How long had she been shuffling those wastes in her grimy environmental suit? The clock had told her at first, of course, smartly, to the second, but some speck of dust from without or drop of sweat from within must have shorted out its wiring. Three days, eight hours, forty two minutes, forty three seconds. Nothing ever worked quite the way it was supposed to, or for as long.
She had tried to turn back. If something that basic was malfunctioning, there was no telling what else about her suit might be leaking or crumbling, slowly poisoning her or about to crack her open like a scab to the planet’s sick yellow atmosphere. Nothing worked quite the way it was supposed to, but everything still had to be double-checked and fixed when it broke.
She had tried. But her positioning system had flickered as well, with her first step back in what she thought to be the direction of base. At that, she had moaned, a nightmare sound trapped with her in the shiny dome of her helmet.
After that, she had told time in sunsets and blisters. Scraping the dust from her visor when she realized she was walking blind – strange how long it took her, sometimes, to notice. The land was so flat, the horizon so bleak, the streaks of dust could pass for the world she was navigating.
For what might have been hours. She’d thought she was off-course enough, once, to see mountains, but no. Black, sooty streaks smeared away to show her a glimmer in the real distance, a setting, bloated egg of a sun and the faceted panelling of Base One down in the valley its bursting effluvium seemed to fill.
She shuffled on. The visor swayed and bobbed around her hanging head, her gloves encrusted to paws of dust. She lurched and slid towards the melting sun, and, at last, sunsets and blisters and false mountains and days, the squat, humming, geometric dome of the base. She scraped her way numbly around its walls to the observation port – more important-seeming, at that moment, than the airlock. A chance to look inside, or to be looked at, to spread her hands- or try to- against the reinforced transparency and clunk petrified gloves against it instead.
To press her visor to it, rolling the dusty smear from side to side and smiling at those who stared at her in slow recognition- then hope- then terror from inside.
