“We’ve ignored it, with a few notable exceptions, ever since Lowell trained his telescope on it and thought he could see canals.”
“But it’s still ours. It’s our backyard.”
“Take a look at your screen, Leroy. Pull it out and spool up those pictures your colleague McMasters is looking at.”
Johnson reluctantly slipped the tablet from his thigh and accessed the video. “These ones?”
“Those exact ones. What do you suppose they’re doing, crawling around in that red dust? What do you suppose they’re saying to each other while they’re doing it?” He dabbed his thick finger at the surface, of the screen, of Mars. “Whose yard does this look like?”
Bradbury had a point. He knew he had a point because Bradbury wouldn’t have a point without him thinking it too. “It, it looks like their yard,” conceded Johnson. “I’m conflicted.”
“Sure you are. You’ve got braid on your arm because you were smart and followed orders. You feel obligated to the suits and the hats because they put you where you are. Where are you, Leroy?”
“I’m on the first manned spaceship to orbit Mars, to meet the first aliens we’ve ever known.”
“Then why are you so miserable about it?” Bradbury’s face broke into a wide smile, and he banged the table with the flat of hand hard enough to make Johnson jump. “I’d have sold my soul to be here in the flesh. What an incredible, startling opportunity, what an unexpected, unlooked-for gift! You should be happy and excited: if it was me, I’d be going to the bathroom every five minutes.”
Johnson felt so sick he started looking around the cabin for a barf-bag. “You know my orders.”
“Screw your orders,” he yelled, still grinning. “Whose goddamn story is this?”
“Yours?”
“You’d better hope not. Or one of Bob’s, either: he’d have had you in a five-way marriage and running around the ship naked by now.” Bradbury reached out and punched Johnson’s shoulder. “It’s your story, Leroy. Only you can write the ending.”
Johnson rubbed his arm. He’d felt it properly, the impact, the way it rocked him off his axis. He looked first at the little beetle things crawling over the face of Mars, the tracks radiating from the five-petalled flower of their base. It looked tiny but it covered a couple of city blocks’ worth of soil. The beetles were as big as submarines.
Then he looked at Bradbury’s solemn, hopeful face. He’d seen that exact same expression staring out at him from the back cover of an ancient copy of The Illustrated Man, lit by flickering torchlight under the warm tent of his blankets.
“Right.” Johnson stood up, too quickly. He bounced across the kitchen and into the lockers opposite. He barely got his hands up in time to ward off the stinging blow, and ended up settled on his back against the central ladder.
“You okay, son?”
“I’ll be just fine.” He pulled himself upright and shook himself down. He started climbing. “Thanks, Mr Bradbury.”
“Don’t mention it, son.”
He was outside the Pacific, tethered to a loading point, lights from his helmet making bright circles on the white-grey of the hull, while behind him, was Mars. It was so close he could reach out and touch it: its smooth white cap, its soft rust plains, its mountain-high volcanoes. It had translucent pearl clouds and storms of pink, and as the terminator swept across its surface it was softened with dusk. It was huge, and in the shadow of the great black radiator fin, it gave him light and hope.
His regulator made little noises, gentle gasps and sighs, and his earpieces a regular two-second tick to show he was still connected. His radio popped and spiked with radiation as he worked the electric screwdriver, undogging the panel on the side of the stubby launch tube.
He’d been trained to do that kind of finger-delicate and methodical work by the very people he was now betraying. The heavy weight of irony was right there: he wasn’t a space-walk virgin, banging around with a wrench and pliers, hoping to get lucky. He knew exactly what he was doing, hard though it was.
Harder than it needed to be, too, because his co-pilot refused to come out of his cradle. Every time Johnson had dragged it blinking into the light, Yussef had just cranked it back closed with him still inside it. So while he really needed the human finesse on the attitude jets to keep him in sunlight, he’d had to cope with gross control from a computer that sometimes wouldn’t quite catch his meaning.
He’d been outside for almost three hours, and he’d disabled three of the four missiles: nothing fancy, he left the warheads alone, and instead opened up the casing to access the rocket motors. They were solid fueclass="underline" no pumps to damage or tanks to bleed, but the propellant still needed a spark to ignite it. Sabotage was nothing more than cutting out a finger-length of wire and bending the ends on themselves. Six times he’d done that, twice per two-stage missile, and he was on the last launcher.
He put each bolt on a magnetic pad as he unwound it, and tagged the panel to stop it from drifting away.
“Hey, Leroy? How’s it going?”
His head rang. “Mr Bradbury. Not so loud.”
“Sorry, son. How does Mars look now?”
“Same as before.” Johnson adjusted his position astride the launch tube so he could turn from the waist: his neck ring wasn’t that flexible and the bulky life-support pack restricted his movements further. “Big. Red,” he said.
“Come on, Leroy, don’t let me down.”
“I’m alone, in a space suit, trying to disable four nuclear-armed rockets strapped to the outside of a spaceship in orbit around another planet. You wanting me to play tourist isn’t making this any easier.”
“Humour an old man. What can you see?”
“One last one, then you leave me alone.” He swung his leg slowly up and over the launcher tube while holding on to the open hatch. “Mars is huge, takes up almost half the sky. I can almost see the underside of the polar clouds, and it’s sunrise on the summit of Olympus Mons. I can cover Phobos with my fist, but it’s coming up fast, and it’s going to be right overhead in an hour. I should be inside by then, because that’ll scare the crap out of me otherwise.”
“You’re a fortunate man, Leroy Johnson. No one alive has seen the sights you have. We can send all the robots we like, but it takes humanity to put the soul into exploration.”
“Okay, Mr Bradbury, that’s enough. I’ve got to get back to work.” He wondered what the others made of it, him talking to himself like that. But maybe they hadn’t heard him. Maybe Abe was too busy trying to decypher the alien language, and Rusa concentrating too hard on debugging the code, and Judi had her head in some compartment somewhere focussing on fixing rather than listening. And Yussef wouldn’t hear him while he was asleep.
Perhaps Bradbury was the only one he could talk to. Perhaps that had always been true.
He turned back to the launcher, and the crouching missile it shrouded.
Johnson cycled the airlock. From feeling the door lock behind him and the floor shiver, to hearing the chug of the pumps only took a minute. The red tell-tale stayed on until ship pressure had been achieved, but as soon as his space suit retreated from balloon-like stiffness, he started to open it up.
Air hissed out as he broke the seal and misted the airlock with moisture. He could smell the cold, sweet welding-smoke scent that clung to the white cover of the suit.
The tell-tale on the inner door stayed stubbornly red.
He scowled, the deep, tired lines between his brows deepening. He spoke into his suit microphone.
“Hey. Judi? The airlock seems to be stuck. Can you come and check it out?”
No answer.
“Judi? Abe? Rusa?”
No answer.
“Mo? Wake up, Mo.”