The Long Mars

Before they launched, Sally said she had two questions. ‘Two ships, right?’

‘Well,’ Frank said, ‘we could carry three persons in one ship at a pinch. We’re taking two ships for backup.’

Sally thought almost fondly of Lobsang. ‘You can never have too much backup.’

‘Right,’ said Frank.

‘Two gliders, then. We need two pilots, from the three of us.’ She looked at them. ‘So, question one: who’s driving?’

Frank and Willis both put their hands up.

Sally shook her head. ‘I won’t waste my time arguing with two old-guy control freaks like you.’

‘You’ll get your turn,’ Willis said. ‘We’ll need to rotate.’

‘Sure. I’m happy to ride shotgun. Do I get to choose who I ride with?’ And before they could answer she snapped, ‘You got the short straw, Frank.’

‘That’s all I need. A back-seat driver.’

‘Don’t push your luck, Chuck Yeager . . . And, Dad, here’s my other question – why all the Stepper boxes?’

‘Trade goods,’ he said simply. He wouldn’t expand further.

She glowered at him, but said no more. This kind of secretiveness was typical – the way he’d known all about the Long Mars before they’d even come here, the way he’d been working with the Russians on Mars who he hadn’t mentioned until they landed, the secrets of Mars itself – ‘Ask your father about life on Mars’ – and now these Steppers, carried for a contingency he clearly foresaw but wouldn’t discuss. He’d been this way since she was a teenager; it was a way of keeping control, and it had always made her coldly furious.

But she’d known all about his personality when she signed up for this jaunt. The time to challenge him would come, but not yet, not yet.

Frank was focusing on the flight. He said sternly, ‘We’re going to take this in stages. We’re going to suit up fully, in case of cabin leaks, and we’re going to make our very first step on the ground. Then, if all goes well, we’ll launch and step further in the air.’

Willis scowled. ‘OK, Frank, if you insist. Safety first.’

‘That’s the way to stay alive. Let’s get on with it.’

On their last night, the Russians insisted on taking them all over to Marsograd, served them coffee and vodka and black bread with some kind of algal paste, and made them watch a movie, called White Sun in the Desert. Viktor explained, ‘Old cosmonaut tradition. Movie watched by Yuri Gagarin before historic first flight in space. All Russians remember Gagarin.’

Frank fell asleep during the movie. Sally just sat through it, trying to avoid conversation with her father.

In the small hours, in the dark, they were driven back to the gliders in the Russian rover. They arrived a little before dawn. The MEM was a silent hulk in the dark, sending reassuring status messages to Frank’s tablet, waiting to take them home.

They clambered out of the rover, and the Russians rolled away.

In their already familiar pressure suits the three of them crossed to their aircraft, and boarded. Soon Sally found herself sitting in a cramped bucket seat, looking at the back of the helmeted head of Frank Wood, in the pilot’s bucket seat in front of her.

Even before this first limited trial Frank insisted on ru

Then he called back, ‘OK, let’s do this. The ground test first. Thor, this is Woden. You hear me over there, Willis?’

‘Loud and clear.’

‘Sally, I have my Stepper box; I’ll do the stepping. For now I’ll carry you and the ship. OK?’

‘Copacetic, Captain Lightyear,’ Sally said.

‘Yeah, yeah. Just take this seriously; it might keep you alive a little longer. Willis, on my zero. Three—’

Before he’d got to ‘two’ Willis’s ship had winked out of existence.

Frank sighed. ‘I knew he’d do that. Here we go—’

Stepping on Mars, Sally discovered, felt just like stepping on Earth. But the landscape beyond the hull of the glider changed dramatically, a more significant difference than most single steps on the Long Earth, unless you fell into a Joker.

Around the two gliders, still sitting side by side on the ground, the basic shape of the landscape endured, the eroded remains of the Mangala valley, the rise to the north-east that was the begi

The MEM, of course, and the tyre tracks left by the Marsokhod, had disappeared.

Frank theatrically tapped one of the display screens before him. ‘Air’s all gone. Pressure down to one per cent of Earth’s, and – yep, it’s mostly carbon dioxide. Just like our Mars.’

They clambered out cautiously. In the thin air Sally found her pressure suit inflated, subtly, making it stiffer to move around in. Frank and Sally checked each other’s suit, checked the glider cab. They took care over this, at Frank’s insistence; a failure of their gear over in the Gap Mars would have been survivable – here, probably not. The average Mars was lethal. Unprotected, Sally would be killed by the lack of air, the cold, the ultraviolet. Even the cosmic rays sleeting through the thin atmosphere inflicted a radiation dose equivalent to standing five miles from a nuclear blast, every six months.

Frank looked east, to the rising sun, holding up his hand to shield his faceplate from the glare, until he found a morning star. Earth, Sally realized, a feature missing from the sky of the Mars of the Gap. Frank opened a hull hatch and pulled out a small optical telescope and a fold-out radio ante

Willis came walking over from his own glider. ‘At last, this is an authentic Mars. Just like our own. The way Mars is supposed to be.’

Sally said, ‘I thought the Gap Mars was barren. I didn’t realize how much life there was, visible even in a casual glance. Not until now, when it’s all been taken away.’

‘You’d better get used to it.’

Frank was peering through his telescope, listening in to his radio gear. ‘You were right, Willis.’

‘I usually am. What about specifically?’

Frank pointed at the sky. ‘That’s Earth. We came East, right? The GapSpace facility is one step East of the Gap. But there’s no radio signals coming from that Earth up there. No lights on the dark side. If that was the GapSpace Earth we’d see evidence of it, hear it.’

Sally tried to get her head around that. ‘So we took a step into Long Mars. But it doesn’t – umm, run parallel to the Long Earth.’

‘It seems not,’ Willis said, peering up into the sky. ‘The Long Earth chain of stepwise alternates, and the Long Mars chain, are independent of each other. Intersecting only at the Gap. That’s no surprise. They’re both loops in some higher-dimensional continuum.’

Sally felt neither wonder nor fear. She’d grown up with the strangeness of the Long Earth; a little more exotica now hardly made any difference.

Frank, as ever, stuck to the practical. ‘What that does mean is that our only way home is back this way – I mean, back to the Gap universe, and the MEM, and Galileo, and a ride across space.’

‘Noted,’ said Willis. ‘OK. Anybody need the bathroom again? Then let’s get these birds in the air.’

To launch, each glider was fitted with small methane-burning rockets. The craft would scoot along the ground and fling itself into the air, gliding when the rockets were shut down. The gliders carried plenty of methane and oxygen propellant, and were equipped with versions of the Russians’ Zubrin factories, small processing plants, to manufacture more if they needed it.

They took their time to pace out a launch runway across the dusty plain, kicking aside any rocks big enough to cause a problem. Then they lined up the ships. From the air they would look like Lilliputians, Sally thought, toiling to move these fragile toy aeroplanes.