Halfway House on Mars

TThe Perihelion came down on the pad at Jezero Station at fourteen minutes past noon, local time, on the first sol of the new arrival season, in a long roaring shudder of retro-rockets and a cloud of rust-colored dust that took nine minutes to settle.

Elias felt every second of it, strapped into a couch on the lander's second deck between a large silent welder and a ten-year-old girl who had been sick twice on the way down and was now holding Elias's hand so hard that his fingers had gone numb. Seven months in transit. Seven months of recycled air and freeze-dried food and exercise bands and the same forty faces, and the stars outside the one small porthole never changing. And now, through the porthole, at last, something else: a flat brown-orange plain under a butterscotch sky, scattered with rocks, and on the horizon, low and dark, the far wall of a crater forty kilometers wide.

Mars.

When the engines stopped, the silence was enormous. Then somebody on the deck above started clapping, and then everybody was, forty people strapped into couches clapping and laughing and crying, and the girl beside Elias let go of his hand and wiped her eyes and said, in a small, astonished voice, "I feel heavy."

She was not heavy. None of them were. Mars pulled at a body with a little more than a third of the force of Earth. But after seven months of nothing at all, a third felt like a great deal. When the crew chief called them to unstrap, Elias stood up, and wobbled, and sat down again hard, and laughed out loud at the strangeness of it: of having weight again, of having the floor be the floor.

It took two hours to get off the lander. There were checks, and suit fittings, and a long patient queue for the umbilical tunnel to the crawler, a pressurized bus on six enormous mesh wheels that would carry them the three kilometers from the pad to the station. Through its thick windows, as it rocked and crunched across the plain, Elias saw Jezero Station for the first time.

There was not much to see. That was the first surprise. Elias had imagined domes, gleaming towers, something from a poster. What there was, mostly, was ground: low long mounds of piled regolith, rust-red and smooth, like enormous sleeping animals, with here and there a hatch, or a mast with an antenna, or a field of dark solar panels tilted toward the sun. Everything important was buried, a meter and a half under the dirt, out of the radiation. Only the greenhouses showed above the surface, a long row of them on the south side, their roofs of thick layered glass glowing faintly pink with the light of the lamps inside. And beyond everything, rising on the western horizon, the rim of the crater, gray-brown and worn, and above it the small pale sun.

"Your first time?" said the crawler driver, a cheerful woman with a buzz cut and a patch on her sleeve, over her shoulder, and then laughed. "Of course it is. Everybody's is. Where are you headed?"

"The Halfway," said Elias. "I'm the new host."

The driver's eyebrows went up, and she looked at Elias in the mirror with new interest.

"You're replacing Otti?" She whistled. "Good luck. She's been running that place since before I got here. Since before most people got here." She swung the crawler round a boulder. "You'll be fine. Probably. Just don't touch her kettle."