Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.1 (rewrite, rough draft)

"As you can see," projected the tour guide, "Base Five was dedicated to Elon Musk." She jestured towards the gaudy half-time portraits painted on the wall in front of us. "Musk was North-America's first trillionaire, and was a life long advocate of the Mars Program." She smiled perfunctorily. "Base Five is often referred to by _Martians_ as 'Musk Station,' isn't that great?" This is false, but I don't say anything. The guide and the tourists following her continued on into the next room, but I stayed for awhile. I liked the mural. Printed with small dots of color, it was the type of image that didn't look like anything untill you were far away. 

I made my way out of the hangar into the hall that the tour group was still percolating through. Lining the wall were portraits of each of stations "Martians" in order of their missions. Maven's freckled grin stared down at me, forcing me to avert my eyes to the following portrait. Captain Ezra Landon, read the brass plaque, with my own humorless face seeming to stare through my head at the wall behind me. It was supposed to say _Langdon_, but I'd never bothered to correct them.

I felt stupid staring at myself. No one ever paid any attention to the portraits anyway. A good thing, or I might have been recognized. I continued down the hall, avoiding eye contact with any further portraits. The tour group had crowded around a waist-high display in the middle of the broad lounge room. It had a little scale model of "Musk Station," surrounded by lilliputian recreations of Mars' riveting geological features: dirt, with the occasional rock.

I push my hands into my pockets and turn around to look out the large window along the back wall, showing the same _breathtaking_ view of fucking nothing, all the way to the featureless, uninhabitable horizon. If you were lucky, and I mean _real_ lucky, you might catch sight of a pathetic little dust devil kicking up a pathetic little whirl of dust. Those only happened on days Mars had constituted wind in its wan, hateful atmosphere. No dust devils to be seen today, I turn towards the corner, where there is a door that appears to lead directly out onto the martian surface.

Unfortunately, there is no rush of wind as the atmosphere rushes out of the station, killing all of us. We weren't on Mars. We were in Texas. The former training facility was just outside of Houston, and the recreation of Base Five in its basement had been been the maintained lovingly all these years, turned into a lucrative tourist attraction.

I exited the stairwell out a second door, out into the very un-martian heat to enjoy a luxury forbidden strictly anywhere but the good ol' Earth's surface. A cigarette.

***

The whole martian program was a lot like that big halftone portrait in base five. Nice to look at from a distance, but more and more meaningless the closer you look. [Section introducing Mars Program as pointless for various reasons]