immediately?" He paused for a moment, talking had exhausted him again and he tried to catch his breath. "Because if that's the case, be careful what you ask."
"This isn't an official interview, Mark. But I've got to be honest, this whole scenario has NASA very worried. The handful of people who are aware of it, that is. When Iris Two failed, and we didn't see any more updates from you; we assumed the worst, Mark. Did we misjudge? Did Iris Two reach you, intact?"
Mark shook his head. "It didn't. Even if it had, I'm not sure if I could have done anything with it, honestly. I was weak from starvation by then, I wasn't able to suit up to clean the solar panels anymore, I was sleeping about 20 hours a day, barely hanging on."
"We noticed that the panels weren't getting cleaned anymore, yeah. So you ran out of food entirely?"
"I was down to the last potato, yes." Mark grinned. "I wound up not needing it."
Venkat caught his breath.
"What happened, Mark? Start from the beginning."
"It's a long story, Dr. Kapoor, and I'm not in the best shape, here." His eyes closed, and he sighed. "It's noisy in here, too. Hard for me to concentrate."
"Okay, Mark. We'll talk some more after you've rested. Is it alright if I bring Teddy Sanders with me? We need to assess how we're going to handle this, and-"
Mark nodded briefly. His eyes stayed closed.
"We'll get this sorted out tomorrow, Mark. Get some rest. Good to see you."
He backed out of the room slowly. At the nurse's station, he paused a moment to tell her that the patient was sleeping again.
"Someone's going to need to tell his parents. Teddy, I think it should be you."
Mitch Henderson spoke quietly, deep in thought. It was early Thursday morning, and they were having a brief meeting in a hospital break room they had commandeered for the occasion. Venkat and Teddy were awaiting word that Mark was awake again.
"What do we tell them? We've got your boy. The one that we held a funeral for now, TWICE, and he's alive and we don't know how?" Teddy shrugged. "You're right, of course. I'll get on a plane this afternoon. Hopefully Mark will give us something more to go on. This whole situation is completely insane."
"Is it absolutely certain that Watney has been in zero-G for several months? There's no other explanation for his lack of muscle tone and weakened heart, correct?" Venkat looked to Dr. Beck.
"That's my assumption, yes." Beck cleared his throat. "From the information I have here, yes. He looks exactly how I would expect someone who'd made the journey back from Mars in zero-G to appear. If a human could have survived such a voyage at all, which is scientifically dubious in itself."
"What about the fingernails? The ridging on his nail beds." Venkat was holding a report they'd gotten from a different NASA physician the previous evening.
"Yes, that's compelling evidence that Mark suffered a lengthy and severe nutritional deficiency that ended, suddenly, around ten months ago. That would tend to rule out the scenario of Mark outfitting his own craft, and lean in favor of a rival space agency-sponsored rescue mission." Beck held his breath, he knew he had reignited the same burning debate that had held them all captive the last two days.
"Seriously? You think China went behind our backs and launched their own probe to go get him, without us even getting a whiff that they were up to something? I wouldn't have thought that was within their capabilities by a long shot. And if, by some miraculous chance, they succeeded where we failed, wouldn't they be proudly announcing that to the world right about now?" Teddy sighed. "That doesn't make sense. None of this does."
They fell into silence.
"Suppose he did get ahold of Iris Two somehow," ventured Mitch, "just suppose all of our data is incorrect and it did land near the Hab before he was in deep starvation. What if he loaded it up, somehow, and took it all to Schiaparelli and used the MAV there to launch for home?"
"He never would have made it," Venkat replied. "Life support on the MAV would never have been sustainable for that kind of voyage. No way. And the Ares 4 MAV is exactly where Martinez parked it, anyway. No data to suggest that it's been touched. And Mark already confirmed to me that Iris 2 never arrived."
There was a knock at the door.
"He's awake."
"Mark, I'm going to be recording this, okay? So that we can transcribe it later. It's all still confidential at this point, though. Speak freely, and try to be as complete and accurate as possible."
Mark cleared his throat, coughed, and began.
"This is going to sound really crazy. I should have died. And I almost did, so many times. I don't recall the exact SOL, but it's in my logs, once I can retrieve them."
"Your logs?" Teddy interrupted, in spite of himself. "Is there any chance that we'll be able to access any of that data, without returning to the Hab for it?"
"I brought it all with me, don't worry."
A flurry of consternation erupted from Venkat and Teddy, as they tried to make sense of what Mark was saying.
"You brought things with you? Where? How? What, exactly?" Venkat stammered in his surprise.
"All my data logs, a hundred kilos of Mars soil samples. Don't worry, your researchers will have plenty to keep them busy. But I'm getting ahead of myself." Mark paused for a moment, and stopped to survey his audience. They were agape.
"Please continue," croaked Venkat. "You weren't sure what SOL it was?".
"Yea. I was laying in my bunk, typing some goodbye letters on my laptop. I knew I was getting close to the end, by then. The Hab was in low-power mode."
"Because the solar panels weren't getting cleaned, correct?" Venkat asked.
"Right, I'd been too weak to clean them for several weeks by then. So there I was," Mark grinned at them, "and the walls of the Hab started shaking. The floor, too. My first thought was that it was an earthquake. It felt kind of like an earthquake. It lasted for about, I don't know, over a minute, less than two."
"I tried to think what it could be, but I just came up blank. Nothing looked different outside. It was kind of bizarre. It occurred to me that maybe NASA had just soft-landed something near the Hab, even though I knew it wasn't likely. So I summoned up all the strength I had left, got my EVA suit on, and cycled through the airlock. I managed to take about two steps before I fell over onto my side, but at that point I was able to see that there was a lander craft, maybe 300 meters from the Hab."
Stunned silence filled the room, while Mark caught his breath from his long speech. He motioned that he would continue in a moment.
"A landing craft," said Teddy, weakly. "Whose was it, could you tell?"
"The Chinese" Venkat managed. "They sent some sort of rescue capsule?"
Mark shook his head, still winded.
"Someone else, then?" Teddy asked. Mark shook his head again, closing his eyes for a moment.
He began again.
"It did look sort of similar to a MDV, but it was taller. It had writing on the side, but in a language I had never seen. A lot of geometric shapes, spaced out like letters. I was too weak to do much more than lay there in the dust, but I had my EVA suit camera, so I angled it around to take some pictures of this thing."
Teddy nodded, eyes wide.
"There was what looked like an airlock on the bottom quarter of the craft, and even though I was weak as a newborn kitten, I started planning that I would crawl out to it, to see what was inside, if I could manage it. Honestly, I was in pretty bad shape, I wasn't sure I could even get that far. I had just started to roll onto my hands and knees to try to start moving again, when I saw the airlock start to open. It had a sort of aperture opening sequence, not like any airlock I'd ever seen."
"I took a few more pictures and tried to get video on the aperture sequence, but didn't quite manage it. Anyway, someone in a suit stepped out at that point.".
"It was a MANNED rescue mission!?" Venkat gaped.
"Yea, you're telling me. I almost passed out. And I really did pass out when the person got close enough that I could see that they definitely weren't human."
Silence again, as this began to sink in.
"Watney, are you telling us-seriously-that you were rescued by aliens?". Teddy managed to say, shaking his head in disbelief.
"Just one alien, actually." Mark grinned at the unprecedented state of his audience. The dramatic reveal had been very satisfying.
Venkat spluttered something that sounded like, "describe..." while he appeared to be at the point of not being able to breathe properly.
Mark paused for a minute again, and then said, trying to remember exactly, "She was small, maybe 1 and a quarter meters tall. She was pretty strong though, she must have been. She carried me in the EVA suit, back to her craft. I came to, just as she was closing the airlock. There was a sort of... lift... thing she hoisted me onto. Alien version of a cargo elevator, I guess. She came right after me, though, and she motioned for me to take my helmet off."
"Mark, you took your helmet off in an alien spacecraft? Please tell me you didn't." Venkat hung his head. Hadn't Mark been through enough training to recognize how dangerous that could have been?
"Well, my EVA suit said the atmosphere was okay, a little higher oxygen level than humans usually breathe, but nothing harmful. And remember, I was practically dead already. It didn't seem too risky at the time. Frankly, I was out of options, and making friendly with the nice alien that owned a spaceworthy vehicle seemed like a good plan. "
Teddy cleared his throat, and said, "Ah. So you thought you'd go ahead and ask the alien if you could hitch a ride. May I ask, how did you know she was friendly? How'd you even know she was female?"
Mark laughed. "I have no idea! So there I was, fumbling around trying to unlock my helmet, on this spike of adrenaline. I couldn't even manage it. She had to do it. I passed out again, I think. She was examining me when I came to again.".
"The alien gave you a medical exam." deadpanned Teddy.
"Well, yeah. I was almost dead, she told me later how worried she'd been that I would die before she had a chance to talk to me."
"She told you... later?" Venkat asked, a hundred anxious questions in his voice. "How did she tell you things? Did she speak... English?"
"Oh, hell no!" Mark burst out laughing. "Oh, how I wished that she did! Communicating with her was a bitch! Especially at first."
He paused for a long time, catching his breath. He was getting tired again, and it showed.
"Mark, do you need a break now? This is a lot for us to process. And we don't want you to overdo it." Venkat was still reeling, and he was feeling a little faint himself.
"Yeah, I could use a break. We can talk some more about it tomorrow. But I have a few questions. Nobody here is talking to me, and I don't know anything-anything that's happened on Earth-for the last year and a half. Did the rest of the crew make it home okay? Do they know that I made it home? What about my parents?".
Venkat sighed. "The rest of the crew arrived on schedule. Dr. Beck is here in Houston, and has been assigned to your service, we thought you'd prefer that. The rest of the crew hasn't been apprised, yet. We just don't really have any real narrative yet to tell them. We're still putting things together, you understand?"
Mark nodded. It would be great to see Dr. Bossy Beck again.
"And Mark," Teddy added, "I'll be on a plane to Chicago in two hours to go talk to your parents. Do you want me to bring them to Houston?"
"Yeah, I'd really like to see them, and the rest of the crew if it can be arranged. Thank you, sir."
"Mark, this is a work in progress, just be patient. You've done an amazing job so far. It'll take a little while to bring you the rest of the way home." Venkat stood up, and shook Mark's hand. "Get some rest. I'll be back tomorrow."