Today's Reading
I walked around our landing craft, the Esther, one last time to check the tie-down straps. The landing pad was the same familiar shape as the one on the Moon, but a soft salmon instead of lunar gray. Everything felt different from training. I'd experienced spacesuits and Moon suits, both were stiffer than a Mars suit. Training on Earth, it was heavier. Training on the centrifugal ring of the Goddard, we always fought the Coriolis effect. Training on the Moon, you couldn't hear the whisper of wind outside your helmet.
Wind. Just wind. Not the sound of a spacesuit failing.
The hours after landing had been a focused series of checklists and supervising the off-loading while other members of the team got the habitat up and running. Then I'd turned to making sure that the Esther was locked down since it would be a month, at best, before I launched again. And Martian months were fifty-five sols long, so beyond the checklists, I wanted to make sure my ship was tucked in snug and secure.
And she was. There was nothing left to do. The last box was checked on my list.
"Elma, come look." Nathaniel stood between the Esther and the arched doorway into the base. "The Goddard is transiting."
I didn't run, because that's a good way to fall and damage your suit. But I looked up as I walked to him. Across the dancing backdrop of the evening sky, the clear bright light of the Goddard, the ship that had brought us here, traced an arc across the heavens.
"Oh—" My breath caught at the sight of an evening star. We weren't displaced enough in the galactic disc to make a difference, so we had the same stars and the same constellations. Except for one significant difference. "It's Earth."
Small and the palest blue, if you thought about the color blue while looking at it, our home planet sat low on the horizon to the west where the sun had set.
Nathaniel was silent as we leaned against each other in an embrace. I could feel his weight against me, but the details of his body were lost to the pressurized surfaces of our suits. He shifted. "Where?"
"See Orion? Follow the belt and then...it's the one that's bright like Venus."
His helmet rested against mine and I could hear the telltale snuffle of an astronaut whose nose is running. You can't wipe them in a spacesuit. It was good to know that the sheer joy of having made it here—to Mars—was making him cry, too.
When the Goddard passed below the horizon, I sighed and turned to look at Nathaniel. The one exterior light at Bradbury Base cast his face into yellow and gray relief.
My piloting work was truly done for tonight and I could feel the fatigue starting to catch up.
I squeezed Nathaniel's hands. "How are things inside?"
"Starting to wind down for the night." He nodded toward the dome, which cast a warm glow up through the bit of translucent curve that peeked above the regolith. "A couple of annoyances but nothing we didn't plan for."
"I can't believe you suited up again to come back out for me." And not just because putting on a Mars suit was tedious, but because he had voluntarily walked away from ongoing work.
"I wanted to be here when you looked up."
Holding his hand, I took one last look at the night sky before walking back to the base. I could stare at the stars forever.
Ahead of us, the entrance to Bradbury Base waited to guide us into our new home. The First Mars Expedition landing team had built it in 1963 as part of the long process to create another habitat for humanity. Nathaniel's engineering team had blueprints and plans for expanding the base, but for now it was comfortably cozy for twenty. Our first order of business would be to build the second dome so that the eighty colonists still aboard the Goddard could start coming down to join us.
I paused at the entrance to check the pressure gauge and then looked through the porthole to confirm that the interior door was shut. I pumped the ratchet handle to open it and Nathaniel followed me in, pulling the hatch shut. I was proud of him as he went through the process of latching it. He'd had training, yes, but this was his first long-duration mission in space.
...
