Copyright
© 2010 by Allen M. Steele. Originally published in Asimov’s
Science Fiction, June 2010. All rights reserved. This story
may not be reprinted or reproduced in any form, including
electronic media, without permission of the author.
Out there, there’s a lot of ways
to go crazy. Get cooped up in a passenger module not much
larger than a trailer, and by the time you reach your destination
you may have come to believe that the universe exists only
within your own mind: it’s called solipsism syndrome,
and I’ve seen it happen a couple of times. Share that
same module with five or six guys who don’t get along
very well, and after three months you’ll be sleeping
with a knife taped to your thigh. Pull double-shifts during
that time, with little chance to relax, and you’ll
probably suffer from depression; couple this with vitamin
deficiency due to a lousy diet, and you’re a candidate
for chronic fatigue syndrome.
Folks who’ve never left Earth often think that Titan
Plague is the main reason people go mad in space. They’re
wrong. Titan Plague may rot your brain and turn you into
a homicidal maniac, but instances of it are rare, and there’s
a dozen other ways to go bonzo that are much more subtle.
I’ve seen guys adopt imaginary friends with whom they
have long and meaningless conversations, compulsively clean
their hardsuits regardless of whether or not they’ve
recently worn them, or go for a routine spacewalk and have
to be begged to come back into the airlock. Some people
just aren’t cut out for life out there, but there’s
no way to predict who’s going to going to lose their
mind.
When something like that happens, I have a set of standard
procedures: ask the doctor to prescribe antidepressants,
keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t do anything
that might put themselves or others at risk, relieve them
of duty if I can, and see what I can do about getting them
back home as soon as possible. Sometimes I don’t have
to do any of this. A guy goes crazy for a little while,
and then he gradually works out whatever it was that got
in his head; the next time I see him, he’s in the
commissary, eating Cheerios like nothing ever happened.
Most of the time, though, a mental breakdown is a serious
matter. I think I’ve shipped home about one out of
every twenty people because of one issue or another. But
one time, I saw someone go mad, and it was the best thing
that could have happened to him. That was Jeff Halbert.
Let me tell about him…
Back in `48, I was General Manager of Arsia Station, the
first and largest of the Mars colonies. This was a year
before the formation of the Pax Astra, about five years
before the colonies declared independence. So the six major
Martian settlements were still under control of one Earth-based
corporation or another, with Arsia Station owned and operated
by ConSpace. We had about a hundred people living there
by then, the majority short-timers on short-term contracts;
only a dozen or so, like myself, were permanent residents
who left Earth for good.
Jeff wasn’t one of them. Like most people, he’d
come to Mars to make a lot of money in a relatively short
amount of time. Six months from Earth to Mars aboard a cycleship,
two years on the planet, then six more months back to Earth
aboard the next ship to make the crossing during the bi-annual
launch window. In three years, a young buck like him could
earn enough dough to buy a house, start a business, invest
in the stock market, or maybe just loaf for a good long
while. In previous times, they would’ve worked on
off-shore oil rigs, joined the merchant marine, or built
powersats; by mid-century, this kind of high-risk, high-paying
work was on Mars, and there was no shortage of guys willing
and ready to do it.
Jeff Halbert was what we called a “Mars monkey.”
We had about a lot of people like him at Arsia Station,
and they took care of the dirty jobs that the scientists,
engineers, and other specialists didn’t want to handle
themselves. One day they might be operating a bulldozer
or a crane at a habitat construction site. The next day,
they’d be unloading freight from a cargo lander that
had just touched down. The day after that, they’d
be cleaning out the air vents or repairing a solar array
or unplugging a toilet. It wasn’t romantic or particularly
interesting work, but it was the sort of stuff that needed
to be done in order to keep the base going, and because
of that, kids like Jeff were invaluable.
And Jeff was definitely a kid. In his early twenties, wiry
and almost too tall to wear a hardsuit, he looked like he’d
started shaving only last week. Before he dropped out of
school to get a job with ConSpace, I don’t think he’d
travelled more than a few hundred miles from the small town
in New Hampshire where he’d grown up. I didn’t
know him well, but I knew his type: restless, looking for
adventure, hoping to score a small pile of loot so that
he could do something else with the rest of his life besides
hang out in a pool hall. He probably hadn’t even thought
much about Mars before he spotted a ConSpace recruitment
ad on some web site; he had two years of college, though,
and met all the fitness requirements, and that was enough
to get him into the training program and, eventually, a
berth aboard a cycleship.
Before Jeff left Earth, he filled out and signed all the
usual company paperwork. Among them was Form 36-B: Family
Emergency Notification Consent. ConSpace required everyone
to state whether or not they wanted to informed of a major
illness or death of a family member back home. This was
something a lot of people didn’t take into consideration
before they went to Mars, but nonetheless it was an issue
that had to be addressed. If you found out, for instance,
that your father was about to die, there wasn’t much
you could do about it, because you’d be at least 35
million miles from home. The best you could do would be
to send a brief message that someone might be able to read
to him before he passed away; you wouldn’t be able
to attend the funeral, and it would be many months, even
a year or two, before you could lay roses on his grave.
Most people signed Form 36-D on the grounds that they’d
rather know about something like this than be kept in the
dark until they returned home. Jeff did, too, but I’d
later learn that he hadn’t read it first. For him,
it had been just one more piece of paper that needed to
be signed before he boarded the shuttle, not to be taken
any more seriously than the catastrophic accident disclaimer
or the form attesting that he didn’t have any sort
of venereal disease.
He probably wished he hadn’t signed that damn form.
But he did, and it cost him his sanity.
* * *
Jeff had been on Mars for only about seven
months when a message was relayed from ConSpace’s
human resources office. I knew about it because a copy was
cc’d to me. The minute I read it, I dropped what I
was doing to head straight for Hab 2’s second level,
which was where the monkey house – that is, the dormitory
for unspecialized laborers like Jeff – was located.
I didn’t have to ask which bunk was his; the moment
I walked in, I spotted a knot of people standing around
a young guy slumped on this bunk, staring in disbelief at
the fax in his hands.
Until then, I didn’t know, nor did anyone one at Arsia
Station, that Jeff had a fiancé back home, a nice
girl named Karen whom he’d met in high school and
who had agreed to marry him about the same time he’d
sent his application to ConSpace. Once he got the job, they
decided to postpone the wedding until he returned, even
if it meant having to put their plans on hold for three
years. One of the reasons why Jeff decided to get a job
on Mars, in fact, was to provide a nest egg for him and
Karen. And they’d need it, too; about three weeks
before Jeff took off, Karen informed him that she was pregnant
and that he’d have a child waiting for him when he
got home.
He’d kept this a secret, mainly because he knew that
the company would annul his contract if it learned that
he had a baby on the way. Both Jeff’s family and Karen’s
knew all about the baby, though, and they decided to pretend
that Jeff was still on Earth, just away on a long business
trip. Until he returned, they’d take care of Karen.
About three months before the baby was due, the two families
decided to host a baby shower. The party was to be held
at the home of one of Jeff’s uncles – apparently
he was only relative with a house big enough for such a
get-together – and Karen was on her way there, in
a car driven by Jeff’s parents, when tragedy struck.
Some habitual drunk who’d learned how to disable his
car’s high-alcohol lockout, and therefore was on the
road when he shouldn’t have been, plowed straight
into them. The drunk walked away with no more than a sprained
neck, but his victims were nowhere nearly so lucky. Karen,
her unborn child, Jeff’s mother and father –
all died before they reached the hospital.
There’s not a lot you can say to someone who’s
just lost his family that’s going to mean very much.
I’m sorry barely scratches the surface. I understand
what you’re going through is ridiculous; I know how
you feel is insulting. And is there anything I can do to
help? is pointless unless you have a time machine; if I
did, I would have lent it to Jeff, so that he could travel
back twenty-four hours to call his folks and beg them to
put off picking up Karen by only fifteen or twenty minutes.
But everyone said these things anyway, because there wasn’t
much else that could be said, and I relieved Jeff of further
duties until he felt like he was ready to go to work again,
because there was little else I could do for him. The next
cycleship wasn’t due to reach Mars for another seventeen
months; by the time he got home, his parents and Karen would
have been dead for nearly two years.
To Jeff’s credit, he was back on the job within a
few days. Maybe he knew that there was nothing he could
do except work, or maybe he just got tired of staring at
the walls. In any case, one morning he put on his suit,
cycled through the airlock, and went outside to help the
rest of the monkeys dig a pit for the new septic tank. But
he wasn’t the same easy-going kid we’d known
before; no wisecracks, no goofing off, not even any gripes
about the hours it took to make that damn hole and how he’d
better get overtime for this. He was like a robot out there,
silently digging at the sandy red ground with a shovel,
until the pit was finally finished, at which point he dropped
his tools and, without a word, returned to the hab, where
he climbed out of his suit and went to the mess hall for
some chow.
A couple of weeks went by, and there was no change. Jeff
said little to anyone. He ate, worked, slept, and that was
about it. When you looked into his eyes, all you saw was
a distant stare. If he’d broken down in hysterics,
I would’ve understood, but there wasn’t any
of that. It was as if he’d shut down his emotions,
suppressing whatever he was feeling inside.
The station had a pretty good hospital by then, large enough
to serve all the colonies, and Arsia General’s senior
psychologist had begun meeting with Jeff on a regular basis.
Three days after Jeff went back to work, Karl Fleischer
dropped by my office. His report was grim; Jeff Halbert
was suffering from severe depression, to the point that
he was barely responding to medication. Although he hadn’t
spoken of suicide, Dr. Fleischer had little doubt that the
notion had occurred to him. And I knew that, if Jeff did
decide to kill himself, all he’d have to do was wait
until the next time he went outside, then shut down his
suit’s air supply and crack open the helmet faceplate.
One deep breath, and the Martian atmosphere would do the
rest; he’d be dead before anyone could reach him.
“You want my advice?” Karl asked, sitting on
the other side of my desk with a glass of moonshine in hand.
“Find something that’ll get his mind off what
happened.”
“You think that hasn’t occurred to me? Believe
me, I’ve tried…”
“Yeah, I know. He told me. But extra work shifts aren’t
helping, and neither are vids or games.” He was quiet
for a moment, “If I thought sex would help,”
he added, “I’d ask a girl I know to haul him
off to bed, but that would just make matters worse. His
fiancé was the only woman he ever loved, and it’ll
probably be a long time before he sleeps with anyone again.”
“So what do you want me to do?” I gave a helpless
shrug. “C’mon, give me a clue here. I want to
help the kid, but I’m out of ideas.”
“Well … I looked at the duty roster, and saw
that you’ve scheduled a survey mission for next week.
Something up north, I believe.”
“Uh-huh. I’m sending a team up there to see
if they can locate a new water supply. Oh, and one of the
engineers wants to make a side-trip to look at an old NASA
probe.”
“So put Jeff on the mission.” Karl smiled. “They’re
going to need a monkey or two anyway. Maybe travel will
do him some good.”
His suggestion was as good as any, so I pulled up the survey
assignment list, deleted the name of one monkey, and inserted
Jeff Halbert’s instead. I figured it couldn’t
hurt, and I was right. And also wrong.
* * *
So Jeff was put on a two-week sortie that travelled above
the 60th parallel to the Vastitas Borealis, the subarctic
region that surrounds the Martian north pole. The purpose
of the mission was to locate a site for a new well. Although
most of Arsia Station’s water came from atmospheric
condensers and our greenhouses, we needed more than they
could supply, which was why we drilled artesian wells in
the permafrost beneath the northern tundra and pump groundwater
to surface tanks, which in turn would be picked up on a
monthly basis. Every few years or so, one of those wells
would run dry; when that happened, we’d have to send
a team up there to dig a new one.
Two airships made the trip, the Sagan and the Collins. Jeff
Halbert was aboard the Collins, and according to its captain,
who was also the mission leader, he did his job well. Over
the course of ten days, the two dirigibles roamed the tundra,
stopping every ten or fifteen miles so that crews could
get out and conduct test drills that would bring up a sample
of what lay beneath the rocky red soil. It wasn’t
hard work, really, and it gave Jeff a chance to see the
northern regions. Yet he was quiet most of the time, rarely
saying much to anyone; in fact, he seemed to be bored by
the whole thing. The other people on the expedition were
aware of what had recently happened to him, of course, and
they attempted to draw him out of his shell, but after awhile
it became obvious that he just didn’t want to talk,
and so they finally gave up and left him alone.
Then, on the eleventh day of the mission, two days before
the expedition was scheduled to return to Arsia, the Collins
located the Phoenix lander.
This was a NASA probe that landed back in `08, the first
to confirm the presence of subsurface ice on Mars. Unlike
many of the other American and European probes that explored
Mars before the first manned expeditions, Phoenix didn’t
have a rover; instead, it used a robotic arm to dig down
into the regolith, scooping up samples that were analyzed
by its onboard chemical lab. The probe was active for only
a few months before its battery died during the long Martian
winter, but it was one of the milestones leading to human
colonization.
As they expected, the expedition members found Phoenix half-buried
beneath wind-blown sand and dust, with only its upper platform
and solar vanes still exposed. Nonetheless, the lander was
intact, and although it was too big heavy to be loaded aboard
the airship, the crew removed its arm to be taken home and
added to the base museum. And they found one more thing;
the Mars library.
During the 1990’s, while the various Mars missions
were still in their planning stages, the Planetary Society
had made a proposal to NASA: one of those probes should
carry a DVD containing a cache of literature, visual images,
and audio recordings pertaining to Mars. The ostensive purpose
would be to furnish future colonists with a library for
their entertainment, but the unspoken reason was to pay
tribute to the generations of writers, artists, and filmmakers
whose works had inspired the real-life exploration of Mars.
NASA went along with those proposal, so a custom-designed
DVD, made of silica glass to ensure its long-term survival,
was prepared for inclusion on a future mission. A panel
selected 84 novels, short stories, articles, and speeches,
with the authors ranging from 18th century fantasists like
Swift and Voltaire to 20th century science fiction authors
like Niven and Benford. A digital gallery of 60 visual images
-- including everything from paintings by Bonestell, Emshwiller,
and Whelan to a lobby card from a Flash Gordon serial and
a cover of a Weird Science comic book – was chosen
as well. The final touch were four audio clips, the most
notable of which were the infamous 1938 radio broadcast
of The War of the Worlds and a discussion of the same between
H.G. Wells and Orson Welles.
Now called “Visions of Mars,” the disk was originally
placed aboard NASA’s Mars Polar Lander, but that probe
was destroyed when its booster failed shortly after launch
and it crashed in the Atlantic. So an identical copy was
put on Phoenix, and this time it succeeded in getting to
Mars. And so the disk had remained in the Vastitas Borealis
for the past forty years, awaiting the day when a human
hand would remove it from its place on Phoenix’s upper
fuselage.
And that hand happened to be Jeff Halbert’s.
The funny thing is, no one on the expedition knew the disk
was there. It had been forgotten by then, its existence
buried deep within the old NASA documents I’d been
sent from Earth, so I hadn’t told anyone to retrieve
it. And besides, most of the guys on the Collins were more
interested in taking a look at an antique lander than the
DVD that happened to be attached to it. So when Jeff found
the disk and detached it from Phoenix, it wasn’t like
he’d made a major find. The attitude of almost everyone
on the mission was oh, yeah, that’s kind of neat …
take it home and see what’s on it.
Which was easier said than done. DVD drives had been obsolete
for more than twenty years, and the nearest flea market
where one might find an old computer that had one was …
well, it wasn’t on Mars. But Jeff looked around, and
eventually he found a couple of dead comps stashed in a
storage closet, salvage left over from the first expeditions.
Neither were usable on their own, but with the aid of a
service manual, he was able to swap out enough parts to
get one of them up and running, and once it was operational,
he removed the disk from its scratched case and gently slid
it into the slot. Once he was sure that the data was intact
and hadn’t decayed, he downloaded everything into
his personal pad. And then, at random, he selected one of
the items on the menu – “The Martian Way”
by Isaac Asimov – and began to read.
Why did Jeff go to so much trouble? Perhaps he wanted something
to do with his free time besides mourn for the dead. Or
maybe he wanted to show the others who’d been on the
expedition that they shouldn’t have ignored the disk.
I don’t know for sure, so I can’t tell you.
All I know is that the disk first interested him, then intrigued
him, and finally obsessed him.
* * *
It took awhile for me to become aware of the change in Jeff.
As much as I was concerned for him, he was one of my lesser
problems. As general manager, on any given day I had a dozen
or more different matters that needed my attention, whether
it be making sure that the air recycling system was repaired
before we suffocated to death or filling out another stack
of forms sent from Huntsville. So Jeff wasn’t always
on my mind; when I didn’t hear from Dr. Fleischer
for awhile, I figured that the two of them had managed to
work out his issues, and turned to other things.
Still, there were warning signs, stuff that I noticed but
to which I didn’t pay much attention. Like the day
I was monitoring the radio crosstalk from the monkeys laying
sewage pipes in the foundation of Hab Three, and happened
to hear Jeff identify himself as Lieutenant Gulliver Jones.
The monkeys sometimes screwed around like that on the com
channels, and the foreman told Halbert to knock it off and
use his proper call sign … but when Jeff answered
him, his response was weird: “Aye, sir. I was simply
ruminating on the rather peculiar environment in which we’ve
found ourselves.” He even faked a British accent to
match the Victorian diction. That got a laugh from the other
monkeys, but nonetheless I wondered how Gulliver Jones was
and why Jeff was pretending to be him.
There was also the time Jeff was out on a dozer, clearing
away the sand that had been deposited on the landing field
during a dust storm a couple of days earlier. Another routine
job to which I hadn’t been paying much attention until
the shift supervisor at the command center paged me: “Chief,
there’s something going on with Halbert. You might
want to listen in.”
So I tapped into the comlink, and there was Jeff: “Affirmative,
MainCom. I just saw something move out there, about a half-klick
north of the periphery.”
“Roger that, Tiger Four-Oh,” the supervisor
said. “Can you describe again, please?”
A pause, then: “A big creature, about ten feet tall,
with eight legs. And there was a woman riding it …
red-skinned, and –“ an abrupt laugh “—
stark naked, or just about.”
Something tugged at my memory, but I couldn’t quite
put my finger on it. When the shift supervisor spoke again,
his voice had a patronizing undertone. “Yeah …
uh, right, Tiger Four-Oh. We just checked the LRC, though,
and there’s nothing on the scope except you.”
“They’re gone now. Went behind a boulder and
vanished.” Another laugh, almost gleeful. “But
they were out there, I promise!”
“Affirmative, Four-Oh.” A brief pause. “If
you happen to see any more thoats, let us know, okay?”
That’s when I remembered. What Jeff had described
was a beast from Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars novels.
And the woman riding it? That could have only been Dejah
Thoris. Almost everyone who came to Mars read Burroughs
at one point or another, but this was the first time I’d
ever heard of anyone claiming to have seen the Princess
of Helium.
Obviously, Jeff had taken to playing practical jokes. I
made a mental note to say something to him about that, but
then forgot about it. As I said, on any given day I handled
any number of different crises, and someone messing with
his supervisor’s head ranked low on my priority list.
But that wasn’t the end of it. In fact, it was only
the beginning. A couple of weeks later, I received a memo
from the quartermaster: someone had tendered a request to
be transferred to private quarters, even though that was
above his pay-grade. At Arsia in those days, before we got
all the habs built, individual rooms were at a premium and
were generally reserved for management, senior researchers,
married couples, company stooges, and so forth. In this
case, though, the other guys in this particular person’s
dorm had signed a petition backing his request, and the
quartermaster himself wrote that, for the sake of morale,
he was recommending that this individual be assigned his
own room.
I wasn’t surprised to see that Jeff Halbert was the
person making the request. By then, I’d noticed that
his personality had undergone a distinct change. He’d
let his hair grow long, eschewing the high-and-tight style
preferred by people who spent a lot of time wearing a hardsuit
helmet. He rarely shared a table with anyone else in the
wardroom, and instead ate by himself, staring at his datapad
the entire time. And he was now talking to himself on the
comlink. No more reports of Martian princesses riding eight-legged
animals, but rather a snatch of this ( “The Martians
seem to have calculated their descent with amazing subtlety…”)
or a bit of that (“The Martians gazed back up at them
for a long, long silent time from the rippling water…”)
which most people wouldn’t have recognized as being
quotes from Wells or Bradbury.
So it was no wonder the other monkey house residents wanted
to get rid of him. Before I signed the request, though,
I paid Dr. Fleischer a visit. The station psychologist didn’t
have to ask why I was there; he asked me to shut the door,
then let me know what he thought about Jeff.
“To tell the truth,” he began, “I can’t
tell if he’s getting better or worse.”
“I can. Look, I’m no shrink, but if you ask
me, he’s getting worse.”
Karl shook his head. “Not necessarily. Sure, his behavior
is bizarre, but at least we no longer have to worry about
suicide. In fact, he’s one of the happiest people
we have here. He rarely speaks about his loss anymore, and
when I remind him that his wife and parents are dead, he
shrugs it off as if this was something that happened a long
time ago. In his own way, he’s quite content with
life.”
“And you don’t think that’s strange?”
“Sure, I do … especially since he’s admitted
to me that he’d stopped taking the anti-depressants
I prescribed to him. And that’s the bad news. Perhaps
he isn’t depressed anymore, or at least by clinical
standards … but he’s becoming delusional, to
the point of actually having hallucinations.”
I stared at him. “You mean, the time he claimed he
spotted Dejah Thoris … you’re saying he actually
saw that?”
“Yes, I believe so. And that gives me a clue as to
what’s going on in his mind.” Karl picked up
a penknife, absently played with it. “Ever since he
found that disk, he’s become utterly obsessed with
it. So I asked him if he’d let me copy it from his
pad, which he did, and after I asked him what he was reading,
I checked it out for myself. And what I discovered was that,
of all the novels and stories that are on the disk, the
ones that attract him the most are also the ones that are
least representative of reality. That is, the stuff that’s
about Mars, but not as we know it.”
“Come again?” I shook my head. “I don’t
understand.”
“How much science fiction have you read?”
“A little. Not much.”
“Well, lucky for you, I’ve read quite a bit.”
He grinned. “In fact, you could say that’s why
I’m here. I got hooked on that stuff when I was a
kid, and by the time I got out of college, I’d pretty
much decided that I wanted to see Mars.” He became
serious again. “Okay, try to follow me. Although people
have been writing about Mars since the 1700’s, it
wasn’t until the first Russian and American probes
got out here in the 1960’s that anyone knew what this
place is really like. That absence of knowledge gave writers
and artists the liberty to fill in the gap with their imaginations
… or at least until they learned better. Understand?”
“Sure.” I shrugged. “Before the 1960’s,
you could have Martians. After that, you couldn’t
have Martians anymore.”
“Umm … well, not exactly.” Karl lifted
his hand, teetered it back and forth. “One of the
best stories on the disk is ‘A Rose For Ecclesiastes’
by Roger Zelazny. It was written in 1963, and it has Martians
in it. And some stories written before then were pretty
close to getting it right. But for the most part, yes …
the fictional view of Mars changed dramatically in the second
half of the last century, and although it became more realistic,
it also lost much of its romanticism.”
Karl folded the penknife, dropped it on his desk. “Those
aren’t the stories Jeff’s reading. Greg Bear’s
‘A Martian Ricorso’, Arthur C. Clarke’s
‘Transit of Earth’, John Varley’s ‘In
the Hall of the Martian Kings’ … anything similar
to the Mars we know, he ignores. Why? Because they remind
him of where he is … and that’s not where he
wants to be.”
“So …” I thought about it for a moment.
“He’s reading the older stuff instead?”
“Right.” Karl nodded. “Stanley Weinbaum’s
‘A Martian Odyssey’, Otis Albert Kline’s
The Swordsman of Mars, A.E. van Vogt’s ‘The
Enchanted Village’ … the more unreal, the more
he likes them. Because those stories aren’t about
not the drab, lifeless planet where he’s stuck, but
instead a planet of native Martians, lost cities, canal
systems…”
“Okay, I get it.”
“No, I don’t think you do … because I’m
not sure I do, either, except to say that Jeff appears to
be leaving us. Every day, he’s taking one more step
into this other world … and I don’t think he’s
coming back again.”
I stared at him, not quite believing what I’d just
heard. “Jeez, Karl … what am I going to do?”
“What can you do?” He leaned back in his chair.
“Not much, really. Look, I’ll be straight with
you … this is beyond me. He needs the kind of treatment
that I can’t give him here. For that, he’s going
to have to wait until he gets back to Earth.”
“The next ship isn’t due for another fourteen
months or so.”
“I know … that’s when I’m scheduled
to go back, too. But the good news is that he’s happy
and reasonably content, and doesn’t really pose a
threat to anyone … except maybe by accident, in which
case I’d recommend that you relieve him of any duties
that would take him outside the hab.”
“Done.” The last thing anyone needed was to
have a delusional person out on the surface. Mars can be
pretty unforgiving when it comes to human error, and a fatal
mistake can cost you not only your own life, but also the
guy next to you. “And I take it that you recommend
that his request be granted, too?”
“It wouldn’t hurt, no.” A wry smile. “So
long as he’s off in his own world, he’ll be
happy. Make him comfortable, give him whatever he wants
…within reason, at least … and leave him alone.
I’ll keep an eye on him and will let you know if his
condition changes, for better or worse.”
“Hopefully for the better.”
“Sure … but I wouldn’t count on it.”
Karl stared straight at me. “Face it, chief …
one of your guys is turning into a Martian.”
* * *
I took Jeff off the outside-work details
and let it be known that he wasn’t permitted to go
marswalking without authorization or an escort, and instead
reassigned him to jobs that would keep him in the habitats:
working in the greenhouse, finishing the interior of Hab
2, that sort of thing. I was prepared to tell him that he
was being taken off the outside details because he’d
reached his rem limit for radiation exposure, but he never
questioned my decision but only accepted it with the same
quiet, spooky smile that he’d come to giving everyone.
I also let him relocate to private quarters, a small room
on Hab 2’s second level that had been unoccupied until
then. As I expected, there were a few gripes from those
still having to share a room with someone else; however,
most people realized that Jeff was in bad shape and needed
his privacy. After he moved in, though, he did something
I didn’t anticipate: he changed his door lock’s
password to something no one else knew. This was against
station rules – the security office and the general
manager were supposed to always have everyone’s lock
codes -- but Karl assured me that Jeff meant no harm. He
simply didn’t want to have anyone enter his quarters,
and it would help his peace of mind if he received this
one small exemption. I went along with it, albeit reluctantly.
After that, I had no problems with Jeff for awhile. He assumed
his new duties without complaint, and the reports I received
from department heads told me that he was doing his work
well. Karl updated me every week; his patient hadn’t
yet shown any indications of snapping out of his fugue,
but neither did he appear to be getting worse. And although
he was no longer interacting with any other personnel except
when he needed to, at least he was no longer telling anyone
about Martian princesses or randomly quoting obscure science
fiction stories over the comlink.
Nonetheless, there was the occasional incident. Such as
when the supply chief came to me with an unusual request
Jeff had made: several reams of hemp paper, and as much
soy ink as could be spared. Since both were by-products
of greenhouse crops grown at either Arsia Station or one
of the other colonies, and thus not imported from Earth,
they weren’t particularly scarce. Still, what could
Jeff possibly want with that much writing material? I asked
Karl if Jeff had told him that he was keeping a journal;
the doctor told me that he hadn’t, but unless either
paper or ink were in short supply, it couldn’t hurt
to grant that request. So I signed off on this as well,
although I told the supply chief to subtract the cost from
Jeff’s salary.
Not long after that, I heard from one of the communications
officers. Jeff had asked her to send a general memo to the
other colonies: a request for downloads of any Mars novels
or stories that their personnel might have. The works of
Bradbury, Burroughs, and Brackett were particularly desired,
although stuff by Moorcock, Williamson, and Sturgeon would
also be appreciated. In exchange, Jeff would send stories
and novels he’d downloaded from the Phoenix disk.
Nothing wrong there, either. By then, Mars was on the opposite
side of the Sun from Earth, so Jeff couldn’t make
the same request from Huntsville. If he was running out
of reading material, then it made sense that he’d
have to go begging from the other colonies. In fact, the
com officer told me she’d had already received more
than a half-dozen downloads; apparently quite a few folks
had Mars fiction stashed in the comps. Nonetheless, it was
unusual enough that she thought I should know about it.
I asked her to keep me posted, and shrugged it off as just
another of a long series of eccentricities.
A few weeks after that, though, Jeff finally did something
that rubbed me the wrong way. As usual, I heard about it
Dr. Fleischer.
“Jeff has a new request,” he said when I happened
to drop by his office. “In the future, he would prefer
to be addressed as ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Your
Highness’, in keeping with his position as the Emperor
of Mars.”
I stared at him for several seconds. “Surely you’re
joking,” I said at last.
“Surely I’m not. He is now the Emperor Jeffery
the First, sovereign monarch of the Great Martian Empire,
warlord and protector of the red planet.” A pause,
during which I expected Karl to grin and wink. He didn’t.
“He doesn’t necessarily want anyone bow in his
presence,” he added, “but he does require proper
respect for the crown.”
“I see.” I closed my eyes, rubbed the bridge
of my nose between my thumb and forefinger, and counted
to ten. “And what does that make me?”
“Prime Minister, of course.” The driest of smiles.
“Since his title is hereditary, His Majesty isn’t
interested in the day-to-day affairs of his empire. That
he leaves up to you, with the promise that he’ll refrain
from meddling with your decisions…”
“Oh, how fortunate I am.”
“Yes. But from here on, all matters pertaining to
the throne should be taken up with me, in my position as
Royal Physician and Senior Court Advisor.”
“Uh-huh.” I stood up from my chair. “Well,
if you’ll excuse me, I think the Prime Minister needs
to go now and kick His Majesty’s ass.”
“Sit down.” Karl glared at me. “Really,
I mean it. Sit.”
I was unwilling to sit down again, but neither did I storm
out of his office. “Look, I know he’s a sick
man, but this has gone far enough. I’ve given him
his own room, relieved him of hard labor, given him paper
and ink … for what, I still don’t know, but
he keeps asking for more … and allowed him com access
to the other colonies. Just because he’s been treated
like a king doesn’t mean he is a king.”
“Oh, I agree. Which is why I’ve reminded him
that his title is honorary as well as hereditary, and as
such there’s a limit to royal privilege. And he understands
this. After all, the empire is in decline, having reached
its peak over a thousand years ago, and since then the emperor
has had to accept certain sacrifices for the good of the
people. So, no, you won’t see him wearing a crown
and carrying a scepter, nor will he be demanding that a
throne be built for him. He wants his reign to be benign.”
Hearing this, I reluctantly took my seat again. “All
right, so let me get this straight. He believes that he’s
now a king…”
“An emperor. There’s a difference.”
“King, emperor, whatever … he’s not going
to be bossing anyone around, but will pretty much let things
continue as they are. Right?”
“Except that he wants to be addressed formally, yeah,
that’s pretty much it.” Karl sighed, shook his
head. “Let me try to explain. Jeff has come face-to-face
with a reality that he cannot bear. His parents, his fiancé,
the child they wanted to have … they’re all
dead, and he was too far away to prevent it, or even go
to their funerals. This is a very harsh reality that he
needs to keep at bay, so he’s built a wall around
himself … a wall of delusion, if you will. At first,
it took the form of an obsession with fantasy, but when
that wouldn’t alone suffice, he decided to enter that
fantasy, become part of it. This is where Emperor Jeffery
the First of the Great Martian Empire comes in.”
“So he’s protecting himself?”
“Yes … by creating a role that gives him the
illusion of control over his own life.” Karl shook
his head. “He doesn’t want to actually run Arsia,
chief. He just wants to pretend that he does. As long as
you allow him this illusion, he’ll be all right. Trust
me.”
“Well … all right.” Not that I had much
choice in the matter. If I was going to have a crazy person
in my colony, at least I could make sure that he wouldn’t
endanger anyone. If that meant indulging him until he could
be sent back to Earth, then that was what I’d have
to do. “I’ll pass the word that His Majesty
is to be treated with all due respect.”
“That would be great. Thanks.” Karl smiled.
“Y’know, people have been pretty supportive.
I haven’t heard of anyone taunting him.”
“You know how it is. People here tend to look out
for each other … they have to.” I stood up and
started to head for the door, then another thought occurred
to me. “Just one thing. Has he ever told you what
he’s doing in his room? Like I said, he’s been
using a lot of paper and ink.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed the ink stains on his fingers.”
Karl shook his head. “No, I don’t. I’ve
asked him about that, and the only thing he’s told
me is that he’s preparing a gift for his people, and
that he’ll allow us to see it when the time comes.”
“A gift?” I raised an eyebrow. “Any idea
what it is?”
“Not a clue … but I’m sure we’ll
find out.”
* * *
I kept my promise to Dr. Fleischer and put out the word
that Jeff Halbert was heretofore to be known as His Majesty,
the Emperor. As I told Karl, people were generally accepting
of this. Oh, I heard the occasional report of someone giving
Jeff some crap about this – exaggerated bows in the
corridors, ill-considered questions about who was going
to be his queen, and so forth – but the jokers who
did this were usually pulled aside and told to shut up.
Everyone at Arsia knew that Jeff was mentally ill, and that
the best anyone could do for him was to let him have his
fantasy life for as long as he was with us.
By then, Earth was no longer on the other side of the Sun.
Once our home world and Mars began moving toward conjunction,
a cycleship could the trip home. So only a few months remained
until Jeff would board a shuttle. Since Karl would be returning
as well, I figured he’d be in good hands, or at least
they climbed into zombie tanks to hibernate for the long
ride to Earth. Until then, all we had to do was keep His
Majesty happy.
That wasn’t hard to do. In fact, Karl and I had a
lot of help. Once people got used to the idea that a make-believe
emperor lived among them, most of them actually seemed to
enjoy the pretense. When he walked through the habs, folks
would pause whatever they were doing to nod to him and say
“Your Majesty” or “Your Highness.”
He was always allowed to go to the front of the serving
line in the mess hall, and there was always someone ready
to hold his chair for him. And I noticed that he even picked
up a couple of consorts, two unattached young women who
did everything from trim his hair – it had grown very
long by then, with a regal beard to match -- to assist him
in the Royal Gardens (aka the greenhouse) to accompany him
to the Saturday night flicks. As one of the girls told me,
the Emperor was the perfect date: always the gentleman,
he’d unfailingly treated them with respect and never
tried to take advantage of them. Which was more than could
be said for some of the single men at Arsia.
After awhile, I relaxed the rule about not letting him leave
the habs, and allowed him to go outside as long as he was
under escort at all times. Jeff remembered how to put on
a hardsuit, -- a sign that he hadn’t completely lost
touch with reality -- and he never gave any indication that
he was on the verge of opening his helmet. But once he walked
a few dozen yards from the airlock, he’d often stop
and stare into the distance for a very long time, keeping
his back to the rest of the base and saying nothing to anyone.
I wondered what he was seeing then. Was it a dry red desert,
cold and lifeless, with rocks and boulders strewn across
an arid plain beneath a pink sky? Or did he see something
no one else could: forests of giant lichen, ancient canals
upon which sailing vessels slowly glided, cities as old
as time from which John Carter and Tars Tarkas rode to their
next adventure or where tyrants called for the head of the
outlaw Eric John Stark? Or was he thinking of something
else entirely? A mother and a father who’d raised
him, a woman he’d once loved, a child whom he’d
never see?
I don’t know, for the Emperor seldom spoke to me,
even in my role as his Prime Minister. I think I was someone
he wanted to avoid, an authority figure who had the power
to shatter his illusions. Indeed, in all the time that Jeff
was with us, I don’t think he and I said more than
a few words to each other. In fact, it wasn’t until
the day that he finally left for Earth that he said anything
of consequence to me.
That morning, I drove him and Dr. Fleischer out to the landing
field, where a shuttle was waiting to transport them up
to the cycleship. Jeff was unusually quiet; I couldn’t
easily see his expression through his helmet faceplate,
but the few glimpses I had told me that he wasn’t
happy. His Majesty knew that he was leaving his empire.
Karl hadn’t softened the blow by telling him a convenient
lie, but instead had given him the truth: they were returning
to Earth, and he’d probably never see Mars again.
Their belongings had already been loaded aboard the shuttle
when we arrived, and the handful of other passengers were
waiting to climb aboard. I parked the rover at the edge
of the landing field and escorted Jeff and Karl to the spacecraft.
I shook hands with Karl and wished him well, then turned
to Jeff.
“Your Majesty…” I began.
“You don’t have to call me that,” he said.
“Pardon me?”
Jeff stepped closer to me. “I know I’m not really
an emperor. That was something I got over a while ago …
I just didn’t want to tell anyone.”
I glanced at Karl. His eyes were wide, and within his helmet
he shook his head. This was news to him, too. “Then
… you know who you really are?”
A brief flicker of a smile. “I’m Jeff Halbert.
There’s something wrong with me, and I don’t
really know what it is … but I know that I’m
Jeff Halbert and that I’m going home.” He hesitated,
then went on. “I know we haven’t talked much,
but I … well, Dr. Fleischer has told me what you’ve
done for me, and I just wanted to thank you. For putting
up with me all this time, and for letting me be the Emperor
of Mars. I hope I haven’t been too much trouble.”
I slowly let out my breath. My first thought was that he’d
been playing me and everyone else for fools, but then I
realized that his megalomania had probably been real, at
least for a time. In any case, it didn’t matter now;
he was on his way back to Earth, the first steps on the
long road to recovery.
Indeed, many months later, I received a letter from Karl.
Shortly after he returned to Earth, Jeff was admitted to
a private clinic in southern Vermont, where he began a program
of psychiatric treatment. The process had been painful;
as Karl had deduced, his subconscious mind had repressed
the knowledge of his family’s deaths, papering over
the memory with fantastical delusions he’d derived
from the stories he’d been reading. The clinic psychologists
agreed with Dr. Fleischer: it was probably the retreat into
fantasy that saved Jeff’s life, by providing him with
a place to which he was able to escape when his mind was
no longer able to cope with a tragic reality. And in the
end, when he no longer needed that illusion, Jeff returned
from madness. He’d never see a Martian princess again,
or believe himself to be the ruling monarch of the red planet.
But that was yet to come. I bit my tongue and offered him
my hand. “No trouble, Jeff. I just hope everything
works out for you.”
“Thanks.” Jeff shook my hand, then turned away
to follow Karl to the ladder. Then he stopped and looked
back at me again. “One more thing…”
“Yes?”
“There’s something in my room I think you’d
like to see. I disabled the lock just before I left, so
you won’t need the password to get in there.”
A brief pause. “It was `Thuvia’, just in case
you need it anyway.”
“Thank you.” I peered at him. “So …
what’s is it?”
“Call it a gift from the emperor,” he said.
I walked back to the rover and waited until the shuttle
lifted off, then I drove to Hab 2. When I reached Jeff’s
room, though, I discovered that I wasn’t the first
person to arrive. Several of his friends – his fellow
monkeys, the emperor’s consorts, a couple of others
-- had already opened the door and gone in. I heard their
astonished murmurs as I walked down the hall, but it wasn’t
until I pushed entered the room that I saw what amazed them.
Jeff’s quarters were small, but he’d done a
lot with it over the last year and a half. The wall above
his bed was covered with sheets of paper that he’d
taped together, upon which he’d drawn an elaborate
mural. Here was the Mars over which the Emperor had reigned:
boat-like aircraft hovering above great domed cities, monstrous
creatures prowling red wastelands, bare-chested heroes defending
beautiful women with rapiers and radium pistols, all beneath
twin moons that looked nothing like the Phobos and Deimos
we knew. The mural was crude, yet it had been rendered with
painstaking care, and was nothing like anything we’d
ever seen before.
That wasn’t all. On the desk next to the comp was
the original Phoenix disk, yet Jeff hadn’t been satisfied
just to leave it behind. A wire-frame bookcase had been
built beside the desk, and neatly stacked upon its shelves
were dozens of sheaves of paper, some thick and some thin,
each carefully bound with hemp twine. Books, handwritten
and handmade.
I carefully pulled down one at random, gazed at its title
page: Edison’s Conquest of Mars by Garrett P. Serviss.
I put it back on the shelf, picked up another: Omnilingual
by H. Beam Piper. I placed it on the shelf, then pulled
down yet another: The Martian Crown Jewels, by Poul Anderson.
And more, dozens more…
This was what Jeff had been doing all this time: transcribing
the contents of the Phoenix disk, word by word. Because
he knew, despite his madness, that he couldn’t stay
on Mars forever, and he wanted to leave something behind.
A library, so that others could enjoy the same stories that
had helped him through a dark and troubled time.
The library is still there. In fact, we’ve improved
it quite a bit. I had the bed and dresser removed, and replaced
them with armchairs and reading lamps. The mural has been
preserved within glass frames, and the books have been rebound
inside plastic covers. The Phoenix disk is gone, but its
contents have been downloaded into a couple of comps; the
disk itself is in the base museum. And we’ve added
quite a few books to the shelves; every time a cycleship
arrives from Earth, it brings a few more for our collection.
It’s become one of the favorite places in Arsia for
people to relax; there’s almost always someone in
there, sitting in a chair with a novel or story in his or
her lap.
The sign on the door reads Imperial Martian Library: an
inside joke that newcomers and tourists don’t get.
And, yes, I’ve spent a lot of time there myself. It’s
never too late to catch up on the classics.
