Sparkl by Adam Stone

EDITOR’s NOTE: This is a fictional story with no inference on people and places publicly known. Any names of public figures, brands, companies or public places mentioned herein are for fair-use as element of dramatization in a fictional futuristic setting. Any claims or liabilities arising from use of such names are solely responsibility of the author. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of this publication or its affiliates.

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Sparkl by Adam Stone

Morrison had gone over the cabin in detail. He’d opened every drawer, taken books down off the shelf, unscrewed the caps on tubs of face cream. He was just finishing up when Rebecca Warren, the ship’s navigator, pulled open the door. They stared at each other.

“You’ve already done mine,” Warren said.

“Sure,” Morrison nodded. “I’ll do it a few more times. Suppose you brought it on board? Maybe you thought you found a safe place for it, but you know that no place is really safe. So you move it around from time to time.”

Warren stepped aside to let him pass into the hall: There wasn’t room for two in the cabin. “I must be pretty clever,” she said, and shut the door in his face.

Morrison stared at the door, wondering.

& & &

After Elon Musk’s second crewed Mars mission also exploded on the launch pad, killing another dozen hale and hearty would-be settlers, NASA had retaken control of the program, and then the International Planetary Assembly formed. Now, 30 years later, there were some 40,000 citizens from 104 nations living under IPA auspices at Second Home, the series of interconnected glass-domed villages where the Martians farmed, mined, manufactured small items for themselves, and hated life.

Mars sucked, was the general feeling among the colonists. The artificial atmosphere inside the domes felt fake, because it was. Nothing tasted the same on Mars, not really, and there wasn’t much to do. The villages had recreation facilities, of course, of the sporting and viewing and drinking varieties. If you got bored with that, and everyone soon did, the only thing to do was visit another village, where you found more of the same. It was like being trapped in Mankato, Minnesota.

The Sun never really shone, not bright and hot and glorious like it did on Earth. It was there alright, a dull-glowing orange ball, just a little too far away. A reminder of what you’d left behind.

At first there were brawls, crime waves, a minor uprising that went nowhere. Then the IPA started shipping in Sparkl, enough to keep the colonists bemused or possibly sedated, depending on the dose. Sparkl had settled the Martians down. Naturally a black-market flow of illicit, high-grade — and more to the point, untaxed — Sparkl soon began flowing in, smuggled aboard cargo vessels.

Planetary Taxation had solid intel pointing to an inbound shipment on this

freighter. As a revenue officer for the PT, Morrison was on board to seize it.

& & &

          In the commissary, over cups of ersatz coffee, the ship’s engineer Ernesto Garcia asked Morrison to show him the scanner again.

          “Sure. But don’t touch,” Morrison said. He put the hard black carrying case on the table, opened the snaps, and turned it around so that Garcia could see in. The scanner was a simple handheld device, about eight inches long, with a button trigger to set it going. Stainless steel and featureless, except for the button and the display screen. It gave nothing away.

          “Maybe it senses ions?” Garcia scratched his beard.

          “Wrong again.” Morrison snapped the case closed and put it back on the floor. “And your interest is frankly suspicious. What do you care how it works? If people knew, they’d find a way to shield the Sparkl from the sensor. You ask a lot of questions.”

          Garcia help up his hands in a defensive gesture. “Intellectual curiosity!” he barked. “Sparkl is the Devil’s food. I hope you find it, if anyone’s got it on board, and I hope the PT can stop the traffic.”

          Morrison blew across the top of his coffee mug and took a tentative sip. “What about those poor colonists, stuck in the red dirt? What have they got besides Sparkl to pass the time?”

          “That’s just it,” Garcia shook his head. “That stuff numbs them out. It’s no way to live. I’ve heard they can sit around for days, staring at their feet, drawing circles, talking to themselves. That’s all they do, pass the time.”

          Morrison took a sip of the terrible coffee. “Aren’t we all just passing the time?” he said. “And it passes slow on Mars. There isn’t much to do in the townships. If Sparkl keeps them from going crazy, what’s the harm? In moderation, of course.”

          Garcia bunched his hands into fists, shook his head. “I’m surprised to hear you say that. You’re the one who’s supposed to be protecting them.”

          “I’m protecting the government monopoly,” Morrison corrected him. “They’re free to use Sparkl all they want, as long as PT gets its share. Anyway, it’s just a job to me. You seem pretty heated up about it.” Was the engineer protesting too much? Except for Morrison, there were only three people aboard: Garcia, Warren the navigator, and the crazy Russian captain. One of them was supposed to be a smuggler, if the intel was accurate.

          “I have a sister in Mexico City.” Garcia stared at his hands on the table. “She got hooked on the stuff. Now she’s living in a group home, probably forever. Doesn’t recognize her husband, her kids. I’m telling you, Morrison.” He looked up, his gaze intense. “It’s the Devil’s food.”

          Morrison looked at the engineer’s dark eyes, the grim set of his jaw, the clenched fists. Sure: It might be true, about the sister back in Mexico City.

& & &

          The massive freighter was bringing enough supplies to feed a couple of the townships for six months, along with a laundry list of needed goods: Machine parts, textiles, computer equipment, the necessaries of life on a remote world. But all that cargo had been scanned and cleared before being locked into the hold, and those hatches wouldn’t open until they reached Mars.

          That left the crew and their personal quarters, the working areas, the recreation space. A lot of places to hide a package of Sparkl that would be no bigger than a brick, if it had been stowed all in one place. It could easily have been broken up into smaller parcels, for purposes of concealment. The ship could have been scanned and locked down before launch, but the PT felt that having a revenue agent on board served as a deterrent.

          Morrison had plenty of time to investigate. With the new nuclear-propulsion systems, a journey that used to take seven to ten months had been whittled down to about 90 days, more than enough time for him to wave his scanner over every searchable inch of the ship.

If the smuggler was moving the stuff around, things would be more complicated, and so he kept his movements random, his searches unpredictable.        At the same time, he watched the engineer, the navigator, the captain. Trying to get to know them.

& & &

          In the lounge, Morrison pretended to watch a vid feed while he listened to the crew argue. Outside the portal to his left: Space. Black, endless, dotted with stars that gleamed steadily white. No twinkle, without Earth’s atmosphere to interfere. No sparkle.

          Sparkl was the topic up for debate, with Navigator Warren insisting it was vital to the success of the colonization effort. “I’ve read studies,” she said. “Deep academic papers where they track hundreds of colonists. The ones who abstain, every one of them shows a decline in mental wellness, in productivity, in overall satisfaction. They all go to pieces to some degree. They need it just to function up there.”

          Morrison smiled: We’re up there, he thought. Shouldn’t it be up here? But really, they were somewhere in between, a month into their voyage.

          Garcia going on again now, heated up over the perils of Sparkl. Back and forth: Was it addictive (Garcia) or merely habit-forming (Warren)? And so on. He’d heard the same arguments on Earth. The solution in America — legalize it with a prescription card — hadn’t really settled the debate. Countries that banned it tended to function like police states, and the places where it was legal seemed to fare okay, except for being overrun by tourists looking to get high. In Amsterdam they routinely fished them up out of the canals, in Bangkok they washed up in the Gulf of Thailand.

          When the argument looked like getting too hot, Captain Ivanov cleared his throat.  “Why don’t we ask the ice cream man?”

Because Morrison sounded, to his ear anyway, like the Russian morozhenoye. Ice cream. Ivanov was quite the kidder. Crazy? It was in the eye of the beholder of course, but in Morrison’s estimation the guy was a loon. He absolutely was drunk on lukewarm vodka martinis for half the day, and his chess game was ludicrous. He’d charge his pieces across the board with reckless abandon, like he wanted them to die. As Morrison would pick them off, one after the other, the drunken captain would laugh uproariously and shout incoherent stories about his days at the academy. “…and then Kusnetsov punches him in the nose!”

Who the hell was Kusnetsov?

          “Come, ice cream man, Sparkl is your department. Share with us your informed opinion. You are the resident expert aboard this barge!” he shouted. All three of them turned to Morrison, who kept his eyes fixed on the vid screen. A spy thriller from a couple years back. He had no idea what was going on except that a lot of guys in suits were chasing each other on motorcycles. He sighed, shifted his gaze.

          “I told you, I have no opinion, informed or otherwise,” he said. “The IPA says the Martians can have the stuff, and PT collects the tax on it. We get intelligence reports when there’s a shipment in motion. An illegal shipment, I mean. So I get on a ship and fly to Mars and find the stuff. What about you, captain? We’ve heard from the navigator and the engineer, but this is your ship. Every inch under your command.”

          The captain puffed out his cheeks. “It takes more than Sparkl to make life tolerable for me,” he said. He seemed to be thinking his own deep thoughts.

          “Maybe it does, but the Martians like it. Warren says they need it. Haven’t you got an opinion on that?” Morrison watched the Russian closely, but the big man’s face was closed. “It’s your ship,” he said again. “You’re better placed than anyone to bring a brick aboard.”

          Ivanov staggered to his feet, shaking a fist. Morrison waved lazily.

“No, now don’t get mad! It’s not an accusation. We’re just having a conversation.” Morrison watched the captain settle back down into his chair, wondered how much of it was an act. Hard to tell withy Ivanov. “Ever try the stuff yourself?” He looked around. “Have any of you?”

Morrison observed the uncomfortable silence as the crewmembers eyed one another. He let them stew in it for a minute.

“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. No one smuggles for ideology,” he said. “You agree with Sparkl or you don’t, you sympathize with the colonists or not. So what? Smuggling is about money, that’s all. So forget ideology. I think about things like greed, or financial distress. My informed opinions, such as they are, lie in those directions.”

The silence that followed was if anything more uncomfortable. Naturally. Morrison had studied their files. The Russian had gambling debts, which the IP could only characterize as “substantial.” Moreover, the people to whom he owned that money were the type who expected to be paid promptly.

Garcia’s recently-ex wife had hosed him thoroughly: He was in danger of losing his nice house in Palo Alto, and his daughter still had two years to go at university. If he missed an alimony payment the ex-wife had a platoon of lawyers ready to pounce, one of whom she was secretly dating.

With the navigator, it was less conclusive. She’d earned her rank young, then earned a Ph.D. by studying up during round-trips to the Martian colony. Finances in order, but he wondered. At 37, maybe she was eager to get out of the interplanetary fleet, where the work tended to put a crimp in anyone’s social life? Ready to find a fella, raise a kiddo or two? The profits from a couple of Sparkl runs would give her the padding she needed to get off the freighters and take a cushy academic gig.

He’d left the question about money hanging in the air. Now the captain crashed his fist on the table. “I love you, ice cream man!” he bellowed. “You’ve got some giant balls, you know?”

Everyone relaxed, and Morrison turned back to the vid screen. In his mind he composed his weekly message to his daughter Eliza. The next transmission would be in three days. Someone at the clinic in Geneva would read it to her.

& & &

          A month later.

In the corridor in front of the captain’s stateroom, Garcia and Warren were physically restraining Ivanov. They hung onto him in a sort of two-person bear hug / judo hold, and it took all their combined strength to keep the Russian’s arms pinned to his sides.

“I will personally kill you with my actual hands!” Ivanov roared, his face red and sweating. “This is the captain’s private personal quarters!”

“Come on, captain,” Warren murmured in his ear. “Morrison’s just doing his job.”

“This is unacceptable entirely!” He thrashed, but they kept him pinned. “It is an insult to search the captain’s personal private quarters!”

“Sure it is,” Garcia agreed. “We’ve all been insulted.”

Ivanov pivoted his shoulder, backed Garcia up against the door hard, once, twice. The engineer kept his grip, Warren used her weigh to keep the Russian off balance, and finally the captain sagged.

Morrison plucked the key card from the captain’s tunic. “Get him up to the bridge,” he said, and slipped inside the stateroom. Locked the door from the inside. Morrison hadn’t foreseen this. The captain ought to have known his turn was coming. Well, it didn’t change anything. He got on with the job.

The captain’s quarters were easily twice the size of those allotted to crewmembers, with four portals offering a vista on the stars. Ivanov had a full-sized bed, as well as a desk and chair, and even a built-in bookcase stocked with novels in Russian and English, some military history titles, scientific texts, a few things Morrison couldn’t recognize from their spines. There were personal items displayed on the bookshelves and the desk: What Morrison assumed were family photos (two chubby teenagers doing healthy outdoor things); a framed commendation of some sort, in Russian; a photo of a comfortable-looking house set in a forest glade, with big wooden beams and wide natural-stone steps. The captain’s terrestrial dwelling-place, Morrison supposed.

With the scanner’s effective range of just a couple feet, it took Morrison over an hour to go over the space, opening dresser and desk drawers, scanning under the bed, taking books off the shelves to scan behind them. He swept the miniature latrine. All the time, something was bothering him.

He stepped out in the corridor and eyeballed the distance to the next door down, a storage space used for spare parts and emergency gear. He opened that door, stretched his arms to measure the space, stepped back in the hallway to take a visual measurement.

The captain’s stateroom was too damn small.

He returned to the stateroom. Knowing it had to be there, it took him only ten minutes to locate the button that caused the headboard to slide down, revealing a narrow opening in the bulkhead. He crawled through, stood up in a sort of boudoir. Pink shaded lamp, eggplant-colored satin duvet on a bed piled high with pink and yellow pillows. The skinny girl who sat propped up against the pillows looked up from her vid screen.

“You speak English?”

“A leetle.” She pulled her nightgown closed tighter.

“Do you need anything?”

“Nyet.”

She watched with bored curiosity as he swept the scanner over the space, six by eight feet wide, same height as the stateroom. He took his time and she didn’t flinch when he went through the dresser, which contained a couple of practical outfits and was otherwise full of useless clothes, lacy peignoir sets and whatnot. He crawled out through the opening in the bulkhead and left it open.

“Wait here.”

She shrugged, went back to her vid screen.

& & &

On the bridge, Ivanov offered Morrison a glass of warm vodka. He took it. Why not? They sat in the pilot and co-pilot seats, listening to the hiss of the ventilation system and gazing out at the star-speckled blackness of infinity.

“Were you going to keep her locked up in there the whole trip?” Morrison shook his head disapprovingly. “It’s four more weeks, for Chrissake.”

The captain nibbled the ends of the mustache, looking sheepish. “Anya comes up here at night with me. When you all are sleeping. We watch vids and look at the stars.”

How romantic. “What about rations?”

“She eats like a little bird.” Ivanov grinned. “I give her from my portion. So I am dieting? I need it anyway. Also, we carry plenty of food on board. No one starves.”

Morrison thought: Jesus. But it was none of his business. “You might as well let her out now. Put her to work, as long as she’s here.”

Ivanov took a slurp of warn vodka. “You not going to report her, huh?”

Morrison shrugged. “She isn’t carrying Sparkl, is she? So what the hell do I care? You’ll have to square it with the crew, though. Find some useful work for her to do.”

The captain raised his glass, insisting that Morrison click with him. “In that case, it’s good I didn’t kill you.”

Some toast, Morrison thought, and took a sip.

& & &

At Mars Terminal, the brass nameplate on the office door said: Maj. Bildjek – Base Commander. Morrison knocked and entered. Bildjek came around the desk to greet him. Tall, lean, with bristly gray hair and wide shoulders, the base commander had a firm handshake and pale gray eyes. He’d been stationed on Mars for three years now and Morrison had reported to him once before. Morrison thought he looked a little older, less substantial. He moved stiffly. But . . . life on Mars, right? It took its toll.

          They sat at the desk and Maj. Bildjek offered coffee, water, Scotch. Morrison declined.

          “Anything to report?”

          “Negative,” the revenue officer shook his head. “No Sparkl on board. Oh, the captain had a girl with him. Smuggled her on. I found her part way into the trip and she turned out to be helpful. She had some basic engineering skills.”

          “Ivanov did that?” the major’s eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. “That’s showing some spirit. I had thought him reliable. But maybe he’s done the Mars run one too many times?”

          Morrison shrugged, offered no opinion. It wasn’t his problem.

          “Otherwise uneventful?”

          “Sure.” Morrison reached down, unsnapped his bag. He took out the brick, peeled back the zinc covering that disguised the stuff from the scanners at Customs. No one had bothered to search his luggage of course, since he worked for Planetary Taxation. He passed the brick across the desk. The major stuck it in a drawer and handed Morrison a vid screen confirming the credits had been transferred to his numbered account in New Geneva, Moon Base 7. It looked alright, everything as agreed.

          “How are the Martians?” Morrison said.

          Bildjek swiveled his chair to face the window. Morrison followed his gaze. Under the glass dome of the village adjacent to the terminal, he saw kids on bikes, neighbors greeting each other on the paths between the bungalows. Further along he could see miniature farm machines moving between the rows in the produce fields. Above it all hung the Sun, pale-orange, diffuse. Very far away.

          “Maybe the kids who were born here will grow up to feel differently about it,” the major said after a minute. “Will you do another run?”

          “You know the rules.” Two years on Earth, before the authorities at Planetary Taxation would send him back to Mars. “Ask me another time.”

          He could have flown back with Ivanov the next week, but the idea of another three months on the freighter, so soon, and with the Russian and his girlfriend the whole time . . . Morrison opted to wait for the next flight.

That gave him a month to visit with the Martians, enjoy the physical relaxation that comes with the early stages of low-gravity living. He found a few farmers to spend time with, at one of the more distant inter-linked villages. He helped them in the fields, to pass the time, and they played pool together in the evenings, hung around the village social hall. He listened to them talk about Martian girls, who were outnumbered two to one by the men and could afford to be selective. They talked about farming and complained that the IPA never sent the right equipment, complained about the sometimes-inconsistent water supply, complained in general.

          They talked about Sparkl, of course. How much and how often, pros and cons. They all took it to some degree, and everyone had a black-market connection. They knew Morrison worked for PT, and so kept it light on the details.

When they asked, Morrison tended to side with Engineer Warren’s opinion, saying that life up here might be intolerable without the stuff. It was the sociable response. The colonists themselves were grateful to the smugglers, but of course they would be.

          He sent messages weekly to Eliza, there in the clinic in Geneva, in the bed she could never leave. She had a view of the mountains, framed by banks of complex medical equipment. Morrison’s Sparkl runs bought her the best care possible, kept her as comfortable as she could be. If she was still alive in two years, he’d take another trip to Mars.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Adam Stone 2025