Day 94 - Landing Story

Landing Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

 It was just a simple side note annotation to a line item amendment amount on a discretionary spending bill; no one paid too much attention to it. No one ever paid that much attention to that sort of spending. There had been committee meetings and back room deals and negotiations and finagling. Everyone assumed it was part of the system and that someone somewhere knew what the amount was for. There was a budget deal in place. No one was going to start asking questions that would upset that and make the debates begin again. It wasn’t as if handouts and pet projects were uncommon in these sorts of things. If some extra money was dedicated to NASA for some reason, then it was pretty safe to assume that it was really for the benefit of someone’s district or some political game or a payback deal to some manufacturer.

No one asked. No one thought to. No one thought they had to. If they had, they would have found they didn’t have the clearance to find out. It was classified. Very classified. So classified that most wouldn’t even be given the chance to know it was classified or existed at all. As soon as the ink dried on the deal, the money would disappear and there would be no way to trace who proposed it or what it was for, or if it was ever used. Someone very high up was doing something with enough money to launch multiple manned flights into space and no one signing the checks was cleared to ask about it or talk about it or record that it had ever happened.

The question was what the secret was and what wasn’t being talked about.

There was something happening on Mars. No one talked about it. Very few even knew about it, including the people at NASA. Before NASA there had been scientists working on ways to reach the Red Planet. There were scientists that had been ‘borrowed’ from Germany and their theories about what existed and what could be reached and how soon became the theories in the United States and the Soviet Union. The joke was always that the space race was between the two superpowers when really they were one and the same, borrowing the same ideas from the same people. Rumors and misinformation were spread by the scientists themselves, claiming German superiority and insisting they were capable of doing what other nations only dreamed of. These scientists ran programs and the information discovered remained secret. Most of their discoveries weren’t shared with NASA and much has been classified or lost.

When the satellites were sent to Mars certain areas were never photographed. When the Rovers landed, certain sites were off limits. The public watched films, saw photographs, and heard when rocks were studied and water ice was examined.

But there were the other satellites and rovers that the public did not know about.

It was not announced publicly for fear of reactionary escalation. The most interesting discovery in the history of manned spaceflight was kept a secret.

These ghost rovers that no one was to know about or talk about stopped sending signals. They produced no images and their entire datum was lost. They had entered some sort of electronic dead spot and whatever was happening, it was happening in untraceable secrecy.

There wasn’t supposed to be a manned flight to Mars, and the technology wasn’t adequate enough yet to guarantee safety, physical or mental, or ensure the return of anyone who so chose to go on such a flight. Safety has never stopped some from traveling across lands or deserts or oceans or into space the first time. Safety wouldn’t stop the few or brave or the dedicated those who were told to go and those that were born to follow orders. So the dangers were ignored and the few and the brave and the dedicated went.

No one was going to come home and they probably knew it. But they had a mission and they had patriotism and pride. And they thought they would have a way to communicate so that there would at least be some purpose to the mission. But same as with the rovers, there was interference of some sort and no electronic signal was going to get in or out.

It was saucer shaped, like a cliché. It would have been funny, it if hadn’t been so shocking and scary. No one on the mission knew what they would find, but they certainly didn’t think it would be another ship. The mission as it turned out was doomed, and the men and women were trapped, but at least they would have company while they waited their demise. The saucer had a crew that was long gone, but they did have familiar markings and insignias – a swastika and a rising sun that was instantly recognizable now and forever.