A TAD MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

keyed the transmit button.

“Vladimir, this is Drew on board the Albatross. Come back. Over.”

I waited impatiently for a reply, but fortunately I did not have to wait long. “Hello, Drew, this is Vladimir. So what is all the mystery about? Over.”

“I have discussed it with the rest of the crew, and we are all in agreement. You guys better pack your bags and any supplies you might want to bring with you, because we are coming to get you. Over.”

“You are on Mars. You are millions of kilometers away. You cannot endanger your entire crew to rescue the six of us; we may all be dead by the time you get here. It would be foolhardy to even try, but thanks for the thought anyway. Over.”

“Listen to me, my Russian comrade. There will only be two of us on the journey. The rest of our crew have very good accommodations on Mars, so they will be staying behind. Yes, we are millions of kilometers from you—hundreds of millions actually—but it doesn’t matter a damn, because we have a few tricks up our sleeves. First is the fact that you and Earth are coming up behind us at a great speed; in fact, you have closed the distance between us by more than 5,400 kilometers during this conversation. We initially calculated that if we launched from Mars in the Albatross in two days time, we would arrive in Earth orbit with you in two months, but we won’t be doing that now. Which brings me to our second trick: we have found a few alien spacecraft parked here on Mars and have learned how to fly them, so we will be coming to pick you up in one of those. They are far more powerful, faster, and maneuverable than the Albatross, or indeed any humanmade ship I have ever piloted, so we could be in orbit with you around Earth in as little as a month to pick you up. Over.”

“I cannot believe it! You have found alien spacecraft and are going to use them to rescue us and take us to Mars? It sounds like one of your British or American science fiction stories. Is this fiction? Over.”

“No mate, it’s science, as unbelievable as it may sound. You won’t believe what we’ve found here. It would take too long to describe it, and you wouldn’t believe most of it, anyway. You can see for yourself instead within a couple of months. I have to go now; there is a lot to be done before we launch, and I’d better go do it. We are looking forward to meeting you all in person. I will call you when we have launched; please

keep this channel open. See you soon. Over and out.”

SOME MORE:

The first thing I noticed as we blazed through the skies above Mars in suborbit was the complete lack of physical G-forces being exerted on us. Nick, Dick, and I were standing, and we continued to stand without needing to hold onto anything to support ourselves. If this had been the Albatross, the three of us would have been hurled backward and smeared across the rear bulkhead. I was starting to fall in love with this baby already. Dick was looking at his watch as if he had to be somewhere else and was in a hurry to get there. I thought of offering to drop him off (without slowing down) but continued to look out the windows instead. I think it was my imagination, but it looked to me that the starry backdrop behind Mars was blurring as well; I wondered at the speed we would have to be doing for that to happen and what power would be necessary to propel us to it. In what seemed like no time at all, we started decelerating and dropping altitude. Not that we felt any change, but the Martian landscape below us gradually became less blurry and started to rise up toward us. We dropped down to an altitude of ten meters, and then the ship rotated ninety degrees to port and floated toward the hangar doors.

“Hey guys, I’m back.” Dick said, I hadn’t noticed that he’d been missing.”How long did it take you to circumnavigate this planet in the Albatross?” Dick asked.

“Two hours, but we weren’t pushing it. Why?” Nick asked.

“This machine just did it in thirty minutes! I timed it with my watch,” Dick said.

“OK, that’s that. I’m flying this baby to the moon and back! Well actually close to the moon and back,” I interjected.

I looked forward just in time to see the ship stop its forward motion in front of the Albatross, rotate its bow ninety degrees to port, and reverse into its parking spot. I heard the whines, hums, and clunks as the landing gear swung down and locked into place before the ship settled gently to the deck. Impressive! I ordered the ship to open the outer hull door but nothing happened. So I did the woman thing and ordered it to open the hull door again (nagging, basically). Still it did not obey!

“Dick, why won’t this bloody thing open its bloody hull door?”

“I would guess that it is waiting for the hangar to fill with air before opening the door to avoid killing us.”

“Oh yeah. That makes sense, I guess.”

“Aren’t you glad this alien spacecraft is smarter than you, mate?” Nick enquired.

Then, to add insult to injury, we all heard the hull door slide open. We exited the ship and I headed toward the Albatross at a brisk pace.

“Where are you going in such a hurry?” Nick yelled after me.

I stopped and called back,

“I’m going to talk to Vladimir. I like being the bearer of glad tidings, and it’s been a long time since I have been.”

I turned and resumed my journey toward the Albatross. I virtually jumped up the ramp into the ship, then I dropped into my chair on the flight deck, grabbed the mike, and keyed the transmit button.

I'M TAKING A BIT OF A BREAK:

It's kinda weird. Here I sit on the veranda of my favourite watering hole with my laptop open in front of me and watching the boats sailing across the beautiful blue waters of the lake before me while I'm thinking about dusty, barren, dry and airless red landscapes of a planet 400 odd million kilometres away while I drink my icy cold pint of beer.

HERE'S A BIT MORE THEN :

“Richard, I would be very interested to know your thoughts on what the hell powers this thing,” I said.

“I’m not sure, but I know it isn’t rockets or any other form of fuel-burning propulsion systems. If I had to make an educated guess, I would say it is powered by some form of electromagnetic propulsion system.”

“What would its top speed be, do you reckon?”

“I wouldn’t have a clue; it could be virtually unlimited.”

“Let’s see if we can find out,” I said. I commanded the ship to fly around the planet at fastest safe speed and return to the hangar. The landscape in front of us suddenly blurred and dropped away even more as the ship went ballistic.

I say that I commanded the ship to perform various actions implying that I was using english language to command it, but this was not actually the case. I am merely explaining to you, the reader, the processes of getting the ship to perform the functions I wanted it to do. I was actually commanding the ship by picturing the functions I wished it to perform in my mind and it complied,

For example: When I commanded the ship to move forward and then stop, rotate to the left ninety degrees and leave the hangar I was actually picturing the ship in the middle of the taxiway, then turning to the left and heading out the hangar doors in my mind and the ship complied.

So I was actually commanding the ship with pictures in my mind...not language. To use the terminology of our younger generation ( May they Rest in Peace)  it was,

WAY COOL!

A BIT MORE :

I allowed Dick to fit the headset onto my skull, and the whole ship suddenly came alive. All the monitors and instrument panels lit up and started flashing strange symbols and what I took to be mathematical formulas across their screens…none of which I understood.

“What the hell is happening now?”

“Relax; it’s just the computer interfacing with your brainwaves and getting in tune with them. It’ll only take thirty seconds or so; you’ll find it is well worth the wait.” As he finished speaking, the monitors and instruments stopped flashing gobbledygook on their screens and all displayed a simple-looking phrase. Except no one knew what that phrase meant because it was in Martian.

“Fantastic. I’m sure you are now in control of the flight-control systems. Give it a simple command,” Dick instructed.

“Start engines,” I said tentatively.

Suddenly, an electrical hum started to build up within the ship, and various symbols and readouts started appearing on various monitors in varying colors, but as none of them were colored in red, I wasn’t alarmed.

‘Rise one meter above the deck,’ I thought to myself and the ship lifted off the deck and hovered one meter in the air. OK, cool.

‘Move forward.’ I thought to myself and the ship moved forward across the taxiway until I thought it to stop, which it did and hovered in the centre of the taxiway.

“Retract entry ramp, close and seal outer hull door.” I heard electrical whirring noises and assumed the ship’s computer had complied with my commands when the noises stopped. I also noticed two green lights appear on one of the monitors. I decided to keep my eyes on that monitor.

“Rotate  ninety degrees to port and leave the hangar.” I was getting cocky now.

The ship cruised down the taxiway, and the hangar doors started to open as it approached, until we found ourselves outside the hangar and hovering above the actual surface of Mars. I commanded the ship to rise quickly to an altitude of 220 meters and hover; the Martian landscape before us suddenly dropped away beneath us as we blasted into the sky and resumed hovering. I say blasted, but we didn’t actually feel anything. If I hadn’t watched the landscape drop away I wouldn’t have known we had moved.

A LITTLE BIT MORE THEN :

We left the flight deck and exited Albatross while Dick headed off toward the cafeteria to inform the rest of the crew what we were up to. Nick and I crossed the taxiway toward the open rear loading ramp of the Martian starship parked opposite. I was the first to enter the hull, with Nick following so close on my heels that when I suddenly stopped just inside the hull, he bumped into me.

“I don’t suppose you thought to bring a flashlight,” I said, just before the whole ship was suddenly filled with light, blinding us for a few seconds.

“That’s interesting! Next question: how do we find the flight deck on this thing? There are corridors leading off in all directions.”

“It’s usually toward the front, Drew,” Nick said with heavy sarcasm.

“Let’s tallyho toward the front then, shall we, Watson?”

Nick stepped past me and walked down a wide corridor to the left of us, which appeared to head toward the bow of the ship.

“Follow me,” he said.

Having nothing better to do, I did as he commanded. The corridor seemed incredibly long with many doors on either side. After what seemed a very long time and a great distance traversed, Nick led me up a short flight of steps and into a short corridor, then through a door into a room filled with monitors and instrument panels. There were no launch chairs for the intrepid, brave pilots to sit in while expertly piloting their ship as it blasted through the universe. Instead, there was a comfy-looking semicircular couch facing the flight deck windows.

“What the hell?” Nick and I said as one as we stood transfixed for what seemed like quite a while.

“Terrific; just as I’d hoped.”

Nick and I spun around to find Dick standing in the doorway with the rest of the crew behind him. He raced forward and grabbed something off the dashboard. Then he turned and held it out to me.

“Put this on.”

I stepped backward. “What the hell is it?”

“It’s a headset. It will allow you to talk to the ship’s computer through your mind. Given about thirty seconds, or in your case probably quite a bit longer, it will tune in to read your thought processes, which will allow you to interface with the ship’s computer and command it to do whatever you want it to do.”

“This I can do?”

“Yes, I think so.”

FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS.'

“Come on, Drew; look around you. With the intelligence and technology those Martians used to design and build this city, do you think they would leave anything to chance? I’ll bet those ships of theirs are fully fueled and ready to fly; they only left them behind because they didn’t need them. Who knows how many thousands of years ago they left this city, and yet Dick was able to fire up the power, air cycling systems, and everything, and it all works perfectly. I haven’t even seen one blown light globe in the two and a half months I’ve been here. Besides, we are crack fighter pilots. If they can fly, we can make them fly.”

“I agree with Nicholas,” Richard said. “If those ships work on the same systems as their main computers, I don’t think it’s going to be a problem firing one up and at least taking it for a test drive before making a decision. Also, as Nicholas says, judging by the technology that went into building this city, it would be reasonable to assume that their ships are far and away more powerful, faster, and easier to maneuver than the Albatross. Ergo, it could cut travel time in half, and thusly, our time in space.”

“Ergo? Thusly? You really are a computer geek,” I said. I smiled, stood up, and jerked my head toward the windows,

“All right then, I have been dying to explore one of these starships ever since I first laid eyes on them anyway, so let’s go kick the tires on that one!”

SOME MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS.' :

I couldn’t help it. I jumped to my feet, grabbed Dick’s hand, and shook it warmly while patting his shoulder,

“Good man! That is exactly what you and I are going to attempt to do.”

Courtney burst into tears. I looked down at her and then over at Melissa, but she was sitting there staring quietly down at her coffee mug. Nick stood up, walked over, and refilled his coffee mug.

“Drew and Richard, could I talk to you on the flight deck for a minute? We’ll be back shortly, ladies.”

Then he led the way to the flight deck and dropped into his chair as I dropped into mine. Dick leaned against the dashboard. Nick produced his flask and sweetened our coffees.

“Nine months in space? That is too dangerous. The odds against succeeding and surviving this mission just got astronomically too high. I do have an idea that may reduce the odds to acceptable levels, but you may think me mad.”

“That’s never stopped you before.”

“That’s true, Drew, and thank you for that remark!”

He looked out the flight deck windows and said,

“What about taking one of those?”

Richard and I followed his gaze, but all we could see was the Martian starships parked opposite us on the other side of the taxiway.

“You’re absolutely right, Nick. We do think you’re mad. For one thing, we don’t know if they’re even capable of flight—if they were, then why didn’t the Martians take them when they cleared out? We don’t know if they have fuel in them, and we can’t check because we don’t know what a Martian fuel gauge looks like, and even if we knew we don’t know what fuel they use. Oh, and we don’t know where the filler cap is, or how to open it either.”

JUST A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS.'

As if on cue, Richard walked in clutching papers in his hand. “I’ve completed the flight plans as you requested, but I’m pretty sure you’re not going to like them.”

“You see what I mean? It only took him thirty minutes. Well done, Richard. What do you mean I’m not going to like the plans?”

“Well, the Earth is coming up behind us, so it was easy for me to formulate a flight plan to launch and intersect Earth’s orbital path just as Earth arrives there and then swing in to an orbit around it. You could achieve that in two months from launch, but then you have to set up a docking maneuver with the space station, transfer crew and supplies onto Albatross, and finally execute an extraction from Earth’s gravity, say forty-eight hours after establishing the Earth orbit. In that time Earth will have pulled ahead of Mars by 1,200,800 kilometers. Then it gets even more complicated. I won’t bore you with the technical specifics, but even the best-case scenario is that when you launch from Mars, you won’t be landing back on it again for at least nine months.”

There was a huge combined intake of breath and then silence, until I eventually broke it.

“Let me ask you something, Richard. If you had the choice to go and rescue the astronauts on the ISS or to stay behind, what would you choose to do?”

“I would choose to go, of course! Those people aboard that space station will perish within four months without our help, and we are the only people in a position to help them. There is no choice; we have to go.”

A BIT MORE:

“What’s up?” Nick asked.

I reached forward and pushed the button to replay the exchange of transmissions between Vladimir and myself. When it had finished, I reached forward and hit the stop button. There was a short silence on the flight deck, until everyone suddenly started talking at once. Everyone, that is, except Nick and me. He just sat in his chair staring at me with a calculating and speculative expression on his face.

“Oh, for God’s sake, why don’t we all go down to the cafeteria and have a coffee while we discuss this?” I exclaimed.

I was fed up with all the loud commotion in such a small space. They filed out of the flight deck, leaving Nick and me room to climb out of our chairs and follow them down to the cafeteria. They all started talking again as they sat down with their coffees until they ran out of things to say and voices to say them. Then Nick spoke,

“So tell me, Drew, what was this idea you mentioned to Vladimir?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Richard, I have a job for you to do. Could you go and have a chat with the nav computer and see if the two of you can come up with a flight plan for the fastest journey to Earth’s orbit and back to Mars?”

“OK, I’ll do it right now; it should take me less than an hour,” he said as he jumped up and left.

Everyone started talking at once again until Nick silenced them with one word,“Quiet! OK, Drew, you don’t have to bother answering my last question, but could you answer me this one: why do you think you should be the one to go?”

“You can’t go. You’re the captain, the commander, the head honcho, the big cheese, our exalted leader…I could go on.”

“Don’t bother! Give me serious reasons.”

“Those were serious, but also, I am a pilot—I can fly the ship.”

“And I can’t?”

“I can fix things if they stop working.”

“I can also fix things if they stop working.”

“I am a trained and qualified paramedic.”

Nick stared at me as his eyes narrowed. “OK, you got me on that one. So could you answer me this one? Who are you intending to take with you—because you sure as hell aren’t going alone.”

“You’re not going to believe me when I tell you. Hell, I don’t believe I’m going to say it, but here goes: Dick.”

“Richard? You’re joking, mate. You two alone on a ship in the middle of space? You’ll wind up killing each other.”

“No, we won’t, because we need each other. Granted, I’ll probably shoot him in the back of his helmet as he leaves the ship after we get back, but not before.”

“But why Richard?”

“Because no one on this crew can interface with a computer like he can, and no one on this crew understands astronavigation like he does. We are the most unlikely pair of misfits to team up for this mission, I admit. But with our individual skills combined we are the team most likely to pull it off.”

A LITTLE BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS':

“Vladimir, can you give me a status report on your shipboard conditions? How many crew members are on board? What are your remaining supplies of oxygen, food, and water, and other necessities? Over.”

The reply once again came back in a relatively short time. “Hello, Albatross. We have six crew members on board the station, including myself. We have water to last us another nine months if we limit our showers, enough food to last us four months on a very strict diet, and enough oxygen to keep us alive until we die from the lack of the other two. Why do you want to know? Over.”

“I have an idea, but I need to talk to the rest of my crew before I run it past you. Could you please keep this channel open? I will get back to you as soon as I can—five hours maximum. Over.”

“I will be standing by. Over and out.”

I switched the radio to intercom. Every crew member had a two-way communicator with him or her so that we could talk to each other when we were working in different areas of the city or outside. Then I keyed the transmit button. “Nick and Richard, please meet me on the flight deck of the Albatross ASAP.”

I had forgotten that the intercom was a general communicator to the entire crew but was reminded of it when two transport buggies screeched to a halt in front of Albatross and the whole crew crowded into the flight deck.

A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF REACH FOR MARS:

I was in the cargo hold of the Albatross when the radio call came through. I raced through the ship, leaped up the stairs to the flight deck three at a time (a difficult maneuver on a narrow spiral staircase), and dropped into my chair while grabbing the mike and keying the transmit button. “This is the Albatross returning your call; please repeat your message. Over.”

I sat there holding the mike and waiting impatiently for a reply. I hadn’t been able to make out any of the words spoken when the message had first come through, as I was too far away in the cargo hold. Actually, I couldn’t honestly say that my ears hadn’t been deceiving me when I heard it, as it was so faint. Even though I was hoping for a reply, I jumped when the radio squawked and a voice filled the flight deck.

“This is Vladimir Lenin on board the International Space Station in orbit around the Earth. It is wonderful to hear another human voice again. What is your position in space? Over.”

“Vladimir, my name is Drew Hunt aboard the USS Albatross. We landed on Mars two and a half months ago. I am glad to hear your voice also. Can you tell me what the status is on Earth? Have you been able to make any contact with them? Over.”

The reply was surprisingly soon in coming.

“I’m afraid not! We have sent many messages to Flight Control, but the only radio transmission we have received is yours. The clouds started to dissipate slowly twenty days ago, and based on what we can see down there there it is extremely unlikely that anything could have survived. It is all charcoal. Over.”

I was disappointed. I had hoped against any logical arguments that some people on Earth had at least survived, although that would have been, literally, hell on earth for them. I then wondered why radio exchanges between us and the ISS took such a short time. I checked the nav computer and found that we were actually a lot closer to Earth than we had been when we landed on Mars. I actually physically slapped my forehead in true old Hollywood comedy style at that point. I had forgotten, or more to the point, had not bothered to think about it much lately (as planetary orbital paths and speeds had ceased to become a priority after we touched down on Mars) that the Earth was closing on us from behind as it followed its faster orbital path around the sun. This gave me an idea.

SOME MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS':

The newly returned crew members were sitting at one of the tables sipping from steaming mugs of coffee by the time I arrived at the Spaceport Café. I greeted them warmly.

“What the hell are you lot doing back here? I thought the Martians must have gotten you! So what mind-blowing, planet-shattering things have you discovered while you’ve been away, pray tell?” I poured myself a coffee and sat down at their table.

Any response to that question was interrupted and postponed by the entrance of Mel and Sammy. Mel poured two coffees and carried them to the table. She put one down on the table near Sammy and sat down next to me with the other while Sammy was greeting Nick. We all then averted our eyes and looked out the windows at the huge starships parked out there in the hangar and the diminutive (by comparison) Albatross parked among them. When we heard breathing again, we looked back as Nick and Sammy sat down.

“After much investigation, Courtney and I have formed the opinion that the doughnut-shaped semisphere in the cylinder is a Torus,” Dick said in answer to my question…which by now I had forgotten that I had asked.

“It’s a what?” I asked.

“It’s a Torus,” Dick replied.

“It didn’t look at all like a bull shape with horns, and it certainly didn’t look like a Ford,” I replied.

“No, no. Not a T-A-U-R-U-S—a T-O-R-U-S,” Dick spelled.

“What the hell is a T-O-R-U-S, you D-O-R-K?” I spelled back at him, starting to lose patience with this conversation already.

“It’s a geometrical and mathematical formula defining a self-perpetuating energy field. It was very much a theoretical and unproven concept back on Earth, but after playing around with the engine on the shipwreck, I am fairly convinced that it is working proof that the theory is correct.”

“Did you switch it off and turn out the lights before you left?”

“I switched it to standby and turned out the lights before I left. You can’t turn off a self-perpetuating energy field.”

“Of course, I know that. Now then, I’ll bet you are all dying to know the reasoning behind my decision to change the name of this place.”

“I have actually been hoping and praying that the subject would be avoided and forgotten,” Nick said.

I explained to them the reasoning behind my decision to change the name to the Spaceport Café.

“Now I realize why I didn’t feel any qualms about leaving you in charge of this place while I went to fetch these two,” Nick snorted.

“Why is everybody being so very sarcastic lately?” I pondered.

“You do know that the rest of us just refer to it as the hangar simply because that is where it is, right?” Nick asked.

“Oh. OK then; we could call it the Hangar, or the Hangout,” I suggested.

“Drew, your growing penchant for giving names to everything is growing very annoying. If you don’t knock it off, I will start coming up with lots of names to give you—and believe me, you won’t like any of them.” Nick exclaimed.

The rest of the crew applauded.

SOME MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

After much thought, I eventually assumed that Nick had been delayed by Dick and Courtney wanting to show off all that they had discovered in a science geek style show and tell, so I put it out of my mind. Well at the very least I shoved it into the dim, dark, recesses of the thickly cobwebbed back of my mind, where so many things had been shoved over the years and so few had ever found their way back out into the light.

It was late in the afternoon, when the shadows were starting to grow much longer on the landscape, that my communicator started beeping loudly to advise me of an incoming radio call. I snatched it off my belt as I heard Nick’s voice and keyed the transmit button to answer him,

“Drew here, who the hell are you and what do you want? Over.”

“Yeah, nice to talk to you too, Drew. Just calling to let you know that we are fifteen minutes out from the city and to ask if you could open the hangar doors for us. Over.”

“Yeah, no worries. I’ll do it right now. Over and out.”

“Mel and Sammy, did you copy that? Steer clear of the hangar; please acknowledge,” I transmitted as I headed to the central tower elevators. They had each acknowledged my transmission by the time I exited the elevator into the flight operations control center.

After pushing the sequence of buttons to extract the air out of the hangar and then open the outer doors, I stood at the windows and stared down at the doorway waiting for the Albatross to appear.

I heard her approach before I saw her. Due to the roar of her thrusters, she could never sneak up on anyone unless that anyone happened to be deaf. Finally, she appeared in the doorway and floated into the hangar on a pillow of fire from her landing thrusters. After passing the alien starships, she stopped her forward movement and rotated ninety degrees before floating backward into her parking spot and settling gently down onto the deck.

As the Albatross’s thrusters died out, I hailed Nick on the radio.

“Very nicely executed. I’ll meet up with you in the Spaceport Café.”

“Where the hell is that?”

“Oh yeah, you haven’t heard. I’ll meet you in the Terminal Café and fill you in.”

“Great, I am so intrigued I can hardly contain myself. I’ll see you there then, whatever the hell you’ve decided to call it now.”

A PAGE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“I heard Albatross blast off earlier, and I notice she isn’t parked in the hangar, so I assume that as you are sitting here Nick must have taken her up to collect Courtney and Dick and taxi them back from the shipwreck.”

“On the face of it, your assumption would appear to be correct,” I replied.

“You looked deep in thought when I wandered in; are you having trouble with your two times tables again?” she asked sweetly.

So I told her about the Terminal Café vs. Spaceport Café issue and the contributing factors that had affected my final decision. She stared at me with her emerald green eyes wide with what I assumed to be admiration for a while. Then she exclaimed,

“Oh, thank the Lord!”, with what I assumed to be deep reverence and awe. “Finally I will be able to sleep and rest peacefully now that you have finally rectified that problem. It really was keeping me awake and tossing and turning into the wee small hours of the morning.”

“You’re being sarcastic, aren’t you?”

“No, absolutely not!” she said with a chuckle. “Can we go home now? I am totally exhausted.”

“Absolutely, for tonight you’ll be able to lay your pretty head down to sleep and rest peacefully in the knowledge that an important and weighty issue has finally been resolved thanks to yours truly.”

“Yes, dear.”

“But there’s really no need to thank me.”

“I totally agree.” Mel sweetly replied.

When we arrived at the Spaceport Café early the next morning to have breakfast and coffee before starting work, I was a little concerned when I noticed that the Albatross had not returned during the night. After finishing our breakfasts and coffees, we went our separate ways—Mel to the laboratories to play with her collection of rocks and dirt there, and I to the terrarium to play with the dirt there. While I was playing in the dirt, I found myself becoming more concerned about the delay in Albatross’s return to the city.

A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF REACH FOR MARS:

It was three days before I saw Nick again. There were no fixed schedules for when we worked or ate or rested, and it was a huge city, so unless there was a specially organized meeting or event, the crew of the Albatross could go for many days without bumping into each other.

Mel and I were taking a break in the Terminal Café over coffee on the fourth day when Nick and Sammy wandered in, got themselves some coffee, and joined us at our table.

“Mind if we join you?” Nick asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Tough,” answered Nick as they sat down.

We chatted for about fifteen minutes about what we had been doing since last we had seen each other before Nick said,

“Oh, by the way, I got a call from Dick and Courtney earlier.”

“Oh, they’re still alive, are they? What have they been up to?”

“You mean since you left them behind, don’t you?” Nick said with a grin, “Apparently they have learned many things in the past four days and would like to be picked up and flown back to the city sometime in the next few days. The only question is which one of us will be flying over there to pick them up.”

“Rock, Paper, Scissors?” I asked.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” said Mel as she and Sammy rose to their feet with coffees in hand and marched themselves off to somewhere else in the city.

Nick and I played a few hands of Rock, Paper, Scissors just to entertain ourselves for a while, but of course neither of us won.

“Actually,” Nick said, “I’ll go pick them up a bit later. I’m suffering a bit of cabin fever at the moment, and I wouldn’t mind a bit of flight time in the Martian skies to clear my head.”

“Well, whatever you do, don’t roll down the Albatross’s windows if you’re not wearing your suit, because hypoxia does not help in clearing the head,” I cautioned him as I rose to return to the terrarium.

Three hours of tilling and toiling later, I was taking a short break and staring out through the dome at the Martian landscape when I saw Albatross rise up into the skies and perform a tight 180-degree left bank, light its tail, and rapidly disappear into the distant Martian skies toward the alien shipwreck on the other side of the world.

An hour later, I walked into the Terminal Café to have a light meal and a coffee and found it deserted. After collecting my meal, I sat alone at a table with my coffee and proceeded to consume both while my mind pondered an important and weighty issue. It had occurred to me that the name Terminal Café did not convey the impression of a safe place to go for a healthy and life-sustaining meal and/or drink.

After much contemplation I decided that Spaceport Café sounded like a much more appealing and cooler place to hang out. I had made the decision to mention it to the rest of the crew when I next saw them as Mel wandered in, smiled at me, made herself and myself coffees, sweetened both from Nick’s bottle (while the cat’s away), and handed me mine as she sat down.

AND YET MORE:

“I haven’t done anything with them, Mel. All I did was leave them behind on board the alien shipwreck with enough provisions and water to last them a week or more as per their request. I guess they wanted to stay and play with the electronic alien toys for a while, so I left them to it and flew back here. They’ve got the ship’s power systems up and running on its primary power, so the ship is pressurized with breathable air and Dick is confident that there is no breach of the hull’s integrity. Plus they have their space suits if needed, so I saw no imminent danger. After due consideration and careful weighing up of the pros and cons of leaving them there, the pros won…so I left them there. If they get into any trouble, they can radio us and we can be there within an hour to rescue them or laugh and point at them, whichever tickles your fancy at the time.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet you weighed the pros and cons in great depth as you packed their bags, their provisions, and their water and threw it all onto the Martian surface from the top of the cargo ramp before sealing it off and blasting off.” Mel replied,

“It wasn’t like that. I didn’t have to pack their bags because they hadn’t had a chance to unpack them. Anyway, I personally loaded their bags and provisions into the buggy, drove over, and unloaded them into the airlock of the shipwreck before I tootled off back to the ship and blasted off.

Nick interjected, “Fair enough. I guess they’ll radio us when they want to be picked up and taxied back to the city, and we might even bother to go get them! Meanwhile, we can fill our days in their absence by doing useful things around here while we await their return with baited breath.”

“Here, here, sir. I will raise my mug to that!” said I.

“Fair enough and fair thee well,” said Nick.

He raised his mug and slurped the remainder of the contents from it before adding,

“Now piss off and do some useful things.”

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AND YET MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS :

We selected the provisions and water containers from Albatross’s hold, loaded them into a buggy, and drove over to the shipwreck to unload into the airlock. When we had finished and Dick had squeezed into the airlock enough for the outer hatch to slide closed, I jumped into the buggy and drove back to the Albatross. I parked in the cargo hold, battened down the buggy, closed and sealed the hold, and headed up to the flight deck. Once the flight-control systems were switched on, I lit the engines to warm up for a bit before firing the landing thrusters to launch the ship into the sky; then I gave the main thrusters a healthy dose of gas, sending the ship blazing through the Martian skies back to the city. When I was fifteen minutes out from the city, I radioed ahead to let them know of my imminent arrival. Nick took the call.

“Roger that. I’ll open the hangar door for you.”

“Simon that. Over and out.”

“Shut up, Drew. Out.”

As Albatross floated across the plain on final approach to the city, I was a little surprised to see that Nick had actually opened the hangar doors ready to receive me. After setting the ship down gently on the hangar deck and shutting down all the flight systems, I grabbed my carryall from my cabin on the way to the cargo hold, left the ship, and headed over to the Terminal Café.

As I entered the café and dumped my bag on the deck on my way to get a coffee, I noticed that the rest of the crew was there to greet me. They looked at me as I reached the coffee machine and glanced at the door through which I had just entered; then they looked back at me. “You seem to have forgotten to bring Dick and Courtney back with you,” said Nick.

I spun around and looked at the door I had just entered through.

“Oh, crap! I thought I heard a lot of thumping on the outside of the hull as I lifted off!”

“You’re a dork, Drew!” said Nick.

“Pot, meet kettle,” said I.

“Shut up, both of you!” said Mel. “Drew, what have you done with them?”

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MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“No,” he replied.

“OK…so what did you want me to come over and look at then, Dick?”

He led me back down the corridor to the flight deck, where Courtney was fiddling around with the flight-control consoles, which were also lit up and flashing, scrolling, and blinking.

“As you can see, we’ve got the ship up and working. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could take her up for a flight.”

“Well, I would be—I have no intention of even trying to do that. What else have you found out about this ship?”

“After close examination of the outer skin of the hull, I am reasonably certain that my original theory about it being sheathed in one continuous solar panel is correct. The primary power source and engine for the ship appears to be some form of electromagnetic field generator. I have also noticed in my observations that although the ship has suffered immense damage to the hull from the crash, it is still airtight, which of course means that you do not need to keep your helmet on. I also would not anticipate any problems in flight performance were you to take her up.”

“Yeah, like I said, that’s not going to happen. My question to you now is do you know how to shut it all down before we leave to head back to the city?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Courtney swivel the pilot seat she was sitting in around so she could watch us, and I knew what Dick was going to say before he said it.

“We’d like to stay here for a few more days to thoroughly examine the workings of the ship.”

“Not a chance! I have a lot to do back in the city, and I cannot waste any more time hanging around here.”

“Well, we were thinking that you could fly back to the city and we could stay here.”

“Are you crazy, Dick? You have no food or water and you wouldn’t have the Albatross here as backup if something went pear-shaped!”

“We could take provisions from the Albatross’s stores and containers of water from her tanks before you leave. The life-support systems and everything else we need aboard this ship are working perfectly, and we have our space suits as backup if we need them. Plus you’re only a little over an hour’s flight from here if we find that we need further backup.”

I thought about it for a short while (mainly because if anything went pear-shaped I would cop the shit for it) before I grudgingly capitulated.

“Yeah, all right. Put your helmet back on and follow me back to the Albatross to select and collect the rations you want to bring back with you.”

A LITTLE BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

An hour and a half later, I set Albatross down gently in the crater alongside the wreck and got on the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we have just landed alongside the alien wreck. Now get the hell off my ship!”

I sat and watched their space-suited figures walking over to the wreck. Then I rested my feet on top of the flight console, stared out the windows, and reflected on how easily I had always been manipulated by just about everybody I had ever met in my life—especially Nick. My reflections were interrupted by Dick’s squawk from the two-way radio,

“Hey Drew, you might want to suit up and come over to look at this!”

I grabbed the microphone and pushed the transmit button,

“Yeah, OK. I’ll be there shortly.”

I climbed to my feet and headed toward the cargo deck airlock, thinking, Well, I guess it didn’t work out too badly for me after all, ’cause here I am on Mars and still alive because of it.

As I entered the alien ship via the airlock, I turned right and headed toward the stern. I was sure that Dick would be in the engine room, and I was proved correct when I arrived there. The place looked a lot different than it had looked the last time I was there. Some of the monitors were flickering with differing sets of readouts, while others scrolled various numerical readouts one after another in continuous streams—all the monitors were busily doing many things. The sphere in the center of the cylinder was firing a continuous array of electrical beams of many different colors all around its enclosure walls, but I noticed that most of the energy from the sphere was emitted from the top of the sphere, at which point it circled the donut-shaped sphere and reentered from below. The overall effect was almost blinding; you could actually feel the energy being produced in that flashing electrical light show.

Dick materialized out of the brilliant light-filled engine room and joined me in the cargo hold, which was as close as I dared to get to that throbbing, humming electrical field.

“Aren’t you afraid of overexposure to the electromagnetic fields being produced in there? Even from this distance the hairs on the back of my neck are standing up; actually, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if every hair on my head was standing up.”

“No,” he replied.

“OK…so what did you want me to come over and look at then, Dick?”

He led me back down the corridor to the flight deck, where Courtney was fiddling around with the flight-control consoles, which were also lit up and flashing, scrolling, and blinking.

“As you can see, we’ve got the ship up and working. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you could take her up for a flight.”

STILL MORE FROM THE PAGES OF REACH FOR MARS:

“Yeah, OK,” I said, and so we started the routine. It was actually five minutes before Dick and Courtney rose and left the café in disgust while Nick and I quietly cackled to ourselves as we watched them leave.

“Ya gotta give Dick his due—he’s a patient son of a bitch,” Nick said.

“Or he is a ‘very slow on the uptake’ son of a bitch,” I replied.

“You two do realize that you are just postponing the inevitable; he will just keep pestering and nagging you until you do it,” Mel foretold us.

“Yeah, I know, but at least I’ll have the satisfaction of tormenting the shit out of him as much as I can before I do it,” I foretold her back.

In the end, it was three days before I gave in and told Dick and Courtney to go pack their bags, but at least I got in three days of tormenting beforehand. My feelings of happy self-satisfaction were tainted considerably when Dick and Courtney raced over to a corner of the café and returned carrying their already-packed bags. My happy self-satisfaction was further tainted by the sound of laughter from Nick, Sammy, and Mel behind me.

“Get aboard the ship and strap yourselves in!” I barked.

As they left toting their luggage, I spun around to glare at the three behind me, but as that didn’t turn them into pillars of salt, make them disappear in puffs of smoke, or stop them from laughing, I marched out of the café to go in search of my space suit.

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AND SOME MORE:

“It would be very useful if I could have a look at the ship in person; I might be able to switch it on so you can get it to fly.”

“We don’t want to get it to fly. It was so badly damaged in the crash I wouldn’t trust its reliability in flight even if I could get it to fly,” I replied. “And we have no need for it to fly anyway. Not to mention the fact that we only just got back from there—” I glanced at my watch, “—four hours ago. We have no desire to fly back there anytime soon. Forget about it because it’s not going to happen.”

I then thought of something, rose to my feet, and walked over to a table in the corner that Nick and I used as a desk sometimes. I grabbed a couple of things from it and returned to my table. I presented Dick with a map of Mars and a compass as I sat back down. Dick looked at the objects in his hand and then at me.

“What are these for?”

“So you can take a buggy and drive yourself over there to explore the wreck.”

“It’s not marked on this map.”

I took the map from him, picked up a pen that was lying on the table in front of me, marked the map, and slid it back to Dick.

“X marks the spot,” I said helpfully.

“But it’s well over ten thousand kilometers from here.”

“So take a packed lunch, or two, or three.”

“Oh, come on. Surely one of you could easily fly me over there. How hard would it be? I mean it’s not like you have to pay for the fuel or anything.”

“Rock, Paper, Scissors?” Nick suggested.

I dropped my head to cover my sudden grin before I glanced to my left at Nick. Way back in the early days of our friendship we had developed a routine to combat pesky people asking one of us to give them a hand to complete a job. It didn’t work if the asker outranked us because the request was basically an order, but if it was anyone of equal rank or below ours, then we could use the routine we had developed and so often practiced. We would play Rock, Paper, Scissors to decide which one of us would do whatever was asked of us, but we would follow a well-rehearsed sequence designed to ensure that neither of us would win more than one throwdown in a row, thus ensuring that neither of us ever won. We enjoyed it and could do it for hours, but we never had to, because the requester would usually watch for about two minutes before losing patience and wandering off in disgust to finish the job by himself.

A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS':

I slammed on the brakes and glared over at her as the buggy screeched to a halt.

“So Nick has told you two about it?”

“No, darling, he hasn’t said a word about anything like that. I of all people know that you sleep in the nude. God knows I am made aware of it during the night at times, especially in the early mornings, and I know that you don’t always put something on if you have to go to the head in the middle of the night. Of course, it is the middle of the night, and the likelihood of seeing anybody else is so slim. Still, if I am awake when you do it I can’t help lying in bed and expecting to hear a scream from Sammy or a ‘What the Fuck?!’ from Nick. Therefore, it’s not too difficult for me to figure out that when you and Nick returned to the ship this morning, he would find out one way or another when it came time for you to remove your suit.”

I drove on toward our abode while Mel continued chuckling very loudly to herself. I certainly was not sharing her mirth.

When we entered the Terminal Café ( I had decided to name it that but had not told the rest of the crew yet) t  tthree hours later, we found Nick and Sammy finishing their meals while Dick and Courtney were busily poring over the photos of the crashed alien spacecraft on his laptop. They were so engrossed in the photos that they barely acknowledged our presence as we sat down with our coffees.

Dick enquired, “Is the surface of the hull actually this shiny, or did you fuck around with it in Photoshop?”

Nick and I looked at each other and then at Dick.

“We’re fighter jocks, what do we know about Photoshop?” I replied. “What you see is what was there.”

“It’s just that the hull looks so unbelievably shiny, which is strange because the Albatross doesn’t look at all shiny,” Dick replied,

“Albatross has been through a hell of a lot of very trying and damaging times,” I said in defense of my baby.

Dick turned the laptop around to face me and pointed to one of the photos on display. I looked at it and saw that it was a front-on shot of the crashed alien craft clearly showing the starboard side of the craft buried in the rock wall.

“So has that ship!” Dick stated. “My point is this: you and Nicholas couldn’t understand how the ship had power to operate the lights and airlocks and everything while the primary power source appeared to be switched off. Have you ever seen solar panels?”

“Of course we have,” I snapped back. “Military used solar power arrays all the time and we…oh, I see what you’re saying. The outside of the hull could be covered in solar panels that provide standby power to the ship when its primary engines are shut down.”

“Very good, Drew! I am impressed. But I suspect that it is actually more than that—I suspect that it might be one continuous solar panel that sheathes the hull. The solar power that it would collect and store in the banks of batteries would be immense. I really need to investigate that ship.”

“No you don’t—you’ve got all these photographs you can look at.”

ALRIGHT, HERE'S A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS':

I sat for a while and quietly sipped my coffee before Nick eventually spoke.

“The girls and I have discussed…” He paused for what seemed like forever. “…if there were any reasons to stay here any longer before heading back to the city, and we can’t think of any. Do you have any reasons that might compel you to want to continue to lurk here?”

I looked laser bolts at him, but as my eyes could not actually fire lasers, Nick was not suddenly riddled with burn holes. Damn it!

So instead I glanced at my watch and said,

“I’ve already battened down the vehicles in the cargo hold, so all I have to do is seal it up and we could be back in the city within two hours.”

“OK then, let’s do it,” Nick replied.

Within twenty minutes, we were strapped in and ready to fly. I lifted off and, with a last glance at the alien shipwreck, rotated Albatross 180 degrees and gave her a large dose of gas, sending her rocketing up out of the crater and rapidly onward toward the city. Our flight was so rapid, in fact, that I was setting the ship gently down onto the hangar deck in the city seventy minutes after liftoff.

While I shut down the flight systems, Nick released his seatbelts and rose from his chair, looked down at me with a smirk on his face, and gave me a hearty pat on the shoulder. “Never a dull moment when you’re around!” he said as he left the flight deck.

By the time I had shut down all the systems and returned to my cabin to pack up my things, everyone but Mel had departed. We carried our luggage out of the ship, paused to turn out the lights, loaded up the remaining buggy, and headed toward our abode.

“Has Nick said anything to you and Sammy about our discoveries this morning?” I asked on the way.

Mel burst out laughing.

“You mean about him discovering that you wander around the ship naked at night?”

OKAY,HERE'S JUST A BIT MORE:

When I entered the cafeteria a short while later, without my space suit but with clothes on, I found Mel, Sammy, and Nick sitting at one of the tables sipping coffees. Nick, who was facing the door when I walked in, looked up at me with a smirk on his face; his upper body was literally shaking with silent mirth. When Mel and Sammy glanced around at me, however, they just smiled with no smirking or shaking. This led me to assume that Nick had not issued an APB or a BOLO in relation to my early-morning naked wanderings of the darkened corridors of the Albatross.

I grabbed a coffee and joined them at the table. Nick reached over and sweetened my coffee as I sat down. He was still wearing the smirk on his face.

“I’m just showing the girls the photos I took of the alien ship,” he told me.

“Yeah, what is this supposed to mean?” Mel asked as she turned the screen of the laptop toward me. It displayed a photo Nick had taken of the port side of the alien ship with me in a kneeling, shooting position facing the bow of the ship with my pistol leveled at the flight deck windows. I shrugged.

“I thought it amusing,” I answered, feeling a little embarrassed.

Nick, who must have sensed my discomfort and embarrassment, said and did absolutely nothing except continue smirking. The bastard.

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OKAY, HERE'S SOME MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“Where are you going, you haven’t removed your suit yet.”

I stopped walking but did not turn around.

“I’ll do it in my cabin,” I replied, hoping he would leave it at that, but of course he didn’t.

“Why not take it off now like you usually do? Otherwise you have to carry it back here later.”

“I’m not wearing anything underneath it,” I admitted.

“You’re going commando in a space suit? What the hell is wrong with you?”

“When I saw the lights coming from the alien craft, I didn’t want to waste time popping into my cabin and throwing clothes on so I raced straight here and put my space suit on.”

“Hang on a second, are you telling me that you were wandering the darkened corridors of this ship in the middle of the darkness of night stark bloody naked? I feel that I should warn the crew and issue a nightly all points bulletin to be on the look out for you…but if seen do not approach as you are considered mentally deranged.”

I started to walk on down the corridor as he yelled after me,

“Or maybe I should just lock you in your bloody cabin every night after the sun goes down.”

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AND MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

“How many photos did you take of the interior of the ship with your helmet camera?”

“Oodles!”

“OK, and how many photos are there in oodles?”

“I believe it’s only slightly less than a shitload.”

“OK, well I took a shitload, so between us we should have it covered. I’ll take some photos of the outside of the spacecraft before heading back to the Albatross. Dick would be very upset if we didn’t.”

“What could possibly make you think I would give a rat’s ass about Dick’s happiness levels?”

“He’ll leave us in peace while he is studying them.”

“Good point! In that case I will help you.”

“That’s jolly decent of you,” Nick said.

I was damned sure Nick did not think it was jolly decent of me when he found out that my idea of helping him was to pose for each photo like a hillbilly posing all over his F350 Ford or Chevy pickup back on Earth, the only difference being that I was wearing a space suit and leaning, or lounging against a crashed alien spacecraft on Mars. In one photo, I was lounging provocatively against the bow of the ship with my pistol raised in the air.

He was still abusing me as we walked up the ramp into the cargo hold of the Albatross. After we exited the airlock inside the ship, I unclipped and removed my helmet and continued down the corridor into the main living areas. Nick, who was divesting himself of his suit, asked after me,

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STILL A BIT MORE FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS.' :

I thought of pushing a few buttons on the flight-control consoles to see what would happen, but then I thought twice about it because I wouldn’t know how to stop something if I was able to start it. I found that the pilot seat revolved 360 degrees, so I started slowly spinning in the seat until, on the twenty-eighth revolution, I spotted a space-suited figure in the portside corridor leaning against the airlock with its arms folded, watching me.

“Are you right there?” asked the figure in what sounded very much like Nick’s voice.

“Yes, I am right here. Are you right there?” I replied as I stopped myself from spinning.

With a huge, long-suffering sigh, the figure straightened up and walked into the cabin toward me.

“Well, show me what you’ve discovered then!”

So I took him on a guided tour of the alien spacecraft, which must have taken quite a while because by the time we returned to the flight cabin I noticed that the sun had almost cleared the horizon. We entered the airlock and activated it, and while we were waiting for it to cycle, Nick asked me,

“How many photos did you take of the interior of the ship with your helmet camera?”

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