Sophia McDougall - Mars Evacuees

‘I’msorryI’msureyougetthisallthetime,’ said Josephine in a rush.

‘Actually no ,’ said Dr Muldoon, dryly.

‘Could you… uh… autograph…’ Josephine stammered. She’d called up a book on her tablet and handed Dr Muldoon her stylus so she could scribble her signature on the screen.

‘So are you both into biochemistry, then?’ she asked.

I said, ‘I haven’t read your book yet, Dr Muldoon, but I am sure it’s very good and I am interested in biology.’ I didn’t add ‘…But I like it to be more normal ,’ because that wouldn’t have been polite.

Josephine said, ‘I’m a little more interested in physics, and, well, archaeology, but…’

‘Then we can’t be friends!’ cried Dr Muldoon.

Josephine smiled at the joke, but she’d become still and solemn instead of twitchy and excited. I started to see that although all that fangirling was perfectly genuine, it wasn’t her only reason for wanting to be there. ‘But do you think… I could be like you? I mean, doing science for the war effort. Any kind of science. Anything, really… rather than being in the army.’

So she’d still been brooding over that first conversation we’d had.

Some of the Good War spark went out of Dr Muldoon’s eyes.

‘Even I’m an EDF officer, technically,’ she said gently. ‘I’ve yet to fire a shot at a Morror, but it could happen. I had to go through the training, and that was… oh, probably around the time you were born. And I can’t do much about the rules… but I’m afraid they’re tougher now.’

Josephine nodded but said nothing, and her face had gone very blank.

‘Come round to the lab on Beagle sometime, if you like,’ Dr Muldoon said kindly, turning back to her screens.

Hugging her tablet to her chest, Josephine turned quietly back to the door. But I couldn’t help asking: ‘What’s living on Mars really like ?’

‘Make sure you’re careful,’ said Dr Muldoon. ‘It’ll kill you if you give it the chance.’ She looked at us again, and her face softened. ‘It’s beautiful, though. It’s home.’

Obviously the issue of what Mars was going to be like was on everyone’s minds, and there were some orientation sessions to give us an idea of what to expect. They were not very reassuring.

‘You must never leave Beagle Base unless you’re accompanied by an EDF officer or one of the civilian robots,’ said Crewman Devlin. ‘There are still flash floods and dust storms, and you’ll need extra oxygen if you’re out on the surface for any length of time.’

The Exo-Defence Force School at Beagle Base would be run in English, Mandarin, Hindi and Spanish, and if you already spoke one of those as a first language then you had to learn another one to make it a bit fairer for everyone else. This left a lot of people thoroughly fed up, but at least there were enough people who spoke French, say, or Arabic, that they could talk to each other. The worst off were the twenty poor kids like Obsiye from Somalia and Taimi from Finland who were stuck being the only person speaking their particular language and were going to be that way for a long time. There would be messages beamed out to us from Earth sometimes, but we were trying to hide our channels from the Morrors so we couldn’t just bat emails back and forth whenever we wanted. And it can take as much as forty minutes for a signal from Mars to get to Earth, so you couldn’t have any kind of phone conversation anyway.

We were going to have to get used to each other.

And one person everyone was already having to get used to was Carl Dalisay. He was hard to miss, partly because he was one of the reigning champions of the Getting Around as Much of the Spaceship as Possible Without Touching the Floor game, (indeed, he was rumoured to have invented it), but mainly as an activist and Leader of the Resistance – that is, because of his ongoing campaign to stop the crew gassing us unconscious every night.

‘OK, PHASE ONE,’ he yawped the afternoon after the deputation failed, while some of us were minding our own business and trying to do useful things like learn Hindi. And then kids started marching purposefully down the aisles and the crew exchanged oh-God-not-again looks.

Carl’s tously little brother came past our cubicle with a tablet and said, ‘Er, hi. We’re doing a petition? About the sleeping stuff ? Could you, um…?’

The text of the petition wasn’t exactly elaborate. It just read:

‘They do already know we don’t like it,’ I said. But I signed it anyway, partly because I didn’t want to give anyone the impression I did like it, and partly because I felt sorry for the kid. He was only about eight, with gappy teeth and a rather pinched, homesick little face. He did not strike me as cut out for a life of protest politics in space. I said, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Noel. Um, Dalisay, obviously…’

‘And he is called Carl? Not Kuya?’

‘Kuya just means Older Brother,’ said Noel, shrugging.

Josephine’s arm emerged suddenly from under the table and Noel jumped. She’d been sitting cross-legged under there not talking to anyone, which was the kind of thing she did sometimes.

‘Give it here,’ Josephine said, reaching for the petition. She took quite some time over it, and when she passed it back, it turned out she’d written a whole paragraph:

We deserve a better answer than that there is a war on. War does not justify something just because you want it to. Therefore I wish to protest in the strongest possible terms your indiscriminate and punitive use of a substance whose safety record has never been shared with us. Sincerely, Josephine Jerome.

As I was reading it, Josephine poked her head out from under the table and peered at Noel with narrowed eyes. She asked, ‘Is that a snail ?’

Noel blushed, clapped a cupped hand protectively over something that was crawling up his sleeve, squeaked, ‘No!’ and scurried away.

Anyhow, obviously the petition didn’t work, even though I think every kid on the ship signed it. Except that Captain Mendez made an announcement informing us that Somnolum X’s safety record was excellent , thank you very much. But still Carl did not give up.

Phase two started with about ten Australian voices, an hour before Somnolum X time. ‘ Don’t push the button ,’ they all chanted in unison. ‘ Don’t push the button. ’ At once, other voices joined in. By the time the chant was happening in every language on the ship at once, it sounded fairly hellish. But even though it was so clearly a losing battle, I did sort of admire Carl’s persistence. I told Josephine so.

‘Oh, this doesn’t count as persistence any more,’ she muttered crossly. ‘This is just showing off .’

I joined in anyway, and Josephine, who was trying to read, shot me a look of complete betrayal. The only result of the chanting was that Crewman Devlin pressed the button half an hour earlier than normal, and Josephine woke up the next morning with a very dim view of Carl Dalisay indeed. This didn’t get any better that night, when they started chanting again, and even earlier this time – two hours before the usual Somnolum X time. Josephine snapped after five minutes of it and shouted, ‘SHUT UP!’ to the spaceship in general. And then Lilly and Gavin had another go at her for being a suck-up in the exercise room the next day, and I had to enlist Kayleigh to help make them leave her alone.

But we still didn’t actually know Carl – until he embarked on phase three.

On the fifth day we were just finishing lunch when I saw Josephine raise her eyes suspiciously towards the ceiling. I didn’t see anything, but I could hear a scuffling, scrambling noise as if there was a rat up there. You never want there to be a rat in the ceiling but particularly not on a spaceship. We both got up and stood staring as the noise came closer, and then suddenly a bit of panelling gave way and Carl tumbled through and knocked us over and this is how we met him properly.