Martian Valkyrie

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I, Enrico Lopez, am the first man to set foot on Mars and come back alive. But there are moments when I feel a heroic death, like that of Robert Falcon Scott, would have suited me far better. Better than what I must live with, and what I must live without.

Back in Bergen, old man Halvorsen must still be laughing. Yes, he is still alive and intends to live forever. Any day now, the genetic engineers have been saying. Good for him. He does not dare die, I think, for where he is going they will not be so gentle.

Let him laugh, part of me says. Despite our problems, we got much more scientific data, core samples, measurements, and everything. Our rovers roved, our balloons floated, and our scientists have enough data for a million graduate theses. So, in the long view of things, I suppose it matters not one bit who was first on Mars or how we got back.

Except to me, and to history.

Four days out from Earth on our very carefully planned trajectory, things had settled into a nominal routine. The United Nations’s official expedition was a four-ship orbital armada, with forty carefully chosen and politically representative scientists and astronauts and the latest hardware, including nuclear thermal rockets and power-assisted hard suits. With a trillion dollars spent in planning, programming, research and development before the first cargo ships left low Earth orbit, we had all the requirements covered. As its commander, I would be on the first shuttle down and first on the surface. I had my speech memorized.

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