Just Say When: a short timey-wimey story

“Hey, Vesper, what have you found over there?” I said, stowing a new dirt sample in the back of the Rover.

Nguyen, sixty metres away by a large upthrust of rust-coloured rock, turned to face me with that little bunny-hop bounce necessitated by the low gravity and her EVA suit. Nguyen is Vietnamese. You’re maybe having trouble pronouncing her name. That’s OK, so do I. The first time I met her, in a small Houston bar, I couldn’t get it right at all.

“That first syllable can be hard for Western tongues,” she had allowed. “Why don’t you just say ‘Wen’?”

“Just say when? Like I’m pouring you a drink?”

“Thanks, I’ll have a Vesper.”

That comment sealed our friendship immediately, and since that day I had simply called her by the name of her favourite cocktail instead. She was happy with that, even amused, and reciprocated by calling me after my own favourite tipple.

“You’ll like this, Shirley Temple,” she said, her voice crackling a little in my earpiece. “It’s a cave.”

Now, before you go getting the wrong idea, Nguyen and I are not, and have never been, a couple. Sure, we’re a team, and a good one: we work well together as colleagues, and as friends, but there’s no romance involved. Throughout training and testing we’d consistently done well, both individually and together, and when the time came we’d both been chosen for the first HEOMD manned expedition to Mars.

I double-checked the screen on the Rover’s output dash. “Geoscan shows nothing in this rock formation but, well, rock,” I said.

We had launched from the Lunar Gateway a year ago now. Nguyen won our rock-paper-scissors decider, despite her missing middle finger, the result of a childhood accident, making it more a game of rock-paper-skewer. Her victory gave her the honour of being the first human ever to set foot on Mars. I’d followed a few minutes later, the Martian Buzz Aldrin. And yes, the moon landings had been a giant leap off the doorstep, but now humankind had properly left home and walked down the road. Humanity reaching out to neighbouring worlds borrow a cup of sugar. Boots on the red planet.

“Nevertheless,” Nguyen said, “a cave there is, and it’s a biggie. Come on, Shirley, get your hairy ass over here.”

I bounced over to her, using the comedic hop-skip gait we’d developed to move safely in the weak Martian gravity. She was standing by a dark opening in the rock, a jagged crack twice my height, yet only a metre wide. I shone my helmet light into the opening. The crevice widened out just inside and ran back a fair way.

“Turn your light off,” Nguyen said.

“What?”

“You heard.”

I did as she said and looked again into the crevice. There was something in there, back in the darkness: a deep red glow, the colour of cinnabar. It pulsed gently, almost like a beating heart.

“What the slippery wiggins is that?” I said.

“I know exactly what that is,” she said. “It’s an anomaly.”

“An anomaly? What’s that? Don’t tell me; is this another Star Trek reference?” Nguyen loved her Star Trek. I’m more of a Buffy man myself.

“Yes. Generally, it means ‘We have no idea what this unexpected thing is’. You can have all sorts of anomaly – this is possibly a crystalline anomaly, a subspace anomaly, or maybe just a common-or-garden spatial anomaly.”

“Should we go inside and investigate?”

“We’re explorers, Shirley. Investigation kind of goes with the territory. To boldly go. Adventure: without it, why live?”

“I take your point. Just say when, Vesper.”

“When.”

We turned on our helmet lights and squeezed into the cave. It widened out after a couple of feet: dust had blown into the entrance a few yards, but further inside the floor was hard and even: safe for us to walk on. Ahead of us, in the dark, the ‘anomaly’ pulsed and beckoned. I watched it for a while, then closed my eyes and watched the green afterglow that remained against my eyelids.

“Fuck. Ing. Hell.” It was unlike Nguyen to swear so baldly, so I pulled my attention away from the radiance.  She was facing the side of the cave, shining her lamp towards the foot of the wall. I joined my light with hers, and when I saw what she was looking at, my sense of the universe changed forever.

“F … Sh … what?” I struggled for words.

Nesting at the foot of the wall was a pile of bones. Human bones, with a human skull and vertebrae, and arm and hand bones reaching towards the cave wall.

“It seems that I might not be the first person to walk on Mars after all.” Nguyen said.

“But … how?”

“All I’ve got is ‘fucking hell’.”

“OK. Perhaps … perhaps there were actual Martians once, humanoids like us, and this is one of them. The bone looks blackened, old.”

There was something – a scratch, a mark – at the very base of the rock wall close to the finger bones. I squatted as best I could in the confines of my suit and looked more closely. There were indeed scratches, faint and worn away by years. At first I thought they were random marks, left by the desperate clawing of a dying Martian, but as I studied them it occurred to me that they resembled three slightly overlapping letters: J, S and W.

“This thing is pulsing faster,” Nguyen said, and I looked up to see she had moved and was staring at the light, which hovered at about head-height just in front of the back wall of the cave. It was indeed pulsing more rapidly, as if excited, like a heart at the sight of a lover. Fascinated, Nguyen lifted her hand to touch it. I’ll regret to my dying day that I was too slow to stop her.

A tsunami of crimson light flooded the cave, causing my helmet faceplate to darken in automatic response, and when it cleared Nguyen was gone. She hadn’t run outside: I checked, obviously. No, she’d just vanished into thin air (quite literally given Mars’ weedy atmosphere). I stared at the space where she’d been, and the pulsing light that had apparently … I don’t know, what? Absorbed her?

What the hell was it? Would it absorb me? Probably, if I got too close. What was it that Nguyen had said about anomalies? Surely Star Trek was fiction; but then a lot of what Star Trek had predicted had come true in the years after it was broadcast, so why not these? What kind of anomaly appeared as a pulsing red light?

Eventually a thought occurred to me, and I returned to the impossible skeleton. This time I paid more attention to the bones near the wall, the outstretched hand. There were no middle-finger bones. At that moment I knew what the scratches on the wall meant, and an hour later, when I contacted Houston, I was with some confidence able to use the words ‘temporal anomaly’. Thirty minutes later their reply, delayed by distance, arrived.

“Please investigate the anomaly <beep>,” it said. “Be cautious but use camera and infra-red analysis for initial investigation. <beep> You might like to toss a rock into it. <beep>”

“Sorry, Houston, no,” I sent back. “I’m not ready to go anywhere near that thing yet.”

Thirty minutes later: “Understood, Mars One <beep>. Tell us when you are ready. <beep> Just say when.”