HOME | DD

Description
The feeling that your friends are growing apart, founded or no, is one that could terrify anybody. Liz was hanging out with other girls more often, and that was understandable for a fifteen year old girl, and John frankly needed to have some friends his own age. Tom’s dad was counting on him more to help maintain the robots always grinding away, making Mars a place where more than six-thousand people could live. I felt like I was the only one who cared we didn’t hang out like we used to. I knew it made sense we should grow in our own directions, but I just wanted to do something to remind us all that we were always going to be friends.

When we were younger, it had been our little game to don the bulky, pressurized suits and ‘explore’ the martian landscape outside the main dome. We weren’t exactly Marco Polo’s or Christopher Columbus’s: GPS had accurately mapped the land before we had even been born, but the bumpy, craggy red earth always seemed to hide the promise of a crashed UFO or maybe one of the probes from back when nobody lived here at all. As time had gone on though, the cultivator robots had systematically wiped out our stomping grounds: chopping up the rocks and forcing fertilizer and seeds into the rubble. We raced them, in a way, trying to discover something amazing before it was flat and carpeted in clover.

That had stopped when Liz got hurt, had fallen into a ravine and broken her leg. We had had to call for help, let the adults handle the mess we’d made. Tom passed out on the way back: he’d torn his suit climbing down to Liz, and even though he survived, the low air pressure burst his eardrums and gave him some pretty bad tinnitus. Even though he idolized me, John never wanted to leave the civilized inner dome after that.

So for two years, I walked out alone, the ever-present chatter of the radio in my ear the only sound I could hear. The middle dome got a bit greener every day, until only a narrow stretch of wild land remained. At least I didn’t have to wear a pressurized suit by then. That wasn’t all I did, of course: we managed to meet up from time to time, though usually minus at least one of us, and played games or rode our weighted bikes. I made a few other friends as well, but I always held out some small hope for the original gang.

The means to that end presented itself during one of my romps out through the field of clover that dominated the middle dome, that just about everyone called HalfBee, for the half-breathable air. Sheltered under the shadow of a giant, raised stone, I actually discovered something the mapping satellites had missed. Rather than thinking to alert somebody I’d found undeniable evidence of advanced life having once existed on Mars, evidence, by the way, that would soon be destroyed by the onward march of the terraforming robots, I did what I think any kid who feared losing his friends would do.

“A fossil?” Liz had been surprised to see me next to her locker at school, but viewed my excited revelation seemingly with the same interest a mechanic gives to a repeat customer describing, for the hundredth time, the rattling sound his car is making.

“A fossil.” I said back, it having only now dawned on me that this reunion would be harder to organize than simply working out our schedules.

“I don’t want to break my leg again.”

“You won’t.”

“I might.”

“You won’t, though.”

She shut her locker and turned to me, “I’ll go if you can get some others to come.”

I think put on a dumb grin, “Tom and John?”

“Whoever you want.”

The others were, surprisingly, fairly easy to convince. John’s my little brother, so there was that, plus his distaste for HalfBee was rather overwhelmed by the prospect of seeing a fossil ‘like they have on Earth’. Tom was oddly at ease with braving another trek out into the wild that gave him lasting hearing damage. I think he just wanted to see if I could get the others to come.

The mild surprise on Tom’s and Liz’ face was pleasantly cathartic.

With one another’s help, we put on our suits, made sure the seals were all solid and our air tanks full, and filed out in what could’ve been the last time we were all together.

Everyone but me was rather surprised at how much HalfBee had changed: gone were the craters and great rocks, smoothed out by machine and by the growth of oxygen-making, nitrogen-fixing clover into a slightly hilly green carpet. It made progress towards the edge of the dome faster than they would’ve expected.

I got the feeling Liz at least still wanted to be somewhere else. She had tried for a while to text her friends as she walked, but the bulky gloves of our suits eventually resigned her to walking, joining in with the conversations we were having.

“How’re the robots keeping up?” I half-shouted to Tom.

He made a sweeping motion to the landscape, irreparably warped in the struggle to claim the red planet’s surface. Earth had had the same problem, losing its forests to cities and farmland. It wasn’t considered an issue in a place where there was no life to displace, no forest to cut down. “It’s going pretty well, Alex.” He said, a bit louder than one would normally talk. “My Dad always talks about how we don’t ‘get’ what we’re doing here. I guess it’s hard to be impressed when this has been your whole life.”

“Makes sense.” I said in reply.

“I can do three flips in the air now.” John quipped. Just about anyone could jump and do a flip when the gravity was apparently ‘so weak’. The unofficial record at John’s school was five from level ground onto level ground.

“I did four once. Didn’t stick it, though.” Liz joined in. We all nodded sagely: we’d seen her try it.

The clover was thinning out as we approached the edge of the dome. The little sprouts were getting crushed underfoot, and without knowing it, we had all fallen into a line, the others behind me, walking in my footsteps.

In the years since the accident that nearly broken us apart, the density of the atmosphere in HalfBee was thick enough you could take off your helmet for a moment to let the humidity out. The others didn’t know this though, so when I did it, John and Liz gasped and Tom swore.

I put my helmet back on with a grin on my face just as we reached our destination.

“Asshole.”

“Don’t scare us like that!”

John was the first to notice the fossil. He didn’t manage to berate me before a small “Cool” alerted the others to what was in front of them.

It felt good to show them that. Even if it didn’t keep us together, I figured it was good just to share this secret with them.

We stepped down into the depression, scraped away some of the red dust, all smiling to one another.

“Looks creepy. Think it’s from Mars, or somewhere else?”

“Probably from here. Doesn’t look like there’s a spaceship anywhere around here.” Tom said, voicing his hypothesis like one of the scientists.

Nearby, the rumble of treads told us one of the robots was about to tear this find apart.

Climbing back out, the four of us watched as the great machine drew near.

“This was fun.” Liz said.

“Yeah. It was cool.” John agreed.

I turned to Tom. “Are you going to stop that thing?”

He shrugged, not realizing, just like any of us, how important these old bones were.
I was fine with that. I felt good. On the way back, I jumped, did two flips, and fell flat on my ass. They helped me up, and we went home.