Another Mars



One of the displays on the lifeless control panel suddenly lit up, showing a blurry, flickering image of a gray-haired man unknown to Mike.

“Hello, are you alive? How are you doing?” asked the image. “Please answer! Turn on the communication system. Turn on the communication system, do you hear me?”

Mike pressed the intercom button with his unresponsive fingers. This was too much. The screen on which the stranger appeared was not a communication screen. It was a display that normally showed navigation information in the rocket plane. The communication screen was broken.

“Yes, I hear you...” Mike replied hoarsely, unsticking his parched lips. “Who are you?”

“We’ll have a chance to talk later.” Said the man on the screen. “The main thing now, I beg you, is not to try any maneuvers. Your engines are most likely faulty... it could be dangerous. You’ve been thrown into a new, very elongated orbit, and you won’t be able to return to Mars on your own. Just keep flying by inertia, and in a few minutes we’ll dock with you.”

Docking? If Mike had been able to think clearly at that moment, he would probably have replied that docking was impossible because the rocket plane was not equipped with a docking module. And he would probably have noticed the strange accent and the speaker’s absurd space attire. But his head was buzzing and his mind refused to work. Too many shocks had happened in the last hour.

This Martian day had begun quite ordinarily: after kissing the sleeping Tammy, he had breakfast in his room, underwent a short routine medical examination, and went to work at the geophysical laboratory. Almost immediately, the lab manager approached him and asked him to fly to a geophysical station a hundred kilometers from the base: in his opinion, the gravimeter there was malfunctioning, giving different readings every day. The boss wanted to install a second device, a control device.

“There is one rocket plane available, number 13,” said the lab manager.

Well, of course... Superstitious employees always left the thirteenth one.

An hour later, Mike was already there in his spacesuit, busy installing the second gravimeter. Suddenly, a sharp, nerve-wracking alarm sounded in his helmet. In an agitated voice, the dispatcher on duty at the central observatory said, “Attention everyone! Attention everyone! Planet-wide meteorite threat of the HIGHEST category is declared!”

“Oh, God...” Mike whispered.

Meteorite threats had been announced more than once during his time working on Mars. But a ‘planetary’ threat of the “highest category” had never happened before in the history of Mars exploration. The dispatcher, clearly in a hurry, read out the emergency message:

“A large celestial body from outer space is rapidly approaching Mars. It is not an asteroid from the Solar System. The object is traveling at a tremendous speed, one-hundredth the speed of light, which is why it was detected so late. The body is at least one kilometer in diameter. According to express calculations, the probability of a direct collision with Mars is almost 100%. The collision is expected in 37 minutes. All personnel working at the bases and family members should put on spacesuits and descend to the most fortified rooms with autonomous oxygen and drinking water supplies. All personnel working on the surface, near the launch-ready rocket planes, should launch immediately into near-planetary space and enter the orbit furthest from the planet, lying in a plane with a declination of 35 and an azimuth of 110 to the ecliptic.”

“It’ll shatter and blow us to devil’s mother!” Someone’s voice said clearly over the airwaves.

Mike ran to the rocket, and only at the entrance hatch did he notice that he had brought the old gravimeter. But it seemed a shame to throw the device on the ground, so he dragged it into the airlock compartment and then wasted an extra minute securing it on a free shelf. To save time, he didn’t take off his spacesuit, just lifted the visor of his helmet. Then he was struck by a thought about Tammy — what if she hadn’t woken up? He called her. Fortunately, Tammy answered right away:

“Don’t you dare come back!” Tammy shouted. “I, Jeanne and two others are already taking off with Boris on his shuttle. He arrived just five minutes before the message. Take off immediately! Talk to you later... I love you.”

Two minutes later, he was already flying at maximum thrust into the black Martian sky, leaving a small scorched crater on the planet. Overcoming the effects of G-force and his pounding heart, Mike entered the orbit parameters into the onboard computer. On one of the screens, he could see Mars slowly receding. There were more than forty bases and colonies on Mars, and patches of greenery had already appeared near some of them. Hundreds of rockets were leaving the planet at the same time as him, reflected as multicolored dots on the large navigation display. But many, too many people remained there... He thought that an asteroid at such a speed could probably tear the planet to pieces and tried to imagine what that would look like. He remembered a time-lapse video of a bullet tearing through a ripe watermelon. But then the thrust shut off, and the sudden weightlessness distracted him from this terrible thought. He caught and put away a few flying objects and buckled himself.

The next quarter of an hour passed in growing tension. Mars continued to broadcast the text of the emergency message, but now it was read out in a mechanical voice by an automaton. Mike stared intently at Mars, which appeared in the porthole on the left, knowing that hundreds of pairs of equally anxious eyes in other portholes were now fixed on the planet. Then he suddenly remembered that he hadn’t sent a message to his parents and began frantically typing. And then the voice in his headphones began the countdown: 12... 11... 10... 9... At “seven,” there was a growing crackle of interference on the air, through which excited and seemingly joyful shouts suddenly broke through. At that moment, something monstrous began to happen to the walls of the rocket; they bent and bulged as if seized by a convulsion. And the same sudden convulsion seized his head and his whole body, as if a giant invisible hand had squeezed him with merciless force, penetrating through the rocket’s ultra-strong hull.

Had this state lasted another second, Mike would have lost consciousness, but the invisible hand immediately loosened its grip. There was no fear. He simply didn’t have time to be afraid. Although he did not lose consciousness completely, his ability to think and clearly perceive his surroundings returned slowly. Cracked displays and torn mountings rattled. Or was it still ringing in his ears? And there was the taste of blood in his mouth...

The speakers were silent, not a single screen was lit. Only the dim emergency lighting was working. He moved his head and fingers, making sure he was intact, glanced around the cabin, and discovered that, in addition to the emergency lamp, another device was lit up—it was the gravimeter. The gravimeter showed “0,” as it should in zero gravity, but below... Below it, the last recorded measurement of gravity was displayed. Mike remembered that a minute ago, the number 0.395 had been lit up—a value he had recorded back on Mars. Now it read 9.999—the maximum value that the gravimeter was capable of displaying.

Mike looked out the left window, then the other two—Mars was nowhere to be seen. Only cold, distant stars. The stars were moving—space was slowly rotating around the ship, indicating that the rocket plane had lost stability. Mike knew he had to find a way out. There didn’t seem to be any air leaks... But the life support systems, if they were working at all, were running on emergency batteries, and they wouldn’t last long. God, if only the communications system would work... or the engine control panel. Maybe he could connect the instrument panel to the batteries? He opened the power supply panel and immediately saw smoking, clearly burnt-out relay board. Mike decided to replace it with a spare one first. He had just started unscrewing the fasteners when suddenly the navigation display lit up and a man appeared on it. The same man he was now talking to.

“Do you understand me? Don’t turn anything on! We’re already close.” The man repeated. “Just look out the porthole.”

“Maybe I’m already dead and talking to God? Or to the Apostle Peter?” - a rather plausible thought flashed through Mike’s mind.

“What about Mars? Do you have contact with Mars after …” Mike faltered, “…after the disaster?”

“There wasn’t any. The collision was prevented.”

“But how!? Who could have prevented the collision?”

“We are,” the man said briefly with a barely noticeable hint of pride. “By the way, we are already close by. We will need another ten minutes to match your speed. Look out the window, and you will see us. See you soon…” And the display went blank.

Mike looked to his right. Behind the porthole glass, there was only the blackness of space and distant, slowly drifting stars. He expected one of the stars to begin to grow, taking on the shape of a spaceship. But something unexpected happened: a few meters away from him, a cylindrical tube emerged from the blackness of space, or rather floated up, like a submarine conning tower rising from the depths of the night ocean, shimmering with a metallic sheen. It began to extend, approaching the rocket plane, like a telescopic “sleeve” that is extended to the side of an airplane for boarding and disembarking.

“How will I open the hatch if they ask me to get out?” - Mike thought, fastening his helmet. “Or will they want to come in? On top of that, the rocket plane is spinning...”

But he didn’t have long to think about it. There was a soft push against the wall of the ship, and the spinning stopped. Then there was a quiet buzzing sound, and the hatch of his ship slowly slid

aside, revealing the figures of two people and two strange creatures resembling medium-sized octopuses with tightly folded tentacles floating out of the depths of the corridor. The people were not wearing spacesuits. One of them was a gray-haired, elderly man whom Mike had seen before on the screen, dressed in a long, baggy jacket with large buttons and homespun-looking pants stretched at the knees. He wasn’t even wearing shoes, but thick, warm knitted socks. The second was a stunningly beautiful smiling girl with brown eyes and black curly hair cut very short.

“You can take off your helmet Mike.” Said the man. “There’s no longer any danger of depressurization. And let me introduce you: Ida, my eldest daughter.” Pride flashed in his voice again. “And you can call me Jeff. Actually, my full name is Hephaestus, and my daughter’s name is Iris, Irida in Greek. Our family likes to give names from Greek mythology. But they’re inconvenient for communication. May I take a look around?”

“Yes, yes, of course...” Mike stepped aside. “I’m sorry, I have nothing to offer you. And everything is powered down.”

They flew into the cockpit of the rocket plane, the “octopuses” following them. Jeff and the girl carefully examined the cabin and the control panel.

“Oh Yes... I think you suffered the most in this meteorite incident, Mike. But now you can be proud: you are probably the first person to fly less than a kilometer from a black hole with approximately the mass of Earth.”

Then he asked Ida: “Well, what do you say daughter? Will three hours be enough for the repairs?”

She replied, but in a language completely unfamiliar to Mike. And that was also surprising, because Mike, in addition to physics, had also graduated from the philology department... and this language was unlike any of the Earth’s languages.

“Okay, so we have four hours.” Jeff turned back to Mike. “Now I invite you to come with me. We’ll let Ida and the robots repair your ship. Believe me, she’s a professional at what she does. Yes- yes - they’re robots, I forgot to tell you. We have time, and you probably have questions. I’ll do my best to answer them. You’re a physicist by training, right? Then it will be easier for you. And you can decide for yourself whether or not to pass this information on to Earth. I’m not sure you’ll want to do that...”