The Lowest Heaven

WWBD ^{SIMON MORDEN}

This is your alarm call. Wake up, Leroy Johnson.

He opened his eyes. The lights over his face had bloomed in anticipation of his movement.

This is your alarm call –

“Cancel.”

In the quiet, there were the sounds that let him know everything was still right with the ship: the air-blowers rustled their tell-tale ribbons, the refrigeration unit hummed in the midrange, ammonia and water bubbled inside their silvery pipes. Above that, the live intercom ticked and intermittent alarms chimed, and below them all, the rockets thrummed.

Johnson snaked one of his long fingers to his neckline, found the ring closer of his sleeping bag and hooked it. He dragged it down and exposed his bony knees to the clean, bright, clinically-scrubbed air before reaching up to press his hands against the luminous surface inches from his face. He could see the faint outlines of his bones through his skin.

“Ship time?”

Ship time is sixteen oh two Zulu, mission day plus one hundred and ninety three.

“Where is everyone?”

Please repeat.

“Locate the crew.”

McMasters and Malinska are on the flight deck. Halliwell is in the air plant. Yussef is asleep in cradle four.

“Any alerts?”

There have been three hundred and seventeen alerts since the end of your shift. Three hundred and fifteen have been identified as either false-positive or required minor corrections. Two are ongoing. One is ongoing. Three hundred and sixteen –

“Enough.” He found the mechanical release on his cradle’s trolley, pulled the latch, pushed the handle. The cradle rolled out into the central well and left him looking at a higher circular ceiling, a ladder up, and an opening in the bulkhead.

He swung his feet off the cradle and onto the floor, feeling the coldness of the smooth, poured rubber and the prickle of goosebumps.

A man stood behind him, a once-tall, slightly shambling, white-haired, jowly old man in an open-necked shirt and pale jacket, creased slacks and a pair of scuffed brown brogues.

“Good morning, Leroy,” he said.

Johnson ignored him, going to one of the wall lockers and pulling out his thicker one-piece blue coverall. He faced the empty locker as he dressed: left leg, right leg, left arm, right arm, then zipping it up the front to his Adam’s apple. The fabric was soft and worn and stained after a hundred and ninety-three days of wear. The ship slippers were in two foot-shaped hangers on the back of the door. He flipped them out and stepped into the them: working his toes and wriggling his heels meant he didn’t have to bend down to put them on.

He closed the locker door, checking it was properly shut so as to not trigger another alert, then rested his forehead on the cool plastic: he knew he had to turn around at some point.

When he did, the man was still there, the cradle lights reflected in black-rimmed glasses with lenses so thick, Johnson could have used them to repair a hull breach.

“Leroy: we need to talk about what you’re going to do next. We’re almost there.” He had a big voice, one that was difficult to ignore in the confines of ship-space.

Johnson still said nothing. He moved to put the sole of his ship slipper against the side of his cradle and it rolled back into the wall. The line of light narrowed, then winked out, and the tell-tales on the console burned a double-green.

Previously, they had the bed between them. Now, there was nothing but a short stretch of rubber flooring.

“I,” said Johnson, looking at the ladder where it went down towards engineering, up to the flight deck, across to cradle four where Yussef slept. Anywhere but the man’s round-cheeked seriousness. “We’ll have to do it later. I’ve got work to do.”

He stepped out over the long drop to the engines and scaled the first ladder to the ceiling, pausing briefly at the bulkhead to clear his closing throat and blink away the tears. Looking down at the old man looking up, he swallowed against the lump and carried on climbing.

McMasters was looking at the latest feed from the orbiter, played out on a hand-held screen so close to his nose that made it difficult for him to tell one pixel from another. Malinska was scrolling through a screed of coding on the main console◦– a page, a pause, another page. Johnson thought she couldn’t be reading more than a single line at a time.

She glanced over her shoulder from the acceleration chair, while her fingers kept dabbing at the touch pad, spinning through the lines of regular expressions to the one Johnson wore on his face. “Bradbury?” she asked. “What did he say?”

Johnson pulled his own tablet from its dock, and opened up the list of alerts. One had been active, and in the time he’d taken to get up, get dressed and climb to the flight deck, there’d been another four. Somewhere on the ship, Halliwell would be fixing something.

“We all know it’s not really him, that he’s something I’ve made up. Having a conversation with him is just talking to myself.”

Malinska was still speaking, but he missed what she said, distracted by the number of messages sent from Mission Control, now well over a light-minute away.

“It’s not like I ever met him,” he said, continuing his own point. “I don’t even know why it’s some dead white guy. Why not my mother?”

“Atavism,” she said, “a case of exaptation co-opting your memories of his stories to construct a mentor figure.”

He deleted all the messages without watching them. “Not everything can be explained by evolutionary biology,” he murmured.

“Wash your mouth out, young man.” She turned back to her screen: she expressed no surprise or concern that the code she was now reading was several thousand lines later.

“How’s it going?” he asked, nodding at her fast-moving fingers.

“I’ll keep looking. It has to be there somewhere.” Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Johnson tucked his tablet in the elastic strap on his leg. He frowned at the shapes on McMasters’ screen, those he could see behind the man’s thumbs and head: petaloid shadows, fuzzy with distance and surface dust, and black beetle things crawling around on the Abalos Undae, presumably mining the subsurface ice.

“Abe? You okay?”

“They’re spelling out words,” said the man with his nose pressed against the screen. “They’re sending us a message.”

“What does it say?”

“I don’t know.” He was trying to open up a conduit from the images direct to his brain. “It’s not in any language I know yet. But I’m learning, Leroy. I’m learning.”

Johnson patted McMasters’ shoulder, right on the mission patch of Mars-and-crosshairs. “If anyone can do it, it’s you, Abe.”

Time to check on Halliwell. He took the single step back to the ladder, and started carefully down. It was easy to make mistakes in the slight gravity generated by the drive: too little pull to momentarily forget he wasn’t weightless, just enough to break something important if he fell.

All that way, all that time. Imagine screwing up by doing something stupid.

Bradbury was still there, head craned back to watch Johnson descend, pillowy stomach straining the buttons of his shirt. Johnson kept going past him, down though to the next deck. When he looked up, he could see the pile of thick white hair, the reflection from the glasses, the tight mouth above the double-chin made more prominent by his posture. He hated it when Bradbury looked sad.

The engine wasn’t louder at the back end of the ship, but he could feel it more distinctly, like a phone vibrating in his pocket. Halliwell was waist deep behind a panel, her legs bent to brace her movements.

“Judi? Just checking up on you.”

“I’m fine,” she said, her voice both hollow and muffled, as if there was a mattress over an open well. “I need to fix this valve like I need to scratch, you know.”

Her hand snaked out and unerringly found the replacement solenoid resting on the loose panel cover, her palm dropping the faulty one even as she scooped the new one up. As she moved, she released a puff of the sharp sweat stink she carried.

“Why don’t you cut yourself a deal, Judi?” Johnson eased her tablet out from between her knees, where it was inevitably open on the faults list. “Why don’t you do this one, and the tell-tale on the tertiary radiator pump, then go and get something to eat? Maybe get yourself in the head and freshen yourself up?”

“Leroy, these things won’t fix themselves. While I’ve been in here, there’s been another four faults flagged. Got to get them all.” She grunted with the effort of fitting a tiny widget in a small space.

“Do I get to order you?” he said.

“Geez, commander. Why don’t you find me a tube of something, and leave it here?”

“Fair enough. Cereal bar and a bulb of coffee?”

“Whatever’s easiest,” she said, distracted. She didn’t want him to be there, and he’d done his duty. The screen blooped and slipped in another fault. By the time she’d done those five, there’d be others. A never-ending cycle of breakdown and repair, and no one to tell her to stop. He didn’t think he’d ever seen her so happy.

The kitchen was the next level up, so he climbed easily and started to busy himself collecting breakfast not just for Halliwell, but for Malinska and McMasters. Bradbury was there, sitting sideways at the tiny fold down table on a pop-up chair. Johnson had never seen him go up or down the ladder, so Bradbury just appeared around the ship without ever taking a step or climbing a rung.

“Shall we try that again? Good morning, Leroy,” said Bradbury.

“Okay.” He filled a coffee bulb with hot water from the spigot and snapped the lid shut: zero-g training right there. “Morning, Mr. Bradbury.”

“You can call me Ray, son. Mr. Bradbury’s awfully formal.”

“I’d like to stick with Mr. Bradbury, if that’s okay.”

“Sure. That coffee smells good, Leroy. You know that means ‘the king’ in French, don’t you?” Bradbury smiled up with his crooked teeth on show.

“If I gave you a coffee, how would you drink it? You being a, a whatever it is you are.”

“Ghost? No shame in being a ghost, Leroy. Even when I was alive, some of my best friends were ghosts.” He gave a little chuckle and his belly jiggled in waves. “Why don’t you leave that for a moment and sit down with me?”

Johnson carried the coffee bulb over and perched at the very edge of the seat opposite. He bowed his head and listened to the thrumming of the engines and the rustling of the air.

“You’re almost there. Final breaking manoeuvres for orbit. Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”

“I… no.”

Bradbury took off his glasses and peered the wrong way through the immense lenses. “You didn’t put up much of a fight when the others mutinied.”

“You were right: there didn’t seem much point in making them push me out of the airlock.” Johnson squirted some coffee into his mouth, and pulled a face. It hadn’t been properly hot when he’d made it: the cabin pressure didn’t allow it. “Does that mean you’ve changed your mind? Do you think I should have? Fought them, that is.”

“I don’t think there was much fight in you in the first place. The whole mission is well, unpalatable, and as for dying for it?” He rubbed his glasses on his jacket cuff and slid them back on his face. “I’ve been showing people the way to Mars for the better part of a century, and because you decided to live, I finally get to go myself.”

Johnson swilled the coffee around in its translucent bulb, seeing how the vortex caught the light. “You realise they’re never going to let another black man so much as drive a bus again, let alone command a spaceship?”

“Oh, Leroy. How do you know what they’re going to do? It’s not as if you’re talking to Earth, are you?”

“Abe thinks the aliens are trying to talk to him through their tyre tracks. Rusa spends all her time searching the software for backdoor exploits that’ll let Mission Control retake the ship, I’m convinced the computer is inventing problems for Judi to fix, and Mo? He’s turned sleeping into an Olympic sport.” He didn’t want the coffee any more, and put the bulb down between them. Its high-tack base stuck it to the tabletop.

“You missed yourself out,” said Bradbury.

Johnson pressed his fingertips together hard enough to make his nailbeds turn pale. “I know what my particular problem is. However you want to explain it, it all adds up to a whole pile of nothing to say to the people back home.”

Bradbury had stopped smiling. “Why don’t we talk about the missiles, Leroy?”

“Do we have to?”

“For Christ’s sake, they’re parked right outside on the hull. Pretending they’re not there is unworthy of you.” He leaned across the table, making the plastic creak. “You can prevent this catastrophe, you know.”

Johnson felt sick. “I’m not comfortable–”

“Good God, man. You’re not comfortable? Imagine how I feel? I warned you before about hubris, and yet you’re making all the same mistakes.”

“You warned me?”

“Those stories of mine weren’t just pleasant diversions for half an hour, and I know you didn’t take them like that when you read them. I’d hoped I was training your mind to reject this lethal brinkmanship, but clearly not.” Bradbury sat back and folded his arms, looking belligerent. “That’s why I’m here now◦– to make you listen to sweet reason.”

“Mars is ours,” said Johnson, making the old man snort in derision.

“We’ve ignored it, with a few notable exceptions, ever since Lowell trained his telescope on it and thought he could see canals.”

“But it’s still ours. It’s our backyard.”

“Take a look at your screen, Leroy. Pull it out and spool up those pictures your colleague McMasters is looking at.”

Johnson reluctantly slipped the tablet from his thigh and accessed the video. “These ones?”

“Those exact ones. What do you suppose they’re doing, crawling around in that red dust? What do you suppose they’re saying to each other while they’re doing it?” He dabbed his thick finger at the surface, of the screen, of Mars. “Whose yard does this look like?”

Bradbury had a point. He knew he had a point because Bradbury wouldn’t have a point without him thinking it too. “It, it looks like their yard,” conceded Johnson. “I’m conflicted.”

“Sure you are. You’ve got braid on your arm because you were smart and followed orders. You feel obligated to the suits and the hats because they put you where you are. Where are you, Leroy?”

“I’m on the first manned spaceship to orbit Mars, to meet the first aliens we’ve ever known.”

“Then why are you so miserable about it?” Bradbury’s face broke into a wide smile, and he banged the table with the flat of hand hard enough to make Johnson jump. “I’d have sold my soul to be here in the flesh. What an incredible, startling opportunity, what an unexpected, unlooked-for gift! You should be happy and excited: if it was me, I’d be going to the bathroom every five minutes.”

Johnson felt so sick he started looking around the cabin for a barf-bag. “You know my orders.”

“Screw your orders,” he yelled, still grinning. “Whose goddamn story is this?”

“Yours?”

“You’d better hope not. Or one of Bob’s, either: he’d have had you in a five-way marriage and running around the ship naked by now.” Bradbury reached out and punched Johnson’s shoulder. “It’s your story, Leroy. Only you can write the ending.”

Johnson rubbed his arm. He’d felt it properly, the impact, the way it rocked him off his axis. He looked first at the little beetle things crawling over the face of Mars, the tracks radiating from the five-petalled flower of their base. It looked tiny but it covered a couple of city blocks’ worth of soil. The beetles were as big as submarines.

Then he looked at Bradbury’s solemn, hopeful face. He’d seen that exact same expression staring out at him from the back cover of an ancient copy of The Illustrated Man, lit by flickering torchlight under the warm tent of his blankets.

“Right.” Johnson stood up, too quickly. He bounced across the kitchen and into the lockers opposite. He barely got his hands up in time to ward off the stinging blow, and ended up settled on his back against the central ladder.

“You okay, son?”

“I’ll be just fine.” He pulled himself upright and shook himself down. He started climbing. “Thanks, Mr Bradbury.”

“Don’t mention it, son.”

He was outside the Pacific, tethered to a loading point, lights from his helmet making bright circles on the white-grey of the hull, while behind him, was Mars. It was so close he could reach out and touch it: its smooth white cap, its soft rust plains, its mountain-high volcanoes. It had translucent pearl clouds and storms of pink, and as the terminator swept across its surface it was softened with dusk. It was huge, and in the shadow of the great black radiator fin, it gave him light and hope.

His regulator made little noises, gentle gasps and sighs, and his earpieces a regular two-second tick to show he was still connected. His radio popped and spiked with radiation as he worked the electric screwdriver, undogging the panel on the side of the stubby launch tube.

He’d been trained to do that kind of finger-delicate and methodical work by the very people he was now betraying. The heavy weight of irony was right there: he wasn’t a space-walk virgin, banging around with a wrench and pliers, hoping to get lucky. He knew exactly what he was doing, hard though it was.

Harder than it needed to be, too, because his co-pilot refused to come out of his cradle. Every time Johnson had dragged it blinking into the light, Yussef had just cranked it back closed with him still inside it. So while he really needed the human finesse on the attitude jets to keep him in sunlight, he’d had to cope with gross control from a computer that sometimes wouldn’t quite catch his meaning.

He’d been outside for almost three hours, and he’d disabled three of the four missiles: nothing fancy, he left the warheads alone, and instead opened up the casing to access the rocket motors. They were solid fuel: no pumps to damage or tanks to bleed, but the propellant still needed a spark to ignite it. Sabotage was nothing more than cutting out a finger-length of wire and bending the ends on themselves. Six times he’d done that, twice per two-stage missile, and he was on the last launcher.

He put each bolt on a magnetic pad as he unwound it, and tagged the panel to stop it from drifting away.

“Hey, Leroy? How’s it going?”

His head rang. “Mr Bradbury. Not so loud.”

“Sorry, son. How does Mars look now?”

“Same as before.” Johnson adjusted his position astride the launch tube so he could turn from the waist: his neck ring wasn’t that flexible and the bulky life-support pack restricted his movements further. “Big. Red,” he said.

“Come on, Leroy, don’t let me down.”

“I’m alone, in a space suit, trying to disable four nuclear-armed rockets strapped to the outside of a spaceship in orbit around another planet. You wanting me to play tourist isn’t making this any easier.”

“Humour an old man. What can you see?”

“One last one, then you leave me alone.” He swung his leg slowly up and over the launcher tube while holding on to the open hatch. “Mars is huge, takes up almost half the sky. I can almost see the underside of the polar clouds, and it’s sunrise on the summit of Olympus Mons. I can cover Phobos with my fist, but it’s coming up fast, and it’s going to be right overhead in an hour. I should be inside by then, because that’ll scare the crap out of me otherwise.”

“You’re a fortunate man, Leroy Johnson. No one alive has seen the sights you have. We can send all the robots we like, but it takes humanity to put the soul into exploration.”

“Okay, Mr Bradbury, that’s enough. I’ve got to get back to work.” He wondered what the others made of it, him talking to himself like that. But maybe they hadn’t heard him. Maybe Abe was too busy trying to decypher the alien language, and Rusa concentrating too hard on debugging the code, and Judi had her head in some compartment somewhere focussing on fixing rather than listening. And Yussef wouldn’t hear him while he was asleep.

Perhaps Bradbury was the only one he could talk to. Perhaps that had always been true.

He turned back to the launcher, and the crouching missile it shrouded.

Johnson cycled the airlock. From feeling the door lock behind him and the floor shiver, to hearing the chug of the pumps only took a minute. The red tell-tale stayed on until ship pressure had been achieved, but as soon as his space suit retreated from balloon-like stiffness, he started to open it up.

Air hissed out as he broke the seal and misted the airlock with moisture. He could smell the cold, sweet welding-smoke scent that clung to the white cover of the suit.

The tell-tale on the inner door stayed stubbornly red.

He scowled, the deep, tired lines between his brows deepening. He spoke into his suit microphone.

“Hey. Judi? The airlock seems to be stuck. Can you come and check it out?”

No answer.

“Judi? Abe? Rusa?”

No answer.

“Mo? Wake up, Mo.”

No answer.

“Computer, locate the crew.”

McMasters and Malinska are on the flight deck. Halliwell is in the tertiary radiator exchange. Yussef is dead in cradle four.

“I… what?”

Clarify the nature of your question.

He was breathing hard, hauling the thin, strange air into his heaving lungs. “Okay. Give me the medical status of Mo Yussef.”

Yussef is dead. His vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-five Zulu.

“Do the rest of the crew know?”

McMasters is dead. His vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-one Zulu. Malinska is dead. Her vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-one Zulu. Halliwell is dead. Her vital signs ceased at twenty thirty-two Zulu.

Johnson reflexively caught himself from drifting, grabbing a handhold on the wall.

“All the crew except for me are dead.”

That is correct.

“What,” and he had to clear his throat, “what killed them?”

Please repeat.

“What was the cause of death?”

I do not know the answer.

“Why won’t the airlock door open?”

The ship is in vacuum.

His fingers flexed around the handhold.

“Has there been a hull breach?”

No.

He screwed his eyes up, trying not to cry. “What happened to the air?”

It was vented to space according to annex four of the emergency protocol.

“Ah crap.” Rusa had been right all along. She just hadn’t found the code in time. “What else is in the emergency protocol?”

That is classified.

He didn’t need to be told, though. He knew what he’d do, if he was them.

“Can I repressurise the ship?”

No.

“If I vent the air in the airlock, can I enter the ship?”

The computer went silent. It was thinking, like the genie of the lamp, whether or not to grant Johnson his wish.

Yes.

He resealed the suit, then switched on all the life support systems he’d just turned off. With the two second tap in his ears again, he pressed the button to cycle the outer door. He felt his suit expand and go stiff again.

Then came the moment when his plans could either be realised, or crushed like an empty can. He reached out to the internal door and gripped the release mechanism.

He felt the locks slip through his gloved hand, and the tell-tale turned from red to green.

He pushed the door aside, and eased himself into the ship. He didn’t have much room to manoeuvre. His suit’s torso was scarab-like, and his back fat with machinery. He knew he could make it through the bulkheads, because they’d been designed that way, but he had to be cautious and careful.

Johnson floated across the cabin to the ladder, which he caught one-handed. He turned himself so that he was head down along the axis.

He glided along the ladder’s length, broaching the bulkhead into the flight deck, which he could see into if he craned his neck just so.

Malinka had been strapped in, and she remained in her couch, but McMasters was floating free, as was his tablet, still playing the last recorded view the orbiter had of the aliens on Mars.

There wasn’t much blood in the cabin. Malinka’s nose was dewdropped with a frozen scab, but the few spots that glittered and spun like garnets were a poor signpost to the murder of the crew. The computer had killed them, slowly and painlessly. More or less. Her eyes were frozen open, irises of the clearest blue and sclera of the deepest red. Thread veins spidered across her puffy face.

Johnson pulled himself through and jumped for the pilot’s chair next to her. He straddled the seat awkwardly, trying not to lean back against his life support.

“I want to calculate an intercept course to Phobos. What delta v do we need?”

Four hundred metres per second.

“Okay. I need to do a burn of a third of a g for two minutes. We can finesse it as we go.”

“What’re you doing, son?”

Bradbury was in another spacesuit, hanging off the back of Johnson’s chair.

“Crashing the ship. We still have four live nukes on board, and I reckon I should put them out of harm’s way.”

“That’s smart thinking, but what if they try and stop you? What if they can fire up the rockets themselves and use the whole ship as a missile?”

“They’re over three hundred million kilometres away. By the time they know what I’m doing, it’ll be too late.” He started fetched out a fine stylus and started dabbing it at the astrogation screen.

“And what about you, Leroy? What happens to you?”

“Turns out I wrote myself into one of your stories after all, Mr Bradbury. This is how lots of them end, right? Bittersweet. I save the aliens from the crazy Earthmen, and die in the process.”

“You’re doing the right thing.” Bradbury leaned forward so that his helmet went tock against Johnson’s. “This is the moral choice.”

“You would say that. Since you’re me.”

“And you’re sure of that? Wouldn’t it be better to think that part of me is part of you? That everyone who’s ever read me makes me just a little bit alive?”

“Hold on, or whatever it is you do.” Johnson dabbed at the screen one last time. “Initiating burn. And make sure Abe doesn’t fall on you.”

The silent rocket motors rattled the ship, and McMasters’ body slipped stiffly down the wall to the floor. Johnson watched his crew mate settle on the rubber matting, all angles and bones. The tablet clattered next to him.

Bradbury shuffled over to the man on his hands and knees. “I wonder if he did get to talk to them. I wonder if they know what we’re doing.”

Johnson didn’t answer: he was watching the lines on the screen, the complex layers of planets and orbits, the natural and the artificial overlain, and his own progress amongst them. He was rising away from the surface, an arc of silver against the black, right into the path on onrushing Phobos.

His mouth was dry, and he took a sip of cold, chlorinated water from the straw in his helmet. He’d never been hit from behind by a quadrillion tonnes of moon. What would that feel like?

“Is there any way I can get out of this?” he asked.

Bradbury looked up from McMasters’ screen, reflecting the images from it on his curved faceplate. “You got the wrong guy, Leroy. If you wanted some kind of technical fix, you should have had Arthur. He was always doing that sort of thing. What was that one on the Moon?”

“A Fall of Moondust?”

“No, the other one, where the guy bails out of his rocket and gets saved by orbital mechanics.” Bradbury tried to mime the scenario.

He knew it. “Maelstrom.”

“That’s the one. Any chance of you doing something like that?”

“I’ve got about an hour’s air left in this, and I don’t know if you’ve noticed but we’re a long way from home and there’s no one to rescue me.” Johnson watched the lines on the screen converge.

Bradbury clambered from the floor and shook him hard by the shoulders. “What do you mean, no one to rescue you? Who the hell is that down on Mars?”

“What makes you think they’ve even noticed us up here?” Johnson gestured at the screens around him. “They’ve never answered a single question we’ve put to them in two years. That’s pretty much how we got to be in this god-awful situation in the first place.”

“Maybe we were asking the wrong questions. I don’t know, Leroy. Isn’t it worth a shot?”

Johnson tried to scrub at his face, but his glove banged against his helmet. “I don’t know either.” His arms slumped down by his side, the weak gravity adding to the futility of his defeat.

Bradbury was suddenly in his face, helmets touching, the old man looking down at him through two thicknesses of clear plastic.

“You’re not giving up, Leroy. I won’t let you. Turn that big dish you’ve got up top and point it at them. Tell them you’re scuttling your ship and bailing out. See what they do. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

“I die quick or I die slow.”

“You get to look at Mars for another hour, son. Right up close.”

Johnson eased Bradbury aside and dabbed his way through the communications systems to turn the high-gain antenna at Mars. It wasn’t like he needed to be accurate with it, just aim it broadly in the right direction. When it had slewed around, he opened the microphone and said:

“My name is Commander Leroy Johnson of the space ship Pacific. My crew are dead and I am destroying my ship to prevent it from harming you. If you can hear me, I am abandoning ship. I will die shortly afterwards. If you want to pick me up, I’ll be right behind the big moon. If you’re longer than an hour, don’t bother.”

He pushed himself out of his seat and started back up the ladder, squeezing himself through the bulkhead. He bundled into the airlock, and Bradbury’s face appeared at the tiny window in the internal door.

“You’d better hurry. That moon’s coming up awful fast.”

Johnson slapped the external door switch with his hand. “This is not easy.”

The door swung open, and he gripped the edge of the airlock. He was facing Mars. Then he looked down the length of the ship, and there was Phobos.

If he thought Mars looked big, Phobos was bowel-emptyingly huge. Something the size of Delaware was about to ram the tiny, fragile Pacific and squash it like a summer bug on a windshield. His heart stopped and his fingers froze.

“Leroy. You got to jump. You got to jump now.”

He climbed out onto the hull, hooking one hand on the door frame so he could coil his feet under him, push his legs down as far as they’d go. The bone-grey moon started to swell, and he opened his hand.

For a moment, he crouched. Then he jumped, hard and straight and true. He closed his eyes, screwed them tight shut, because he was terrified. He’d rather not know that Phobos would hit him with all the casual effort of swatting a moth.

There was nothing. And nothing. And nothing.

“You did it,” shouted a jubilant voice in his helmet, “You made it, Leroy. God speed, you glorious man. Say hello to the a–”

He opened one eye. Mars. Big and red. He opened the other. To his right, Phobos ground on in its orbit, chemical fire stuttering to an end on its planetward limb. Dust twinkled in its path, and patted softly on Johnson’s space suit. As the moon receded, even that lessened, and he was left alone, face down over Elysium.

The two second tick had gone. And with it, Bradbury.

His own breathing. The pulse in his ears. The hum of fans and the hiss of air. That was going to be it from now on, until those failed and fell silent. Some time later, his orbit would decay, and he’d fall, a fiery Icarus to the land below. Parts of him would reach the surface, and the bacteria within him would spill out onto an alien and inhospitable environment, in turn to wither and die.

Or perhaps not.

A spark of light flashed at the edge of the ice cap, and rose towards him on a pillar of ragged smoke that dragged through the clear, pink Martian sky.