The Worst Man on Mars

by Mark Roman

  19. In a Spaceship, Everyone Can Hear You Scream

  In the Assembly Room, Dugdale floated above the podium at the front, waiting for the general hubbub to die down. A glutinous smile sat on his lips, although his eyes registered contempt for all before him.

  Finally, when the room was quiet, he started. “Eight months I’ve been cooped up on this sh ...”

  Delphinia clapped her hands over Tarquin’s delicate ears.

  “... it-bucket with you bunch of friggin’ weirdos. Finally, NAFA ‘ave given all-clear for t’landin’ tomorrow.”

  Despite the Dugdale-centric slant on the news, a buzz went through the room. There was cheering from the colonists, some high-fives, and the odd kiss.

  “So, when I step out ert space elevator and give me first-man-on-Mars speech, I’ll have done me bit. Then it’s down to you lot to go off and do yer little scientific experiments or set up a community or start having babbies or whatever. Me, I’ll be kickin’ off me boots and getting’ one o’ them little metal robots to bake me a pie and bring me a barrel o’ Stallion. Then I’ll sit back to watch t’Big Game: Featherstone Rovers v Batley. Any questions?”

  The colonists were too excited to ask anything; they just wanted the next day to come.

  A single arm went up – Mr Snuggles’s articulated metal arm. “What’s a ‘shit-bucket’?” asked the robot, keen to add a new expression to his expanding vocabulary.

  *

  Gripping the safety-rope for dear life, Lieutenant Willie Warner stared down at the vast red planet below. Somewhere, down there, were 12-foot bird-like creatures, possibly highly advanced. In his mind he rehearsed his first words to them. He rejected “Take me to your leader” as far too cheesy. “I come in peace” sounded corny. Maybe, “Hi, the name’s Willie. Lieutenant Willie Warner, from Earth.”

  His musings were interrupted by Zak’s voice in his earpiece. “Any whiff of a stiff out there?”

  “No,” was Willie’s curt reply. He pulled himself back to the spaceship and started climbing its exterior structure, every now and then unclipping his safety rope and clipping it back further up. There was no sign of the bodies. Perhaps they had become detached and floated off into space. But, just then, a glint of sunlight reflected off something peering over the upper helm of the ship. He gulped. It was a space helmet.

  Zak heard his gulp. “Wassup, Hilda?”

  “I’ve spotted one. Seems so far away,” said Willie, climbing higher. “How long’s the rope?”

  “Standard length for tying stiffs to spaceships.” Zak sniggered at his own comment.

  Willie continued climbing and, as he did so, a second body came into view, and then a third. He now understood why the first had seemed so distant; they were tethered in a line, like a kite-string of corpses flying behind the ship.

  Willie stared in morbid fascination and reasoned they must be in order of demise. Attached to the ship would be Dame Sylvia, Nobel prize-winner and the world’s foremost expert on hydroponics. Unfortunately, the lifetime she had spent gaining her great knowledge meant that her body was too old to withstand the take-off and she had died of heart failure 45 seconds into the mission. Next along the line would be Penny Smith. Willie caught his breath at this thought. The very, very pretty, yet brutally murdered, Penny Smith. And the third corpse had to be the last, and incomplete, mortal remains of Mission Commander Chad Lionheart.

  “Don’t forget, space cadet,” Zak was saying, “never look into their faceplates, man. Radiation causes degeneration resultin’ in liquidization. Plus, in Penny’s case, there’ll be the after-effects of blunt-force mutilation.”

  Willie tried to calm his breathing and heart-rate by remembering his mum’s guiding words, “When you’ve finished what you’re doing, William Warner, you can get upstairs and tidy your bedroom.”

  For once, this seemed a hardly onerous prospect given the emptiness of his current sleeping quarters.

  *

  In the Assembly Room, the colonists were staring up at the giant TV screen which was showing a shot of the Martian landscape at sunset, the glorious colours all shades of red and yellow. This was the start of the video supposedly sent by InspectaBot as part of his report. Dugdale wore a satisfied expression on his ugly face, and he kept glancing back to gauge the prospective colonists’ reactions.

  The camera panned to the impressive construction that was Botany Base, sitting like an architectural jewel in the landscape. Gradually, the camera zoomed in. Then it took off to commence a ‘fly-through’, first around the shiny outside, and then through the main entrance and into the slick, space-age interior. The viewers felt themselves shoot along the corridors, into common rooms and individual apartments, panning slowly around each one. Everything had been beautifully constructed and impeccably finished. The bedrooms looked as though they belonged to a posh, 5-star hotel. The plants in the BioDome looked green and fresh and ready to eat, and free-range chickens patrolled the floor looking fat and healthy. In the centre, a fountain gushed clear water, splashing it onto sculptures of mermaids and dolphins and chubby cherubs.

  “Swish,” said little Tarquin, moving his body in synch with the flight of the camera.

  “Wicked,” said one of the teenagers at the back.

  “Love it, love it,” squealed Adorabella in delight.

  Delphinia and Brian Brush high-fived each other, and Dugdale grinned smugly as though it were all his own work.

  Only Emily Leach seemed a little concerned. “How did they fly that camera around the buildings like that?” she asked.

  But nobody heard her or took any notice of her.

  *

  Taking a deep breath Willie Warner gave a quick burst of the small thruster rockets attached to his back, alas a little too much. Before he knew it, he found himself closing in on the furthest corpse at an alarming rate. In panic he groped for the reverse thrusters, but couldn’t locate them. He screamed. There was no way of preventing the collision. But, just inches from Lionheart’s spacesuit, his safety rope tautened to its full extent and yanked him back with a lung-emptying jolt. “Oof!” he cried.

  Out of the corner of his eye he glimpsed a spacesuit, only inches away. With a shock he realized he had drifted to within touching distance of Penny Smith. Worse still, he was staring straight into her helmet. With a yelp, he averted his eyes.

  “Don’t look into the faceplate, mate,” Zak reminded him, as though guessing the cause of Willie’s yelp.

  “Thanks a lot. Terrific advice.” Fortunately, Penny’s helmet had been too dark to register any of its contents.

  Keeping his eyes away from the helmet, Willie searched Penny’s spacesuit for the place where Lionheart’s rope was attached. There was a karabiner clipped onto a belt-loop at the waist. With trembling fingers, he reached out to unclip it. It was very fiddly, and his gloves were cumbersome, but after a brief struggle he managed to get it free. He now gripped the end of the rope.

  Slowly, slowly, Willie pulled himself back towards the spaceship, towing Lionheart behind him. When he reached Sylvia Rothschild, he unclipped Penny Smith’s cable from the old lady’s belt and pulled Lionheart’s and Penny’s ropes towards the ship. There he unclipped the final karabiner and now held all three ropes, like a balloon-seller hoping someone would buy his dead-astronaut balloons.

  Panting with exhaustion and emotion, Willie started the slow climb over the ship’s hull, back the way he had come, this time having to make the manoeuvre using one hand as the other hand was occupied.

  “Not far to go now,” he muttered to himself, as the airlock doors came into view.

  But as so often happens when the end is in sight, little accidents can result in serious setbacks.

  Unlike the majority of Willie’s personal effects, which were heading down towards Mars, his dungarees had caught on a Mayflower III toilet extract vent. Whether it was the vibration of the astronaut’s movements or just because they were pleased to see him, the dungarees chose that moment to drape themselves
around their owner’s head. Suspecting an attack by an acid spewing space-alien, Willie instinctively tried to rip them from his head with both hands. Too late he realized that his act of unnecessary self-defence had caused the ropes to slip from his fingers. As he shook off the attacking trousers he looked in horror at the bodies floating away from him, tumbling and rolling as they did so. Penny’s body was moving off to the left, Lionheart’s at a slight angle upwards, and Sylvia was drifting towards the far end of the ship.

  Panic filled him. “No, no, no. This can’t happen. Nooooo,” he wailed as he watched the corpses go, the blood thumping in his head. Already the bodies were beyond reach.

  “Speak to me, bro’. Share the show,” said Zak in his earphones.

  “I’ve dropped them,” was all he could say.

  “Not the stiffs. Don’t tell me you’ve lost the stiffs.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s très négligente, dude.’

  Willie’s eyes focused on Sylvia’s tumbling form. At least she wasn’t heading out into space. His hopes rose. If only she would come to rest against the side of the ship, he might at least still be able to salvage one corpse. He fired his thrusters and set off in pursuit, hoping to reach her before she bounced off the hull and tumbled away like the others.

  But as Willie gained on her, his eyes widened. The body was taking a direct path towards the large, picture-window of the Assembly Room.

  “No, of all places ...,” he cried.

  He could only watch in frozen horror as the spacesuited cadaver spread-eagled itself against the glass, facing directly into the Assembly Room.

  And then he heard the screams, awful screeching screams, clearly audible in the background of his open comms link to Zak Johnston.

  “Whoa, what was that?” exclaimed Zak. “Sounds like Dugzilla’s just flashed his privates again. Better check it out.” With a click, the comms link fell silent.

  Willie managed to grab a rung on the outside of the ship to halt his progress. He was just metres from the window against which Sylvia’s corpse had come to rest. He could imagine the mass hysteria, horror and revulsion on the other side of the glass. In the silence of his helmet he could hear nothing but the throbbing of blood in his ears. He glanced away to catch sight of the other corpses serenely heading down towards Mars as though on a nice holiday.

  If Willie was thinking things couldn’t possibly get worse, he was about to find out that they could. For, the very next moment, an electronic debris-sensor on the outside of the ship detected a foreign body on the surface of the glass and triggered the window’s enormous windscreen wiper. Its first sweep thumped into Dame Sylvia’s spacesuit and thrust her at Willie. He yelped, sure she was about to come hurtling at him. Fortunately, (or as it turned out, unfortunately), part of her spacesuit snagged on the wiper blade. So, instead of flying towards him, her trajectory came to an abrupt halt as the wiper changed direction. Willie watched in horror as the wiper zipped back and forth, back and forth, thrashing the body across the window, limbs flailing and helmeted head butting the glass.

  It was at this point that Lieutenant Willie Warner started to scream.

  *

  The Assembly Room was in a state of pandemonium. The screaming, already loud from the moment of Sylvia Rothschild’s macabre arrival, ratcheted up several notches as the corpse lurched drunkenly from one side of the window to the other like a deranged can-can dancer. Flint Dugdale, initially speechless, started bellowing and roaring for calm, ordering them to return to their cabins immediately. But even his loudest commands went unheard and unheeded.

  Emily was the first to stop screaming, but only because the horror of the scene had made her faint. On Earth, she would have slumped in her seat, but, being weightless, she remained as she was, the only tell-tale signs of her unconsciousness being her closed eyes and motionless limbs.

  Everyone else was transfixed by the morbid oscillations before them. The teenagers had simultaneously whipped out mePhones and blablets and started filming the space dance the moment it had begun. It was only when one of the corpse’s eyeballs dropped out of a socket that the gagging spectators had to look away.

  Visibly fuming, Dugdale stared at Sylvia’s lifeless form as it continued its wild swings across the window. Catching sight of a dial marked ‘Wiper’, he doggy-paddled his way across to it, initially turning it the wrong way, (which doubled the speed and height of Sylvia’s leg-kicks) before moving it to the “off” position. The body stopped its dance in mid-swing as if waiting for applause or shouts of ‘encore’. Its single remaining eye stared at the colonists while its limbs drifted gently as though caught on an interplanetary breeze. Flint jabbed at the control panel and slowly, very, very slowly, the horror show faded as a window blind descended. Finally, the shutter had made sufficient progress to hide the zombie spectacle from view.

  One by one, the ship’s heavily dazed personnel turned and drifted out of the Assembly Room like a departing horror movie audience. Even the teenagers stopped their filming and left the room to go view the footage somewhere quiet.

  “Chuffin’ magic,” said Mr Snuggles as he departed.

  Soon, the only people left were the furious Dugdale and the unconscious Miss Leach.

  “You too,” he ordered. “Out yer go.”

  But Emily moved not a muscle.

  “Oh, chuffin’ Nora!” exclaimed Dugdale on seeing her motionless form. “Don’t tell me another one’s snuffed it!”

  20. Unequal and Inapposite Reactions

  Back in her cabin, Delphinia Brush was wailing in high dramatic fashion, bear-hugging Tarquin’s innocent little head to her ample bosom. “Oh, my poor little space hero.”

  Tarquin struggled against his mother’s grip, unable to speak, unable to breathe.

  “It’s all my fault. I should have covered your eyes sooner and spared you the horror. But I was in a state of shock. It was so awful!” Her hug tightened. “I hope you didn’t see that awful, ghastly thing, my little flapjack. If you did, try to put it out of your mind, else you’ll have nightmares; you’ll be scarred for life. Oh my God, what a terrible thought – and it’s all my fault.”

  The youngster managed to release enough of a nostril to fill his empty lungs with air.

  But this only made his mother hug him tighter. “Mummy’s here for you.”

  Tarquin was starting to turn blue, and on the point of passing out, when Delphinia finally released him, clasping his cheeks between her chubby fingers and slapping a huge, wet kiss on his forehead.

  “I’m OK, Mummy,” said Tarquin when he had regained sufficient breath. “It was real bad.”

  “I know it was, my little fruit bat. I know it was.”

  “No, I mean ‘bad’ as in ‘good’. So cool. Especially when her eye popped out.”

  *

  Dr Adorabella Faerydae scrolled through the list of bush-remedies on her scratch-pad.

  “Not feeling too good, honey bumps?” asked husband Brokk, pushing himself towards the mini-fridge for a space-can of lager. “You should try one of these.”

  She gave him a look of utter disdain. “I devote my life to caring for others, not myself.”

  “Sure you do, cherry lips. Sure you do. But who do you think might need emergency alternative treatment at this hour?”

  “Duh! Like ... did you not see what just happened in the Assembly Room? Emergency? I’d say so.” She turned to her alternative medicine cabinet and scanned the labels on the bottles before plucking a bottle of earwig powder and baboon navel fluff.

  Brokk looked puzzled. “You mean that mummified old trout in the window? You might be a bit late to save her, my fairy cup-cake. By about eight months.”

  Adorabella flashed him a furious glance. “Not her, you idiot.”

  Brokk took a swig of his lager and gave her an enquiring look. “So?”

  His wife huffed. “Any minute now,” she explained patiently, “people are going to be knocking at that door, desperate for post-traumatic
stress counselling.” She pointed at the cabin door, as though he didn’t know where it was.

  Brokk gave a sceptical chuckle and strapped himself into his gaming console.

  Adorabella stared at him. “What’s that laugh supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, come on, Addy-bells. You know no one ever comes to see you for treatment.”

  His wife was speechless.

  “Aside from the medicals that everyone has to have, you’ve only had one ‘patient’ during this entire trip,” continued Brokk. “And she’s dead.”

  “That’s simply not true.”

  “Which part?”

  Adorabella stuttered, “I ... I ... I ... She died of natural causes.”

  “That’s not how I heard it.”

  “What?”

  “It’s OK, darling, we all make mistakes.”

  *

  Harry Fortune was pushing himself back and forth between one end of his cabin and the other – the zero-G equivalent of pacing. His face glowered, eyebrows melting towards the bridge of his nose, mouth downturned. He was fully immersed in his dark, artistic side. It was a huge moment for him, he knew that. Massive. And it terrified him. Was he up to the task? Would he be able to produce the goods at last?

  For eight whole months he had not written a single poem of note, which, for a Poet in Residence, could be construed as something of a failure. The few love-odes dedicated to Penny Smith had bordered on the obscene and could hardly be classed as the sort of poetry commemorating Mayflower III’s historic mission as his appointment required.

  Nothing had come to him. His muse was extinguished. He felt a failure and a fraud.

  Finally, after such a shocking event, such a dramatic, gut-wrenching, vivid event, the inspiration was flowing and he began to write.

  Incident in the Assembly Room

  High above the Martian sand,

  We’re waiting for the word to land.

  InspectaBot’s report comes through;

  Base looks good – base looks new.