The silence was broken by a joyful jingle, as the glow from a mobile phone display illuminated the room.
“It’s yours …” Natalie murmured with a thick voice.
A moan, a movement among the sheets and finally an arm passed over her, reaching out for the night table beside her. Jan tapped the answering icon and lifted the phone to his ear. “Hello …?” He let a yawn follow that word.
A voice on the other side pronounced his name.
“Yes, it’s me. Who’s speaking?”
His brain was still clouded by sleep. What time was it? The wall display indicated four a.m. As he heard the name and the title of the person at the other end of the line, he woke up completely and sat up.
“Who’s calling at this time?” the woman near him said, rising from the pillow and turning on the light.
Jan was motionless; he was listening intently. An adrenaline discharge had drained any fatigue in a moment.
Natalie was watching him, puzzled. She rubbed a hand on her sleepy face, then took her glasses from the night table and put them on.
“Oh, my God … Anna.” Jan felt invaded by fear. He would’ve liked to say something else, but was too upset.
“Anna?” the woman echoed, at once more interested in that conversation. “Anna, your ex?”
He shifted his gaze to her and nodded.
“But isn’t she on Mars …?” Natalie said, then, as she realised about the situation, she placed a hand on her mouth. “Oh God …”
“Yes, sure,” Jan said into the phone. “When?” He paused to listen, then nodded. “Okay, see you later.” And he hung up.
“Is she …” Natalie started the sentence, but then stopped.
Jan shook his head. “It was the Isis mission director from Houston. He hasn’t explained the entire situation.” He got out of bed. “I must hurry.”
“Tell me,” she exclaimed, following him.
He turned round and placed his hands on her shoulders. “Nat, it’s confidential information. I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you about it.”
“Oh, holy smoke!” she reproached him. “I’ve been your agent for more than three years. We have a relationship based on friendship and mutual trust. Sometimes we share the same bed, and none of that interferes at all with your silly affairs with various starlets and models, nor with my marriage. I can keep confidential information about your ex living on another planet, don’t you think so?”
Even if he knew she was right, Jan was undecided. On the other hand, talking to her could have relieved his anguish a bit. Finally, he gave up.
“I don’t know exactly what happened. They didn’t want to recount the details by phone.” He felt a stab of pain in his head. He had drunk too much. “It seems Anna went mad and escaped in a rover, refusing any contact with her colleagues on Mars and those at NASA.”
“Let me guess,” Natalie stepped in. “They want you to persuade her to come back.”
“Exactly. And now, excuse me, but I gotta go.” He let her go and started putting on his clothes one by one, as he found them scattered in the room from the previous evening.
She looked at him, half smiling. “I can’t believe that. Jan love-’em-and-leave-’em De Wit is still in love with his ex, who dumped him to go to another planet. That explains a lot …”
“Oh, please, Nat, don’t start this now.” He wasn’t really in the mood to listen to another lecture from the woman who persisted in criticising his private life. He had now donned his trousers and shirt, but was still looking for his shoes.
Still smirking, Natalie looked around, then headed for the couch. “Let me help you,” she added, lifting a pair of men’s shoes from under the piece of furniture and showing them to him.
He went to her and almost ripped the shoes from her hands, then he reconsidered his action. “Thank you.” He planted a kiss on her lips. “You’re always the best.” And he sat down on the bed to put them on.
“I know,” was her ironic comment.
He felt short of breath, as his body was pushed against his seat in a way he hadn’t expected. Even after the acceleration ended, it took some minutes before his nausea disappeared and he could return to his senses.
“The first few times are a little traumatic, but then you get used to it,” Miller commented. The man from NASA, as he had defined himself, had come to Jan’s villa to take him to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, from where they had left for Houston on board a strange kind of aircraft.
“What did you call this thing?”
“Simply air shuttle.” Miller seemed amused. “It’s a prototype for a passenger transport aircraft conceived for intraplanetary supersonic travels.”
“And by intraplanetary, you don’t mean Earth, I suppose.” Now he had the sensation of being stationary, perhaps because the speed had become constant. Looking from the window, he stopped to admire the breathtaking sight of dawn on suburbia.
Miller smiled again. “That’s right. The idea is to send a few of the crafts to Mars, where subsonic flight is made difficult and expensive by the planet’s thin atmosphere. But they work well in the hereabouts as well, actually they work perfectly!”
“I don’t doubt that.” Yet he felt anything but safe.
“One day they’ll become as common as helicopters and private jets. Maybe even more common.” And he laughed. Was there something funny? “Don’t worry, Mr De Wit. Everything will end in twenty minutes.”
For a split second, Jan stared at him with a quizzical look, then he understood. “What do you mean, twenty minutes? We left less than five minutes ago!”
“These things are quite fast, Mr De Wit.”
Promptly, twenty minutes later, the air shuttle underwent a deceleration which, if possible, was even more abrupt than the initial acceleration. Or at least that was Jan’s impression. It was followed by a much smoother descent.
When, at last, the aircraft had touched down and the pilot had given the go-ahead, he unfastened his safety belt with some difficulty, and staggering to his feet he headed for the exit, with Miller glued to him like a shadow. As he disembarked from the shuttle, he found another group of people waiting for him, led by an African-American with a grave look. Behind him was a gorgeous woman in her forties and two more men, perhaps in their thirties. He wasn’t sure, because they wore informal clothing, giving them a juvenile appearance. One of them was Asian, from the Far East, barely reaching one metre sixty in height, frail, smart look, very neat. The other one was much more corpulent, making the first one look even smaller. He had chestnut hair that was a little too long, and a bored expression on his face. They all looked distraught.
The group leader came forward and shook his hand. “Mr De Wit, welcome to the Johnson Space Center. I’m Jamal Nichols; we spoke on the phone.”
“Sure, yes, nice to meet you,” Jan replied to his handshake, trying to appear self-confident, but actually feeling intimidated being there. Like a fish out of water.
“Please, follow me …” Nichols added, gesturing with a hand. And he started walking at a brisk pace.
Jan caught him up, while the other three followed suit.
“Please, let me introduce JSC Deputy Director Maggie Moore, Isis program’s deputy flight director, Masu Sasaki, and software engineer, Michael Gray.” He introduced them as he kept moving, without pointing them out, or turning round. Jan looked back to greet them. However, there was no need of further explanations to match each of them to a name. Only Moore replied with a smile. Sasaki did nothing but nod, while Gray just ignored him. Miller had vanished without trace.
They entered what Nichols indicated as being the Ares Building. The journey inside the complex, through long corridors and a ride in a lift, appeared never-ending but it gave the mission director, with the help of the others, the time to brief him about the events, thus disclosing the reason for their presence. They served to speed up the explanations and avoid wasting more time.
When they reached the mission control room, Jan had already got a sense of the latest incidents on Mars, starting with the death of two crew members, which had occurred in mysterious circumstances and been kept hidden from the public eye, and the doubts on the responsibilities of the other three, in particular Robert Green and Hassan Qabbani. The name of the latter made something ring in his memory. He recalled that Anna had mentioned a certain Hassan during the training period, and that she didn’t like him, which was quite an understatement. She had often talked about him, ill concealing a certain amount of contempt. Jan knew well what the origin of her behaviour was, and was aware that his attitude, as referred to by her, might have been a direct consequence of her hostility. Apparently, considering Nichols’s statements about Anna’s accusation against Qabbani regarding what had happened at Station Alpha before her impromptu departure, their relationship hadn’t improved much, in spite of the passing of time.
The strong smell of coffee almost knocked him out as he entered the room, bringing him back to reality. It wasn’t even eight in the morning, but everybody was at their place. Actually, judging by their faces, it would seem they were still at their place.
The mission director had explained him that most of the work was carried out during the daytime in Station Alpha, which unfortunately moved forward about thirty-nine and a half minutes each day, because a complete rotation of the planet around its axis took longer on Mars than on Earth. In the control room they actually lived with Martian time, whose hours and minutes were a little longer.
“Please, take a seat.” Nichols spoke to him, pointing at a workspace. Though feeling a bit ill at ease, Jan obeyed and sat down, but the mission director remained standing at his side, along with Moore, who stood to his other side. Sasaki and Gray, instead, took seats in different zones of the room, presumably at their workspaces.
On the huge screen was a topographic diagram, on it he noticed a green spot marked by the Greek letter alpha and, a little south of it, there was another sign.
“This is the latest position where Anna’s rover has been detected, before she turned off the transponder,” Moore explained, pointing out the second spot. He had heard about the woman, too, but wasn’t sure about the context when it had happened. “We’ve tried to contact her, and as a reply she disconnected from the satellite.”
“I think she will reconnect eventually. I have the impression she wants to show us something. Or at least I hope so.” Nichols paused and sighed, then he sat facing Jan and fixing his eyes on him. “We’d like it so that, when it happens, Anna will receive your message.”
“That was clear,” Jan replied, holding his gaze.
“No, I want you to fully understand this point: it doesn’t matter how things between the two of you have ended up or how much you’re mad at her. You must say something to persuade her to come back, anything. You must ensure her we are really working hard to get them away from there, but most of all you must give her a good reason, a great reason, to do as you suggest. Whether it is true or not isn’t important.”
“And the fact you are working hard to get them back to Earth is true, isn’t it?” Jan urged him.
Nichols hesitated. He looked around, as if to check that nobody was listening. He moved his head closer to that of his interlocutor. “This is another matter, which unfortunately falls outside of my power. There are various political forces in play.” He had lowered his voice. “But one thing is certain: she won’t come back if she’s dead.”
Jan shuddered at the mere thought of it. That surely didn’t go unnoticed by the mission director, who kept on scrutinising him, evidently waiting for an answer.
“Okay, let’s do this thing.”
“Mr De Wit.”
Jan woke up with a jump. He had fallen asleep on a couch in Deputy Director Moore’s office and it had been Maggie’s voice that had woken him.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you, Mr De Wit.”
“No, don’t worry,” he replied, still dazed. He was feeling quite rested. How long had passed? “Please, let’s leave pleasantries aside, call me Jan.” And he gave one of his smiles that used to strike a chord with women. It came out spontaneously. A moment after he spoke, the feeling that he may have been inappropriate occurred to him.
Maggie barely smiled. “Jan, we need you in the control room.” Even though she called him by his first name, she kept a formal tone. “We’ve received a message from Dr Persson.”
Oblivious of the previous embarrassment, he stood up. “Oh, thank God. Yeah, here I am.”
Once in the control room, he realised that the atmosphere was much more hectic then before. Nichols went to meet him at the door.
“It’s a written message, with a few attachments.”
They reached the central workspace, where the mission director gestured Gray with a hand. The main screen was populated with a series of sub-screens. One window included a diagram, the second was a topographic map with an area circled in red and the last one to appear was a written message, but too small to be read from there.
The diagram was brought into the foreground. “What you can see,” Nichols explained, raising a hand to point out. “That is a graphic representation of a high frequency acoustic wave, so high it is inaudible to the human ear, but it’s been detected and analysed by a computer. The transmission lasts a few seconds. At first, it seemed confused, then we realised it was a series of pulses, exactly three short, three long, and again three short pulses.”
The man was smiling while pronouncing those words, but Jan had no clue as to what he was referring to. His perplexity must have been obvious, because the mission director immediately hurried to explain.
“It’s Morse! It’s the equivalent of the distress signal: SOS. Do you understand?”
He wasn’t sure he understood, but the mission director went on anyway.
“The other image.” The topographic chart enlarged. “This area has been detected by the Mars positioning satellite system. The radius runs for some kilometres including part of Ophir Planum and Ophir Chasma. The first one is a flatland; the second is a canyon belonging to Valles Marineris.” He gesticulated, more and more agitated. “Anyway the point is that the Morse transmission results coming from that area.”
Finally, Anna’s message was brought to the foreground.
Jan held his breath whilst reading those words.
JAN, I HAVE NO INTENTION OF DYING.
I WANT TO GO HOME. THIS IS WHY I HAD TO LEAVE STATION ALPHA.
DO YOU REMEMBER WHAT I TOLD YOU THE LAST TIME WE TALKED REGARDING WHAT WOULD ENSURE THE SENDING OF A RETURN SPACECRAFT?
IN A WAY I’VE FOUND THEM.
I LOVE YOU, A. XXX
A moment after he was laughing. Sure, he remembered her words. He would’ve never forgotten that conversation.
“Can you tell me what she means?” Nichols incited him. “These data bring us to a conclusion, even if it is theoretically impossible. The only thing we don’t understand is her words.”
The most total silence had pervaded the room. Everybody was watching, waiting for an answer. Jan laughed again. Even in such a situation, Anna was having fun with her plays, her mysteries. She hadn’t gone insane at all.
“She said that Isis mission wouldn’t include a return spacecraft, unless they found the Martians.” And he laughed again at the absurdity of it. The others were looking at him, astonished, absorbing that information.
“The Martians wouldn’t surely use Morse Code.” The sarcastic comment of Gray, who was at once much more interested in the whole matter, broke the silence.
“If my memory doesn’t fail me.” A very close voice spoke behind Jan, making him turn with a start. It was Sasaki. When had he arrived? “That is the area where a few remains from the Hera mission shuttle were located.”
“Oh, fuck.” Nichols was shaking his head. “I want an orbiter over that area, now,” he ordered Sasaki, who jumped to a workspace.
“They are all quite far,” the latter said after a while. “Anyway we have thousands of shots taken in the latest thirty years. I doubt anything has escaped us. If you like, I’ll show you the most recent ones.”
“No,” the mission director boomed. “I wanna see what’s happening there now.”
Far from frightened by the tone of his superior, Sasaki resumed working. “I’m going to reposition the nearest one, but it might take several hours before it gets over there.”
“So don’t you waste more time.”