Within a couple of weeks, they’d taken a big bottle of water and worked out what kind of bacteria they’d need. They’d ordered them through the lab and put in some plants to create oxygen. Finally, they’d added their colonists – a pair of freshwater shrimps – and sealed up the bottle.
Everything in the bottle was designed to create a self-sustaining ecosystem. The plants created oxygen, the shrimp ate the plants, and the bacteria recycled the waste. All it needed was sunlight.
Now, a year later, the bottle still sat on Carl’s windowsill. The two shrimp astronauts were still thriving. In fact, Carl had noticed, they’d just laid tiny eggs that stuck to the plants’ leaves. He wanted to tell Dad. But Dad was gone.
When the bell rang, Carl was on his feet and out of the school gates in under a minute. He got to the bus stop just in time, took the short ride to the station and reached the platform just as a tube was pulling in.
From the Underground, it was a short jog to the museum. The place was like a cathedral, grand and imposing, but instead of carvings of saints and crosses, the exterior alcoves were carved with the images of animals, living and extinct, in soft, rounded stone. Carl walked up the wide stone steps and under the arch. The head of the diplodocus skeleton in the main hall hung in the air above his head, impossibly small compared to its enormous body.
He ignored it, walking through the main hall and along one of the side galleries to a small door with a combination lock. He’d been here often enough with Dad and he couldn’t be expected to look away every time someone entered a security code. He keyed in the number and stepped through.
The offices of the museum were a stark contrast to the cavernous galleries. They were a maze of corridors, tiny labs, offices and storerooms. Most of the museum’s enormous collection was not on display, but was stored in rows and rows of huge, grey cabinets. Carl’s dad had told him that there were so many fossils here that many weren’t even catalogued or named.
He walked on past them, deeper into the warren of corridors until he came to a grey door. He quietly pushed it open and stepped inside.
The room was part office, part lab. At the front sat a desk with an open laptop on it. Ordinarily, anyone sitting at the desk would have been able to look directly out of the window and down over London. Right now, however, their view would be obscured by a huge skull with curved, serrated teeth. Whoever sat at the desk now would be met, each time they glanced up from their work, by the gaping jaws of a megalosaurus, poised as if about to strike, empty eye sockets glaring straight down at them.
Along one wall was an arrangement of lab equipment, some bottles of liquid and a centrifuge. Next to it sat a large, powerful microscope and a figure in a crumpled blue suit, completely oblivious to Carl’s presence.
‘Hello, Dad,’ said Carl. Dad looked up. He was grey and drawn. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten for a week. Carl sighed. The living dead again. Dad managed a smile. It looked real, but forced at the same time. As though the intention to smile was there, but the muscles needed to produce one were out of condition.
‘Hello.’
‘I just thought I’d come to see you…’ Carl wasn’t really sure what to say.
‘Yes?’ Dad replied. There was a long pause.
To break the silence, Carl said, ‘So this is the skull?’
Dad brightened noticeably and seized on the chance to talk about something easy. ‘Beautiful, isn’t she? I say she just because of the size, of course. Can’t be sure.’ He looked up at the skull. ‘Look at the way the eyes face forwards – typical predator, you see, so she can judge distance when she’s hunting.’ He started to describe the teeth and the muscles that attached the jaw, even going so far as to explain how the creature’s brain would have been arranged within the skull.
Carl interrupted him. ‘Mum wants you to come back home,’ he said. ‘We both do.’
‘Of course,’ Dad continued, ignoring Carl’s interjection, ‘what I’m interested in is inside the bones.’ He dragged his eyes away from the skull and walked back to the microscope.
‘I know you get caught up in your work,’ Carl pressed on, ‘but this – this is more than that. This is serious now. You can see that, can’t you?’
Dad had got wrapped up in work before. Sometimes he’d been distant and hard to reach, but there had always been a way to get through to him. To bring him back. This time was different. He’d never let it go this far before. He’d never moved out before.
‘You see,’ his father continued, a far-off look on his face, ‘what I’ve done is taken a shaving of bone, and used a fairly standard sort of test but with a bit of a twist, and – ’
‘A test for what?’ snapped Carl, caving in to his father’s obsession.
‘DNA.’
‘Dinosaur DNA?’ Carl looked incredulous. Everyone knew fossils were just stone. There was no DNA in stone.
‘Take a look at this.’ Dad gestured to the microscope. ‘She’s more alive than you think!’
In spite of himself, Carl moved over to the microscope and peered into it. Blurry yellow shapes drifted in front of the lens. They shifted and changed as he scanned the slide and changed the focus the way Dad had taught him. Carl had seen DNA through a microscope before. In fact, they’d extracted it at home using strawberries, a bottle of vodka and some washing-up liquid. He’d seen its long, ghostly strands scattered over the slides they’d prepared together, and if there was one thing he was certain of, it was that what he was looking at here wasn’t DNA.
He stood away from the eyepiece. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he said. ‘It’s just bits of stone.’
Dad grabbed the eyepiece and stooped to stare down into it. He clenched his teeth in disappointment. ‘It was there!’ He scanned the slide quickly from one side to the other. ‘You’ve lost it!’
No, thought Carl. You’re the one who’s lost it.
Instead he said, ‘I’ll come back later, shall I?’ Dad just waved him away without looking up from the slide.
Chapter 11
Carl Marchant: 2014
Mum had been crying, that much was obvious, but she’d also been doing something else. Something much worse. She had been packing.
Flat-packed boxes were piled around the living room. Some were empty, some were full. There was no order that Carl could see to the work. It was as though she had simply started to throw everything they owned into crates.
When Carl had arrived home, he’d found her sat in the middle of the floor. She had been caught, midway through her work, by a photo album that she’d made the mistake of opening. Her expression, as she slowly turned the pages, said everything and nothing at the same time.
She looked up at him as he walked in. ‘Grandma and Grandad have offered to put us up for a while. After that, we can find somewhere up near them.’ There was a resigned tone to her voice.
‘Dad will come back!’ Carl tried to sound more confident than he felt. ‘You know how he is… he just needs to work it out. He just needs time.’
‘I’ve given him time. So much time,’ she said quietly. ‘I can’t do it any more.’ She closed the photo album and put it in the box next to her.
‘I don’t want to leave school,’ Carl lied. ‘I’m settled there.’
Uprooting Carl from school had always been the strongest argument Mum or Dad could ever come up with for not moving. Every time either of them had thought about the possibility of moving to a less expensive area, or a city with better job prospects, the subject of Carl’s schooling had come up and that had put an end to it. Carl, apparently, was ‘settled’ where he was, and that was that.
In truth, Carl wasn’t bothered. School was OK. He could take it or leave it. He had friends there, and he had enemies, just as he would anywhere else. Starting a new school might actually be quite fun, and anyway, there’d always be Facebook.
But Carl wasn’t ready to give up. Dad had gone deep this time, deeper than he’d ever been. In his mind, he was lost in a Jurassic jungle, but C
arl was sure there was a way back. There was always a way back.
He just needed time to work on him. There was no sense trying to force him back to reality – that risked driving him deeper still. You simply had to be there and wait for him to come around.
‘How long have we got?’ he asked.
‘I’ve already spoken to your school,’ she said. ‘We’re moving on Saturday’.
‘The day after tomorrow?’ Carl felt as if he’d been hit in the stomach. He only had one day?
‘I’m sorry. I really am, but if I don’t do it now…’ She trailed off. ‘You’re going to have to say goodbye to your friends at school tomorrow.’
The next day however, Carl did not say goodbye to his friends, because he didn’t go to school. Instead, he got straight on the underground to the museum. There was no time to wait for Dad to come around now. It was now or never.
He punched in the entry code and walked purposefully up to the grey door to the lab. Then he paused. He realised he had no plan. Slowly he turned the handle and pushed.
Dad was sitting at his desk, his back to the door. He had his elbows on the table and his hands up to his face. He was staring up at the huge skeletal face hanging above him, looking into its empty, glaring eyes.
‘Where are you sleeping?’ Carl said quietly. Dad turned. He looked as though he wasn’t sleeping anywhere, but he nodded towards the corner of the room. A sleeping bag was rolled up against the wall. He looked back at his laptop screen. It was covered in a pattern of red, blue and green blocks arranged in a complex grid.
‘It’s human,’ he said dejectedly.
‘What’s human?’
‘The DNA on the slide. It’s human.’
‘You have to snap out of this right now, Dad,’ said Carl.
Dad’s eyes suddenly widened, as though an idea had struck him. ‘Did you touch the slide?’ he demanded accusingly.
‘What?’
‘It was contaminated with human DNA,’ he snapped. ‘And it’s not mine!’
‘I didn’t touch it,’ sighed Carl.
‘What about the skull? Did you touch the skull?’
‘No, Dad, I didn’t. It could have come from anywhere!’ Carl almost yelled.
‘But you were here. You were in here.’ Dad looked angry. Angry and desperate. He was standing now, pointing at Carl. ‘You could have accidentally – ’
‘Mum wants to move.’ Carl cut him off. ‘Tomorrow.’
Dad stopped for a second, frozen as though part of him had suddenly glimpsed what was really happening to his life. Then the other part kicked in. ‘This is a laboratory!’ he barked. ‘It’s not a place for children!’ Behind his shoulder, the skull watched them with predatory eyes.
‘Did you hear me?’ Carl said each word, slowly and deliberately. ‘We… are… moving… tomorrow.’
Again, Dad paused. Carl knew he was on very dangerous ground. ‘Look, I’m sorry,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m sorry there was no DNA. But that’s it now. You know there’s nothing there. It’s over. You can come back.’
Dad looked at Carl, then back at the skull.
‘It’s only a fossil, Dad. Is it really worth losing everything for a piece of rock?’ Carl searched his father’s eyes for some kind of recognition. And there was something there. Carl saw his eyes dart one way and another, as though he was a hunted animal looking for a way out. He was thinking, beginning to understand…
Suddenly, he gasped, ‘No! No. That was just one sample.’ He stepped towards Carl, grabbing his shoulders, smiling a triumphant smile. Carl’s heart sank. ‘I’ve got dozens of samples. They’re all scanned. They’re all on the hard drive.’ He pointed at the laptop on the table in front of the skull. ‘I will find it!’
That was it. Carl had lost him. There was no way back now. No hope. That computer held enough work to keep Dad obsessed for months. More than long enough to destroy him, and his family. Carl looked into his father’s eyes. They were filled with a strange and desperate energy.
Carl wrenched himself free from Dad’s grip and grabbed a flask of liquid from the bench next to the microscope. The liquid was clear and the flask unlabelled, but Carl knew what it was. It was strong acid for dissolving stone. He yanked out the stopper, and before Dad could stop him, he poured the contents over the laptop keyboard.
The screen went blank instantly and there was a fizzing, buzzing sound as the liquid soaked through the keys and started to burn through the hard drive. Fumes began to rise in front of the skull’s snout.
Dad was staring at the laptop in horror, his mouth hanging open. ‘What have you done?’ he screamed, rushing towards the corroded computer.
Carl barged into his father, blocking his way. From behind him he felt a heat on his back like the breath of a dinosaur. Dad pulled back one arm, clenching his fist. Carl closed his eyes.
Nothing happened.
He slowly opened his eyes again. Dad was standing in front of him, head and shoulders down. He was shaking.
‘I… I’m sorry,’ he started. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’
Carl paused. ‘I’ve ruined your laptop,’ he said.
Dad shook his head. His eyes were full of tears. ‘It’s OK. There was nothing important on it anyway.’ He reached out his arms and held Carl for a long time.
‘Come on,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s time to go home.’
At the door, Dad stopped and looked back at the skull, still staring down at them. ‘My grandfather discovered it, you know,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘I just wanted to add something to it. You understand?’
Carl shrugged. ‘Sort of,’ he said.
‘I hope your mother will take me back,’ Dad said finally, after another long pause. ‘I’ve been an idiot.’
I hope so too, thought Carl.
Chapter 12
John Marchant: 2201
People were always asking John Marchant what it was like to be the first Martian. He never really knew how to answer them. The truth was, it wasn’t like anything. It was just his life. He was born here on the base. It was as simple as that. He didn’t know what it was like not to be the first Martian.
He made a pointing gesture inside the mechanised suit and it reacted instantly, uncurling one long metal finger. He made a tapping movement and the finger’s chisel-like end stabbed at a piece of rock, splitting it neatly along its seam so that it opened up like a billion-year-old book.
He examined the inside of the rock. It was smooth, featureless. Just another blank page in Mars’ history. He tossed the rock away. It bounced high in the low gravity and toppled down the side of the crater, sending up flurries of dust.
He looked over his shoulder at his parents, who were digging a little further down the slope. None of them had been able to resist one last dig before they left, probably forever. John turned back to look at the base.
When he was very small, the base consisted of six domes growing just enough food to feed him, his parents and a couple of other scientists. They had needed constant supplies from Earth, which roared in on shuttles every couple of months, bringing strange surprises like toys and chocolate. It had always seemed to John that Earth was a far more interesting place than Mars and yet, oddly, everyone he got emails from seemed fascinated by their cramped little home.
Slowly, the base had grown. Day and night the automated foundry churned out iron and clay bricks of different sizes, and everything from buildings to toothbrush handles were built from them. The blocks were solid, interchangeable and on Mars, they were light enough to build almost anything with. They were the secret of the base’s success, and meant that the old glass-roofed domes were being slowly crowded out by windowless and mostly empty cube-shaped buildings.
They were self-sufficient in most things now. Food, fuel – there was even a pod for growing synthesised meat, although John was constantly told that it didn’t taste like the real thing. What held up the base nowadays wasn’t a lack of space or food. It was electronic
s. That was why many of the new buildings stood empty. The base just didn’t have the processing power available to manage their temperatures and work their doors.
Nowadays, the traffic from Earth had slowed and most of the transports were in the opposite direction, Mars exporting materials rather than importing them. So no more chocolate. And tomorrow, they would export John and his parents.
He looked back at his dad, hacking out and smashing one rock after another before tossing it into the crater, and his mother picking slowly and deliberately through every stone in front of her. He knew neither of them would leave if it were up to them. This was his decision, and they’d agreed for the sake of his future.
John lifted another small slab of rock and split it. Nothing unusual. He threw it away. There never was anything. Or at least there never was the thing. Every day since he could remember, his parents or the other scientists on the base had gone out to the crater, and chipped away at the ground there. Even today, on their last day on Mars, they couldn’t resist the urge to go back out.
Over fifteen years, his parents had excavated the rocks that told the history of the planet in layers. Every day they had learned more about that history and returned with more samples to analyse in the labs. They rarely even spoke about what they were really hoping for.
Every few years, someone would find something. A microscopic pattern embedded in the rock that could have been a fossil. A different kind of rock that might have once been organic. But each time it had been examined, it had come to nothing. There were no fossils on Mars. At least, no undisputed ones. Except the old megalosaurus in the centre dome. The skull was always present, glowering down from a plinth to remind them why they were there.
John stepped back and looked at the side of the crater, which swept out in a huge wide curve. Whatever had hit the ground here had carved a great scoop out of the side of the planet, and around its edge layers of rock, each a subtly different colour from those above, were exposed. The further down the crater you went, the further back in time you could explore.
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