- WE ARE MARTIAN !

- WE ARE MARTIAN.

BY

G.F. SHERIDAN.

Other Books by G.F. Sheridan:

Reach for Mars. - Now re-printed as the Collector’s Edition.

PREVIOUSLY IN

‘REACH FOR MARS’.

I am writing this two and a half years since we returned to Mars with the crew from the International Space Station. It has certainly been a very eventful, challenging, and satisfying time here on Mars.

We all worked together as an extremely effective crew and soon developed a highly productive and well-organized working routine. So much so that some long and tedious jobs that needed to be done were polished off in a surprisingly short time.

No one in our crew worked harder (or could have worked harder) than Grizzly. He had the strength of an ox, as his stature would imply. If we had asked him to pull a plow across all the plots in the terrarium, I believe he could have and would have, but we didn’t of course. He and I were both toiling in the terrarium one day and Grizzly took his sweat-sodden shirt off and laid it on the lid of the composting structure to dry off. Then he continued working. He looked like the Incredible Hulk, but much hairier and not at all green, and he didn’t roar quite as much. I once jokingly said to Nick that if we wanted to move the Albatross across the taxiway to the other side of the hangar and couldn’t be bothered to go through the rigmarole of firing up her engines, I bet Grizzly could pick it up and move it for us if we asked him nicely. Nick’s reply, after removing the expletives, was roughly,

“Good luck finding someone to bet against you!”

Our most important priority was getting the terrarium filled with plants and animals, and I am very happy to report that we have had a lot of success so far. Some of the seeds we’d brought with us failed to germinate, but the bulk of them didn’t fail, and with pollination, propagation and determination, we now have more than half of the terrarium filled with healthy fruit trees, other trees, shrubs, and vegetables. It looks, in short, like a jungle up there, but a relatively orderly one.

We had a 100 percent success rate with the animal embryos we brought with us. They survived, they grew, and they reproduced. We now have almost three times the animals we started out with wandering around up there. We would have a bountiful supply of meat for our diets if it weren’t for the unfortunate fact that we became vegetarians as soon as we started bringing the animals to life. Once we had created them, none of us could bring ourselves to kill any of the animals or their offspring. Even Grizzly, who looks like a ravenous wildman, couldn’t do it. As it turns out, he is one of the gentlest beasts on ‘God’s green Earth’, (Sorry—I meant ‘God’s red Mars!’).

 At least we have a plentiful supply of eggs, milk, and—thanks to one of Yelena’s skills—cheese to help fill our plates at meal times. The closest thing to meat we eat is in the few remaining supplies left that we brought with us from Earth. Needless to say there’s a reason why they are still remaining. It is amazing how good a vegetable curry can taste if made by the right hands, and thank God for the efficiency of the air recycling systems in our fair city!

So, do we live in peace and harmony? Mostly I would have to say a loud and resounding yes. There have been a few minor disputes in our time here, but with diplomacy, tact, and reasonable and learned advice from Nick and me, Dick usually heeded our recommendations to pull his head in, shut up and piss off, or die. For the most part, the city has been filled with laughter, camaraderie, and happy thoughts.

Our population has also been growing in the last two years. Nick and Sammy have an eighteen-month-old daughter, a beautiful, blue-eyed, blond little girl with an engaging, smiling, and placid personality. Unfortunately, with Nick as her father and guiding light, that may slowly change over the next few years. Grizzly and Yelena have also been blessed with a girl, a lovely fifteen-month-old, raven-haired girl with piercing aquamarine-colored eyes. As far as I can tell, she has no body hair yet, but with Grizzly as her father I seriously hope she got the genes that control hair and stature  predominantly from her mother.

I am the proud father of a bouncing eighteen-month-old boy, and I love him with all my heart. I am sure he is the reason I survived all the fire fights and other perils I have lived through, just so I could bring him into the world—sorry, the universe.

Of course, with all these babies being born, we have had to modify our work routines considerably. We set up a nursery in the control building on level seven, adjacent to the terrarium, and had the crew member with the least duties of the day oversee the children. Naturally, Dick and Boris weren’t the slightest bit interested in participating; they didn’t have any children and considered that they were always too busy playing with their computers to spare the time. Needless to say, we were happy about that. I formed the opinion, however, that Nick should not be left alone with small children for any length of time. They were very impressionable and prone to be influenced by the views and attitudes of the adults who guided them.

This was brought to my attention one evening when I was playing with my dearly beloved son. He looked up at me with a huge smile, looked straight into my eyes with his deep emerald green ones (inherited from his mother, of course), and called me an idiot. That had to be Nick’s influence—my son hadn’t known me long enough to know that.

“Mel!” I yelled, and when she came into the room I said,

“Our son just called me an idiot!”

“Well, I suppose you’d better get used to it, then,” she said, chuckling as she returned to the kitchen.

It was then that I began to wonder whose influence it actually was.

But in general, our city was filled with laughter, camaraderie, and happy thoughts.

As we were progressing so quickly with the building of our future in the city, I started taking T-2 out to survey, map, and photograph the Martian landscapes surrounding us and gradually expanding outward. A month ago I was out on one such trip when I received a radio call. It was very faint, with a lot of interference, so I could hardly hear the voice and I couldn’t make any sense of what it was saying, but it sounded like it was in a strange language so I wouldn’t have been able to make any sense of it anyway. I immediately sent back a message:

“This is the Albatross on Mars returning your call. I did not understand your message; please repeat it. Over.”

All I heard back was the sound of a weak carrier beam and a lot of static, but no voice this time. Then the hum of the carrier beam died. I carried on and completed my mission, and then I returned to base. I told the rest of the crew about the phantom radio call and asked if they had tried to call me. I think Nick put it best when he said,

“Why the fuck would we want to call you?” (Fair enough, and well said.)

Another strange thing happened on a flight two weeks later. I happened to overfly the pyramid and the face on Mars area, but the cameras failed so I wasn’t able to take pictures. I have to admit, though, that I could not see a face. There were some interesting surface formations, but none of them looked like a face, at least from my height above the surface. I did see a possible pyramid shape rising from the landscape, but it was so thickly shrouded in dust that I would have to say it was inconclusive. The odd thing was that after I had overflown the area, all the cameras started working faultlessly once more. Intrigued by this, I overflew the mountain containing the city and tried to photograph it on my return; the cameras failed yet again. Very interesting, I thought to myself as I flew into the hangar.

I told the assembled crew that evening what I had found on my flight that day, and it was greeted with great interest. Dick was especially excited about it,

“There must be some sort of electronic cloaking devices over their installations on Mars, and that’s why the cameras failed!”

“Why would they have installed cloaking devices?” I asked him,

“I don’t know—so their enemies couldn’t find them, I guess.”

“Dick, we have searched just about every square inch of this city and have not found one defensive or offensive weapon yet. They had no enemies to worry about. I am pretty sure this was a base from which they could launch to explore this corner of the galaxy. It was a pioneer outpost, not a strategic military base. I’m sure you would have found a full account of weaponry installed in this base while you were on their computers, just as I’m sure it would have been rated high priority on those computers,” I assured him.

“Well then, why the electronic cloaking?”

“I don’t know, but now you have something to ponder on,” I said.

After two and a half years, it is looking like we are having a gradual effect on the

Martian atmosphere with our attempts at terraforming Mars. We built some of the bio

domes on the plain where the remotes are parked and filled them with plants. The plants are thriving in them and the gases and moisture produced by them are vented into the atmosphere through a chamber in the roof of each biodome. We also quickly found out that the city terrarium also has a venting chamber, which is far larger and more efficient, of course.

According to the gauges that read the outside temperature, it has risen a few degrees in the past year and there may have been a slight increase in moisture content as well. Mel claims that she was working alone in the terrarium last week when the sunlight suddenly dimmed ever so slightly; she looked up in time to see a small wisp of a cloud passing across the sun. This has caused a lot of good-natured ribbing from the crew, led by me of course: “What plants are you smoking up there? I’d like to try some!” Which of course earned me a blow to the ribs, but she’s not as fit as she once was, so it didn’t hurt quite so much.

Thinking about it, I suppose it isn’t beyond the realm of possibility that it could have been a cloud. I was out in T-2 recently surveying, mapping, and photographing the landscapes north of the city and saw what looked like a couple of green patches in a protected fissure in a gully. It may have been vegetation, but it was in extremely rough terrain so I couldn’t land and investigate it.

Epilogue

As we occasionally found ourselves with some free time, some of us began taking up hobbies. Not surprisingly, Nick, Grizzly and I decided to try our hands at fermenting grapes. As with all the plants being grown in the terrarium, the grape vines were growing extremely well and were producing bountiful supplies of big, luscious grapes. We, of course, didn’t want to let any of them go to waste. In the beginning, however, a lot did go to waste because our first attempts were terrible. It seemed a very bad idea to drink our early batches because just sniffing the concoctions burned our nostrils for days afterward, so we didn’t.

With trial and error, however, along with practice and the addition of biochemical knowledge from Mel and Sammy, we did get a lot better. Some of our latest offerings were quite pleasant on the palate. We are now thinking of fashioning a still for the fermentation of sugar, and maybe another one for potatoes (got to keep the Grizz happy, you know).

Well, I guess that pretty well brings this historical record up to date so far. I thought it might be a good idea to start this record chronicling our time on Mars—how we got here, why we’re still here, and how we are doing. I will do my best to keep it updated whenever I have a spare moment.

Oh, and before I wander off to do something useful, I would like to add the following anecdote.

Every few days the whole crew gathers together in the terrarium for the evening meal. It is a happy and amusing celebration of the fact that we are still alive and living relatively well. Last night was one of those evenings, and we all had a great time as usual. I picked up the bottle of wine Nick had brought with him and looked at the label, which was a strip of duct tape recording the date the bottle was filled in handwritten laundry marker.

“Last Tuesday—that’s a very good vintage!” I said.

“I know, and very rare I believe.”

“Indeed. We only got six bottles out of that batch, and numbnuts over there,”—I jerked my head toward Dick—“dropped one and broke it. Blokes don’t shed a tear over spilled milk, but they shed buckets over spilled wine. I nearly bloody killed him!”

Dick didn’t hear me because he was busy raving on about his pet theory to Boris and Natasha once again. How we were Martians before we ever set foot on Mars…that the Martians sent a few starships to Earth way back when the Earth was young, set up bases there, and started to populate the Earth. Either that or the Martians sent groups down to Earth to walk among us primitive, apish primates, taming and educating us and mating with us to start a new race on Earth called mankind. Either way, he claims, we are descended from the Martians who built this city.

There is of course no way of proving or disproving his theory, which of course means that he will most likely never shut up about it, ever! The only possibility is if the Martian computers hold within them historical records of the base, we may eventually find them and find a way of converting them into English. This is Dick’s pet project, and it keeps him out of our hair most of the time, for which we are immensely grateful.

As the sun started to disappear over the horizon, the crew gradually diminished two by two as they retired for the evening until only Mel, our son, and I remained to watch the sun’s dying light highlight the stark redness of the Martian landscape as the shadows grew longer and darker.

We stood there among the palms and other plants we had grown that filled this area of the terrarium, with the animals we had brought from Earth, and to life, wandering about us and our son chasing them as we watched the last rays of the sun fade into darkness. I hugged Mel as the thought suddenly occurred to me that it was quite possible we might be standing in a new Garden of Eden.

******

AND NOW LET US PRESS ON

WITH THE TALE:

We Are Martian.

Prologue

TERRAFORMING: To set in motion a series of events that will ultimately transform an alien atmosphere into something similar to Earth’s in order to facilitate human habitation without the support of space suits or any other protective or supportive equipment.

So the question is, how to terraform a planet like Mars into a life-sustaining environment similar to that on Mother Earth? It’s actually not as difficult as you would expect—although Mars is roughly one-third the size and mass of Earth, it can still create a gravity field strong enough to retain a breathable atmosphere and a reasonable atmospheric pressure. The real problem is creating the atmosphere and air pressure to begin with, along with the buffers to break down the ultraviolet and gamma rays from the sun and space before they reach the surface of Mars…and the humans walking upon it.

Yet another problem is increasing the ambient temperature of the planet’s surface, which is so cold that carbon dioxide is frozen into dry ice on the surface; it is especially cold at the south polar cap, but the entire surface of Mars is so cold as to be uninhabitable without suitable protection. By implementing measures to solve this problem also goes a long way to solving the first problem until a point is reached where the measures to solve each problem start to interact and begin to solve both problems virtually hand in hand.

It is interesting to note that Mars’s atmosphere consists of 95 percent carbon dioxide (a notorious greenhouse gas according to Earth’s greenies), and yet Mars is a cold and desolate planet. Still, Mars does contain most of the building blocks for life and a breathable atmosphere. We just had to defrost and therefore release it into the atmosphere. In order to raise the temperature and thicken the atmosphere of Mars, we release shitloads more carbon dioxide from the poles and the surface of Mars by heating and melting the dry ice on the surface and within the regolith (basically the dirt on the underlying surface).

It also helps to throw lots of chlorofluorocarbons (another dirty word in the Greenie Bible) into the atmosphere to help warm the atmosphere as well as buffer it against the aforementioned harmful invading ultraviolet and gamma rays. Basically, we had to pollute the Martian atmosphere to buggery to make Mars habitable for us humans. (Go figure!) Thank God there were no greenies in our crew (but of course there would never be, because a greenie would never venture forth from his, her or its comfy, taxpayer-funded den to do anything useful or productive), and I thank the Lord for that. Otherwise, the future of mankind would involve the constant wearing of space suits for all time and living in caves forever, as well as paying a fortune in carbon taxes (all for the good of this godforsaken, lifeless planet, of course).

However, even with the godsent lack of greenies to prevent the completion of our mission, we still had many logistical problems to overcome. Thanks to our ‘great and valiant’ leaders, who decided to blow our home planet to kingdom come, we could not complete the mission using the methods that were originally planned. We would not be receiving the deliveries of equipment from Earth that were planned to facilitate our terraforming of Mars, such as the solar mirrors that would reflect and concentrate sunlight onto the polar caps to heat and release the carbon dioxide frozen there into the atmosphere, for example. We would not, in fact, be receiving anything we needed from ‘Mother Earth’ anymore.

This was not, however, as huge a catastrophe as you might at first surmise. Fuel we had in abundance to run the rovers, because the remotes were still processing and storing fuel from the Martian atmosphere. The by-products of that process were water and oxygen, so we had ample and endless supplies of both of those necessities. The fuel processed by the remotes consisted of methane and oxygen, and methane is a chlorofluorocarbon. Thus, as we had plenty to spare, we would vent the storage tanks in the remotes into the Martian atmosphere every few weeks. We knew it would be a very long while before any visible effect would be noticed, but you do what you can with what you’ve got. Also,  the Albatross still had slightly more than half of her fuel load left in her tanks, and she hardly went anywhere anymore, so we had plenty of hydrogen, a gas not readily available on Mars at this stage and necessary as a chemical feedstock for the processing of the Martian atmosphere into fuel, oxygen, and water. There is also another factor that I like to call the snowball effect. Nobody else likes me calling it that, but I don’t give a rat’s ass—I am the one writing this historical chronicle after all.

Anyway, over time, if you can increase the atmospheric temperature by as few as four degrees centigrade through polluting the atmosphere, then the frozen ice starts to melt and release the carbon dioxide gas into the atmosphere all by itself. This helps warm the planet surface, thereby melting and releasing more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and increasing the core temperature of the surface…thereby melting more dry ice. I think you know where I’m going with this, boys and girls, but only time will tell if we are right. It is unlikely that we, the original crew, will ever be able to dance and prance about the Martian landscape without space suits, but if we are able to survive, it is entirely possible that our children will be able to.

Although only God knows why the hell they would feel the need or desire to dance and prance about the landscape in the first place!

QUOTE:

“Lets just deal with what’s happening now and worry about the future later”

Nick Watson. Circa AD 2017.

Chapter 1.

I cannot believe that it has been five years since I last made an entry in this Historical Chronicle. My only excuse is that so much has been happening in that time that I have not had a chance to sit and write it all down until now,( after all, building a new civilization for Mankind (and of course, Womankind) on a godforsaken, inhospitable, barren and alien planet can take up quite a lot of a person’s available free time you know). Truth be told, it has been a very hectic, busy, and exhausting,(yet very productive), five years. There have been hardships and challenges along the way, and there have been a few earth-shattering (pardon the pun) surprises, all of which have given us very interesting lives and also increased our confidence in our chances of survival on this planet and in this universe by a significant margin. I hardly know where to begin, but I figure that if I try to continue from where I left off, that might be a good place to start.

So here we go!

As previously mentioned, the addition of the six crew members we had rescued from the International Space Station to join our happy little crew were making a huge difference to the progress of our “strive to survive” campaign. Surely—but not slowly—the plots in the terrarium on the top level of this fair city inside a mountain were being filled with healthy plants, growing faster and more vigorously every week. The plantations had gotten to the stage where we had to organize harvesting crews to pick the fruits, nuts, and so forth off the trees once and sometimes even twice a month.

Eventually the terrarium was full of fruit trees, nut trees, banana trees, coconut trees, pear trees (complete with partridges at Christmas hopefully…and quite possibly) as well as just about any other tree or shrub you can think of. We also had a huge amount of stuff growing underground—beetroot, parsnips, onions, carrots, and of course, that age-old staple that nobody, especially Irishmen and Russians (for totally different reasons), could live without, potatoes. And I’m sure you won’t be too surprised to learn that we also have quite a large crop of sugar cane growing up there.

After the annihilation of life on our home planet as we were rocketing through space toward Mars we were left alone in space with no other choice but to proceed to Mars and try to complete our mission, only now the goal was for our own survival without hope of any support, succor, or supply from our home planet. If not for the discovery of this abandoned, self-contained, underground city shortly after landing on Mars, we would not have reached this stage of colonization or advancement. We would in fact have been living like primitive Neanderthals, albeit in airtight biodomes instead of caves and in space suits instead of loincloths.

Who built this city and for what purpose we neither knew nor cared, (except Dick, of course, who started babbling on about it being a pioneering outpost, built as a base to explore this end of the universe and colonize the Earth). All the rest of us cared about was the fact that once we got the life-support and all other systems of the city online and running, we could live and build and grow stuff much more easily and quickly than our original mission parameters had allowed.

Thanks to all of this, it was literally becoming a jungle up there in the terrarium, but a well-planned and controlled jungle (we hoped). We were so proud of our success that we started to wonder what else we could do to show off as well as fill the pages of this chronicle with our inspiring and impressive ingenuities and derring-do’s.And so it was that one night a few weeks after I stopped writing in this chronicle Mel asked me over a romantic candle-lit dinner if we had any biodomes left over that we could deploy somewhere else on the planet. I blew out the romantic candle and glanced across the table at Nick while he thought about it.

“Let’s see…, we’ve got two deployed out on the plain adjacent to the city, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got another two of them in storage,” he said as he lowered his eyes from heaven and looked at me.

“Yeah, sounds about right,” I added.

“Good, I’ve got an idea!” Mel said.

Nick and I were still staring at each other, for we both knew that one way or another, this would not be good news for him or me.

She went on to explain to everyone in the cafeteria, which was the whole crew who basically just wanted to eat their dinner, her grand idea. We would venture forth with said biodomes in tow and set them up. (She had never built one, so she had no idea what it was like to build a  flat-packed biodome). She then went on to explain the basics of terraforming a virgin planet into a beautiful new world where you could prance and dance about in a life-sustaining and breathable environment without space suits. We, of course, already knew all this, as we had read the same manuals, but we let her continue as it seemed important to her. I did, however, make a mental note that when it did become possible to prance and dance about the planet without a space suit (or even with one for that matter), it would be immediately outlawed on the grounds that it was totally unnecessary and would look absolutely ridiculous.

The manuals she was quoting from that we had read and studied so many times over the past eight years stated a number of basic scientific facts to know if we wanted to rebuild a planet such as Mars. All of those facts thumbed their noses at the Greenie Bible (or dogma).

Basically, Mel believed that venting gases only from our location would not be effective enough in the long term, so we should build biodomes on the other side of Mars to start “polluting” that side as well. As I listened to her, I had to agree with her reasoning, but I was also considering the logistics of what she was proposing and how to overcome the problems that I expected to arise, so when she had finished speaking, I almost applauded. As I was about to bring my hands together, I glanced across the table at Nick, saw the disdainful glare on his face, and lowered my hands quietly to rest on the table instead.

After Nick and I had finished our dinners, we grabbed our glasses of red wine, made our excuses, and took ourselves up to the control tower on level six, where the maps and photos of the Martian surface were stored. We pored over them, looking for a likely site to position the biodomes and argued over the pros and cons of each site that was suggested. Eventually, I dropped my extended right index finger onto a crater on the map we were studying and said,

“What about the crater where the alien shipwreck is?”

Nick pushed my finger aside and studied the crater that had been revealed on the map.  

“Yeah, it’s as good a place as any, I suppose,” Nick said, and we began plotting where each of the biodomes could be placed.

“It’s going to be a pain in the ass carting water and oxygen over there every week to feed and water the plants, though,” Nick complained.

“Maybe not,” I said as I grabbed a large piece of paper, a large pencil, and a large ruler and started to draw up a large blueprint. When I was satisfied with my efforts, I slid the paper across the desk to Nick, who looked down at it and then up at me.

“Very impressive, but what the hell is it?”

“It’s a schematic diagram of the grid of water pipelines and oxygen feed lines that we will be laying to service the biodomes.”

“OK, what is this big circular thing that all the lines and pipes are coming out of?”

“A remote we will fly over there and leave parked in the crater to process the Martian atmosphere as well as feed and water the plants in the biodomes automatically. That way we only have to fly over there once a month or so to check on progress and vent the storage tanks into the atmosphere.”

“A remote YOU will fly over there and leave parked in the crater,‘cause I am never going to fly one of those pigs ever again! I’ll pick you up in T-2 for the return journey.”

“Aye, aye, Captain—you big Wuss!”

“That’s ‘You big Wuss, Sir!’”

We had selected a crater almost exactly on the opposite side of the planet from the city, deep enough that the biodomes were protected from the worst of the Martian winds but not too deep to shade them from the sun. After studying the photos and maps of the area, we decided to fly one of the remote ships over there tomorrow with T-2, park the remote in the crater, and check out the crater firsthand, until I asked,

“Aren’t the biodomes still on the Albatross?”

“Oh yeah, they are,” Nick replied after much thought.

“Then maybe it would be a better idea for you to fly the Albatross out to the crater tomorrow instead of T-2. Surely it would be easier and quicker to unload them straight from the Albatross, don’t you think?”

“OK, smartass!”

We then returned to the cafeteria and informed the rest of the crew what we were going to be doing in the morning. Grizzly, Mel, and Sammy volunteered to come with us and work out what would be needed to complete the task. We would then return to the city in the afternoon and load up T-2 with the necessary equipment the following day, before flying T-2 back to the crater to live in until we had finished setting up over there.

So it was that I found myself sitting parked outside Nick’s place at 0600 hours the following morning waiting (not so) patiently while Nick and Sammy loaded themselves and a number of cases into my buggy.

“You do realize that we are only going to be over at the crater for the day, so you only have to take a packed lunch with you.”

“We are, plus a few instruments for testing soil samples and such,” Sammy replied.

I left it at that and shut up. If it had just been Nick, I would have found it entertaining to argue with him for an hour or so, but I avoided arguing with women whenever I possibly could on the principle that a guy can never win, even though he so often should. When they were finally loaded, I drove up to the hangar deck and then waited (somewhat) patiently while they unloaded their packed lunch and instruments into the Albatross. I then kissed Mel goodbye and put my helmet on, sealed it, and cracked the oxygen bottle open to fill my space suit.

Mel would be flying with Nick, Sammy, and Grizzly to the crater aboard the Albatross while I drove across the plain and into a remote to fly there alone. I drove over to the hangar doors and parked in front of them, and then I twisted around in my seat to watch the Albatross fire up her engines. The pilot inside me still got a thrill every time I watched her come to life with fire belching from all of her thrusters. While they were warming up at idle burn, Dick activated the airlock system, and when the hangar doors slid open I drove out and headed toward the remote I had selected to fly over to the crater. I stopped and watched Albatross accelerating rapidly as she flew over me, blasting toward the crater on the other side of Mars. Only after her tail fire had dwindled into the distance did I continue on to the selected remote to follow her.

After driving the buggy into the cargo hold, I parked and battened it down, and then I activated the controls to recall the motorized carriage carrying the nuclear processing reactor back into the remote. After closing and sealing the hull, I walked through the ship to the cockpit. It was like walking through a ghost ship, totally devoid of any sign of present or previous human occupation. The only thing missing to complete the picture of a ghost ship were cobwebs, which of course couldn’t exist in an oxygen-deficient environment. Even spiders can’t survive for very long in a vacuum, and as the remotes had never been manned, the life-support systems had never been switched on.

I dropped into the pilot’s seat and started punching the series of buttons and flicking the switches to activate the flight-control systems and monitors of the ship. When they had fired up and were giving me good readings of the ship’s flight status, I pushed the throttles to the max and hit the fuel feed pumps to blow any built-up Martian dust out of the thrusters and facilitate startup. Knowing that I had flooded the thrusters with fuel, I waited a few minutes before I hit the ignition buttons so the thrusters would fire up instead of blow up, and I was rewarded for my patience with the sound of all burners firing up. I immediately pulled the throttles back to idle power to let them warm up before they had to fly while I completed the rest of the preflight checks.

Then, for the first time in over two years, the remote ship lifted off the surface of Mars and hovered above it in a cloud of red Martian dust. I moved the throttle levers and sent the ship rocketing across the surface of Mars toward the crater. I set a safe and economical speed to my destination but still found myself setting up for landing within seventy minutes of liftoff. I backed off the throttles and used the bow retro rockets to slow the ship so that it was moving relatively slowly forward as it approached the crater. I spotted the Albatross parked in the crater and touched down as close as I safely could to it.

I hadn’t bothered to switch on the life-support systems of the ship for such a short trip, so I was still fully suited and therefore didn’t have to mess around with pressure-equalizing airlocks. Consequently, I was in my buggy and on the surface of Mars less than five minutes after touchdown, heading toward the three suited figures standing in various poses of activity not too far away from the Albatross.

I easily spotted the towering shape of Grizzly gazing about the crater landscape as he meandered hither and thither. As I pulled the buggy up alongside him, he stopped his meandering and raised his hands to rest on his hips while he stared across the crater to where I had parked the remote. He glanced around at me as I climbed out of my buggy.

“Well done; you’ve managed to park that remote exactly where I think is the best position to build the biodomes. That sheer crater wall starboard of the remote would give plenty of protection for the domes from the Martian winds, most of which would come in from that direction, and the domes will still get the most and the best of the sun each day.”

“OK, then. You, Nick, and I can start unloading the domes out of the ship and dumping them over near the remote with the tractor crane for future erection. Where is Nick, by the way?”

“I don’t know; he came out with the rest of us, looked around, and disappeared back into the ship half an hour ago. I haven’t seen him since.”

“Well, let’s go find him then, shall we?”

As I drove the buggy up the ramp into Albatross’s cargo hold, I saw a large number of pallets loaded with equipment sitting in the middle of the cargo floor and the tractor crane heading toward me towing three pallets on its flatbed trailer. I swerved out of the way as Nick drove past me with a wave of his hand and disappeared down the cargo ramp onto the Martian surface. I turned and followed him over to the remote, where he parked in front of the ship’s bow. I jumped out of the buggy and climbed into the crane operator’s seat, and then I unloaded the pallets while Grizzly hooked up the loading chains. Once the pallets were resting safely on the Martian surface, he unhooked them. Nick, who had never left the driver’s seat, immediately started driving back to the Albatross so Grizzly and I could load up more pallets. With the three of us working together as a team like this, everything we needed to build the biodomes, lay the pipes and pumps, and so on was sitting on the Martian surface within three hours of Albatross touching down in the crater. Then we were ready to fly home.

After Nick had parked the tractor in the cargo hold of the remote, we closed and sealed the remote’s cargo door against the ubiquitous Martian dust and drove the buggy back to the Albatross and up the ramp into the cargo hold. I closed and sealed the cargo door as Nick went to the flight deck and fired up the engines for the return flight to the city. I punched the intercom button as I walked to a launch chair and, in my best British accent (which truthfully was not at all good), declared,

“Home, Watson, and don’t spare the horses!”

I only just managed to seat myself and strap in to avoid being flung backward and smeared against the rear bulkhead from the explosive acceleration of the ship. When we reached the cruising speed Nick had set up, I thought about unstrapping myself and bounding up to the cockpit. I then thought twice about it, because I would possibly be smeared against a forward bulkhead, as we would soon be rapidly decelerating so as to fly gently into the city instead of crashing into it. And just as well I did, because just as I finished that thought, I was thrown forward hard against the seatbelt straps as the rapid deceleration began.

After Nick had flown Albatross into the city and settled her gently to the deck, I heard the thunder of her engines wane into silence and unstrapped myself from my chair. I stood over by the cargo bay doors waiting for the all clear to open them. Together, the crew walked down the ramp and separated at the bottom, the girls headed toward the control tower and the labs contained within to study their newly collected samples from the crater. Meanwhile, we guys headed toward the Terminal Café to have some coffee. Once we were comfortably seated at a table with coffee fumes laden with a bit of Northern Queensland sweetener rising from our mugs and filling our nostrils, we started discussing what we thought had to be done and how the hell we would do it. Our discussion was interrupted an hour later when Dick, Courtney, and Boris walked in, grabbed coffees, and sat down at our table wanting to know how it went and what we’d found while we were out there.

“We found the crater we were looking for and dumped the necessary gear in it to build the domes, Dick. With a bit of luck, we’ll be able to find that crater again and be able to put together the stuff we dumped there, at which point all will be right with the world, or at least this world. What did you expect us to find there?”

“Oh, nothing; I was just wondering if you found anything out of the ordinary out there.”

Nick and I looked across the table at each other and then as one we turned to stare at Dick and asked,

“Why?”

“No reason. I’ve only ever been over to that side of the planet once. I just wondered what it looked like.”

“It looks pretty much like this side, Dick—a few more craters, maybe, but pretty much like this side. Also, the crater we’re talking about is the one where the shipwreck lies, so you have been there!” Nick answered. Then he glanced over at me with one of his eyebrows cocked.

I shrugged my shoulders and took a sip of my coffee as if to say, Dick’s just being Dick!

Nick frowned at me as if to say, Well he should bloody well knock it off!

I laughed, causing Dick, Boris, Courtney, and even Grizzly to look at me strangely. Nick and I had flown, traveled, and walked side by side for so many years in each other’s company that we could sometimes read each other’s minds and communicate silently with a look, a gesture, or a subtly extended finger without anyone else being aware of it. But sometimes, like now, it could be embarrassing, so I took another sip of my coffee and started talking about the task ahead of us once more. We had pretty much worked it all out between us when the rest of the crew joined us, so next we had to outline our plan to them. When we had finished, Dick chimed in,

“I think Courtney and I should fly over there with you guys and give you a hand setting it all up.”

Nick and I looked across the table at each other, and then as one we turned to look at Dick and asked,

“Why?”

“We can help you wire up the electrical systems to run all the automatic systems and pumps to feed the biodomes with water and oxygen, and anything else that is needed.”

“Yeah, but we could be over there for a month or more until it’s all up and running.”

“True, but it might get finished a lot sooner with us to help you,” Dick pointed out.

I glanced over at Nick and saw the same look of sullen resignation in his eyes that I was sure he saw reflected in mine.

We spent the next day packing provisions and loading them as well as the equipment we had decided we needed to take with us onto T-2. When we had finished, we gathered together with the rest of the crew in the terrarium for our last meal together for several weeks—it was a fitting farewell that was enjoyed by all.

The next morning at 0600 hours we gathered together with the rest of the crew in the terminal once more to say farewell. Nick, Dick, Courtney, Mel, Sammy, Grizzly, and I would be flying to the crater on the other side of the world on board T-2. Eventually, we said farewell to those who were remaining behind in the city and walked across the hangar deck. Then we climbed aboard T-2 and waved to them from the flight deck as we floated past the terminal windows on our way out the door before we went ballistic once we were clear of the city and the ship’s bow was pointed toward the crater on the other side of the world.

CHAPTER 2.

The glaring differences between the more advanced technology of the Alien ship and the Albatross were made blatantly apparent on that flight. Without feeling any of the effects of violent acceleration or deceleration that we had suffered while flying in the Albatross two days before, we found ourselves hovering above the crater within an hour in T-2. I directed T-2 to touch down close to the Remote’s rear end. With no drama or fanfare she gently settled to the ground exactly where I wanted her to land and quietly shut down her engines. For God’s sake (and Nick’s and mine), don’t let on to the rest of the crew that Nick and I were obsolete as pilots thanks to the Alien Star-ships. Anyone could fly one of these craft with a bit of training in how to tell it sub-consciously where you wanted it to go and how soon you wanted it to get there via a headset which read your thoughts.

Eeeezy-Peeezy!

After we touched down the whole crew left the flight deck and headed down to the cafeteria for a quiet and calming coffee after the ‘long flight’ before Nick, Grizzly and I bid farewell to the rest of the crew as we carried on to the cargo hold, suited up then lowered the ramp and walked over to the Remote. Opening the Cargo hold we jumped aboard the Tractor then unloaded all the equipment we had loaded onto T-2 back in the city and dumped it onto the Martian landscape alongside all the other equipment we had unloaded from the Albatross two days before. When we’d finished that job we marked out where the bio-domes and the pipes that fed them would go so we could start putting it all together the following day.

Satisfied with our efforts Nick and Grizzly rode the Tractor back to T-2’s cargo hold while I drove the buggy out of the remote and parked it inside T-2. We closed and sealed the cargo doors, climbed out of our Suits and hung them up before going in search of sustenance and liquid refreshment. We found both in the deserted cafeteria favoured by the whole crew because that was where all the sustenance and liquid refreshments were stored. We carried our plates and glasses over to a table overlooking the work area and put them and our asses down to eat, drink and discuss our plans for the coming weeks.

There were no set meal times amongst us Martians, unless a dinner party was especially planned and organized. We basically just turned up at the cafeteria when we were hungry and/or thirsty, ate and/or drank, then wandered off to continue doing useful things. Sometimes we met up with fellow crew-members there and sometimes we ate alone, so on this occasion we discussed and planned for almost two hours before we wandered off in different directions to continue doing useful things without seeing any other crew-members. I assumed that the girls would be in one of T-2’s laboratories playing with their rocks and also assumed, with a fair amount of certainty that Dick and Cassie would be off somewhere playing with their computers.

I was soon to find out how completely and totally wrong I was in one of those assumptions!

My first inkling of it became apparent when I entered the cargo hold to refuel the tractor and the buggy, which I had forgotten to do when we returned earlier. I have always been a firm believer in the saying, ‘Don’t put off until tomorrow what you can bloody-well do today, while it is still in your mind!’ I suppose my military training had probably instilled that in my sub-conscious over the years and I would never forget it, which is just as well. I would hate to go for a drive across the Martian landscape in a buggy and run out of fuel 5 kilometres or more from the city then have to push the damn thing back because I had forgotten to refuel it.

As I entered the cargo hold I noticed that the tractor and the buggy were there as was to be expected but the pressurized rover was not, and it should have been. I tried to remember if it had been parked in the cargo bay when we had returned earlier but I had no clear recollection of its presence, or absence. It had been parked on the other side of the cargo deck out of the way of the main storage areas because we don’t use it very much, so it was entirely possible that it was missing earlier and I hadn’t noticed. It was too early in Mankind’s time on Mars to expect, and therefore be on the lookout for, vehicle theft I would have thought, and yet the vehicle was definitely not there!

I walked over to the electronic vehicle log mounted on a wall near the internal airlock door to check the entries but there were none relating to the taking out of the rover. It was supposed to be a regulation that any vehicles taken outside of the ship onto the Martian surface should be listed on the electronic log as to time, vehicle number ,and the name of the person signing it out. We didn’t worry about the buggies as we had a number of them and the crew were always rushing hither and thither about the place in them. However, it was generally frowned heavily upon and considered very naughty to pinch one of the heavy lifting, earth moving or transport vehicles without entry in the log because we only had one of each, and the pressurised rover was definitely included in that category!

As I went about the business of refuelling the tractor I pondered upon a number of questions that I considered it necessary to ponder upon:

1. How did Dick manage to drive off into the dusty red Martian landscape with the Rover without us seeing him do it?

2. Why did he take the Rover instead of the buggy?

3. Where did he take the Rover to and why, as he was supposed to be helping us in the crater?

4. What I was going to do to him when he returned with the Rover?

5. What would happen to me if he returned with the Rover and opened the outer cargo doors while I was not wearing my Spacesuit in the cargo hold?

I quickly answered Questions 2 and 5 by myself. The buggy was parked in the remote until I drove it back earlier, leaving the Rover as the only available vehicle on T-2 before that. I also climbed into my Spacesuit to avoid being sucked outside and asphyxiated in the thin, poisonous Martian atmosphere if the cargo doors opened while I was still in the Hold.

As it turned out I was glad that I had, because the warning klaxon started blaring and the external cargo doors started opening as I was shutting off the fuel valve and stowing the refuelling nozzle back in its storage rack. I turned to face the Rover as it came up the ramp into the hold, with my legs crossed and my (oh no, sorry that’s not right), with my legs apart and my arms crossed, looking for all the world like ‘The Stig’ in that ‘Top Gear’ show.

The Rover pulled up in front of me and I could see the two Space suited figures through the windscreen as they rose from the front seats, waved to me and turned to head aft to the exit hatch. I walked around the nose and headed down the port side of the Rover to meet them there. The warning light on the cargo bay wall flicked to green to let us know that the bay had been re-pressurised so we could now breathe comfortably without the aid of Spacesuits. The exit hatch projected itself away from the Rover’s hull with a slight hiss of escaping gas then swung down into its gangway position so the crewmembers could walk down to the deck. After I had removed my helmet I raised my head and looked at the two suited figures as they removed theirs and whatever I was about to say jammed in my throat with shock. The removal of their helmets did not reveal Dick and Cassie as I had expected, instead I found Mel and Sammy standing there looking back at me.

“Awwwh! Did you miss me that much that you decided to wait in the cargo hold to greet me when I returned, Honey?” Mel asked with a smile,

“Actually no, I didn’t miss you because I didn’t know you were missing, until now. Where On Mars have you been, pray tell?”

“We went out to collect some rock and soil samples from the North-eastern quadrant of the crater. The survey photos you took of this area a few months ago looked promising so we thought we d investigate.”

“Did you find anything interesting?”

“Yes we did actually, and you can help me carry the samples to the Lab.”

I glanced over at Sammy but she wasn’t there, she must have wandered off into the ship while Mel and I were chatting. After collecting the samples we were heading towards the airlock doors into the ship when I veered slightly to the left and pushed the button to activate the vehicle log.

“I wanted to show you this contraption. Whenever a heavy vehicle is taken out of the hold onto the Martian surface for whatever reason it’s a good idea to enter your name and the vehicle you’re taking out with you in here so that the rest of the crew know.”

“Really? That’s very interesting, dear. Thank you for sharing that information with me, but what I’d also like to know is why you didn’t make an entry in the vehicle log when you took the tractor out for the whole day,” she said as she studied the screen.

DAMN!

“Tell you what, dear. When you start making entries on that thing, then I will too.” she said as she continued on into the ship.

“Yes Dear.” I said as I followed her.

When she was happily perched on her stool in her laboratory with her equipment and samples gathered about her and knowing that she would be busy for hours I announced that I would be taking my leave to go in search of coffee. With her eyes still stuck to the microscope before her she gave me a casual wave of her hand to let me know that I was dismissed.

Life on this side of Mars continued on for eight more weeks before we could complete our tasks and fly back to the city. We didn’t see much of Dick in that time because he kept wandering off to God knew where, and God knew we didn’t care. Even though he was supposed to be helping us with the construction of the Bio-domes we didn’t mind that he rarely showed up, as we had quickly found out that we accomplished a hell of a lot more useful and productive work when he didn’t.

Gradually the Bio-domes rose from the Martian landscape and when completed we started to lay and connect the pipelines to them from the remote ship. This was all very hard and heavy work, involving the constant use of the tractor crane and our muscles to position and bolt together the framework of the Domes as well as laying out and connecting the tough, thick and heavy rubber and carbon fibre piping. Thankfully the lesser gravity on Mars made them a bit lighter and easier to handle by comparison than they would have been on Earth. Even so by the end of each day we were totally exhausted and weak with fatigue, even Grizzly admitted to being buggered. Too tired to eat after we’d finished work for the day we staggered to our cabins and collapsed into our bunks to sleep for ten or more hours before rising, having a huge breakfast and then returning to work.

On the seventh day of the seventh week Nick, Grizzly and I held a workers meeting and decided to go on a three day strike to give our torn and strained muscles and bodies time to recover a bit. We didn’t bother to include Dick in the meeting as he hardly ever turned up to work anyway. As we had finished laying and connecting the pipes at that time it gave us quite a bit of satisfaction to ‘advise’ Dick that he could now program the onboard computers on the remote to automatically work the on/off valves for the watering systems and the venting systems for the storage tanks at programmed times. And that he should do it within the next three days.

I spent my three days off doing a bit of relaxing, a bit of double checking that we had totally completed the pipe laying, a lot of supervising Dick while he hooked up and programmed the remote’s computers to operate everything and a bit of exploring. While I was doing my bit of exploring I managed, with very slow and careful driving, to find my way up to the top of the crater that the Domes were nestled in. I did not do this because I fancied myself as an intrepid explorer but because I had formed what I considered to be a master-stroke of ‘Genius’ that would mean we would not have to fly over to Base 2, (which is what I had decided to call it), fortnightly or monthly or even at any regularly set time in fact.

My brilliant idea was to set up a weather station which would take readings and stream them to the computers back in the city, as well as remote controlled video cameras so we could keep an eye on what was going on around here from the city. Nick would have you believe that it was his brilliant idea but it was definitely mine, unless it goes pear-shaped, in which case it was definitely Nick’s!

 I found what I considered to be the perfect location for the equipment near the edge of the crater, close to a large outcropping of rock which would protect the equipment from damaging exposure to the Martian winds while having a commanding panoramic view over the Domes and surrounding landscape for the cameras.

I walked back to the buggy and searched through the equipment trunk until I found an aerosol can of line marking paint to mark the rock for identification purposes so I could find it again and also be able to point it out to the rest of the crew from below. I found the can and walked back to the rock to spray parts of it for identification purposes.

I quickly discovered a problem when I tried to spray the rock! Mars gravity is only a third of Earth’s and the air pressure is also considerably less but the can of spray paint had been pressurised on Earth. Consequently, when I pressed the button to paint a mark on the rock the paint exploded into the air in a rather large Fluoro- pink cloud. As my luck would have it, and with impeccable timing, a sudden burst of Martian wind appeared out of nowhere and plastered the airborne paint all over my lovely white Spacesuit, and more importantly my helmet’s visor, thereby severely restricting my vision.

(Instead of looking at life through rose-coloured glasses I was looking at Mars through a pink-coloured visor, which was very unsettling!)

The remainder of the flouro-pink cloud that did not attach itself to me reformed on the other side of me and started wandering lonely as a flouro-pink cloud across the Martian landscape towards the distant horizon. As I watched it sailing away I stupidly tried to wipe the paint off my suit and visor, succeeding only in smearing the paint even wider across my suit. I then threw the paint can into the buggy’s boot, climbed into the driver’s seat and headed back (very carefully) to T2.

As I approached the ship I spotted with dread two space-suited figures wandering around the landscape between me and the ship. One of them held up his hand signalling me to stop, and with great trepidation I complied. The figure raised his right arm and used it to lean on the top of the buggy’s windscreen while he chuckled,

“Oh, don’t you look precious, Sweetie. How the hell did you get yourself in such a state?” Was Nick’s immediate, intellectual response after he noticed the state of my Spacesuit.

“Get in the buggy, I want to show you something.”

“Righto Pinky!”

After the rest had climbed into the buggy I threw it into a dusty 180 degree turn, drove over to the crater wall below the outcrop and pointed at the paint mark on it,

“I figured we could set up a weather station and video cameras up there to keep an eye on things without having to fly over here constantly.”

“Hmmm, a surprisingly good idea from an idiot who manages to cover himself with Fluoro-pink paint.”

“Yeah about that,” I said as I started driving back towards T2, “how many spare Spacesuits have we got?”

“A few, but I hope you’re not thinking that you are going to get one. They are replacements for emergencies, and spraying your suit with Fluoro pink paint does not really qualify as an Emergency that would justify a replacement suit, Pinky.” Nick replied.

“Stop calling me that!”

“Why? It amuses me.”

“It does NOT amuse me!”

“Well, you can’t please all of the people all of the time, I guess. So when do you want to set up the weather station, Pinky?”

“Well we’re not doing anything tomorrow.”

“Okay then, when we get back to T2 we’ll load the necessary tools and equipment into the buggy so we’re ready to go early in the morning. Perhaps we will also remove any pink aerosol paint cans from the buggy at the same time to prevent Drew from having any more accidents. Dick, you’re coming with Drew and me so you can hook up the electronics and transmitters in the morning.”

When we got back to T2 we loaded the necessary tools and equipment that we would need tomorrow while the cargo bay was re-pressurizing. I then virtually jumped out of my suit in the airlock and hung it up with the front facing the wall before entering the main part of the ship, carrying my helmet tucked under my arm so I could try to clean the pink paint off it and the visor. I had no idea how to clean the paint off the suit at this stage but I needed to clean the helmet and visor to improve my vision when I was wearing it. I left it on a bench in one of the unused laboratories on my way to join the others for food and refreshments, intending to return later to try and clean it.

I entered the cafeteria to the sound of laughter and saw a video of me sitting in the buggy talking to Nick with my Spacesuit coated across the shoulders, upper chest and all down my right arm, as well as portions of my helmet with fluoro pink paint being displayed on a computer screen.

“How the hell did you get that?!”

“How the hell do you think I got it? I filmed it with the video camera in my helmet, you idiot!”

DAMN!

CHAPTER 3.

As agreed the previous night the three of us congregated in the airlock at 0630 hours the following morning, climbing into our suits while the oxygen was sucked out of the cargo bay. I suffered an onslaught of chuckling from Nick and Dick as I climbed into my fluoro-pink stained suit. I had managed to clean my helmet and visor the previous evening but I still had no clue as to how I would clean the suit.

We were working on the cliff-top edge of the crater a few hours later setting up the weather recording station that would beam weather measurements to the city and the cameras that would beam videos back to the city when I saw Dick slip and disappear over the edge. He was about 40 metres away from me when it happened and Nick was witness to it so nobody could ever accuse me of pushing him. I sauntered slowly over to the cliff edge to see what had happened to him, glanced down and saw him spreadeagled about 30 metres below me. I wasn’t too worried about him though, Mars gravity is about a third of Earth’s so it is possible to survive falls from high places without sustaining major injuries (well at least some of the time, if you’re lucky), plus he was tethered by a bungie type rope to the rock that I was casually leaning against while I stared down at him. I was actually quite amused, not only because it was the sort of thing that usually happened to me but this time hadn’t, but also because it was Dick that it had happened to. He started to squirm and thrash about (literally at the end of his tether) while screaming at Nick and I to haul him up,

“Stand up Dick!” I told him,

“Just haul me up before I fall any further!” Dick replied.

“Just stand up Dumb-ass, you’re only two feet off the ground!” Nick answered, and then when Dick was standing on the ground,

“Good, now unclip your tether so we can pull it back up here.”

“What about me?”

“Well that is entirely up to you, Dick. We’ll be finishing up here in about an hour so you could either find a nice comfy rock to perch upon until we pick you up if we bother to remember, or you could start walking back to base and we’ll pick you up on our way back, if we bother to stop.” Nick answered.

We then went back to completing our tasks, as well as Dick’s, since he’d had the ‘misfortune’ of disappearing over the cliff. It was about an hour by the time we finished setting up the weather station and testing it to make sure it was fully functional. After loading our equipment and tools into the back of the buggy we set off in search of Dick. On arriving at the spot where we had last seen him and finding him no longer there I put the buggy in neutral and pulled on the handbrake, then climbed out and slowly circled the buggy with my eyes scanning the ground,

“I find tracks, Kemo-sabe!

“They’re yours you idiot, you just left them while you were circling around the buggy!”

I pointed at a set of prints that headed off in a reasonably straight direction towards the west,

“Those ones I am referring to Kemo-sabe, you idiot! Dick’s boots head off in that direction, so assuming that he is still in them I will track them.” I said as I climbed into the buggy and followed the tracks into the west. We had travelled about a kilometre when a figure popped out from behind a rock to my right,

“Over here guys, I’ve found something!”

I pulled up in front of him after swerving and slamming on the brakes to avoid hitting him, as he had jumped out right in front of me.

“What have you found, Dick?”

“Follow me.” He said as he spun on his heel and walked towards the canyon wall. Nick and I looked at each other, shrugged then climbed out of the buggy to follow Dick. He stopped and pointed at what appeared to be a cave leading into the crater wall,

“Don’t tell me let me guess, another access tunnel to another underground base?” Nick enquired,

“I think it’s quite possible, yes.”

“Why is it that every time we leave you alone to wander around the Martian landscape, you always wind up disappearing down a hole in the ground? You’re a bloody Wombat!” I exclaimed.

I walked back and jumped into the buggy then nosed it into the cave/tunnel and stopped, turning on all the head and spot lights to light our way while Nick and Dick climbed aboard. I noticed as I started forward that with all the spotlights brightly lighting the way ahead it became very obvious to me, with an almost overwhelming sense of ‘Deja-Vu’, that we were driving into a tunnel, not a cave. The walls were unnaturally straight and met the ceiling at a geometrically perfect ninety degree angle and although they were covered in a thick patina of red dust there were spots where the reflection of our lights back at us proved that the walls and roof were of a metallic structure. The tunnel was in fact exactly the same as the access tunnels that surrounded our city.

I travelled a further half a kilometre down the tunnel before I braked to a halt next to an exit tunnel.

“What are you stopping for?” Dick asked,

“I don’t see much point in continuing the search. The odds against us finding an open airlock like we did with the first city are astronomically high, to say the least. We don’t need an extra city at the moment so I don’t see the point in wasting the time and fuel at this time searching for an entrance into it. We can easily put it on the backburner until someday in the future.”

Nick interrupted when Dick started arguing,

“I agree with Drew. Let’s just deal with what is happening now and worry about the future later. I for one would rather concentrate our energies and time on completing the remaining tasks as quickly as we can so we can go home.”

I reversed into the exit tunnel, then drove the buggy forward and re-traced its tracks back up to the surface while I pondered,

There used to be a saying amongst us Earthlings back in the good old days when we were still on Earth that went something like this:-

‘Be it ever so humble, there is no place like Home.’

But what happens when you don’t have a home anymore? Our home was over 56 million kilometres away at times, over four hundred million kilometres away at other times, and somewhere in between the rest of the time. Not that it mattered in the overall ‘Universal’ scheme of things as our home was now a huge charred, black and probably still smoking lifeless rock. So here we were, living on an alien planet we called Mars, in a city built by Martians, but at the moment ‘roughing it’ in a star-ship built by Martians. The city was a very large and very comfortable place to live, but the Spaceship, although much smaller than the city, certainly was not cramped nor was it any less comfortable than the city. So why did Nick express a desire to finish up here as soon as possible and head ‘Home’ to the city? I asked myself instead of asking him. It then occurred to me that our kids and the rest of our crew were back in the city, they were all our family now and this prompted another famous saying to spring into my mind,

‘Home’ is where your heart is!’

I suddenly found myself wanting to finish up here as soon as possible and fly back to the city as well, for it was now my ‘Home’ too.

It was at this point that I told myself to shut up, which handily coincided with our arrival back at T2. After I closed the cargo bay doors the other two entered the airlock and climbed out of their suits when the pressure had equalised while I fuelled up the buggy ready for the morrow. After I had changed out of my suit I went to the cafe to meet up with them and found the whole T2 crew in there expressing their surprise and amazement at the news of the suspected discovery of another city.

After I had filled a mug with coffee I sat down next to Mel, she took my other hand and smiled at me while Nick reached over and poured a wee dram of ‘sweetener’ into my mug.

“So do you think there might be more underground cities we don’t know about, Pinky?”

I glared at her but she just stared back at me with a completely innocent and enquiring expression on her face so I glared at Nick but he just stared back at me with his smug, smarmy, ‘Hardy, hah, hah, hah’ expression on his face. So I answered Mel,

“It’s possible, I guess. Maybe the aliens were a race of rabbit-like creatures and there are warrens of underground cities all interlinked by an underground tunnel system,” I then glanced over at Dick, “or a race of bloody Wombats. Do you think it’s possible that there might be an underground tunnel that might connect between our city and this one, Dick?”

Dick smiled,

“I was actually just considering that possibility since you put forward the rabbit warren scenario. I do not think it is beyond the realms of possibility. I will do some investigating on the ship-board computers after my meal, but I may need to access the city’s mainframe to fully explore the possibilities, which I can easily do with the on-board computers of T2 anyway. I have had suspicions about the possible existence of another city from strange references I could not understand on the City’s computers, but I have not managed to track the references to any information that would lead me to a definitive conclusion as yet.”

“Right! A simple yes or no would have sufficed really!”

I now had a sneaking suspicion that Dick knew a hell of a lot more than he was telling us. I also suspected that I now knew why he had been so insistent on flying over here to assist us, then not actually doing much assisting as he was always gallivanting around the Martian landscape looking for holes to disappear down! It was also then that I decided that from that day forth I would be calling Dick ‘Wombat’. Over time it became apparent to me that he didn’t seem to mind too much, I guessed it might possibly be because it was much less insulting and derogatory than all the other names that I called him.

We spent another two days there while we double checked all the seals and piping, as well as the bio-domes and made sure the whole system was airtight and leak-proof. We also checked that the weather station and video cameras were working properly and transmitting all data to our on-board computers.

Once we were satisfied that all systems were fully operational there was no longer any reason to hang around there so we picked up, packed up and pissed off. As T2 hovered one hundred metres above the surface and rotated one-eighty degrees to line up with the city that we now called ‘Home’ I glanced at the bio-domes and then glanced over at the alien spaceship half buried in the canyon wall before sub-consciously ordering T2 to take us home.

*******

CHAPTER

It was on a lovely day in the month of May, (according to the old Earth calendar which we had loosely adapted to use on Mars to keep track of the passing of time, which strangely meant that we had more leap years than we did on Earth), when Dick suddenly disappeared. One day he was there annoying the buggery out of me as usual and the very next day, he wasn’t. I did not immediately notice or question the why or wherefore of his sudden disappearance as I was busily enjoying the Dick Headley-lessness of the moment.

The underground city was very large and the number of our crew was not, so it wasn’t at all unusual to go days without seeing other members of the crew unless there was a dinner or some other get-together organized in advance. I also suspected that I may have been subconsciously organizing my schedule in such a way that would guarantee that I was less likely to bump into Dick, although most of the time it seemed to me that it didn’t work at all well because he still so often bumped into me.

It was in fact three days A.D. (‘After Dick’ disappeared) before I voiced my wonderment in relation to the missing Dick to the rest of the crew at a communal dinner close by the lagoon in the Terrarium on the evening of the third day, after I noticed that he still wasn’t with us.

“Has anyone seen Dick lately?” I expressed my wonderment succinctly.

All conversation stopped as the  rest of the crew turned and looked at me confoundedly, and  I could well understand their confoundedness due to the fact that of all the people who might notice and express concern at the possible disappearance of Dick I would never have been considered in a million light-years to possibly be one of them. They then mumbled amongst themselves for a bit before Nick answered on behalf of them all,

“Since you mention it I can’t recall seeing Dick about the place for a couple of days, and I must say that I am surprised that you, of all people, would notice and express concern about such an occurrence.”

(See? I told you!)

“It’s just that it has just occurred to me that I haven’t told anybody to fuck off, or indeed even used a swear word in the last few days which of course has eventually caused me to wonder where Dick is and what, by the grace of God, has caused his much appreciated absence. Might it be that he has been abducted by aliens, I ask hopefully?”

“Nah, if aliens had abducted him they would have thrown him back so quickly that we would never have noticed him missing!”

“Now that I think about it I don’t recall seeing Cassie around recently, either.” Mel added.

Nick looked over at me with a grin on his face,

“Oh well, don’t they say that absence makes the heart grow fonder?”

I looked back at him with no grin on my face as I replied,

“In this case, they don’t!”

The whole crew then immediately decided to mount an urgent concentrated search of his usual haunts and other places he might be found starting sometime tomorrow, and then continued on with their evening meals and conversations.

Feeling satisfied that I had done everything that I could reasonably be expected to do at that time about the missing Dick I shoved the matter into the cobweb adorned, dim, dark recesses of my mind and left it there to see if it could find its way back into the light while I continued to enjoy my dinner.

We arise from bed early in the mornings and work hard through the days so we are not the types to party on into the wee small hours. Consequently our dinner party ended at around 2130 hours which was pretty much the norm.

After driving through the semi-darkened streets of the city to our digs I climbed out of the buggy and glanced across the street at Dick and Cassie’s house which still sat in the semi-darkness without any lights on.

“You’re actually worried about them, aren’t you?” Mel asked as she slid her arm around my waist and hugged me.

“I have to admit that I am beginning to be, maybe just a little.” I replied as we walked up the porch stairs and entered our digs with our son asleep in my arms.

I have to admit at this time that although I profess everlasting dislike, if not outright hatred at times towards Dick, I actually was becoming a little worried about him. He was after all a vital member of our crew, as was Cassie of course, and I couldn’t help wondering what had happened to them, how it had happened to them inside the city, and whether they were okay. I even have to admit, (to my all-consuming chagrin and horror), that I was actually starting to miss the Bastard!

I shoved all of these thoughts into those dark recesses at the back of my mind where I shove all the other thoughts that annoy me (most of which never do see the light of day ever again), as I prepared for bed and then laid my weary head down to sleep.

   

CHAPTER 4.

It was about a month after our return from the other side of the world, when things had settled down into a normal routine ( well as close to normal as they were ever likely to get) that Nick, Grizzly and I came up with a new project for us to tackle as we were dining one night,

“I wonder how one might fashion a Still for the fermentation of potatoes or sugar into alcohol, like Vodka, or perhaps Rum.” I ruminated out loud.

“I could do that, if I had the right metals and the right tools to do it with.” Grizzly stated as he gazed down into his wine glass.

Nick and I glanced at each other then turned and looked hopefully at Grizzly,

“You can?” we asked as one. Grizzly raised his head and looked at both of us,

“I was a metallurgist and a welder before I finished my Masters Degree in Science then signed up with N.A.S.A. You give me the right metals and the right welding rig and I can fashion a Still for you.”

Nick and I glanced at each other with raised eyebrows then turned and looked at Grizzly once more,

“Can you fashion two Stills?” I asked hopefully. Grizzly grinned back at me,

“Supply me with enough of the necessary metals and I can fashion as many Stills as your little heart desires.”

“Let’s start with two to begin with and see how we go before we think about opening a bloody huge distillery.” Nick interjected.

“Right, now we have to work out how to ferment stuff. For that we would probably need, oh I don’t know, maybe a Bio-chemist. Does anyone here have any Bio-chemical knowledge?” I asked,

“HELLO!” Mel said. I glanced over at her,

“Yeah Hi, I’ll be with you in a minute Sweetie, we’re busy trying to sort out a problem just now.” I then glanced back at Nick and Grizzly,

“Well, anybody got any ideas?”

It was then that I received a blow to my lower ribs. Nick laughed as I coughed and spluttered,

“Hey that looks like fun Mel, can I do that to him as well?” Nick asked. Mel ignored him and continued to fix me with her baleful stare,

“What am I?” she asked me,

“I don’t think this is a good time to ask me that question after what you just did to me!” I replied as I turned back to the boys while I massaged my sore ribs,

“Hey guys, I think I may have come up with a brilliant solution to our dilemma. Mel may be of some help to us as I seem to recall something about her being a bio-chemist once.”

“Idiot!”  Mel said as she rose, smiled at me, (sort of), and left. Nick watched her leave then looked over at me,

“Man, you like to live dangerously!”

“You think?” I replied as I continued to massage my sore ribs, “It doesn’t hurt that much.”

“You do seem to be quite adept at raising her Irish Dandruff, oh wait, I um, meant Dander. You do remember that she knows where we hid the firearms, don’t you!”

Grizzly looked at Nick,

“You hid the firearms? What on Mars for?”

“We decided that as we didn’t need them there was no point in leaving them lying about the place, and to remove any temptation to shoot anybody.” I told him,

“Who would you have been tempted to shoot?”

“Dick!” I immediately replied then looked over at Nick,

“You are actually right when using both words, my dear Watson. Dander means a layer of dead skin at the base of fur or hair, so raising her dander would cause dandruff to explode off her head and yet dander also means temper, so either way raising her dander would be extremely unpleasant for ‘yours truly’!”

“Would you really shoot Dick? I know he can be an arrogant, pedantic, pain in the arse most of the time but would you really shoot him?” Grizzly interjected,

“No, I very much doubt it. We haven’t shot him so far and we’ve known him for a few years now, so I would say that it is highly unlikely that either of us would bother now!” Nick told Grizzly,

“Speak for yourself!” I told Nick,

“Anyway, we still need him for so many other tasks Drew, such as helping us with the task we are discussing now.”

He then glanced over at Grizzly,

“You will have to excuse Drew. Methinks he doth protest too much! Methinks in fact, that he perhaps harbours a secret, all encompassing, awe-inspired and worshipping adulation for Dick, which he tries valiantly, but unfortunately not very convincingly, to hide.”

“Fuck you and the Spaceship you flew in on, Watson!”

Grizzly laughed then posed the question,

“There is one small problem that I can foresee as being quite a large one. I can build a still but I have no idea how to design one. How does it work, what does it look like inside? Does it have chambers and internal piping, and more importantly, pressure relief valves to prevent the whole contraption from blowing the top off this fair city?”

Nick and I looked at each other then I returned my gaze to Grizzly,

“That is a very good point and I have a very good solution for it, I think. We’ll ‘Google’ it! I’m sure there would be a mine of informative articles on Stills and how to ferment stuff in them available on there for our perusal, contemplation and consideration.”

“You seem to have forgotten the quite important fact that ‘Google’ most likely ceased to exist at roughly the same time that the Human Race did. A simple fact which would make it extremely difficult to ‘Google’ anything anymore I would have thought!”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that, my dear Watson. At the rate they were growing and the money they were making I wouldn’t be surprised if they had sites on many planets in the solar system, even on Uranus. If not, I suspect that ‘NASA’ would have uploaded many reference programs and manuals onto the vast memory banks of Albatross’s computers. Such as Encyclopaedia Britannica perhaps, and a very large and comprehensive dictionary to help us with our Scrabble games during the long six month voyage to here perhaps, and maybe even Wikipedia.”

“Yeah right Drew, we’ve never played Scrabble in our entire lives, let alone on this trip and I’m damn sure they would not have included a reference manual on how to build a Still for the production of alcohol on the ship’s computers!”

“Stills are used for many purposes other than the fermentation of alcohol, Watson. They are used for medical and pharmaceutical purposes such as distilling of water for purity, separating chemical compounds, and so on. Stills are also used for the creation of perfumes, and imagine if you dare what a living Hell the girls would make of this already red planet if they ran out of perfume!”

There was a minute’s silence while us blokes contemplated the horror of that scenario and then as one, shuddered convulsively. Grizzly was the first to recover his voice, but I couldn’t help noticing the quiver in it as he spoke,

“So how do we find out if we have this information at hand as well as what we need to do to start the process?” Grizzly asked,

“Easy,” I said, “we’ll ask Dick to start poking around in Albatross’s memory banks and see what he comes up with.”

I saw Nick glance over at Grizzly and grin and saw Grizzly grin back but I chose to ignore the exchange as I went on,

“You and Grizzly can go and ask Dick now, while I go ask Melissa to compile the necessary information for us, Nick.” I said as I continued to massage my lower ribs.

And so it came to pass that a new project and hobby was born to amuse ourselves and play around with in our limited spare time. We very quickly had Dick busily digging around in the bowels of Albatross’s memory banks in search of the knowledge that we sought, while the love of my life burned the midnight oil poring over thick tomes full of interesting knowledge about Biology and Bio-chemistry as applied to the rotting of plant matter thereof, in search of the knowledge that we sought. This she did because of her deep and everlasting love for me and the red dusty ground I walked upon, or so I would like to have you (and myself) believe. Truth be told, whenever I walked into her Lab where she was working she glared at me with such malevolence that I was very glad that her computer was securely attached to her desk.

Did it not make sense, after all, to stave off the potential for failing mental acuity and Alzheimer’s disease from lack of stimulation and exercise of our brain cells by stimulating and exercising our brain cells on thought provoking projects such as developing ways and means of producing chemicals that would slowly kill our brain cells over time, but in a more enjoyable way?

No? Well each to their own, I guess.

This project certainly stimulated and exercised our brain cells! For although N.A.S.A. had chosen the extremely powerful Windows 10 ‘Universal Vista’ as their mainframe and computer operating platform complete with Internet (Space) Explorer 11 we found with much experimentation that we could not in fact Google anything ‘live’ on Albatross’s computers, even by using Google +, Google Chrome or any other Google Apps.

I considered that possible reasons for this were four-fold:

1.      NASA hadn’t paid their Internet Service Provider monthly accounts for over three years,

or

2.      The Wi-Fi signal wasn’t strong enough to reach across the vast expanses of Space to us on Mars,

or

3.      Google had in fact ceased to exist at the same time as the Human Race did,

or

4.      A combination of a few of the above but most likely, just Number 3.

*****

Nick and I were on our routine monthly flight to Base 2 on the other side of the planet one fine day when we were confronted with evidence that we may not be as totally alone in the Universe (or even on the planet Mars) as we had thought we were for so long. I was setting up the Ship for landing when I saw something on the ground below that made me order the Ship to hover while I studied the ground in more detail.

“Nick, come over here and have a look at this.”

“Look at what? Nick said as he gazed out the Bridge windows,

I pointed below,

“Those marks and indentations on the ground just forward of the bow of this ship are landing pad markings from a Spaceship.”

“So? They’re obviously left from our last visit here.”

“No they’re not. They are a different shape, configuration and spacing from ours. The ship that left these is larger than anything we have. Aside from the fact that since we were last here there was that three day windstorm which would have erased our landing marks with sand and dust.”

I then gently set the ship down alongside the existing imprints. As we had already suited up during the flight over here Nick and I were on the Martian surface and surveying the landing gear imprints of the Alien ship in a very short time. After we had measured and compared the Alien prints to our landing gear Nick conceded that they were indeed similar but decidedly different.

“You have always had a gift for decisive and definitive comment.” I told him.

“Go Fuck yourself!” He wittily replied.

“How long ago did the last windstorm finish, was it four days ago?”

“On our side of the world it did, but I couldn’t say with any decisive and definitive comment when it might have ended on this side of the planet. Why?”

“I have an idea how we can find out and also see what landed here.”

I then flipped the switch on the dashboard of the buggy to activate the long-range Receiver/ Transmitter and called Dick,

“Hey Dick, I’ve got a little job for you to do, but I don’t want you to tell any of the crew about it until I say OK. OK? I want you to review the digital video records from base 2 to find out when the windstorm ended here. Then review the camera footage from that time till now.”

“Why, what am I looking for?”

“You’ll know it when you see it. We’ll be back in the city at around 1400 hours today and you can show us what you’ve found then, over and out.”

“OK, over and out.”

We climbed into the buggy and followed the tyre tracks that were not made by us to the remote ship and the bio-domes. Aside from the tyre tracks there were no signs that anybody or thing had been here since we were last here, or so we thought. We searched the remote ship first and found no signs that it had been tampered with in any way, or had even been entered although that couldn’t be either proved or disproved. While the tanks were being vented we turned our attention to searching the bio-domes, Nick searching one while I searched the other. After completing our search of the bio-domes we tended to our chores before returning to the remote to shut off the venting valves from the holding tanks.

“Some of the fruit trees have been picked of apples pears, apricots. Oh, and a few of the nut trees. All in all I would estimate about 25% of the total existing produce. Did you find anything?

“Pretty much the same in the other bio-dome, about 25% produce picked. Not enough to even worry about when you consider that we get more than enough from the Terrarium for our needs, and that’s not even counting the produce from the Domes on the City plain.”

“Well we’re finished here for now so I suggest we head on back to the City and see what Dick has found for us.”

“Aye, Aye Captain,” I replied as I headed back to the buggy.

As we lifted off the landscape I directed the ship to hover three hundred metres above the surface so I could compare the landing footprint of T-2 to the Alien ship’s footprint. There was no doubt about it, they were slightly different, and yet quite similar. It occurred to me then that I was comparing the landing footprint of a Ship which was built and flown by Aliens, to the landing footprint of my ship, which was built by Aliens but flown by me. The similarity of the footprints between the two ships took on a whole new meaning for me, and I didn’t find it at all comforting. Saying nothing to Nick about my realizations and the misgivings it had created in my mind I sent the ship blazing through the skies towards home.

After arriving home and shutting the ship down Nick and I disembarked and rapidly walked across the hangar deck to the central tower, caught the elevator down to upper level 4 and found Dick so agitated he was jumping up and down from one leg to the other and almost dancing about the room in excitement.

“Okay Dick, show us what you’ve found.”

He danced and leaped over to his control panel and started punching the keyboard at an almost frenetic speed,

“The storm abated at Base 2 at approximately 1300 hours three days ago, I found this on the digital camera feed at 1600 hours same day.”

On five large computer screens we saw the images of an alien space craft touching down in the crater near the remote and the bio-domes. We watched as hover craft floated out of the cargo hold and flew rapidly over the ground to the bio-domes where space-suited figures climbed out and loaded them with produce from the bio-domes then returned to the space-craft. The cargo ramp immediately closed and the ship lifted off and rose twenty metres before sling-shotting out of the camera’s view. I glanced at the time stamp in the top right hand corner of the screen and knew that they blasted off almost two and a half hours after landing, three days ago.

One other thing I had noticed on the video was one buggy that flew off in the opposite direction to the other buggies and returned to the ship just before it blasted off.

“I think now might be a good time to call the tribe together for a little Pow-Wow.” I said to no-one in particular as I stared at the screens.

Dick immediately got on the radio, switched it to public address and clicked the transmit button,

“Attention all personnel, report to the control centre, ASAP!”

Nick looked at me as if to say, ’Is he for real?’ I shrugged my shoulders and turned to look at Dick as I said,

“Are you for real?” His only response was a chuckle.

Within fifteen minutes the crew started sidling in by ones and twos, all of them showing surprise when they saw Nick and I lounging in seats until Mel, who was the last of the crew to turn up, noted our presence with,

“Oh, so you’ve snuck back into the city unannounced while nobody was looking, have you?”

I smiled and waved to her as I stood up and signalled Dick to start the video again,

“We thought you should see this!”

Mel’s smile evaporated when her eyes looked at my waist and saw my holstered pistol still hanging from it before her eyes raised and locked with mine. The last thing I ever did before I left the ship or the city on an EVA was to strap on my pistol and the first thing I did when I returned was to remove my pistol and lock it away in the firearm cabinet in the loading bay airlock. The presence of my holstered pistol still hanging on my hip inside the city told her that something was seriously wrong. I put my arm around her shoulders and gave her a gentle hug as Dick started the video playback.

The gasps from the whole crew when the video showed the alien ship touching down on the Martian surface near Base 2 filled the very large room, as did the following gasps right up till the time that the ship lifted off and quickly disappeared out of the camera’s view, leaving behind a stunned silence.

Eventually it was Grizzly who broke it,

“So, it seems we are no longer alone.”

“That is exactly why we thought you should see this, my little Russian comrade.” I replied,

“How much of our produce do you think they took from those Bio-domes?” Grizzly asked,

“Not all that much as it happens, maybe 25 percent of the current harvest in those Bio-domes. We certainly wouldn’t miss it.”

CHAPTER

Nick and I were bouncing and jouncing across the landscape of Mars in a buggy one fine Martian morning when I glanced up at the sky while waiting for my ass to recontact my driver’s seat after a particularly high bounce (or it may have been a jounce). I slammed on the brakes and brought the buggy to a skidding, dusty halt as I continued to stare at the object that had caught my attention up there. Nick straightened up in his seat and twisted around to look at me,

“Why the Fuck did you do that?”

With my eyes still firmly fixed on the object in the Martian sky I raised my right arm and pointed up at it as I replied,

“That’s something you don’t see every day!”

Nick twisted and leaned back slightly so his gaze could follow the direction of my pointing finger,

“Why the Fuck is there a Spaceman falling out of the sky towards us?”

“That is a very good question and I wish I had a very good answer to it but the fact that I’m not the only one who sees it means that I’m not suffering from Martian madness!”

“I wouldn’t be too quick to leap to that conclusion if I were you.” Nick replied.

I put the buggy into reverse and backed up 50 metres to ensure that the Spaceman didn’t land on us, then pulled on the handbrake and shut off the engine as I didn’t think we would be going anywhere for a while. I suspected that even at this distance from the Spaceman’s predicted ‘Impact Zone’ I may still have to clean bits of Spaceman off my windscreen so I could see where I was going.

Nick and I were sitting silently watching as the Spaceman plummeted towards the ground when the Spaceman suddenly exploded into flames. The fireball that used to be the Spaceman streaked through the sky like a comet until I noticed its rate of descent was rapidly slowing as it neared the ground then suddenly stopped falling and hovered two metres above the ground for a brief moment before gently touching down on the Martian surface in a huge cloud of billowing red dust. The flames died out and the Martian dust slowly settled, gradually revealing to us the figure of the Spaceman standing firmly on the ground with legs apart, hands on hips and smoke rising from his suit as he faced us.

I glanced to my left and saw Nick surreptitiously remove his pistol from its holster and rest it on his seat as he flicked off the safety. I released the flap on the holster of my weapon as well as the safety on the pistol before I climbed out of the buggy and walked over to meet the Spaceman, keeping my right hand well clear of my holster so as not to alarm him. He did not move a muscle, as far as I could see, as I approached him until I was roughly a metre from him when his open right hand shot out towards me,

“Man, it has been a lot of decades since I last did that, I had forgotten how much of a blast it is! Howdy stranger, my name is Gorad, and not in any way related to the legendary Dragon.”

As his extended right hand was empty I took it and shook it,

“Howdy stranger, my name is Drew. You certainly know how to make an entrance, very subtle and low key.”

“Thanks, we don’t use these suits much anymore as the Parasuits are much easier and more comfortable to use, not to mention far less likely to set you on fire. But they don’t have the flash, flair and visual impact that these suits do. You can tell your friend that he can put his pistol away, I am unarmed and mean you no harm or bad Vibes.”

He then released his grip on my hand and waved at Nick sitting in the buggy. Nick responded by raising his hand and waving back. To my horror I saw that he was waving back while still holding his pistol in his hand. I moved in front of Gorad and moved my hand in a cutting motion at Nick. He stopped waving the gun about, looked up at it in his raised right hand then threw it onto the back seat. Surprised that it didn’t go off with the impact I turned slowly back to face Gorad,

“Sorry about that! He’s not the brightest star in the firmament, or anywhere else in the whole damn Universe for that matter!”

“Not a problem, every space crew has at least one loose cannon. So take me to your Leader then.”

“He IS our Leader...........! Sorry, just joking. We don’t actually have a leader. We work together as one for the good of us all, not to mention survival. But I can take you to our city and offer you sustenance.”

“I have no idea what sustenance is but by all means let’s do that.”

As we walked towards the buggy I explained to Gorad what sustenance was,

“Oh right, food and drink. Why didn’t you just say food and drink? It would have been much easier to say and understand and would have saved a lot of precious oxygen.”

“I don’t know. I think I had a reason at the time but I don’t remember what it was anymore.”

It was then that the Spaceman punched me on the arm,

“Relax Drew, I was just throwing an electro-magnetic spanner in your propulsion systems, feel free to laugh if you like.”

I didn’t. I had never met such a strange Spaceman before in my life, although to be perfectly honest I had never actually met a real Spaceman before. I’d met human Spacemen on my home planet, like Neil Armstrong a few times and ‘Buzz’ Aldrin a few more times when I was in Astronaut training. They were extremely personable, friendly and down-to Earth blokes, quite extraordinary when you consider that they had not only been the first men to fly to the moon and back, but also to walk upon it.

 Gorad was the first Spaceman I had ever met that was actually from another Planet, but I couldn’t help wondering what Planet this Spaceman was from and what percentage of the population walked around on it wearing Straight-Jackets!

We reached the buggy and I was surprised to find that Nick had not only not moved or acknowledged our presence with a smartarse comment but I thought I heard a slight snore over the com. channel. I leaned over and checked his oxygen regulator and found to my horror that the pressure was significantly lower than it should be. I was checking his tank to make sure that the oxygen feed valve was fully open when Gorad asked,

“Is there a problem?”

“His oxygen regulator is mal functioning, he’s not getting enough oxygen!”

“Oh I wouldn’t worry too much about it, they do malfunction sometimes.”

He then leaned forward, tapped the offending regulator and I watched in amazement as the digital readout started to climb back towards the green zone. After a few seconds Nick stirred then groaned, and I think farted judging by the sound I heard over the com. I raced around and jumped into the driver’s seat as Gorad climbed into the back, but instead of settling gently back into the backseat he was thrown into the backseat as I pointed the buggy towards the city and launched it at ‘full speed ahead’.

“You can slow down if you want, Drew. Your friend isn’t in any danger, except from your driving, that is. It seems rather pointless bouncing around the Martian landscape at great speed then constantly having to back track to pick up the passengers that have been flung out, don’t you think?”

I glanced back at the Spaceman in the rear view mirror as I eased off on the throttle. He was sitting calmly and completely at ease in the back seat.

“What the Hell is going on Drew?”

I glanced over at Nick,

“Your Oxygen regulator mal-functioned but Gorad fixed it.”

“Oh right. Who the Hell is Gorad?”

“He’s the Spaceman that fell out of the sky.”

“Oh right. What the Fuck are you talking about?”

“Don’t worry, Drew. It will all come back to him as his brain recovers from the oxygen deprivation.” said the Spaceman.

“Who the Fuck said that?”

“The Spaceman that fell out of the sky,” I replied helpfully.

Nick jumped as a gloved hand appeared before him from behind,

“My name is Gorad, the Spaceman that fell out of the sky, Nick. I am very pleased to meet you.”

Completely surprised and flustered Nick took the gloved hand and shook it. His consternation was greatly increased when the gloved hand withdrew and then re appeared holding Nick’s gun by the barrel.

“Yours, I believe.” Gorad then sat back in his seat as Nick took the gun and holstered it before adding,

“Don’t worry Nick. We’ll be back in the City very shortly, just a few more minutes at this speed.”

Nick was understandably totally surprised and flustered, but I wasn’t too far behind him. As I drove towards the city I thought back over the conversations and events that had transpired after meeting the Spaceman. I was pretty damn sure that I had not mentioned Nick’s name to the Spaceman, and yet he knew it. I saw Nick’s gun when Gorad handed it back to him, the hammer was down and the safety was engaged. I wondered if it was still loaded or whether the bullets were now resting safely in a pocket of Gorad’s Spacesuit. But what really worried me was how the hell he knew where the City was, and therefore how close we were to it. Suddenly another thought exploded into my already overloaded and rapidly overheating mind, causing me to slam on the brakes, bringing the buggy to yet another sliding, dusty stop as I twisted in my seat to look back at the Spaceman, who was still sitting placidly in the back with his hands resting calmly on his knees while my right hand rested tensely on the butt of my pistol.

“What the Hell did you fall out of, or should I say jump out of?”

Still sitting placidly in the back seat the Spaceman answered,

“Look up Drew.”

I did as I was told, as did Nick. I had never had much time for, or much interest in, movies or television in my adult life and even less in Science Fiction (Yeah I know, surprising when you consider that I would eventually wind up living in a Science Fiction adventure). But a phrase from one of the few Science Fiction movies I had seen sprung into my mind as I looked up,

“RESISTANCE IS FUTILE!”

Hovering quietly about eight hundred meters above us was a spacecraft similar in size and silhouette to one of our Star-ships.

“I would consider it a sign of Universal camaraderie and goodwill if you would remove your hand from your weapon and drive on to the city, Drew. We mean you no harm and all will be explained when we can sit down in comfort, face to face and have a relaxed chat. Also, as I do not like repeating myself, would you be so kind as to contact the rest of your crew and have them meet us in your usual common gathering area when we arrive.”

“Don’t do it Drew! Why do a ‘Trojan Horse’ by driving him through our defences and into our city, not to mention herding our people into one place to make it easier for Gonad and his space goons to contain and/or kill us all.?!”

“What choice do we have, Nick? Take another look upwards and see if the Spaceship is still above us if you like. Check the load in your pistol to see if it still has any bullets in it if you like, it doesn’t really make any difference anyway. The Spaceman is unarmed and alone and therefore supposedly vulnerable while he‘s with us, but obviously he doesn’t consider that he is. I bet he’s got a couple of remote control buttons on his watch that control the Airlock systems of our City, and what defences would we be driving him through as we don’t have any, and I’m damn sure Gorad knows it. I suspect that if he had wanted to wipe us out he could and would have done it without putting on this histrionic pantomime for us just to introduce him-self.” I glanced back at the Spaceman,

“You buggered up Nick’s Oxygen regulator as well, didn’t you? How did you manage to do that?”

“I sent out an electro-magnetic beam that partially closed off his regulator to reduce Nick to a state of semi-consciousness for a while when I waved to him. Shall we proceed on to the City where we can continue this conversation in more comfortable surroundings, Drew?”

I did as Gorad had asked, all of it! Dick answered when I put out the general call on the R/T Comm. Channel,

“Dick, can you get the whole crew to meet us in the ‘Hangout’ cafeteria? We’ll be there in a couple of minutes.”

“I guess so, why?”

“Just do it Dick, I’ll explain when we get there.”

 I then shut off the long range Receiver/Transmitter to prevent any further argument or questions from Dick. This would not have prevented any conversation between the three occupants of the buggy however, yet we travelled the remaining distance to the city in silence. Nick’s silence was worrying me because in all the years I had known him he had never been silent for longer than 45 seconds, even when he was asleep.

The scuttlebutt (maritime version of rumours on the grapevine) on the aircraft carrier while Nick and I were stationed on it was that Nick snored so loudly that if the aircraft carrier was going to be sailing closer than 10 kilometres off enemy shores the Captain commissioned four sailors to guard Nick to ensure that he did not fall asleep and therefore alert the enemy to our presence. It was told that the Captain seriously considered making it a permanent detail so that the whole crew of the carrier could get a decent night’s sleep occasionally! Imagine if you will the considerable amplification and echo effect in a steel enclosure! The only way that I can think of for it to be worse would be if Nick was stationed on a submarine! But one has to ask why the Hell a pilot would be stationed on a Submarine, unless of course, he was a very bad pilot!

(Those of you who have read the earlier entries in these historical Chronicles may remember that I do have a tendency to sometimes ‘ramble on’ when left to my own devices!).

Anyway, after his impassioned plea to refuse Gorad’s requests Nick sat silently, some might even say sullenly, in the passenger seat. He didn’t even bother making any smart-arse derogatory remarks about, or directly at, Gorad. I guessed that the effects of the momentary drop in his oxygen supply had befuddled his normal behavioural traits for the time being, as I am pretty sure was the intended effect for least resistance. One thing I was sure of, however, he sure as hell wasn’t himself!

After I drove into the access tunnel and then straight into the open airlock Gorad broke the long silence,

“I’ve got this, Drew.”

I glanced in the rear view mirror in time to see Gorad push a button on his watch that made the outer hangar doors slide shut. While I waited for the airlock to re-pressurize so the inner airlock doors would slide open I ruminated silently to myself that me being right all the time can sometimes be a hugely annoying pain in the ass to me as well as everybody else!

I drove forward into the city as the inner airlock doors slid open, then pulled up and parked outside the door to the Terminal Cafe. I climbed out of the buggy then glanced back at Nick to see if I would have to assist him from the buggy into the Cafe and watched with relief as he climbed out of the buggy and marched through the door under his own steam. I followed him then stepped to the right side of the doorway as I removed my helmet and tucked it under my arm as Nick had just done on the left of the doorway.

 The rest of the crew looked up at us with mildly enquiring expressions on their faces which suddenly collapsed into eye-widening, jaw-dropping shock, and I knew that Gorad had just entered behind us. You could have cut the stunned atmosphere in the Cafe with a knife, but it would have been a lot easier with a chainsaw I thought to myself as I turned to look back at Gorad. He stood in the doorway with his helmet still on and his suit charred with Carbon exhaust from his directional thrusters, and still smoking. He stepped into the room and with a slight hiss of escaping oxygen undid the locking clamps of his helmet and lifted it over his head, then tucked it under his arm as Nick and I had done.

The countenance of the creature that was revealed by the removal of that helmet was sort of surprising to me. It wasn’t green, lumpy and bumpy with huge ears, antennas poking out of the top of its head and a protruding snout, constantly drooling, dribbling and possibly even foaming. Nor did it have Burning eyes of any colour!

The creature’s face that was revealed by the removal of that helmet was very definitely human in a very surprising way. Gorad had golden blonde hair swept back from his thin, slightly pale aristocratic face, with the most peaceful, calming, and kindest blue eyes I had ever seen. He actually bore a very strong resemblance to my favourite uncle Lionel, well he wasn’t actually my favourite Uncle Lionel ‘cause I only had one Uncle Lionel but he was my favourite Uncle. This information is totally useless to all you readers as none of you could have possibly ever met my uncle as he has been dead for the past fifteen years, but he did look a lot like Gorad.

In fact the powerful presence that emanated from Gorad was exactly that: calming, peaceful and kind, I felt at ease and safe in his presence. An effect that was increased even more, I noticed, when he smiled,

“Greetings Earthlings,” He paused as his smile grew, “or perhaps I should say Martians. My name is Gorad. I am an Explorer, Scout and Ambassador from the planet ‘Zengrila’ and I mean you no Harm or Hassles.”

He placed his helmet on the end of the table then stepped back and leaned against the wall behind him as Nick and I moved forward and stood on either side of the table then placed our helmets alongside Gorad’s. Yeah, I’m sure anybody reading this with their PhD’s in Psychology firmly grasped in their hands  are probably saying to themselves that surely this act was a subconscious aligning with, and deference of authority to Gorad. Well those people can shove their PhD’s where the Sun never shines (except in their own minds) and grasp something else of theirs firmly in their hands if it pleases them. Nick had nothing but nasty thoughts about Gorad at that time and would certainly not even consider doing anything that might in any way help or please him, and nor would I. The table where his helmet rested just happened to be the closest flat surface to put our helmets down on and as we were tired of holding them tucked under our arms and we wanted a drink, which also happened to be on that particular table!

“Tell me Gorad, have you ever heard of and/or tasted Alcohol in any of its guises?” I enquired. Gorad glanced over at me,

“That depends, describe some of its guises to me.”

So I did until Gorad held up his hand to silence me,

“I have heard of wine, rum and vodka. I would like a glass of the one with the lowest alcoholic content if you please, as I am driving later.”

I made my way to the kitchen and made a coffee for Nick and myself to go with the rum as I figured he needed it and I knew damned well that I did! I poured a red wine for Gorad and carried it all back to the table on a tray. As I entered the dining area I saw that Gorad was being assaulted with and trying to fend off many questions from the excited crew. I rescued him, sort of, by handing him his wine and with a nod of thanks he took a large swallow from the glass, which was very ill-advised. When sampling our alcoholic products for the first time it is advisable to use utmost caution, we were getting better with practice but the use of the word ‘rough’ when describing the bouquet, taste and character of our red wines was still considered a very polite word to use.

Gorad was suffering bouts of coughing caused by his reckless lack of caution but managed to croak out these words between coughing spasms,

“Smooth! Very smooth! I think I know ........what you do with any............ extra methanol you......... find lying about the place.”

Gorad staggered over to the table and sat in the seat at the head of it while I was hammered by a fusillade of filthy looks from all of my fellow crew-members, except Nick of course. He sat happily sipping his coffee and rum with a beatific smile (and no sympathy whatsoever) on his face while he watched Gorad’s suffering.

“You really should sip it slowly, Gorad,” I said belatedly, “You didn’t give me a chance to warn you.”

Gorad’s coughing abated so he tentatively took a small sip slowly from his glass which only caused a slight hiccup instead of a coughing fit.

“Yeah, I guess that was my mistake. Sorry about that.”

He then stood up and leaned forward to rest on his hands as he placed them on the table before him. Dick interrupted Gorad as he was about to speak,

“Did you build this City?”

“I didn’t, but my ancestors did, and we want it back. So if you could pack up all your stuff and clear out by the end of the month we would very much appreciate it!”

He then straightened and held his hands up in a friendly pose with a smile on his face,

“Don’t worry, I am joking. This place is yours to do what you wish with. I am here simply to offer you any assistance that we can provide to help you to survive and acclimatise to life on this planet. We know that you are from the planet that you called Earth and we know what happened to it and believe me, we do sympathize with you. It was a colossal waste of lives, technological advancement and achievement, art and knowledge. So much was lost in the pursuit of Greed and Evil Power, perpetrated on an entire race by a handful of evil rulers who were already undeservedly wealthy, thanks to the unearned wealth handed to them by their fathers and forefathers, and helped by their political henchmen/puppets. I do apologise, I do not mean to ramble on, but I hate the useless waste of lives and Planets that greed causes! Universal history has told that tale many times over the Millenniums, believe me! You can’t change what has happened, but you can change and control what will happen from now onwards. I stand before you now as an Ambassador of Zengrila and offer you our assistance for your survival and prosperity! We are one race after all and it is our duty to help our fellow comrades when they are in need of it!”

“What do you propose to do to help us then, and what will it cost us?” Nick asked,

“We will help you to build a new world for yourselves, Get this city running properly once more, for example. We will show you how to activate and capitalise on all the functions and power of this city to their full potential, for example. You could be much further along in terra-forming this Planet if you did, for example. When my Ancestors left this planet it was a verdant, lush green planet with beautiful waterfalls cascading into crystal clear, blue lakes spilling out to the sea in gentle streams and rivers. That of course was a very long time ago, but with our help it wouldn’t take a terribly long time to bring it back, and it won’t cost you anything. The first step will be to show you how to switch on the air conditioning system to restore the planet to the state I have just described.”

Gorad took a sip of his glass of wine then stared at the glass he held before him and smiled, (or perhaps it was a grimace),

“We will also teach you how to make wine more better!”

Nick and I exchanged glances before I asked Gorad,

“More better?”

Gorad held his glass up once more,

“ Than this.”

He then glanced at each of us and said,

“Oh! I do apologize if I’m fluffing up your language, it has been many decades since I studied ‘Earthling’ languages.”

I drove Gorad out onto the plain near the city so he could be picked up by the rest of his crew, and of course the rest of my crew tagged along in two other buggies.

“You can stop here Drew, this’ll do fine.”

I stopped the buggy and climbed out with Gorad, expecting a long walk to allow room for his Star ship to land to pick him up and was surprised when Gorad stopped about 15 metres forward of my buggy’s nose. I looked up into the sky but found that Gorad’s ship was no longer hovering above us so I glanced over at Gorad,

“It would appear that your mates have pissed off without you.”

“Watch this.”

He raised his arm and tapped a couple of buttons on his watch then raised his arm into the air with his fist clenched as a loud and strident whistle issued forth from his helmet and filled the air around us. As loud as that whistle had been I would not have believed that it was loud enough to travel to the horizon and beyond, yet within a second or two his Star-ship popped up from over said horizon and blazed through the skies towards us at an altitude of roughly three hundred metres above the Martian landscape. It slowed only slightly as it passed over us before blasting into the Martian skies with incredible acceleration until, with a brilliant flash of red phosphorescence and a “PHUT” sound, it left Mars Atmos and disappeared amongst the stars. I tore my eyes away from the sky and looked around at Gorad to make a smart-arse comment about his dopey mates forgetting to stop and pick him up but the words jammed in my throat in surprise, (which was fortunate because my crew would have wondered why the Hell I was talking to myself). Gorad was gone!

As I drove back to the City I made a mental note to ask Gorad to teach me how to do that trick when next we met. It was way cool! I was trying to decide whether to call the trick a ‘Hot Zone Retrieval’ or a ‘Hot Zone Recovery’, or just simply an ‘HZR’ when Nick interrupted my thoughts,

“So tell me true Drew. Do you really believe that with all the technology at Gonad’s disposal he seriously had to whistle to call his ship in to pick him up?”

“No, he is very much the flashy, theatrical showman type is our Gorad.”

“You mean show-off, surely!”

I then told Nick my thoughts that he had interrupted,

“Yeah, good luck finding someone to practise on, because it sure as Hell won’t be me!”

“Dick?”

“Whatever! But my question to you now is this, Drew. Do you trust Gonad and his goons?”

“You do realise that his name is Gorad not Gonad, but yes I do trust him as it happens for a number of reasons. The first one being that there is nothing that we have that he would either need or want that I can think of. We live in a deserted city that his Race built and then abandoned, we only produce enough food and water to sustain ourselves and we have ‘Sweet F.A.’ of anything else! He didn’t have to go to the extremes that he did to introduce himself without alarming us. He could have just hauled up in his Star-ship and blown us to smithereens if he meant us harm, but he didn’t. Desert Eagle semi-auto handguns are very big and scary looking and they make a hell of a big bang when you fire them but I don’t think we would last longer than half a second in a shoot-out against the high-tech weapons Gorad and his goons would have at their disposal to point and shoot at us.”

“I agree with Drew, for all the reasons he just gave, but especially because we really don’t have any choice. There is Fuck -All we can do about it whether we trust him or not!” Grizzly interjected.

At this point in the conversation we were sitting in the ‘Hangout’ Cafe having coffee and drinks, surrounded by the rest of the crew after we had returned to the city.

“Yeah, and I still maintain that he wouldn’t have bothered with the ‘Circus-Show’ antics if he meant us any harm. He could have just blasted in and unloaded a shit-load of laser bolts at us, or just cut the power to the city with his watch until we packed up and pissed off. I am sure he means us no harm or he would have already harmed us a lot!”