Brad drifted into his sleeping compartment and stared at the mesh cocoon hanging limply against one of the bulkheads. He had put off trying to sleep for as long as he could, forcing himself to stay awake even when his eyelids grew as heavy as anvils.
He knew that if he slept he would dream. The same dream. Its details changed now and then, but it was always the same.
Now, so weary that, as he hung weightlessly in the middle of the narrow sleep compartment fighting against his body’s need for sleep, he knew that his struggle was futile. Sooner or later he would fall asleep. Better to succumb in the zero-g cocoon than while trying to operate the ship’s systems.
He had thought of asking the ship’s doctors, back on Odysseus, for some medication that would block out the dream. But that would mean explaining why he was troubled and he’d end up being examined by the psychiatrists, or worse, being taken off duty entirely. And he certainly didn’t want Kosoff to know about his problem.
So, wearily, warily, he peeled off his coveralls and popped them into the washer, then slid into the mesh cocoon and zippered it up to his chin.
He commanded the lights to shut down, then stared into the enveloping darkness. Totally dark, except for the unblinking red light at the base of the comm console.
Just like my room at Tithonium. Dark. Black as night. Dark as death.
The dream always began the same way. He was jarred from his sleep by a rumbling, growling sound. Like some alien beast snarling at him.
Fourteen-year-old Brad sat up in his bed. Mom and Dad were in the next room, he knew. Davie was in the bed next to his own.
The room was shaking.
And somehow Brad was outside, out in the open, wearing a pressure suit and helmet, standing on the floor of Tithonium Chasma, and it was bright daylight. The wall of the canyon rose up, a serrated sheer scarp that ran more than a thousand kilometers in either direction. Atop the rim, the Martian sky was a dull butterscotch yellow-brown.
Suddenly a streak of fire blazed across that sky. A meteor, young Brad understood. A big one. It roared terrifyingly as it disappeared over the canyon rim. And exploded.
The concussion knocked Brad off his feet. And the red, rock-strewn ground beneath him was shaking, trembling as if some invisible, gigantic, monstrous hand was shaking it. Pebbles skittered and jittered as Brad climbed shakily to his booted feet. Pressure-suited people were running away from the crumbling chasm wall. Rocks were tumbling down the scarp, some as big as houses. They fell slowly, almost leisurely, in the low Martian gravity, but still smashed whatever they hit as they struck the chasm floor.
Brad saw one of the hothouse buildings crushed as a boulder flattened it.
Mom and Dad and Davie are still inside the housing complex!
Brad stood in an agony of indecision. What should I do? What should I do?
“Hey, you! Don’t just stand there!” one of the construction crewmen’s voices screamed in Brad’s helmet earphones. “Grab a tractor and pick up as many people as you can!”
I don’t know how to run a tractor, Brad wanted to answer. I’ve never been allowed inside one. But whoever had yelled at him had run off to help others. Brad’s height had fooled him: in the helmeted pressure suit Brad looked tall enough to be an adult.
He ran to an idle tractor and climbed into its cockpit. Gasping, his heart racing, Brad looked over the controls, then punched the big red button that started the engine. Looking up, he saw the whole wall of rock crumbling, falling, smashing the puny human buildings at its base.
The tractor lurched into motion. Brad tried to steer it, but didn’t know how. The machine seemed to have a mind of its own. People were rushing away from the buildings, away from the killing rocks tumbling down the wall. Brad saw bodies sprawled everywhere, men and women and children who had bolted outside without sealing their pressure suits. Some of them didn’t even have their helmets on. Their faces had exploded in blood.
Brad couldn’t control the tractor. It plowed ahead, rolling over bodies living and dead, until it bumped to a stop against the remains of what had been the building where Brad and his family had been quartered.
Horrified, Brad looked down from his perch in the tractor and saw Mom, Dad, and Davie staring up at him. Dead and accusing. Why didn’t you help us? Why did you let us die?
And Brad was struggling in his sleep cocoon, writhing inside its mesh confines, his eyes blinded with tears, his mind screaming with memories.
He tore at the cocoon’s zipper and sailed out of the cocoon, banging his shoulder painfully against the far bulkhead of the narrow compartment.
For long moments he hung there in a fetal crouch, in the darkness, slowly drifting across the chamber, gasping for air.
It hadn’t happened the way his dream showed it. He had been outside, of course, fully suited up. But he had never taken a tractor. Panting, doubled over as he hung in midair, Brad muttered to himself, “There was nothing I could do. There was nothing I could do.”
Yet the reality was that he survived the catastrophe without a scratch while his family was killed.
He had had another argument with his father. Over what, Brad couldn’t remember. But he’d bolted from the breakfast table, grabbed his camera, run down to the air lock and pulled on a pressure suit, then gone outside—away from his father, away from the whole family. He had to get away from them.
I was outside taking pictures of the chasm wall when it happened, Brad remembered. I should have been inside having breakfast with my family. But I couldn’t sit down with them. I went outside. I left them to be crushed to death while I went out to take fucking pictures.
I let them die.
I should have died with them.
Every time Brad had the dream he awoke with the same overwhelming sense of guilt. He had gone through more than a year of intense psychotherapy; he had learned to control the guilt during the day. Sometimes he actually forgot it. Almost.
Eventually, he earned a degree in anthropology from the distance-learning University of Mars. When the call went out for volunteers to participate in the star missions to save alien civilizations threatened by the death wave, Brad signed up. Atonement might be found in a flight to another star. He had nothing to lose, nothing to leave behind except his memories.
But even two hundred light-years away from Mars he had to sleep. And, sooner or later, he would dream. And the awful sense of guilt and shame would crush him the way the tumbling rocks of Tithonium Chasma had crushed his mother, father, and little brother.