[Writing Prompt] The first expedition to Mars is a success. As the spacecraft lands and the crew steps out, they notice something laying in the red dust: A Soviet flag.
For Irina
Our lander came down a bit hard.
“Any landing you can walk away from,” the Captain said with a laugh.
I’m inclined to agree, especially when your flight was 55 million miles long.
“Home one,” the Captain radioed up to the crew in orbit, “we have touched down.”
Copy that Captain. Proceed to Eco-Hab. Congratulations boys.
Eco-Hab was the automated system sent ahead of us, about a decade ago. If everything went according to plan, and all indications were that it did, then Eco-Hab should have set up a base camp by now, fully stocked with oxygen, potable water, and an automated hydroponic garden.
The Captain confirmed everyone was suited up before ordering the exterior hatch to open. The oxygen in the cabin was sucked back into tanks until there was a near vacuum inside. Only then did the exterior door slide open soundlessly.
I will never forget the image framed outside that door. The immense expanse of red dirt, the far-off crest of Olympus Mons, and the first glimpse of Martian sky. If things had gone differently, walking out onto that planet would have been my strongest memory of the mission.
I saw it first. While the Captain and Ensign Laramie were getting our bearings, I happened to glance at one of the landing struts, and there it was, “underfoot” so to speak. We’d landed right on it. I don’t need to tell you the chances of that happening.
“Captain. What am I looking at?”
The Captain came over, followed my gaze, and stopped cold. “That’s impossible.”
And yet, there it was, tattered and sun-bleached, but still recognizable, the outline of the hammer and sickle looking like they were burned into the fabric by a hot iron.
A Soviet flag stared back up at us from the Martian soil.
We made it to Eco-Hab within an hour. We bundled the flag up as carefully as we could but it shattered into pieces. So we put the pieces in a plastic bag and brought them with us.
The Eco-Hab system was up and running, but we knew we were not alone the moment we entered the primary hatch, where streams of pressurized air blew off the Martian dust to avoid contamination inside the facility. We could see it, through the Plexiglas leading to the next room. A space suit. An antiquated thing, stained completely brown, its blue stripes and red patches as sun-bleached as that old Soviet flag. Still, the make of the suit was clear to all of us immediately. It was a cosmonaut’s suit. A Soviet suit.
The inner door opened wide and we walked out. We removed our helmets, scanned the area and, once assured no one was nearby, we got out of our suits. The Captain bent down and inspected the tattered antique. “This can’t be here. It just can’t.“
Laramie chimed in. “Yet, there it is.”
“The second impossibility,” I add.
Then we hear it. A sound from the direction of the hydroponic garden. Not just any sound.
Singing.
A man was singing, his voice almost as tattered as the flag and the suit. We were not armed, NASA doesn’t tend to send astronauts to dead planets with guns, but neither, we hoped, was our impossible interloper. Slowly, carefully, we approached, our hearts racing.
We came upon him amongst the vibrant green of the lettuce leaves and kale fronds. He was turned away from us at first, just running his hands through the greenery. The top of his head was hairless and he was thin as a rail. He was singing in Russian. The Eco-Hab was recording his haggard old voice and later I was able to identify the song as “Kalinka”, an old Russian folk song about a berry in a garden.
“Sir?” The Captain broke in. We all expected the man to leap around and charge at us. But he did no such thing. Instead he finished his song, lowered his hands, and turned around slowly. I admit I recoiled at the sight of his ancient, destroyed face. It was a mask of suffering. What must have been decades of exposure to solar radiation had left its cancerous mark on the man, leaving his skin looking much like the surface of the planet he had been trapped on for the last forty years.
But then that broken face smiled, ear to ear. “Friends!” He said in Russian. The cosmonaut opened his arms wide as though to embrace us all, but took a single step towards us and collapsed to the ground.
I ran over and bent down to him. I speak Russian fluently and tried to speak to the man.
In the future, we would come to know about the Soviet mission in more detail – a failed effort to start a long term Mars colony using 1980s technology. We learned his name was Vasily. We discovered the broken down habitat Vasily had survived in for forty years, thirty of those years alone. We would find the irradiated, rancid rations he’d survived on all that time. Later we would find out how Vasily was abandoned by his government when the Berlin wall fell, his entire mission erased from Soviet history, like so many other things during that time.
All this we’d learn later. But right then, as Vasily died in my arms, he only cared about one thing. He took a small pin from inside his ancient pants pocket and placed it in my hand. With a smile, he spoke his last words.
“For my little Irina. Tell her Papa loves her. Papa is sorry.”
We carried out the remainder of the mission. We buried Vasily but took his suit and the flag we’d found as proof. Two years later the relief team came, along with the first colonists and we went home.
Apparently, NASA had records of the Soviet mission, knew about it all along, but felt it was irrelevant. The Russian Federation never officially admitted anything, but Vasily’s flag and suit were accepted by them in lieu of his remains. They held a ceremony for the hand-off, which I volunteered for.
There were numerous Russian officials there, as well as media. It was a big deal in Russian, the unofficial return of a lost Soviet hero, brought by an American no less.
But only one person interested me. A dignified woman, in her early fifties. She stood by the head of the Russian space program wearing a stoic look. I guessed immediately who she might be and after I handed over Vasily’s suit and the remnants of the flag, I turned to her and asked.
“Are you Irina?”
The woman was surprised. “I am.”
“Vasily’s daughter?”
The woman’s eyes were red, her jaw tense, holding back tears. “I am.” She said again, quieter.
Reaching into my pocket, I took the small pin – a tiny hedgehog engraved in brass – and held it out gently.
Irina reached out, took the pin in her hands and examined it. After a long moment, recognition shot through her gaze and she looked up at me, her eyes no longer the eyes of a woman but of a small, confused child again, a child whose father disappeared one day, long ago, into the sky and never returned, his name unspoken for a lifetime, reduced to myth.
A million questions bloomed behind those sad eyes. Questions for which I had no answers.
So I took her hand in mine and told her the only things I knew for sure.
“Vasily wanted you to have it. Your father loved you very much.”
With those words, forty years of hardness born of necessity shattered into pieces and for the first time since her father left her for the stars, Irina let herself cry.
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