Autumn on Mars
A science fiction novelette by Matthew Crane.
A Modern Odyssey, Chapter 3: Settling into Solitude
It took 40 minutes to get the rover working again. 40 minutes that I suffered through while the rover decided if it would let us drive again. All that time I knew that if someone had set out less than 40 minutes after us, they’d catch up to us and it would be all over. But I knew I had to keep being sure about it for Mika.
I looked over 50 minutes later and it was done. I probably should have worried about it more but they hadn’t caught up to us so it was good enough.
Then we had breakfast. On the go.
By then I though I was as good as driving as I am now.
I wasn’t, but I didn’t have to think about it as much as I did when I started. It was becoming routine, but not boring. There’s no way what we were doing would even be boring.
So I had a lot more thinking to do. I started following the route Mika had drawn out, and I started stopping more, so we could get out and look around and back towards home. But I couldn’t stop it, it started creeping in and I started to think about what we were doing.
Most people when they do stuff like this have a plan, and I’m not those people. I’m the people who has an idea last evening and does it this morning. And last evening I said I would find the canals. I went to Mika and asked her if she wanted to come with me. After bedtime we just loaded up some things from the kitchen, set the alarm to 5, and left.
I always thought there should be more to doing things, so I just kept on doing more crazy difficult things so that eventually I’d actually be satisfied of it. And I knew that this would be it. The spin-out, waiting for the rover to start again, breakfast, everything that had got in our way was something we had to push through, and everything we had to push through made it more with it in the end.
When I was thinking about all that stuff, and trying not to think about other stuff, I ran into the next thing in our way. Literally. There was a sudden shock from the rover that rocked back towards us, throwing us hard against the seat harnesses, and our stuff just flew everywhere. I looked out the front. It was a rock, or part of a rock. The other part was scraping somewhere beneath the floor.
“Hey Trip? I can’t see”
Mika is one of those people who look really weird without her glasses on. A lot of people just look like they’re sore and tired but back then my stupid brain was sure that she looked like she was accusing me.
“Hold on” I said, it was kind of sheepishly, and I dove to get them out from under her chair.
They were hooked in there pretty hard but I got them out mostly fine. You should never look at anyone who normally wears glasses when they’re not wearing glasses. It just doesn’t look right.
I kept myself from thinking after that. There was still things I would have to get to eventually but getting better at driving again was a good excuse not to do that yet. After that it was still a long time till we reached the rover’s second timeout, which feels like it went by really fast looking back, but it didn’t. It took forever, I was surprised how glad I felt to be stopped again.
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