Dead on Mars

Chapter 224 - Sol Three Hundred and Thirty-Three, Eve
Chapter 224: Sol Three Hundred and Thirty-Three, Eve

That night.

Tang Yue lay in bed, clinging tightly to his blanket with only his head peeking out. The rotation of the fan blades produced a soft hum that sounded like a mosquito. The temperature in the living quarters was maintained at 20°C, but the temperature outside had already dropped to –60°C.

There was a pale yellow light seeping in through the gap of the curtains. Tomcat wasn’t resting yet. It was still making preparations and packing for tomorrow’s expedition. Tang Yue listened to the familiar noises. Tomcat was rolling up maps. With the Mars Wanderer heavily damaged, it didn’t have a single intact monitor. They had no choice but to use paper maps.

Tang Yue looked at the tiny lights on the ground. They seemed to jog memories of his youth. When he returned home during summer break, he would live in his old bricked house. Every night, the young him would lie in bed wrapped in blankets. The warm light would seep in through the gaps in the door and occasionally his grandparents would tiptoe over to cover him. Whenever that happened, he would immediately close his eyes to feign sleep, opening them again when the elderly person had gone.

He didn’t know why he would recall these. The old house had already been demolished, and his grandparents had passed away when he was in college. Now, even Earth was gone. No one was around to prove that they had once existed. All of that only existed in Tang Yue’s memories.

Tang Yue repeatedly ruminated over these memories that ran from childhood to adulthood. It went from the television and ice popsicles he had at his old house in the village to the time he was training in Lop Nur with Old Wang at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. He tried hard to confirm each and every detail—the opening theme to Young Justice Bao that was replayed year after year, the words on the paper used to wrap the ice popsicle, Old Wang rummaging through his backpack beside the bonfire only to take out two secretly stashed Qingdao beer.

Tang Yue was afraid that he would one day forget these people.

Unfortunately, memories were the hardest thing in the world to solidify. One could try hard to mold them into the image of someone, and no matter how lifelike it was with each strand of hair defined and clear, they would still slowly lose their definition like sand. Eventually, all that was left was a smooth, featureless blob. Even if one stared at it all day, nothing could be gleaned from it.

Tang Yue closed his eyes, whispering, “Are you still there?”

There was silence.

A cup of water was placed beside Tang Yue’s bed. Beside it was a wooden frame with a picture inside. It was a group picture of the astronauts of Orion I before they set off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Commander Old Wang and Thomp stood in the middle at the back. To their sides were Old Zheng and Max. Tang Yue and Mai Dong were crouched in front, with all six of them holding each other by the shoulders smiling. The girl had one hand holding down the hair at her ear due to the strong winds. Old Wang’s eyes were squinted due to sand. He bared his teeth and was just about to curse, but before he could break out into expletives, the camera had fixed that moment forever.

In the distance was the huge launchpad under the blue, sunny skies. The manned spacecraft was still being assembled.

On the floor beside the bed was a pair of slippers. In the corner of the room was a plastic trash can. Hanging on the wall were pants, shirts, and empty hangers. Tang Yue’s room was very simple. He didn’t have much he needed to take with him.

“Tomcat?” Tang Yue pulled out his arm from under his blanket, using it as a pillow for his head.

“I’m here.” A cat’s head peeped in through the curtains. “Why aren’t you sleeping? We will be setting off early tomorrow morning.”

“I can’t sleep,” Tang Yue said.

“Nervous?”

Tang Yue shook his head.

“Anxious?”

Tang Yue shook his head.

“Terrified?”

Tang Yue continued shaking his head as he looked at his hand. “Do you know that human emotions are built on the fact that one is alive? Only with life will there be emotions… But I’m no longer able to find the reality of life for myself. At times, I suspect I’ve become a puppet who doesn’t sense or know anything. I don’t feel any temperature when I touch myself. Compared to you, I’m more like a robot…”

“Don’t doubt yourself.”

Tang Yue was stunned.

“Don’t doubt yourself,” Tomcat repeated. It walked over to hold Tang Yue’s hand. The paw’s meaty part was pressed against his palm. “Look, how is there no temperature? Never ever doubt the value and meaning to your existence, no matter how dire the situation is. Even if no one in the entire world admits it any further, even if there’s no witness or recording of it, you have to firmly believe that your life is the most precious thing in the Universe… You have to believe that you are unique in all of the Universe. You can live on. You have to live on.”

Tang Yue slowly nodded.

“Whenever you encounter an uncrossable chasm, tell yourself that.” Tomcat smiled. “It’s because in this world, no one else will believe in you except yourself.”

“Sleep well. If you can’t sleep, count sheep.”

It released Tang Yue’s hand, turned, left the sleeping quarters, and drew the curtains along the way.

…

Tomcat sat on the table piled high with paper and charts. The long numbers were dazzling to the eye as if they were some cryptic code. Tomcat was like an astronomer in ancient times, doing something no one understood. Before large-aperture telescopes and computers were invented, the daily work of astronomers was math. They would use pen and paper to calculate, handling massive amounts of observation data before finding a brand new celestial body in the massive amount of data.

To laypeople, astronomers of that day and age were mysterious and unfathomable. People even believed that they could see the future. This was because the numbers on these people’s scrap paper could predict full solar eclipses.

Tomcat was doing something similar at the moment.

Using a sextant allowed it to obtain the latitude, but it wasn’t able to directly observe the longitude. To obtain one’s longitude, other methods were needed. Tomcat was going through an extremely precise star catalog. This thing helped prevent them from getting lost in the desert.

“11… 261.233.541… 155.355.715…”

“12… 200.351.547, 399.241.955…”

Tomcat sat in its chair motionless. It held a pen in its paw with a charging cable connected to its back. Its furry body was curled into a ball as its long fur was fluttering in the breeze.

“12, 26.413.273…”

“12, 274.360.669…”

It muttered softly and calculated as it wrote inside a chart. The clock was ticking away.

There was silence from the sleeping quarters since Tang Yue had finally fallen asleep.

Deeper into the night, the amount of paper piled on the desk became taller than Tomcat. These papers had numbers that were the results of a calculation and not the calculation process. Without Tang Yue, Tomcat didn’t need to show its work to anyone. It did all the calculations mentally, but due to the massive amounts of data, there was not enough white paper. Eventually, it had to reuse some of the scrap paper.

Tomcat tidied the data and stacked them together before placing them into a drawer.

If there wasn’t an accident, these sheets of paper would stay there till the end of the world.

“SUN, 10:00, 102.543.027…

“FRIDAY.

“01, 02, 03, …, 23.

“Next is SATURDAY.

00, 102.548.227, 104.424.152, 212.240.270, 01…

“195.544.473.

“01, 25, 02, 52, 03, 45.

“Next is SUNDAY.

“SUNDAY.

“Sunday… Sunday, where is it on Sunday?”

After an unknown period of time, Tomcat put away its pen in satisfaction and exhaled, declaring that everything was a success. The sunlight beneath the horizon had already illuminated the sky.