Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

There was some kind of fuss happening on the ground among the little kids, who were supposed to be doing their own training exercises under the supervision of the Teddy and the Sunflower. At first Carl and I were too busy with bouncing down the climbing tower and being yelled at by the Goads to pay much attention. But when we got down, the Teddy was waddling around making a honking noise and bellowing: ‘NOEL DALISAY.’

‘What? Where’s Noel? What’s going on?’ Carl asked, that huge voice suddenly small and strangled. He went running. One of the Colonel’s Goads came whizzing after him and to my alarm Carl actually HIT it and said, ‘That’s my brother .’

Then the Colonel himself came pouncing out of nowhere on his robot beast and jumped down to the ground. Thankfully he ignored Carl and said, ‘You. Bear. What is this?’

‘NOEL DALISAY IS MISSING,’ explained the Teddy in its horrifying voice.

‘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?’