The Long Mars

‘Roger. But what about you two?’

Frank faced the plume of dust. ‘We split up.’ Without hesitating he turned and began to run, clumsy in his suit, across the dirt. He looked back once, still ru

She stood frozen for a heartbeat.

Then she began to run in the opposite direction. She ran with her head down, her body tilted forward, her boots thrusting back at the crusty ground. She had practised ru

‘He can only come for one of us at a time,’ Frank called. ‘He can strike at us from a distance, but this way at least one of us has a better chance. And if we keep on moving, maybe we’ll wear him down.’

‘Maybe. We could have just stood and fought.’

‘With what? This is the better way, Sally. Weaken him, finish him later.’

‘Dad? What can you see from up there? What’s he doing?’

‘Hesitating. He’s by the campsite, what’s left of it. Making another couple of passes through the wreck of the Woden, just for fun, I guess. Listen, I’ve a better idea. I’ll come down, pick one of you up.’

Frank seized on that immediately. ‘Do it.’

Sally said, ‘Leaving one at his mercy?’

‘We’ll deal with that when we get to it,’ Frank said. ‘Come on, Willis, do it.’

Sally stopped ru

She was Willis’s daughter. She imagined that for most people that would swing it. But Willis was no ordinary father.

Still Willis hesitated. He was actually thinking it over. Choosing between her and Frank Wood, who to save, as she waited.

At last, with a dip of its wings, the glider came out of its banking circle, like sliding off an invisible summit in the air, and swept down towards the ground.

Heading straight at Sally.

In the glider, Sally and Willis watched from the air as the whaler’s yacht closed on Frank Wood, trailing plumes of red Mars dust. Frank made his last stand, lashing out with his gloved fists as the yacht made pass after pass. There was nothing they could do to help.

Finally the crustacean jumped off his yacht, hitting the ground ru

Then the spear slammed into Frank’s faceplate, shattering it.

The noise of Frank’s ragged breathing cut out of the comms link immediately, and he shuddered and toppled back.

And Willis shifted them stepwise, over another crimson Martian plain, under an identical buttery sky. The scene of devastation and death below was gone, whisked away as if it had never happened.

40

THERE WAS NOTHING to say. So, at first, they said nothing.

They were stepping West now – West, back the way they had come, back to the Mars of the Gap, and, ultimately, home.

Sally made her way to the rear of the pressurized compartment, where a small bathroom was partitioned off. Here she opened her suit, for the first time since leaving the campsite to explore the pit – it seemed days ago, it was only hours, it was still early afternoon on Mars. She breathed in cabin air that felt suspiciously thin, with a faint tang of burning. No doubt there were leaks in the pressurized i

Time away from her father.

When she joined him again, he was still at the controls. The glider was facing geographic west, appropriately enough, and the shrunken Martian sun was starting to descend across stepwise landscapes all but identical save for the usual flickering changes of detail, the scattered rocks and craters, the patterns of shadows. His faceplate open, Willis glanced over at her, and held up a small glass vial with some kind of whisker within. ‘Some day we’ll come back out here and give Frank Wood a proper burial. Later yet, they’ll build a statue to him. A three-hundred-foot tall statue of Mars rock. And it was all for this.’

‘Beanstalk cable.’

‘Yep. We got what we came for, whatever it cost us. And with this we’re going to change the world. All the human worlds.’

‘Again.’

‘You better believe it. Listen, Sally. I’ve checked over the systems. With just the two of us the supplies we managed to salvage ought to be sufficient to get us home. But we have other problems. Thor’s not going to make it back, not all the way. We took too much damage. Lost too many fluids for one thing, coolants, hydraulics. Even our methane-fuel factory is failing.’

She sat down in her couch, behind him, and shrugged. ‘She did well to keep flying at all, after a rocket attack.’

‘Yeah. Well, we’re going to need to ditch.’ He paused. ‘And I’ll need you to tell me where.’

She understood what he meant. She closed her eyes and felt the stepping, the slow rhythm of it, again, again, again, one a second, like a deep pulse inside her head. And, under that, she had a vague, misty sense of the wider topology of this Long Mars, just as she always had of the Long Earth. A sense of co

Her father wanted her to bring him to a soft place, a short cut in the Long Mars. There they would ditch . . .

‘And I’ll take you home,’ she said, completing the thought aloud. ‘Through the soft places, as Granddad Patrick used to call them. Holding you by the hand, like when I was a little kid taking you to your tool shed in Wyoming, West 1.’

‘That’s the best plan I got. It was only ever a fallback concept, Sally. I mean, it was a logical anticipation, but I didn’t know for sure if there would be soft places here, if you would be able to detect them, use them . . .’

‘Use them to save you. You and your precious cable whisker.’

‘Well, it is precious, Sally. More precious than anything.’

‘More than the life of a man like Frank Wood?’

‘The rights of an individual, the life of one man, are as nothing compared with the value of a technology like this. We’re talking about the destiny of the species.’

She felt cold, sluggish, passive. As if she had to work through this one step at a time.

‘When you were up in the glider, and Frank and I were on the ground – we were waiting for you to choose which one of us to save. You hesitated.’

He said nothing.

‘I mean, most fathers would save their daughters instinctively. Right? I think Frank would have understood. But you – you hesitated. You were calculating, weren’t you?’

‘I—’

‘Here’s what I think. You weighed us up, Frank and me. Frank’s the better pilot. Given an operational glider, Frank would have been more useful to you than me. And also Frank was obviously better equipped to handle the Galileo and take us home. But you assessed the damage, and you figured, no, the glider wasn’t going to make it, you were going to need the short cuts. As for the Galileo, well, you watched me train on the emergency procedures, and I guess we’ll have support from the Russians at Marsograd when we need to fly home. We’ll cope with Galileo. But the soft places were the key item.