Mars Evacuees

7

‘Well, how did you let that happen?’ yelled the Colonel, and then looked disgusted at himself for talking to a six-foot teddy bear, and stalked off.

‘NOEL,’ boomed Carl. ‘NOEL.’

‘He can’t have gone far,’ I said. But I got a horrid cold watery feeling because since we got to Mars, we’d all had it drummed into us that Wandering Off On Your Own had replaced Getting Into Cars With Strangers as top of the list of things it was incredibly bad to do. Mostly because you’d run out of oxygen, somewhat because you’d die of hypothermia, and a little because the atmosphere was still too thin to filter out the radiation that gives you cancer.

‘I promised Mum and Dad I’d look after him,’ said Carl, his eyes unfocused.

The Colonel mounted a little rise; his Goads sprang into the air and he bawled, ‘Stop what you’re doing!’ through them. ‘This is now a search and rescue operation. All you with the –’ he grimaced as if he felt sick, ‘– the flower-thing and that damn bear, get inside, look for him there. Everyone else, I want you in pairs or groups of three. No one make a move on your own! I want you to spread out slowly, in a circle. If you do get separated, stop moving and yell. But you DON’T get separated, UNDERSTAND?

‘Don’t worry, Dalisay,’ the Colonel’s voice added to Carl via one the Goads, while the Colonel himself went bounding off over the rocks. ‘Got heat-vision on these things – he’ll show up.’ And the Goads went spiralling about overhead, scanning the ground.

But half an hour later we still hadn’t found him, and it was getting awfully cold. I had run out of ways to say that Noel would totally be fine, and Carl had gone very quiet, which was particularly unnerving because it was him.

Then we heard sad, swoopy music, like the Martian tundra had somehow turned into a pavement outside a Parisian cafe from the olden days. Of course, it was Josephine, who was sitting cross-legged on a rock gazing thoughtfully at the sky and playing her harmonica.

Carl stared at her. ‘You’re not even going to help?’

‘No point carrying on that way,’ said Josephine. ‘He’s not there. We’d see his tracks in the salt crust – you can see ours. And I am helping.’ She took a swig of oxygen from her canister and went on playing.

‘How is that racket going to help?’ Carl cried.

‘It’s Clair de Lune,’ said Josephine reproachfully.

‘This isn’t really the time,’ I said. ‘And you’re supposed to be in a group.’

‘I don’t want to be in a group,’ said Josephine.

‘Well, you’re in one now,’ I told her firmly.

Rather to my surprise, she sighed and got up and joined us. But though she gave up on Clair de Lune she kept playing, her hands fluttering over the harmonica and a brisk bluesy soundtrack accompanying us as we bobbed and glided along our worried way.

‘You shouldn’t use up your breath like that out here; you’ll run out of oxygen,’ I said.

‘Hmm,’ said Josephine vaguely. ‘It’s actually quite an interesting feeling.’

I was worried her lungs would swell up and she’d get pneumonia, and I also wondered if she’d decided to get her own back on Carl by being as annoying as possible in her own particular style, and thought her timing was pretty mean if she had. Although I was actually quite glad of the music because it was so quiet without it, and it was true – she was good.

Carl was mainly too worried to pay all that much attention to Josephine either way. At least he started talking again. ‘Stupid little tick!’ he cried, leaping over a crater thinly lined with arctic grass. ‘I’m going to kill him!’

‘It wouldn’t be that hard to get lost,’ said Josephine. ‘You don’t burn energy so fast in this gravity, so you can go a long way without feeling it. And then with the horizons being closer—’

‘Yes, I know,’ snapped Carl. ‘I bet, when we find him, it turns out he was following a bird or something.’ A snow-goose flapped slowly past above our heads. ‘Yeah. One of those. An actual wild goose chase! Him and his animals!’

Abruptly, Josephine stopped playing the blues, turned off to the left, and started marching away from us.

‘Oh, what now?’ I cried.

‘He’s been gone long enough to have realised he’s come too far and tried to walk back,’ said Josephine. ‘But no one’s found him, so he must have gone the wrong way. He can’t be anywhere to the north of us because someone would have found his tracks. The geese are flying that way, towards the sea. Carl, you just said he might have followed one. They’re certainly the most obvious animals around. And something must be stopping the Goads finding him. So if he started off towards the sea and went wrong when he tried to come back and ended up somewhere where he wouldn’t leave obvious footprints and where the Goads’ thermal imaging can’t see him, where could he be? He’s over there among those hills. They look enough like the ones around Beagle to have confused him. There’s really nowhere else he can possibly be.’

There was a pause and then I started yelling and waving my arms to get the attention of one of the Goads.

‘There,’ said Josephine rather maddeningly. ‘Music helps me think.’

‘You don’t really know that’s where he is,’ said Carl dubiously, while I tried to summarise to the Goad what Josephine had just said. Soon we saw the Colonel hurtling towards us on his Beast.

Josephine suddenly seemed to lose interest in the whole business. ‘Well, that’s sorted,’ she said. ‘Actually, I think I’m going to have a look at the sea.’

‘No! You know you can’t go off on your own!’ I protested, which didn’t have any effect whatsoever.

‘It’s only over the dunes. I’ll be back in a minute,’ Josephine said, and wandered off playing Clair de Lune again. Then the Colonel galloped past us towards the cluster of knobbly hills with just a quick nod and Carl went running off after him. And I couldn’t stick with both Josephine and Carl at once, and I did want to see if Noel was OK, so I sighed, and made a roughly arrow-shaped heap of stones pointing the way Josephine had gone in case she did collapse from oxygen deprivation or anything and we needed to find her, and went after Carl.

It took me a while to catch up with him, and by the time I did the Colonel was coming back towards us. He had Noel in front of him on the Beast, wrapped up in a silver blanket, and Noel was shivering and apologising and looking a bit weepy.

The Colonel slowed beside us and Carl bounded six feet in the air and exploded: ‘You stupid little dipstick! You’ve got the whole base looking for you, you know! Don’t you realise you’re in the middle of woop-woop on bleeding Mars? Why are you so fantastically moronic?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Noel, crying some more. ‘I didn’t mean to. But after I got to the sea then there was this thing on the beach, Kuya – I was trying to get close enough to take a picture of it on my tablet, but it was too fast…’

‘I don’t care about your flaming animals! Oh, Jesus,’ Carl added, ‘don’t cry about it.’

‘It wasn’t a normal animal,’ said Noel. ‘Sir,’ he appealed, turning to the Colonel. ‘It wasn’t a normal animal.’

Carl went on alternating between yelling at Noel and being nice to him as we went along, and then we passed my little marker of stones. I wondered if I’d better tell the Colonel we needed to start another search party, but then Josephine emerged over the dunes. ‘Hi,’ she said to me, strolling up. ‘Hi, Noel, glad you’re OK.’

‘What are you doing on your own, Jerome?’ blazed the Colonel. ‘Because it looks a lot like defying a direct order.’

Josephine was not quite so unflappable as not to look a bit scared and start stammering, ‘Oh, I was only – it was just for a few—’

Carl sighed. ‘Don’t be too hard on her, sir,’ he said. He looked awfully tired now. ‘She was the one who worked out where Noel was.’

The Colonel looked meditatively at Josephine and growled, ‘I’ll overlook it. This time.’

Josephine fell into step beside me and Carl, the Colonel’s Beast treading slowly enough that we could keep up with it. ‘So what was the sea like?’ I asked.

‘Pink,’ said Josephine.

Carl had recovered enough to snort, ‘There, what did I say?’ and elbow me in the ribs.

We went along in silence for a while. The sun was setting. The sea would be pink, I thought, a bit wistfully.

‘What happened to your legs, sir?’ asked Noel, suddenly.

‘Noel!’ I said, scandalised. I didn’t mean to start him off crying again but unfortunately that looked as if it was going to be the effect.

‘What,’ said the Colonel irritably. ‘I’m a freaking cyborg and he’s not supposed to notice? You tell me, son – what do you think happened to them?’

‘Um. The Morrors?’ sniffed Noel.

‘No, no, this was thirty years ago. See, there was some local trouble in the Pacific back then, and one day I’m out on a patrol boat and we run into pirates. And so we tangle with them and as the pirates go down, they launch one last torpedo. Boat disintegrates around us. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, up comes a shark…’

‘A shark!’ Noel yelped involuntarily.

‘…and I fought that shark to the death. He got my legs, and a one-way ticket to the bottom of the sea.’

‘You killed the shark? Even when pirates sank your ship and the shark had… had…?’ asked Noel, too amazed to keep crying.

‘Oh yeah,’ said the Colonel. ‘Knife between its eyes.’

‘Wow,’ said Carl respectfully, and we were all silent.

‘Is that… actually true?’ asked Josephine tentatively.

‘Ah, you caught me,’ said Cleaver cheerfully. ‘No, no it wasn’t really a shark. It was back at the beginning of the war. I was on a spacefighter-carrier taking a consignment of the old Aurora models out to the Moon, and we took a shockray hit to the bow. Lost my legs in the explosion and, just before I was blasted out of the wreckage, I let all the air out of my lungs and used a fire extinguisher to propel myself through the vacuum of space. Then I managed to catch hold of one of those Auroras and pull myself inside before I passed out.’

I realised my mouth was hanging open. Josephine tilted her head slightly.

‘Or,’ said the Colonel, before any of us could say anything, ‘maybe it wasn’t a spaceship, now I think about it, maybe it was a fighter-plane and I was shot down over Tanzania during the Second Water War. Now, it wasn’t my plane blowing up that was the problem, I’m parachuting out of there, and everything seems OK – except then I realise I’m coming down miles from anywhere, straight into the middle of a pride of lions.’

‘And it was the lions…?’ I asked.

‘I spotted the biggest and toughest lion,’ said the Colonel, ‘and I steered around in the air and landed astride that lion’s back, grabbed its mane and rode it twenty miles across the Serengeti. But then we passed a river, and out of the river comes a crocodile, headed straight for us. Now, by that time, the lion was my buddy, so, to defend the lion…’

There was another pause, and a bit nervously, Carl began laughing. And then the rest of us started off as well.

The Colonel grinned quickly. ‘Something like that. I forget.’

We were nearing Beagle Base now and Noel was looking a lot better. ‘Carl,’ he said, ‘Carl. The animal I saw. It was kind of like a worm, but it could fly? But it didn’t have wings, it had segments that went round and round, like… like a drill. And it buzzed… and it was this big, and it was eating the sand…’

‘You’ll have to ask Doc Muldoon about that,’ said Colonel Cleaver. ‘She’s probably loosed a load of mutant freaks out here; it’s the sort of thing she’d do. Even those geese have had their genes messed with.’

He swung down from the Beast outside the gates of Beagle Base and deposited Noel on the ground.

‘I lost Enrique,’ said Noel forlornly. ‘My snail,’ he explained, when we looked at him.

‘We’ll get you another one,’ said Carl automatically, in the mindless tone of someone who’s said the same thing a thousand times before.

‘There aren’t any other snails on Mars,’ said Noel.

‘I wonder what that flying worm-thing he saw was?’ mused Josephine, when we were back in the dorm and had warmed up with hot showers.

‘He was probably making it up,’ I said. ‘I mean, maybe not on purpose, but he was pretty scared, and I’ve heard your brain can do weird things when you’re low on oxygen.’

‘He wasn’t making it up,’ said Josephine. ‘When I was on the beach, I saw the tracks it had made in the sand.’

Our room didn’t have windows except for the round skylights high in the ceiling, and for once I felt a little pleased that we couldn’t see the emptiness of Mars spreading around us into the dark. Because Josephine murmured, ‘There’s something out there.’