Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Goldfish, can you send out a signal that we’re here and we need help?’ asked Noel.

‘Already doing it, Noel,’ said the Goldfish. Carl looked briefly deflated.

‘So there’s nothing to do but wait,’ whispered Noel, looking at the ground.

Carl gave him what I guess was supposed to be an affectionately boisterous shove, and yelled, ‘We’re not going to just wait. That’d be… that’d be feeble! Let’s make a sign. You know. Belt and braces. Just in case no one picks up what the Goldfish is doing.’

We gathered stones and laid them on the ground to spell out ‘HELP’ in big letters. Then we thought of adding an arrow pointing to where we were.

Then we ate a dismal lunch of Smeat and energy bars. Carl kept talking breathlessly the whole time: ‘This stuff is gross. What do they get paid for in those labs? I bet you I could synthesise something better out of sawdust, or… or Blu-Tack. I could murder a hamburger made of actual dead cow, I don’t care what you say, Noel.’

Noel was in fact saying nothing, so I felt I had to fill in some of the gaps. ‘You know, what I’d really like is spaghetti carbonara. I haven’t had decent pasta in forever, they couldn’t do it properly at Muckling Abbot either. My gran makes it with cream…’

I wished I hadn’t thought about my gran. Or about spaghetti carbonara, come to that. And Noel still didn’t say anything, until at last we were finished and he looked over at our sign and asked, ‘What shall we do now?’

‘Add an exclamation mark?’ I said.

‘Nothing left but to pass the time, until they get here,’ said Carl, shrilly.

So we played cricket. That was Carl’s idea, obviously. Carl had a tennis ball, it turned out, but cricket does not work very well with three people in low gravity with broken bits of spaceship for bats and wickets, and Carl was blatantly letting Noel win, which was so unnerving that I got worried about Josephine and went looking for her.

She was perched on top of a twisted stack of red rock, high above the valley floor, her legs dangling. Her harmonica was lying on her lap, but she wasn’t playing it. She was just staring into the distance.

‘Um, hi,’ I yelled up at her.

‘It’s so huge,’ she said blankly. ‘You can’t see from down there.’

‘Huh?’

‘The Labyrinth. It goes on for miles.’

The Labyrinth of Night. I hadn’t quite realised we were in it.

‘Come back,’ I said. ‘There might be Space Locusts.’

Josephine hung her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t know if I can do it.’

‘Do what?’

‘Pretend to Noel that we’re not going to die.’

I felt a bit like kicking her and a bit like screaming. I did know, in one way, that this was what Carl was doing, and what I was doing too since I’d gone along with it. You don’t want an eight-year-old to work out that he’s part of a small group of people who are all going to run out of oxygen soon. You probably don’t want twelve-year-olds to work it out either, but unfortunately no one was in a position to do much about that. But I didn’t like her just saying it. ‘Well someone might find us,’ I said desperately. ‘Where there’s life there’s hope.’

Josephine sort of half smiled and gazed at nothing.

‘It’s cold out here,’ I said.

She climbed down and walked back with me in silence. We found Carl on the brink of volcanic overreaction to Noel having lost the tennis ball and Noel possibly about to burst into tears, and Josephine shut her eyes at the sight of them before strolling over and saying with forced energy, ‘Let’s get back inside; I know a game.’

Actually she knew about a million extremely complicated word games, which I guess Lena had taught her on long car journeys or whatever. Josephine got very eye-rolly when we forgot the rules, but she kept us occupied and this was about as perfect for our horrible situation as anything could have been. She managed to keep typing something on her tablet while we were struggling to come up with a three-word phrase made up of words beginning with S in the form of a question, and eventually Noel curled up into a ball of half-shredded sleeping bags and went to sleep.

Carl looked at him and said, ‘Oh, God’, and then lurched out of the ship. Josephine and I went too and next thing I knew, Carl and Josephine were both collapsed against the wreck practically cuddling each other.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘Thanks for all of that. I couldn’t. I can’t.’ He put his head in his hands and said in a broken little voice, ‘Mum and Dad are going to be so angry with me.’

‘They’re not,’ said Josephine. ‘They’ll think you were amazing. I’ve written down everything that happened.’

She showed him her tablet. Carl grinned shakily. ‘I see you’re guilting them into making “Jeromiana Waterlands” official.’ He paused, reading on. ‘…That’s nice. Thank you.’

‘Your parents will be proud of you,’ said Josephine. ‘They’ll be right to be.’

Carl smiled again, but he was crying again too. ‘They’re going to be wrecked .’

Josephine swallowed. ‘I’m sorry. I was the one who wanted to run away. I stole the ship. This is all because of me. We should have stayed back at Beagle.’

‘Oh, that’s bull, Jo, everything had gone to hell back there, you didn’t make that happen. You didn’t munch a load of holes in the spaceship either. Everything was messed up to start with: you tried to do something about it. It’s not your fault it worked out like this.’

Josephine gave a crumpled laugh. ‘I guess at least it looks like I won’t have to be in the bloody army.’

‘Ahh, if they gave you a chance and a decent laboratory or whatever, you’d probably win the whole war in like a day.’

They went on telling each other in heartfelt terms how awesome the other was and I didn’t know why I couldn’t bring myself to be part of this conversation. A bit of me wanted to go and hug them and tell them they were amazing and that whatever happened, I was glad I was with them. But somehow I also felt like knocking their heads together.

The Goldfish was a little way off, hovering twenty feet above the valley floor, and I decided I’d go and chat. ‘How’s the signalling going?’ I called up.

The Goldfish’s glow was very dull and even its permanent smile seemed like a kind of torture, like someone had forcibly carved it on to its plastic cheeks. ‘I’m so sorry, Alice,’ it whispered.

‘And evidently you can’t think of anything to get us out of this,’ I added.

The Goldfish waggled dolefully in the air, and I understood it was shaking its head. ‘I guess I’m just not programmed for this.’

‘Me neither,’ I growled and stomped back past Carl and Josephine, climbed back into the spaceship, lay down and pulled the sleeping-bag rags over my head.

‘Alice,’ whispered Noel. ‘We’re not getting out of here, are we?’

I knocked my head gently against the floor. ‘Of course we are,’ I said brightly.

‘It’s all right. You don’t have to pretend right now. Except… except please go on doing it when Carl’s around,’ whispered Noel. ‘I don’t want him to know I know.’ And he burrowed into an even smaller ball.

I knocked my head against the floor more vigorously.

All that work we’d put in trying to fool him, and apparently the only person still being fooled was me.

And that was even though, in the far distance beyond the hovering Goldfish, I’d seen many high, drifting plumes of dust, which probably marked the destruction the Space Locusts left in their wake.

In the morning (three days, sixteen hours, seven minutes of oxygen left) Josephine started playing her harmonica again. I’d never heard a harmonica sound so beautiful before, or so despairing. It was as though all the emptiness and shadow in the Labyrinth of Night was mourning for itself through her, using her mouth and lungs and the little metal box she held to pour itself into heartbroken sound.