Mars Endurance Base

By Stuart Lenz

Man did eventually go to Mars and build the first Mars Endurance Base, but not when I dreamed as a child we would, not even within my lifetime.

After the original manned moon missions, my youthful dreams of manned ships did not come to pass, except in science fiction shows. Do you remember Star Trek in all of it instantiations, Farscape, Babylon 5 and all of our other dreams. In fact manned ships to other planets did not come to pass during my life, but we contribute much toward the day that man did walk on Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. I remember as a young engineer, helping a geology professor do a comparative analysis of the moon rocks brought back by the early manned moon missions with the volcanic rock of Earths Hawaiian Islands. Later my generation helped to build the technologies to explore space, the early space observatories and manned space stations, but men did not go to the other planets, only our robotic probes.

Our next manned ships, after Mercury, Gemini and Apolo, were not heroic in and among themselves, just freight haulers to low earth orbit. They carried the space observatories and parts for the space stations into space, performed some basic science and died one by one from mistakes make by NASA and except for the crews lost during those missions, mankind would probably not remember them.

As a generation, our largest contribution was to pass on our dreams to future generations.

Which brings me back to why I am here now on Mars. I am entering this story among the random bits into the flash memory of a now almost forgotten Mar Explorer "Spirit" originally launch in 2003 and landed on Mars in early 2004. It did some great science for a while and found evidence of water on Mars, was followed by other probes and forgotten. Of the technologies currently available, I remember and understand how to operate this one, because my generation designed and built it and someday, someone may find this story preserved within its memory.

It turned out that Mars had once had water and life, and that life had developed intelligence and curiosity, watched as the early life on Earth was devastated by the impact that create Earths Moon and later mixed their DNA into the Earths seas when their own planet was destroyed by meteor impacts, but that is another story, one that we would not learn for many years to come.

It came to me in a dream. It seems that we all have some important thing that we can to contribute to Mankind. Sometime we can see it from far away, more often we do not know it at the time, if we did it right or when it has passed us by and we missed it. In my dream I watch my granddaughter rescued by a man I do not know, from the top of a waterfalls where she had gone to play. He stood there at the top of the waterfalls, held out his hand and kept her from falling. And then faded out. He appeared several other times in her early childhood and she called him Uncle Ghost without knowing that is what he actually was. And I don't know if this was of my true memories or just wisps of memory from dream states, but I do know that I need to be here with her, because my important thing had not happened yet.

As a young woman on her way to Mars, she no longer remembered him, had never even know me. I came here without mass or life support, riding within the technologies we help to create. You will not find my name on the crew lists of the any manned flights to Mars or even reference to my presents on the equipment manifests, because I am the first Human ghost on Mars. I was here, now on Mars to save Ellie, to supersede between mankind and the very ancient Martian ghosts.

Our first actual steps on Mars were tentative, a crew of ten. The first habitations were built, mining operation, food and air manufacturing started. Some of the original ten would later leave, others would die, all worked hard and waited for the resupply ships to arrive.

The Martians has other ideas, but after 2 billion years not much remains of what they had built, only sand and dust. A Martian dust storm will scour exposed flesh off of bone in several hours, with winds over 200 MPH and lots of dust and sand. The storms called up, throw it all at the base. Once the storm started, there was no going outside to retreat to other structures and one by one the building fell and the people died. After 12 days only one refuge remained, now buried behind and under tons on sand, containing what remained of the crew.

The Martians plan was to sandblast all evidence of man from the surface of Mars and here is where my actions were able to save the MEB. By lowering the air pressure slightly in front of the base, the particles precipitated out of the wind and built up a giant dune protecting the Mars Base.

No one could ever explain why it happen and no one would ever know I was here.