The Long Mars

Well, they hit no such terminal condition on this jaunt. But to Maggie’s mind the most remarkable Earth of all was West 247,830,855.

This Earth was not a planet at all, but a moon: a mere moon, of a greater body. The moon-Earth was smaller than the Datum, hotter, the air denser – more geologically active, Gerry speculated, because of tidal squeezing by its big primary world. ‘It’s a mutant cross between Earth and Io, moon of Jupiter,’ he said gleefully. Yet even here they found life, and complex life at that. One drone returned a striking image of what looked like pterodactyls to Maggie, huge bony flyers swooping around an active volcano.

And the sky was dominated by the primary, a nameless world that had no counterpart in the solar system of Datum Earth. This too was a rocky world, more like Earth than a gas giant like Jupiter, say, but many times more massive than Earth itself. It was a big angry ball that hung unmoving in the sky, though the sun wheeled beyond it; the Earth-moon was so close to the primary that it was tidally locked, with one face turned forever to the giant world. And as the primary itself turned it revealed sprawling continents, tremendous oceans, dense, smoggy air, and flaring volcanoes to match the activity on its Earth-moon.

They stayed a full twenty-four hours to study this object. Maggie thought the crew took more amateur photographs of this world than of any other sight they’d come across, save only the wreck of the Armstrong I.

And, most tantalizing of all, on the primary’s darkened hemisphere, they saw lights. Maybe only campfires, but still . . .

‘It’s maddening,’ Maggie said to Mac. ‘We’d need a spaceship to get over there. We stepped a quarter of a billion worlds to get here. And now we can’t cross a few thousand miles to go see all that.’

Mac only smiled. ‘We have to leave something for the future to achieve. Damn, this bottle of Auld is empty. This ship is ru

Bowing to a petition by the scientists, and some of the more adventurous crew, Maggie left a small party behind to explore this Earth-moon further. Then they moved on.

35

ON MAY 24, 2045, four months after leaving the Low Earths, the US Navy airships Armstrong and Cernan reached their nominal target of Earth West 250,000,000.

The world itself turned out to be unprepossessing, barren, ordinary, but at least you could land on it with a facemask, walk around a little. The crew built a stone cairn, affixed a bronze plaque, set up a Stars and Stripes, took a few photographs. When Wu Yue-Sai showed images of a similar ceremony performed by the crews of the Zheng He and Liu Yang, who had reached Earth East Twenty Million, they built the cairn up a bit to make sure it was bigger than the Chinese one. The trolls looked out from the observation galleries – they weren’t about to wear facemasks to go outside – and sang a sweet barbershop-quartet kind of song, over and over as a round, that sounded as if it had been selected to celebrate the journey, about how it was mighty nice, a trip to paradise, with my baby on board . . .

Even Douglas Black came down to the surface, with his aide Philip at his side. At Maggie’s quiet order, while he was off the ship Mac was never more than a few yards from Black, with full medical kit to hand. Black looked around, smiled, chatted, and allowed himself to be photographed alongside the crew, but refused to do any more than that. This achievement was the crew’s, he said; he was only a passenger, cargo. He did collect a handful of the local dirt, and slipped it into a plastic bag: a mundane souvenir of an unprecedented journey. Maggie rather liked his lack of ostentation.

There wasn’t much else to do here. Some of the crew played an improvised game of golf as a tribute to Alan Shepherd, an American hero who was one of their own, a Navy man who had once played a golf shot on the moon.

Then they turned the ships around, metaphorically speaking, to head Eastwards, and home.

At this point Douglas Black made another rare emergence from his suite, and asked a special request of Maggie.

They had logged Earth West 239,741,211 on the way through, but had not lingered long. Now they returned, for a longer stay.

This was one of the smaller worlds, with a mere eighty per cent of Datum Earth’s gravity. On the local version of the North American craton, tremendous glacier-striped mountains strained for a sky laden with fluffy water-vapour clouds, and in the valleys impossibly spindly trees clustered. The animals too were tall, slender, graceful, even though a peculiar six-legged body plan had prevailed. This world was, according to Douglas Black, just like a Chesley Bonestell painting, and all of them save Mac had to look up that reference to see what he meant.

When Maggie authorized shore leave, the crew loved it. Delightfully, thanks to an atmosphere that happened to be especially rich in oxygen, you could walk around with no special protection whatsoever. Harry Ryan and his engineers wandered around pla

When the moon came up, Maggie could see the grey and the white, the lunar seas and the highlands, were all wrong. Proof, if she needed it, that this was far from home.

But – as Douglas Black a

‘Hmm. On this world of all the worlds, of all the possibilities for life on Earth that we saw?’

‘I always knew what I was looking for, Captain. I had a quite detailed specification, and my staff have scrutinized the records of every single world we stepped through. And this place fits the bill, most nearly, of all those we have witnessed. Now, I have prepared for this possibility. In my sealed cargo I have everything required to establish a home here, safe, secure, provisioned. For now I need only Philip at my side, my staff, my equipment. I would ask only of you, Captain, that you take the news of this place back to the Low Earths, a

Maggie was puzzled. But when she asked Mac’s advice, the doctor shrugged, evidently having no particular objection.

Maggie said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth, Mr Black. You might not be alone. Some of my younger crew are thinking of jumping ship and staying here. It’s an open secret. Thanks to my XO I can tap into the scuttlebutt.’

Black seemed delighted. ‘I would be glad of the company of young people. Of course we could assist each other . . . And are you thinking of permitting this?’

‘Why not? I can’t let the ma

‘Ah! That delightful young officer. She would be very welcome. Her children will be tall and slender and have big chests for the thin air. Just like the Martians of Ray Bradbury! What do you think, Captain? How about yourself? You are healthy, still young. You too could stay, build bridges, raise babies.’