Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

I thought it was just as well she hadn’t been at Muckling Abbot, which was very down on that sort of thing. And then I thought that the army was probably very down on that sort of thing too, and became rather worried about her. Or even more worried about her, because I never completely got over that suitcase business.

She often held her harmonica to her lips and pretended to play it, but didn’t – ‘Even though I’m very good at it,’ she told me candidly – because she thought it might not be the best way to make friends on a cramped spaceship.

Not that she seemed very interested in making friends. Except with me, and she didn’t even exactly make friends with me – she just seemed to accept it had somehow happened.

She was getting a reputation for being weird. One day I came back from the exercise chamber and found six kids gathered around our pair of beds where Josephine was sprawling as usual, this time with her legs propped against the wall so that she was half upside down.

‘Oh my God, don’t you ever change your clothes?’ asked Christa Trommler, who seemed to be the leader of the outfit.

‘No,’ Josephine said regally, without lifting her eyes from her book. ‘I like these ones.’

‘Ew,’ chimed in an American girl called Lilly. ‘Gross.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gavin, another British kid. ‘You’re really starting to stink.’

Josephine sighed. ‘If you’re going to do this,’ she said, ‘try to take account of modern technology. Obviously I don’t stink. No one stinks any more.’

I was impressed at how good she was at seeming not to care, but her hands were very tight on the tablet.

And of course she didn’t smell. For one thing, no one who is taking reasonable care of themselves in other ways starts to smell after only a few days of wearing the same outfit – even if that outfit doesn’t have nanotech in it, and practically all clothes do now. For another, there were not only ordinary showers on the ship, there were these sonic baths that could blast the dirt right off you and you could use one of them in your clothes.

‘You might as well say I’ve got bubonic plague,’ concluded Josephine. ‘Or demonic possession.’

‘Well I bet you have ,’ said Gavin, who clearly wasn’t very quick on the uptake.

‘She’s one of those exam kids, Christa,’ said Lilly, pinching one of Josephine’s stones and tossing it gleefully to Gavin. ‘They all think they’re something special.’

I was already stomping up in a state of some indignation but that last bit did not improve my mood at all. ‘Get out of our cubicle,’ I said.

‘Or what?’ said Lilly, rolling her eyes.

‘Or I go and tell Sergeant Kawahara how you are harassing us, obviously. It’s not very complicated.’

‘Oh, like she would even care about you whining,’ said Christa.

I shrugged. ‘Well, I’ll give it a try and find out.’

‘You’re a snitching little cow,’ said Gavin.

‘Yes,’ I said grimly. ‘That’s exactly what I am.’ I sat myself down next to Josephine and glared at them until they wandered off huffing and shrugging and generally making a great show of that totally being what they wanted to do anyway. I do a good glare.

Josephine didn’t say anything, but one hand came up and patted me on the arm.

‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘I’m used to it.’

On the third day, Captain Mendez told us we would be slowing down to pick up a new passenger. This gave me of an amusing mental image of an isolated bus stop hanging in the void of space, but actually there was a research ship on its way back to Earth from the asteroid belt and a scientist was going to shuttle over from it and join the Mélisande on its way to Mars.

We were all quite pleased to see someone new. We felt a silent clunk as the shuttle attached to the port bow, and a small group of nosy children gathered around the doors. But then nothing happened; the scientist did not come out. Captain Mendez went in and presumably said hello and checked that there really was a scientist in there and not an attack squad of Morrors. But he came out by himself and said, ‘Everyone back to your seats. Dr Muldoon is very busy .’

Josephine sat up in a clatter of falling pebbles. ‘Dr Valerie Muldoon?’ she repeated in an uncharacteristically high-pitched squeal. ‘ Oh my God . She’s on our spaceship! She’s going to be on our planet!’

I watched her jump up and down a little. ‘And… we like her because…?’ I asked.

‘She’s a biochemist ,’ said Josephine, in the tones in which other people would say, ‘She’s a rock star .’ ‘You must have read the profile on her in Nature …’ She saw my expression. ‘OK, no. But she’s one of the minds responsible for accelerated terraforming! She’s why Mars is supporting animal life even as much as it is!’

She bounced again, and then abruptly sat down and hugged her knees, looking agonised.

‘…Do you want to go and see her,’ I said, trying (or at least mostly trying) not to sound amused.

‘I can’t bother her,’ whispered Josephine. She sounded almost crushed.

‘Why don’t you write her a fan letter?’ I suggested.

‘Huh,’ said Josephine, rolling her eyes and trying to look above such things, which didn’t work very well given everything I’d just witnessed.

She managed to hold herself together for about fifteen minutes, lying on her bed and pretending to read a book, and then she cracked and started scribbling on a piece of paper. It took about five tries before she produced something that didn’t send her into fits of self-loathing, which I took to Crewman Devlin and asked if he could give it to the scientist when convenient. Crewman Devlin looked sceptical for a moment but then glanced at Josephine, whose eyes were now enormous wells of pleading, and he smiled and did something on his tablet, and a few minutes later the doors of the shuttle slid open to let him inside.

We waited and Josephine tried to listen to music and not to have a nervous breakdown. Then eventually Crewman Devlin came out and said, ‘OK, she doesn’t mind chatting to you, but keep it quick, all right?’

I went along with Josephine out of nosiness and for moral support. Dr Muldoon’s shuttle was a dimly lit, confusing place: like a small laboratory that was also a cosy bedroom and a rather alarming museum and, of course, a small spaceship. There was a bed with a patchwork quilt beside a window looking out on to the stars. There was a tank full of swimming things that I assumed were fish until they turned out to be gerbils with fins and furry fishtails, swimming around underwater and nibbling seaweed as if that was perfectly normal. Another tank held several gallons of violet goop, sloshing quietly under its own power and emitting a gentle hum (B-flat, Josephine told me authoritatively later). And in a plastic case was what looked like a pink football hanging in a tangle of red wires, but which seemed unfortunately likely to be a living ball of skin in a tangle of blood vessels . The room was lit by the amber glow of virtual screens hanging above a bank of whirring devices and Dr Valerie Muldoon was rapidly adjusting figures on one and flicking the results over to another. She had a lot of long red wavy hair and a sharp pointy nose. I could see at a glance she was another one like my mum – one of the few who were having a really good war. Dr Muldoon’s eyes were almost too sharp and awake and bright as she turned and looked at us. You only noticed the tired look around the eyes of most grown-up people when you met someone who didn’t have it.