Infinity
She turned to stare out the translucent pane. It was always the same: dust and wind and a great haze of unbreathable gasses. Man, and it had been man, no woman had stepped on that lunar rock had successfully conquered Earth’s satellite. Her grandparents had vague memories of watching those few steps and the planting of a flag stiff with wire.
Now it was supposed to be their turn, the generation raised on technology. A cell phone had more computing power than the entire roomful of mainframes that had crunched numbers for the lunar landing. She ran a hand down her face, wiping the sweat and grime from her forehead to her chin. Water for washing had long since run out. They were supposed to build a self-contained camp; none of the brilliant minds, who had organized this expedition, had foreseen the potential for the unmanned supply ship’s fatal malfunction that led it to crash land far from the target area. It was still transmitting telemetry, but it might as well be as lost as the sailing ships of yore for all the good it did.
Two teams had tried to reach it. One hadn’t made it over the cliffs; they weren’t trained mountaineers. The other had stumbled among the wreckage too weak and too short of oxygen to even find the emergency oxygen. They’d died huddled together against the perishing cold of a Martian night. Merrill’s last radio transmission would be forever scorched into Hannah’s soul.
She’d known surprisingly little of her fellow shipmates. They had been selected during a country wide search and had only trained as a unit for two weeks before departure. Training had been undertaken by the various corporate entities underwriting and controlling the mission. The capsule might have a large U.S. flag on one side, but the corporate logos were far more important. The shreds of her space coveralls still sported the patches of a worldwide conglomerate more known for ready to eat food than engineering prowess.
Merrill had been a quiet man in his thirties, recruited for both his scientific knowledge and his adventurous background. He’d biked around Asia on a school holiday and kayaked in the Arctic. Hannah was far from stupid, and it was obvious to her that proper looks and exciting back story had played as important part in the selection of team members as more concrete qualifications. They had been a pretty bunch for modern corporate promotion—half traditional white America, the other half an exotic mixture of shades, but none too black. There was all important African heritage needed for successful advertising campaigns in the supposed modern melange, but it was disguised with straight hair or sharper features of mixed race.
Merrill had been one of their brown members, perhaps corporate America’s most coveted class, the American Indian. Nothing sold more goods than a relationship to America’s first and most persecuted people. A tiny percentage donated back to a Native charity made everybody feel good, the benign fruits of capitalism. Merrill had babbled semi-incoherently into his radio his final night, speaking to a wife who wouldn’t hear the transmission for days and then only it its most sanitized version. He’d spoken of the children he had yet to father and the son only now starting in preschool. He’d named his future children that night, and Hannah hoped that had been passed on. He’d hoped for an Albert and a Marie; names that even the least educated would recognize. His voice had become more raspy, more painful, and finally faded into the nothingness of this God forsaken place.
“Hannah?”
“Robert.” Robert was tall and blond and had been Hollywood handsome. Most of his striking beauty was now lost under dull eyes and shriveling muscles. He ran his hand through his snarled hair that rested in dirty blond waves on his shoulders. Hollywood never had gotten the lost and the desolate right. They weren’t dramatic heroes of rugged individualism and shining morality; they were lost and battered and dreamed of going home for the most mundane reasons.
“I think we should try.”
“And die like everyone else?” Hannah ran through the names in her mind: Merrill, Jonathon, Andrea, and Cora.
“Is this better?” Robert stared at her. He was used to getting his own way; he was used to everything working out in his favor. He’d been captain of his baseball and basketball team, a top scholar at Yale, a promising scientist already bantered about as a future Nobel winner. He didn’t die in a hunk of plastic and metal on a rock.
“Longer,” Hanna said simply.
They both knew there was no hope of rescue. There was no rescue ship, not even the availability of unmanned drones to drop supplies. Redundant capacity damaged profits. Months from the gala of initial blastoff, they were probably all now forgotten except by the few waiting at home for news that would never come. Radio contact had been lost in a violent windstorm weeks ago and never recovered. Hannah would already have been mourned and buried in her small town, and Robert probably had a building named after him at Yale.
“I’ve studied the terrain. I think we can make it.”
Hannah wanted to believe his enthusiasm, to do rather than to wait.
“We have enough oxygen.”
By whose calculations? Walking on perfectly flat terrain without impossible cold, they had enough oxygen. This wasn’t a walk down Main street.
“There are supplies. It isn’t far.”
And so what? This was beyond a deserted island in the sea; no rescue was eminent. It was only dust and cold and a homesickness for a world that she would never see again.
“I won’t die a caged rat.”
“To die out there is better than to die in here?”
“Yes.”
Hannah rose and folded the sheet of paper, marking the date with a pen that spluttered and faded as the last loop closed. Paper, a finite and poor media, all that was left. With two fingers she made the scissors of the childhood game. Scissors cut paper and rock crushes scissors.
