My voice sounded very strange and looming, like when someone suddenly speaks after a long silence during a night journey in a car. It was as if this planet wasn’t used to human voices.
Tommy:
Angela and Dixon fetched Mike down from the capsule and settled him on the ground, still fast asleep. He came round a few hours later. There was no screaming and yelling this time. He just wandered through the trees like the rest of us and found a place to sit down and stare and try and take it all in. It turned out that he was some kind of amateur naturalist back home – he went on bird-watching holidays and stuff like that with his wife and kids – and now he had a whole new set of plants and animals to explore. It was him that came up with the theory that the trees worked like radiators, pumping water through hot rocks underground, circulating it through their branches, and warming the surrounding air. They got their energy from the planet’s core, he reckoned, instead of from a sun.
Eventually everyone got hungry and we reconvened round the capsule for a share of the rations we’d brought down with us. We supplemented this cautiously with fruit we’d found on the trees. Most of it turned out to be good to eat.
“Isn’t this great?” exclaimed Dixon, munching contentedly, his back against a warm tree-trunk. “This is what it must have been like in Eden before the Fall.”
And Eden is what we decided to call the place.
Angela:
Mehmet was the one I got on best with. He was friendly and interested and fun to be with. Dixon was okay I suppose but I was really angry with him for selfishly doing the leap when Mike and I were so close. I’m not a person that likes to hold grudges but I really did need to get some of that anger off my chest before I could get along with him – and he simply wouldn’t let me. Whenever I tried to challenge him, he just said that God had told him to make the leap: the fact that we’d found Eden was proof of it.
‘I’m sorry I dragged you away from your family and your friends Angela,’ would have been nice, or even: ‘I quite understand why you’re so angry.’
But I wasn’t going to get any of that. Instead it was: ‘Angela, you need to try and accept the will of God.’
The will of God! The arrogant prig! It seems wrong to talk about him like that now, after what’s happened since to the poor bloke, but that’s how I felt at the time.
Mike, on the hand, was really sweet in this context. Free of the role of RAF officer and free of the fear of space, he became a sort of gentle, dreamy, solitary child. He’d spend his time making lists of all the animals and plants he could find, and giving them names.
But Tommy, he really got on my nerves. He tried to be charming and helpful but he was this world-famous lady-killer and he couldn’t forget it. In one way I felt that he just took it for granted that I’d want to fall at his feet, yet in another way he was quite afraid of me and needed to keep testing me out all the time to see if he could get a reaction and work out where he stood with me. So he was complacent and insecure, both at the same time, a weird and seriously irritating combination.
Annoyingly, though, he was just as handsome as he’d always looked on TV, so you couldn’t help looking at him, whether you wanted to or not.
Tommy:
Angela was graceful, funny, natural. I thought she was wonderful. Stranded a million light-years away from home and very probably in the final days of her life, she was dignified and undefeated and unbowed.
I’ve been with all kinds of women in my life – models, film stars, university professors, athletes and, yes, I admit it, even whores – and I guess what everyone says about me is true in a way. Women are not just people to me: they are also a kind of addictive drug. But, and I guess this is the part that many people don’t understand, I really do like women. I mean I just like being with them, I like them as human beings – and I always have. I remember when I was five years old my teacher asked the whole class one day to pair up for a walk in the local park – and all the boys looked for other boys and all the girls looked for other girls, but I risked the ridicule of everyone to ask a girl called Susan if I could hold her hand. I remember another time I was chasing round the school yard with a bunch of boys, yelling and hollering and waving sticks around, when I noticed a bunch of girls quietly playing in a tree. And suddenly I wanted to be in their game with them, their quiet game, and not with the boys at all. That’s how I felt about Angela. I just wanted her to let me join in her game.
The sad thing was, she didn’t like me at all. Every time I tried to talk to her, she ended the conversation as quickly as she could. Whatever tack I tried with her, I could see she saw it all as some kind of trick. Yet she would sit for hours with that goddamned Turk, talking and laughing away like they’d known each other forever.
Angela:
When we’d been there the equivalent of two or three Earth days we started to ask each other the question ‘What happens next?’
I wanted to know what the chances were of getting successfully back to Earth. Dixon immediately said that he had no doubt at all that God would see us safely home to bear witness to the new Eden. But Mehmet and Tommy thought that it would take at least three leaps to get back to Earth and that each leap would have no more than a 25% chance of success. A quarter of a quarter of a quarter: that was a one in sixty-four chance of getting back alive. A fourth leap, which we’d quite likely need, would knock those odds down to one in two hundred and fifty-six. A fifth leap was apparently out of the question. We just didn’t have the power.
“There is an alternative, though,” I said. “We could stay here.”
“That’s true,” said Tommy. “Or some of us could stay here while the others tried to get back. If they succeeded, they could send out another crew in the Reckless or the Maverick, to fetch back the ones who’d stayed.”
“But if they failed, the ones who’d stayed would have to grow old and die alone,” said Mehmet with a shudder. “Okay I know it’s pretty here, but to live a whole lifetime here and die here and …”
He broke off, and no one spoke for a little bit.
“Not necessarily grow old and die alone,” I eventually said. “Not if I was one of the ones who stayed and one of you stayed with me. We could have babies, and then we wouldn’t be alone. We could start a whole new race.”
Men are funny prudish creatures in some ways. They all visibly squirmed – and then they all laughed loudly to cover up their unease.
I told them I wasn’t kidding. I’d stay here with any one of them, or more than one if they liked, and if the Defiant didn’t make it back and the Reckless and the Maverick never came, I would make babies with whoever was with me.
Tommy:
I wanted to shout, ‘Me! I’ll stay!’, but I honestly wasn’t sure whether I was included in the invitation. Dixon put on his religious voice and said he was married. Mike and Mehmet both said they had to at least try to get back to their kids.
“How about you, then Tommy?” Angela asked.
I was amazed.
Angela:
Tommy and I gave them two months, two Earth months. If no one had come back for us by then, it would mean the Defiant had definitely failed to get through.
Two Earth months was April 8th. The date didn’t mean anything, of course, in constant Eden, which has no days or nights or sun or moon and (as it turns out) doesn’t even change its own position relative to the distant galaxy, or not so you’d notice. But we still followed Earth time on our watches, and hung onto some kind of notion of months and days. And both of us started keeping a diary record on pocket recorders.