Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘Where’s the Goldfish?’ I asked.

‘It’s up there,’ said Carl soberly, pointing to the sky. ‘Watching for Space Locusts.’

The Goldfish was no bigger than a grain of rice among the clouds, which I noticed were worryingly dark – less purple and more a deep and bloody umber. Just as I looked up, it plunged down to hover close above us.

‘So hey, kids, there’s something kind of quirky about half a mile north,’ it said, with the particular type of cheeriness we’d come to understand meant trouble.

‘Space Locusts?’ I asked.

‘Not exactly. Not now ,’ said the Goldfish. ‘But I think it might be where they’ve been .’

‘Let’s go around it, then,’ I said.

‘Well, sure! We can do that! But here’s the thing,’ said the Goldfish, apologetically. ‘It’s a little on the large side. If we go around it’s probably going to add more than an hour.’

‘We’ve got to get another hundred miles closer to Zond before dark,’ said Josephine at once.

So we went straight on. Before we even saw the scale of what the Space Locusts had done, we felt the traces of it in the air. Fine dust came sweeping over us on the wind, such thick clouds of it that we had to put our masks on again just to breathe and see. And all the vegetation gave out. There were pale scars gouged into the rock where moss or flowering lichen or little shrubs had been torn up.

Then we came to it: an enormous wound in the surface of the planet. The chaos of rocks and streams gave way to great banks of dust, sloping down, down, down into nothing. You couldn’t see the other side of that awful gap. It must have been easily the size of the Grand Canyon, but instead of being full of inner peaks and cliffs carved by a river over millions of years, there was nothing in it but eddies of dust and pools of red mud where the little new Martian streams had leaked into it. One day, I thought hopefully, perhaps it would be an enormous lake, and people could sail boats and fish could live in it. But it was just horrible to look at now, and we were the only things alive there.

‘Get her to speed up, will you, Goldfish,’ Carl said after we stared at it for a while. Monica carried us down the scarp. Agile as she was, she foundered from time to time and I wondered what on earth we’d do if she got stuck. The wind picked up and dust whipped around us like smoke, so before we even reached the bottom it got so dark I could only just see the blue glow of the Goldfish’s eyes through the murk and I hoped it really knew where were we going.

No one said much until we were out the other side of it. I’m sure the Goldfish and Monica tried their best, but we couldn’t go close to top speed, so it took easily an hour.

The faraway sun had dipped a lot lower while we’d been down there in the dust, so we emerged into twilight.

‘Maybe we should have gone round after all,’ said Josephine when finally Monica scuttled us up the other side.

‘There must be such a lot of them now,’ I said.

Josephine made faces. ‘The question is, are they arriving, or are they breeding ?’

‘Ugh… brrr…!’ I shuddered.

There was nothing we could do but keep on, of course. Josephine felt better enough to play her harmonica for a bit, but then Noel rather tactlessly wondered aloud how far the sound carried and if maybe the Space Locusts could hear her. So she stopped.

The signs of the Space Locusts faded away from the landscape. Patches of green reappeared on the rocks and eventually they were fuzzy and mossy again.

‘We should make camp,’ I said.

‘When we find somewhere flat enough,’ agreed Carl.

Then we saw something else up ahead – something pale, streaming up into the purplish air.

‘Is that them ?’ asked Noel anxiously, all of us thinking of the plumes of dust we’d seen rising from the ground where the Space Locusts had been.

‘That looks more like steam ,’ said Josephine. And indeed the column of vapour seemed to wisp into nothing in a way that wasn’t like rising dust.

‘Maybe there’s somebody here!’ said Noel excitedly.

Somehow, even though we’d come all this way and had so many bad things happen to us expressly so we could try to find somebody, this was surprisingly unnerving. We were used to having miles and miles of emptiness all to ourselves, and this wasn’t where we were expecting to find any people. We were silent, watching the steam.

‘Can you see what’s causing that?’ Josephine asked the Goldfish.

The Goldfish soared up to have a better look, but soon dipped back down to us. ‘Darndest thing, it looks as though it’s coming right out of thin air. I’m going to check it out, kids. You wait here,’ it said, and bustled away.

We were left kicking our heels on Monica’s back.

‘Christ, it’s freezing,’ said Carl.

‘It’s Mars,’ I said. ‘It’s always freezing.’

‘It wasn’t this bad before,’ Carl grumbled. ‘Not even with the wind going.’

He was right. The moss on the rocks around us was crusted with frost. I noticed little white pockets of ice in the hollows between them. Our breath misted the dry, cold air like the white thread of steam up ahead.

We decided we’d get down from Monica and move around a bit to warm up, so we were stamping and blowing into our hands and then someone blurted out: ‘What’s that?’ and to my surprise I realised it was me.

‘What’s what?’ asked Noel, reasonably enough.

‘I… thought I saw someone, just there by those rocks. But obviously there isn’t. Ha ha.’ I didn’t like how babbly and weird I sounded and was in the process of shutting up when there was – or at least, I thought there was – this flickering on the edge of my vision. I said, ‘Oh, there, it moved! Wait, no. Sorry. Having a funny turn, apparently! Oh dear.’

‘You do sound a bit oxygen-deprived,’ Noel said sympathetically. ‘Put your mask back on for a while.’

‘Alice,’ said Josephine quietly. ‘Can you still see it?’

Josephine was making herself look and sound extremely calm, but I knew she wasn’t. She had gone very still, except for how she was breathing faster than normal and her hands were screwed into fists. I looked over at the perfectly ordinary patch of Martian ground. ‘Nope. Nothing,’ I said decidedly.

But Josephine reached out and took hold of my shoulders, to make me face her.

‘Alice,’ she said firmly, ‘look at me. Do you see it now? Out of the corner of your eye?’

The iciness in the air wormed its way under my skin, gnawing and wriggling like the Space Locusts chewing up soil. I wanted to squirm away. I whispered, ‘Sort of.’

‘And what’s it doing?’ Josephine asked impassively.

‘Standing on the rock,’ I stuttered. ‘Watching us. No .’

Carl breathed, ‘It couldn’t be…’ and he and Josephine exchanged a look. I wasn’t an idiot, I knew what they were thinking. They were thinking that even if Mum’s genius for flying spaceships wasn’t particularly hereditary, maybe other things about her were . In which case…

‘No it couldn’t ,’ I agreed, and I lurched forwards, bounded off the rock and stumbled straight towards what wasn’t , couldn’t possibly be there and so it had to be my imagination that something had seen me coming and was backing away.

‘Alice, wait!’ Carl called, and he and Josephine came hurrying after me.

But they couldn’t stop me in time, and the thing that wasn’t there couldn’t get away from me. There was nothing, there had to be nothing, I had to prove there was nothing – so I ran into it, something solid and invisible and very cold. I almost fell over and grabbed on instinct, and felt swathes of smooth, icy fabric under my fingers, which slid away from the shape underneath.