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When Ryland Grace decided to return to Earth, he knew it would be a Big Deal. Eridians, while never pushing him, had seemingly anticipated his change of heart—or perhaps they’d been planning their own independent travels themselves, as it did not take very long to launch the mission. To his relief, Rocky had quickly volunteered to accompany him, along with a thrum of approximately 15 other Eridians specializing in biology, ecology, linguistics, and so much more. As Rocky explained it, it was one of the most competitive calls for scientists in Erid’s history.
Grace knew the trip would take a toll on his body, which had spent too many years oscillating between Zero Gs, Erid gravity, and 1.5Gs in the Hail Mary. His joints were wrecked, bones ached, and muscles were confused. There was a part of him ready to die on Erid, but the call of his home planet had been too great. He wanted—no, needed to see it. And he had to leave soon, before his age became too great to make the journey.
The Erid delegation kindly allowed him to enter a coma for most of the journey. He found comfort knowing that should the Hail Mary begin showing her age, the many engineers and scientists on board would take care of him. The laptop he’d gifted catapulted their understanding of Earth technology and culture, and he had faith that they could repair anything on his ship should it begin to fail on the journey.
They’d woken him as they entered his solar system—years gone in the longest sleep of his life.
“It’s good to see you again, friend Grace,” Rocky had said.
“It’s good to be back.”
Even when they’d entered the solar system, it took until they got to Saturn to start receiving messages.
‘Is this the Hail Mary?’ the screen asked, the words flashing on screen.
‘Affirmative,’ Grace had typed back. ‘Ryland Grace, returning to Earth.’
‘Welcome back, Dr. Grace.’
The next few weeks were filled with a flurry of procedures, questions, and demands. The Erid ship had not gone unnoticed, and Earth leadership was scrambling to prepare themselves for their international ambassadors. Grace sent along an updated file—a compendium of the language he’d become fluent in and so many research papers that he hoped the US government would foot the submission fees for.
By the time Grace found himself back on Earth, a feeling that’d sent him blubbering into the earpiece of mission control, he’d expected there’d be a few questions, an interrogation about the mission, Erid, and astrophage. He knew there would be endless medical exams. They poked and prodded at him, muttering about vitamin deficiencies, arthritis, and elevated radiation levels. They took blood samples, ran him through a litany of machines meant to tell doctors about every inch of his body, and placed him in physical therapy. He was going to end up in a few case studies, he was certain.
The psychological part of it he should have anticipated. Once they’d gotten the whole story of his journey, a gentleman who was almost certainly born decades after he’d left Earth battered him with questions about the isolation, about his dead crewmates, about meeting alien life, and living on the edge of death at every moment.
Grace was sick of it.
He wasn’t a danger to himself, and yes, he was probably messed up in the head, but this was the sacrifice he’d borne to save the Earth. He just wished Earth would let him sit down and watch the 90 years of movies he was behind on.
“You should talk to Mark Watney,” the psychologist concluded after a particularly grueling session about all the things he had to eat to stay alive. Taumoeba was not on his checklist, it seemed. Grace decided to leave out the cannibalism.
“Who?”
It was how he ended up on a bench in Houston at a park near NASA headquarters. It was well-shaded—Grace found that too much open sky upset him nowadays. That was something he should probably bring up in one of his next appointments, he realized.
“Dr. Grace?” He looked up. The man had salt-and-pepper hair that was cut short, a pair of reading glasses, and a cup of coffee in his hand. He was probably just a few biological years behind Grace and looked exactly like his headshot. Grace vaguely wondered if the government would allow him to legally be the oldest man alive in a few years (assuming he even made it that long) by a technicality.
“Dr. Watney?” he asked. “Call me Ryland.”
“It’s an honor to meet you, Ryland,” he said, eyes sparkling. “I was a teen when the Hail Mary flew. It was a part of what brought me into science. Albeit I ended up in a different field.” Grace ignored the twinge of discomfort at his apparent celebrity. He hadn’t even wanted to go.
“Botany,” Grace said, remembering the profile his psychologist had given him. Watney took his seat on the bench, his bag settling on the ground. He was a teacher now, if Grace remembered correctly.
“Yeah,” Watney confirmed. “The sun was dimming enough that it was a competitive field. Bioengineering and all that. It was through pure luck that NASA found me.” Grace hummed. A botanist with NASA—they either wanted him to build a farm on a space station or on a planet.
“So, what’s your story?” Grace asked. His psychologist had restricted his internet access. It was for the best, he insisted. After Grace managed to get ahold of a computer a foolish junior researcher left unlocked, he reluctantly agreed with the decision. He had no idea how to even navigate the damn thing nowadays. Even Google was different.
Watney didn’t seem phased by the question. He must have been prepped beforehand. “I was on the Ares missions—one of the early ones. I was supposed to study the soil and the feasibility of growing produce on the planet should, well, the worst happen.”
“On Mars?” Grace questioned. Watney shrugged.
“They’ve got proper farms up there now, you know?” No, Grace hadn’t actually known that. It made sense—as he understood it, Space programs across the world had exploded in the wake of astrophage. There were colonies on the Moon, projects on Mars, and at least one planned interstellar trip to Erid. “I was going to be the first to explore the idea. But a dust storm cut our mission short.”
Ah, dust storms. Despite himself, his lips quirked up. “You should have seen the dust storms on Erid. They’re like, hurricane strength, but Erid infrastructure is so solidly built they don’t even blink an eye at it. It freaked me the hell out the first time I heard it.”
Watney looked like he he had about a thousand follow-up questions to that particular statement. With a steadying breath, he continued. Whoever gave him this assignment knew what they were doing. “While we boarded, debris hit me—a piece of antennae. It knocked out all our comms, pierced my suit, and knocked me out.” Grace winced. He was lucky his EVA suit withstood all the time he’d spent in space. He wouldn’t have a clue what to do if it were damaged. “My crew left.”
It dawned on Grace why they’d insisted he speak with Watney.
“You were all alone,” he realized with a breath. Watney gave him a grim nod.
“The antennae broke my health monitoring system. For all intents and purposes, the crew and NASA had no reason to think I was alive. Comms was down, so I couldn’t tell anyone. It took NASA a while to realize what’d happened, and even longer to communicate with me.”
Grace sat with that, letting the silence stretch between them. When he spoke next, he was quiet.
“How long were you up there?”
“More than 500 Martian days,” he said.
“You had it worse than me, then,” Grace said. “I had a little under two weeks in the Tau Ceti system before I met Rocky.”
“How did you see the ship?” Watney asked, unable to hold back this question.
“It was near the Petrova line in the Tau Ceti system,” Grace said. “It was the weirdest thing; it was like there was a gap there. But then, boom, it got closer, and I realized it was a ship.” For all the time that’d passed, he would never forget that first sighting. The way the ship came into view, their rudimentary communications through engine flares, the tubes. Watney’s eyes sparkled. “Rocky’s an incredible engineer. He built a whole tunnel to connect our ships in a matter of hours.”
“Xenonite really held back twenty-nine atmospheres of pressure?”
“Yep, it’s amazing,” Grace said. “Communication took a while, but when you’ve got urgency, it all comes together.”
“Fuck,” Watney said. “That’s cool.”
Despite himself, Grace couldn’t hold back the grin. He’d faced so many questions with grim-faced NASA officials and world leaders, soulless inquiries and demands, and empty queries from fans—it was nice to talk with someone who actually understood. It was the coolest thing ever. Even with all the pain that came afterwards.
“Yeah,” Grace agreed. “It was.”
“Did you ever see inside?” Watney asked.
“We couldn’t figure out how to get me in without getting instantly crushed, and it wasn’t ‘mission relevant.’ I did eventually see inside an Erid ship before the journey home, but they are not designed for people our size. You know ant hills? They're sort of designed like that.”
Watney grinned. “You should’ve seen what NASA made me do to the ship that got me off Mars. I had the gut the whole thing to get in the right trajectory.”
“What did you eat up there?” Grace asked. “Did your companion’s packs last that long?” He hadn’t a clue how long the man’s original mission would have lasted, but he doubted there were 500 days worth of meals in their reserves. Grace had been barely able to make his own rations last.
“Potatoes,” he said, a sly grin on his face. “I grew them.”
“On Mars?”
“I broke into the waste system to create fertilizer in the Hab.” Watney let Grace sit with that. After a beat, he burst into laughter.
“You grew potatoes in your own shit?”
“You bet,” Watney said. “It worked pretty well until the airlock malfunctioned and blew it all up.” Grace winced. He knew what it was like to encounter a setback like that—one that threatened your very survival. The taumoeba in his engines, the damaged ship, the food supplies. It all could go so very wrong so very quickly.
“I’m sorry,” Grace said honestly. He gestured towards his arm, which bore the scars of the airlock incident. “It can get bad out there.”
“Yeah,” Watney agreed, settling back on his chair. “No one down here really understands that. NASA and the other space orgs do their best, but you can really only rely on yourself. I had to science the shit out of my situation.” Grace chuckled.
“That’s exactly what I said to myself when I woke up in the Tau Ceti system.” Watney grinned.
“Well, I guess that’s Science: 2, Space: 0.” They sat in silence for a moment, allowing the moment to pass between them. Grace knew that their situations were very different. Grace had been isolated from all human contact for more than two decades in the most remote part of space. It was only through good fortune that he’d found other beings kind enough to help him solve his mission and keep him alive. There was a tendril of familiarity there. A realization that for all their differences, he knew just how hard it was.
“Thanks for coming, Mark,” Grace said.
“No problem. Listen, there are a lot of people in there—” he gestured towards NASA headquarters. “—who genuinely want to help you. Believe me, I got frustrated at the barrage of tests and questions and examinations after I returned, but it was important. It’ll die down eventually, I promise.”
“Not soon enough,” Grace muttered.
“You are possibly one of the most important persons in the universe,” Watney reminded. Grace winced.
“I know. They have a statute of me!”
“There are more statues out there too. San Francisco loves you.” Grace groaned. “But to my point. They need to make sure you are all right. No human psyche has gone through what you have. Waking up to two dead crewmates, meeting an alien species—living on an alien planet. It’s a lot.”
“I don’t need reminding,” Grace muttered, running his fingers through his hair.
“You’ve spent a lot of time fighting for yourself. Just let them take care of you now. You can relax.”
Grace chuckled. He supposed it would be difficult to explain how the Eridians took care of him, how they made sure his environment was perfect for him—minus the gravity problem, of course. He never wanted for much, and they’d even allowed him to return to teaching.
Yet, there was always the threat of ‘what if?’ One breech in the walls, one misstep in the lab producing his food, one error in his environment monitoring system and he could have been instantly killed. The Eridians treated him as a guest of honor, but he still depended on them for life.
Now, here he sat on Earth with the wafting smell of bluebonnets, the oaky aroma of the tree that shaded them, and the distant scent of rocket fuel. The warm sun kissed his skin, unimpeded by a spaceship or EVA suit. Distant chirps of birds skittering in the trees, the sound of the airplane in the sky, the laughter of a group trotting around the grounds. He was home. He could breathe the air, see the horizon, and look out at the stars.
“Yeah. I suppose I can, can’t I?”