The Long Mars

3

Would Frank Wood take a ride to Mars?

In 2045, Francis Paul Wood, USAF (retired), was sixty-one years old. And flying in space had been his dream since boyhood.

As a kid he’d been an odd mix of sports jock, engineering hobbyist and dreamer. He was encouraged by his parents, and an uncle who wrote about the space programme and loaned him a library of old science fiction, from Asimov to Clement and Clarke and Herbert. But by the time his dreams started to take realistic shape, the Challenger crash was already history, a disaster that had happened before he was two years old.

Still, he’d progressed. Once he’d been a NASA candidate astronaut, a career development after active service in the Air Force; he’d got that close. Then came Step Day, when an infinity of worlds had opened up within walking distance of an unequipped human, and spaceships had become instant museum pieces. And so had Frank Wood, it felt like, at thirty-one years old. He had become restless, nostalgic, and without a close family, having sacrificed relationships for a dream of a career. Suddenly he found that he’d become the uncle with the connections to the space programme and a trunk full of science fiction novels.

Burdened by a sense of opportunities lost, he’d spent some years hanging around what remained of Cape Canaveral, doing whatever work he could find. But Canaveral, aside from a continuing programme of launches of small unmanned satellites, was little more than a decaying museum of dreams.

And then had come the discovery of the Gap, a place where a conjunction of cosmic accidents had left a hole in the chain of worlds that was the Long Earth, and a new kind of access to space. A few years after that Frank, by then in his fifties, had gone out there to find a bunch of kids and young-at-heart types busily building an entirely new kind of space programme, based on an entirely new principle. Frank had thrown himself into the project with enthusiasm, and liked to think he injected a modicum of wisdom and experience into what had felt, in those early days, like some kind of ongoing science fiction convention, and these days more like the Gold Rush.

When Yellowstone had blown up back on the Datum, Frank, with many others—including a new friend called Monica Jansson, whom he’d met when Sally Linsay had come here to rescue abused trolls, as she’d seen it—had put aside his own projects and had travelled home to help. Well, Monica was long dead now, and the Datum was kind of settling down to a new equilibrium—or at least people had stopped dying in such numbers as they had been—and Frank felt entitled to go back to his own set-aside dreams. Back to the Gap.

And now here was Sally Linsay in his life again, and her father, with a startling proposition for him.

Would Frank Wood take a ride to Mars? Hell, yes.

They got to work.