‘It’s all going wrong,’ was all he said. The two men stood there. They watched as Abel and the others left the buggy and went towards the now refuelled ferry. As the men climbed aboard, Jarvis ran over and thrust his food pack into his brother’s hands.
‘You’ll need this, Abel. Good luck! My love to our family!’
His brother scowled. ‘You rotten little titox,’ was all •he said. He swung the pack on to his free shoulder and disappeared into the ferry. The hatch closed behind him.
Jarvis Feneloni and Dick Harrison climbed into the shelter of the buggy. They waited until the ferry lifted off into the drab skies before starting the engine and heading back to the domes. Neither of them said a word.
Abel Feneloni’s exploit and the departure of the fridge wagon from its parking orbit caused a stir for a day or two. Jarvis put the best gloss he could on the escape, claiming that his brother would present their case to the UN, and rescue for all of them would soon be at hand.
Time went by. Nothing more was heard of the rocket. No one knew if it reached Earth. The matter was eventually forgotten. As patients in hospital become so involved in the activities of their ward that they wish to hear no news of the outside world, so the new Martians were preoccupied with their own affairs. If that’s a fair parallel!
Lotteries for this and that took place all the time. I was fortunate enough to win a trip out to the science unit. Ten of us travelled out in a buggybus. The sun was comparatively bright, and the PIRs shone like a diamond necklace in the throat of the sky.
Talk died away as we headed northwards and the settlement of domes was lost below the near horizon. We drove along a dried gulch that served as a road. There was something about the unyielding rock, something about the absence of the most meagre sign of any living thing, that was awesome. Nothing stirred, except the dust we churned up as we passed. It was slow to settle, as if it too was under a spell.
This broken place lay defenceless under its thin atmosphere. It was cold and fragile, open to bombardment by meteors and any other space debris. All about us, fragments of primordial exploded stars lay strewn.
‘Mars resembles a tomb, a museum,’ said the woman I was travelling next to. ‘With every day that passes, I long to get back to Earth, don’t you?’
‘Perhaps.’ I didn’t want to disappoint her. But I realised I had almost forgotten what living on Earth was like. I did remember what a struggle it had been.
I thought again, as I looked out of my window, that even this progerial areoscape held – in Tom’s startling phrase – that ‘divine aspect of things’ which was like a secret little melody, perhaps heard differently by everyone susceptible to it.
I managed to terrify myself by wondering what it would be like to be deaf to that little tune. How bearable would Mars be then?
I was grateful to him for naming, and so bringing to my conscious mind, that powerful mediator of all experience. All the same, I disliked the drab pink of the low-ceilinged sky.
The tall antennae and the high-perching solar panels of the Smudge laboratory and offices showed ahead. It was only a five-minute drive from Mars City (as we sometimes laughingly called our congregation of domes). We drew nearer. The people in the front seats of the bus started to point excitedly.
At first I thought paper had been strewn near the unit. It crossed my mind that these white tongues were plants – something perhaps like the first snowdrops of a new spring. Then I remembered that Tom and I had seen these inexplicable things on our visit to Dreiser Hawkwood. As we drew close to them they slicked out of sight and disappeared into the parched crusts of regolith.
‘Life? It must be a form of life…’ So the buzz went round.
A garage door opened in the side of the building. We drove in. The door closed and atmosphere hissed into the place. When a gong chimed, it was safe to leave the buggy. The air tasted chill and metallic.