Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘I don’t know whether you’ve noticed, but we’re on Mars ,’ I said. ‘We can’t exactly pop round to the neighbours for a cup of sugar.’

‘That’s why we need to work out how to get into the hangar,’ said Josephine.

I forgot about saving oxygen and made a long alarming noise that was sort of laughing and groaning at the same time. ‘You want us to steal a spaceship ,’ I translated.

‘Only a little one,’ said Josephine. ‘I haven’t worked out how to get past the locks yet, but we’ll think of something. Obviously you’ll have to do most of the piloting.’

I dropped my forehead against the cold metal of the tower. ‘ Please tell me you’re not thinking I can fly you back to Earth.’

‘Well, probably not, but—’

‘Probably!’

‘I should think you’re easily good enough to get us to Zond Station, that’s only three thousand miles—’

‘Three thousand miles!’

‘Stop repeating everything. Zond’s a proper military base: we’ll tell them what’s happened – we’ll find out what’s gone wrong! They’ll either be able to sort it out or they can fly back to Earth before the channels open and at least whatever else happens we’ll be away from all of this .’ She waved a hand down at Beagle Base. Then she said more quietly, ‘And I want to know what happened to Dr Muldoon.’

‘This is insane, Josephine,’ I moaned.

‘There isn’t a risk-free option! Sitting around here hoping it all works out is the most dangerous thing we can do.’

‘Oh, you don’t know that,’ I shouted. ‘I think crashing a Flarehawk in the middle of the Terra Sabaea sounds pretty dangerous!’

‘Alice,’ said Josephine more quietly than before. ‘People are going to start killing each other.’

There was a long pause. The tower hummed in the wind.

‘Now come on,’ she urged me at last, and started to climb again.

After a moment I started climbing too – but the other way, down to the ground. She called my name, but she didn’t stop going her way, and I didn’t stop going mine.

Over in the garden dome, Carl’s lot, which meant about fifty kids, mostly younger than thirteen, had built a camp in the middle of the sports field with mattresses and crash mats and a few tents made out of blankets and gym horses and things. It was a bit smellier and messier than it had been the day before, but it still looked festive, like some sort of carnival, what with the flags and paintings people had made. But I did notice there didn’t seem to be as many kids around any more, and there was a row going on between the ones who were left.

‘We can’t sit on our bums here forever, where’s the fun in that?’ Carl was saying.

‘It’s a bad idea to go anywhere,’ said a boy called Ramesh. ‘We’ve got to protect our territory.’

‘We’re not dogs ,’ objected Carl, who was looking much more harassed than I’d ever seen him.

‘I just don’t think Christa and Leon were kidding about wanting us out of the dome,’ said Ramesh.

‘Well, so we’ll leave guards,’ said Carl.

But though several people seemed not to want to go down to the sea, nobody wanted to sit around and be a guard either, especially since guarding anything implies you’re expecting to be attacked.

‘Let’s draw lots,’ Carl proposed.

‘I notice you’re not volunteering to stay,’ grumbled a girl called Mei.

‘This whole thing with the boat is my idea !’ cried Carl in exasperation. But he still grinned when he saw me. ‘Oh hey, Alice, welcome to Carltopia,’ he greeted me. ‘You and Jo not joined at the hip after all then?’

‘I wouldn’t call her that where she can hear you,’ I said. And I suppose I should have sat down for a sensible discussion about what we were going to do about Christa and Leon and Gavin and Lilly and all the horribleness that was brewing at Beagle Base. But I still couldn’t really believe things could be all that bad after just three days without adults and robots, and after all, nothing dramatically dreadful was happening right there where I could see it. I didn’t want to be thinking about territory and factions and guarding things any more than Carl did, so I said, ‘What about building this boat?’

‘Good question. What about it?’ he asked the rest of the assembled kids. ‘Because I’m going to the sea. The rest of you can do what you like.’

So it started out as a bad-tempered, muddled expedition, without anyone making any decisions about guarding the camp and people just going or staying depending on what they felt like. And those of us who were going fought quite a lot about what we would make the raft out of and whether or not we should take sheets to make a sail with.

Noel said something about driftwood, but of course there wasn’t any; the seas of Mars were too new for that. And though there must have been some hammers and nails and things in Beagle Base somewhere, we hadn’t found them. But we did find plenty of empty barrels near the hangar that had once held liquid oxygen, and we had a table and some strips of plastic panelling that had been torn off a wall at some point in all the excitement. Then Carl found some tough plastic-covered string stuff in the garden and decided we were ready.

‘ Cavemen could make boats without nailing things,’ he said to the slightly demoralised band he was leading across the Martian countryside. ‘And so can we.’

Somewhere between Beagle Base and the sea, the faraway little sun came out from behind a purple-grey sheet of cloud. The wind had died down and though it wasn’t warm , it wasn’t freezing either. Cydonia was having its spring. Mei squeaked, ‘Rabbits!’ and Noel corrected, ‘Arctic hares!’ And whatever you called them, they were white and fluffy and adorable and hopping about the Martian tundra.

‘They’re there so their droppings add biomass to the soil,’ said Noel happily.

‘And so we can hunt them,’ said Carl.

‘Oh my God, I want one,’ said Mei, and we all agreed catching a baby one and keeping it as a pet would be the next order of business.

By the time we dragged our raw materials to the dunes we were all much more cheerful, and the actual raft-building was just as lovely as I’d hoped it would be.

‘WE ARE THE FIRST MARINERS OF MARS!’ yelled Carl, into the silent lavender sky, as soon as the amethyst sea opened before us. And I’ve never read about any of the earlier scientists or explorers using boats on the Borealian or the Utopian seas, so he was probably right. We dropped everything and ran down to the water to start kicking it about and shrieking at how cold it was. I found tiny white flowers growing among the red rocks and thought it was wonderful that even with a gigantic war going on, humans could make flowers grow on a planet that used to be dead.

Obviously, when we lashed the table to the barrels with the string, the resulting raft was not particularly seaworthy and it fell apart before very long, but it did last until everyone had had a go on it, and when I was lying on the tabletop, looking up at the passing snow geese, with Carl using a cane from the gardens to punt through the shallows, I thought that being kids alone with an entire kids’-sized planet to play with really wasn’t so bad.

Then I wondered what Josephine was doing and that made me feel uneasy and a bit guilty, so I tried to stop.

The string holding the raft together came undone again and no one felt like mending it this time and we left its ruins on the shore as a monument to the expedition. Even then, although we’d all started shivering a bit and Mei said her hands had gone numb even inside her gloves, we weren’t in a great rush to head back. No one wanted to say that we were scared we wouldn’t like what we’d find. And anyway, Noel wouldn’t let us leave until everyone had had a look for his flying worm-thing, but we didn’t find any sign of it.