Two-hundred-million Miles in the Air - Ch.2

     Don't get me wrong, when I first set foot on the surface of Hell, I was elated. It was, maybe, one of the best moments of my life. Just that feeling of achieving something you've been working towards for years. Plus, I was really fucking happy to be walking on a nice solid surface with honest to god gravity. The transit shuttle has an exercise centrifuge to keep your muscles from shriveling up over the months you spend in space, but it is not remotely the same. The viewport that looks out over the rest of the ship makes you feel dizzy as you spin, and there is this disgusting feeling of your feet feeling heavy while your head feels nearly weightless.

    So yeah, it was great. I had that feeling like, I imagine, everyone does. That feeling like all the horror stories you've heard are over-blown bullshit, and this is going to be the best six months of solitary confinement of your life. That feeling lasted all of like, thirty seconds. Right up until I caught sight of Maven.

    Maven Larson was a great dude. We were part of the same training program, and had actually spent a good bit of time together. His mission fell right before mine in the scheduling- which was completely fair. The system ranked him a few points higher than me on the personality scoring. Maven had wife, and was definitely more of a people-person than I am-- both of which are actually not great features for a Mars-candidate. But he was significantly more physically fit than me, which I guess counts for more. Romance and I have never gotten along so great. I'm in shape, but I haven't exactly spent all my free time doing pushups.

    Maven and I talked pretty regularly on the ride over. The way the missions line up, the guy that replaces you ends up leaving earth around the same time you touch down on Mars. The closer I got to mars, the longer the delay in messages to-and from earth. When the earth and mars are at their closest, its around three minutes. At the furthest it's around twenty. Its the opposite, of course, for communicating with someone on mars as you head their way. It got easier and easier to hold an ordinary conversation, which is nice to have when you're alone for months.

    Maven took his stint in Hell really well, actually. Surprisingly well, it seemed. He had a pretty cherry attitude every time we spoke. He had always said he was going to break the streak of sourpusses that came home from Mars, and planned to have a great time. It had seemed as though he was true to his word, right up until the last couple weeks of travel. You see, my take off had been delayed by a week. There had been something wrong with one of the rocket's redundant fire prevention systems that had to get fixed last minute. Then the weather was bad for several days. This is pretty normal, but I guess it hadn't been communicated to Marvin clearly. He had been, apparently quite privately, counting the fucking minutes until my ship arrived to get him off the red rock, but hadn't realized he was going to have to spend a whole extra seven days on Mars beyond the point he was expecting his stint to be over. He'd made an off hand comment, two weeks until arrival about that being his last week, and someone at mission control had corrected him. And he went batshit.

    Like I can't express to you how fundamentally this guy's attitude changed. He stopped chatting me up as frequently. In fact, I only talked to him a couple more times, but he'd apparently been ranting non-stop to Houston about the situation, and they were like... the fuck do you want us to do? teleport the shuttle to you? First day into the last week he stopped communicating all together. The operator monitoring Base Five's cameras could still see him storming around the habitat, growing more and more agitated. Second day in, he seemed to have become aware of this fact, and shut all the lights off. Mission control talked about him like he was a child throwing a tantrum, and had asked me to tell him all sorts of things when I got there, since they couldn't get through to him. I don't remember what they said. Something about being court-marshaled when he got home. It doesn't fucking matter.

    I was a short walk from the landing pad to the airlock. My concern for Maven vanished as I took in the sight of it all. The hallway that the airlock opens up into lacks a camera for some reason. I would later find that there were all sorts of blind spots in the monitoring system. Maven had managed to loop an extension cord around the hall's light-fixture and had hanged himself. His bloated corpse was positioned to stare me right in the eyes as the airlock door swung open. It was surely unintentional- nothing about the suicide seemed particularly thought out-- but it felt like a personal gesture. As if I was at fault for his ride home being a few days late.

    The smell was absolutely indescribable, so I won't bother trying, except to say that the scent of own my vomit that came soon enough was almost a relief. I considered, for an upsetting few moments, smearing some under my nose to mask the smell. I couldn't exactly escape the situation. There was, after all, no one in the station but me. The sanitation drones would take care of my puke, and had already tidied up whatever piss and shit had dripped to the floor under Maven, but had no means of disposing of a body, much less getting him down from the ceiling.

    Saying I couldn't escape wasn't exactly true. The return shuttle was primed and ready to take Mave home. I could have hopped on and bailed on the whole mission right then and there. Would have looked pretty fucking shitty on my record. Ezra Fletcher, the chicken-shit that spent ten minutes on mars and ran home. That said, I didn't have all the time in the world to sit and puzzle about it. Despite what the delay that led to this mess might imply, Mission control run a tight schedule. We were lucky to have had the luxury of waiting a week to take off, and in meant that there was absolutely no room for delay upon arrival. They wanted Mave on that shuttle and ready to launch within three hours of me landing.

    I've thought about offing myself before. Who hasn't? Hell, I even thought about having to kill myself during the mission. Like, what would happen if an asteroid hit the earth while I was there on Mars? My hand and I can't exactly re-populate the species, and I'd be damned if I would spend the rest of my life alone on a sandy red shitpile of a rock. I'd imagined firing up the emergency gas-generator, and sitting around inhaling the fumes would be easy and painless enough. 

    I mention it because I recon Maven took the slowest, most painful way out imaginable, outside of gutting yourself with a box cutter. Mars has gravity, but it isn't as much as Earth. You're effectively a third your normal weight on the Martian surface. That makes relying on your own body-weight to strangle yourself much more difficult. Whatever his reasons for doing in, Maven had to have been extremely determined. It would have been easier to just walk outside and ditch your helmet. He did it this way on purpose.

    Anyway. He'd been considerate enough to leave the stepladder he had used to hang the extension cord leaning up against the wall, so it took only a couple minutes to get him down. A couple more dry-heaves later, I'd built myself up enough to drag Mave into the airlock. I then began the nightmare of stuffing him into a pressure suit. While it probably seems like a silly thing to do-- its not like he needed air or something, you have to keep in mind how fucking cold it is on the surface of mars. On a good day, its minus-eighty-fucking-degrees Fahrenheit. He'd be frozen solid before I got him to the shuttle, making hauling his sixty some odd pounds of corpse that much more difficult. I couldn't just stuff him in a crate or something, the system literally would not take off without a body in the launch seat. Besides, he'd be a bit less likely to permanently stink up the cabin in a sealed suit. I'm very considerate.

    The first check in with mission control was fun. The were losing their minds; they'd just watched my scrawny ass drag (what they assumed to be) an unconscious Captain Maven Larson out of the airlock and stuff him into the shuttle. His state of decomposition had warmed his meat enough to fog his suit's visor, so they hadn't been blessed with the sight of his five-or-six day dead countenance just yet.

    "What the fuck do you mean he's dead?" said the beet-red face in the center of the comms screen. It was a conference call, so there were several faces staring at me, but mission director Knox was the only one saying anything. After pinging mission control, I had delivered my message, trying to convey the details as evenly as possible. I was supposed to be a professional, but it wasn't really difficult at that point. I was pretty numb. To my horror, however, I saw Maven's wife's face appear in the conference grid during the six or so minutes I had to sit and twiddle my fingers between message deliveries.

    "We- we just spoke to him last week Fletcher! He was cheery as a nun in church, just like he god damn always is!" Knox stormed off the screen to, I don't know, get some air or something. I don't remember really. The only face I could watch was Dinah's as she heard my curt mechanical report of her husband's death. I really should have lead with something different.

    I told the conference I'd need to send a written report, and left it at that, signing off to lay woodenly on a bed in the rest quarters. I listened to the roar of engines as the shuttle took off into the air, thankful I hadn't gotten back on the shuttle. I don't think I'd have made it home alive. I imagined Maven's body, strapped limp into the launch chair for the next several months. I stared at the ceiling, feeling as though I could see through it, imagining the shuttle growing fainter and fainter, until I it was out of sight.

Except.

    That night, the earth would be hanging in the sky over me, a pale blue dot in an endlessly black void. And it was then that it felt so distinctly like the earth was not above me. But rather that I had taken off its surface in the same shuttle that was now playing the role of Charon, the ferryman, delivering Mave back to the same dirt every other human being had been buried in for all of time. I was hanging in the sky above that earth, two-hundred-million miles up in the air.