Snowy seemed to frown; his expression was always hard to read. ‘Con-shh . . . Cons-thrr . . .’

‘I mean, better. I know you look down on the way we treat our dogs. But we do cherish them, you know.’

Hemingway seemed interested in the conversation. ‘Not only that, Captain, some people think that our relationship with our dogs contributed to our own evolution. And maybe, if we follow up this experiment with Snowy, if we continue to work together in future—’

Snowy regarded him gravely. ‘Maybe humans-ss be b-hhred better-hrr than before.’

Maggie let her smile broaden. ‘Crewman, I’ll make a note in my log that you just made your first joke. Now, as for these crab critters—’ She crouched down, staring at the bloody scene playing out before them. ‘You know, we’ve got more in common with these little guys than you’d think. We meaning humans and beagles, at the least. Like us they’re toolmakers. Like us they build cities. Do we know if they count, Gerry? Do they write?’

‘Ah, Captain—’

‘You know, if I could find a way to recruit one of these guys on to the crew of the Armstrong—’

‘Captain.’ More urgently.

She turned. ‘What?’

He gestured, embarrassed. ‘The corner of the temple. Your, umm, butt . . .’

She turned and looked. ‘I demolished the west wing. Oops.’

‘They ss-see us now,’ Snowy said, looking down.

Maggie saw that the emperor character was waving his big pincers at her in a kind of comical, miniature rage, laying about him, scattering his soft-fleshed concubines. Everywhere pincers were being clattered, a rising tide of soft but persistent noise. She had offended the king of Lilliput, by brushing his palace with her ass. She tried not to laugh.

But then she felt the ground lurch.

Hemingway turned to look. ‘Umm, Captain.’

‘What now, Gerry?’

‘The big crab form on top of this building. The really big one.’

‘What about it?’

‘We thought it was a sculpture.’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, it isn’t.’

‘Then what?’

‘A moult, Captain. It’s another moult.’

‘A moult of what? Ah. Of what’s emerging from the ground over there. I see. What do you advise, Lieutenant?’

He didn’t hesitate. ‘Run, Captain!’

They ran, from a crab that burst from its burrow in the sandy ground, a crab the size of a small bear and with the speed of a cheetah, moving sideways or not.

The airships stayed three days, observing, measuring, sampling. They left behind a three-person team of volunteers from Hemingway’s department with instructions to study the crab civilization, to make contact if they could – and to survive, at a minimum.

Then they flew on.

16

FRANK WOOD TOOK A step forward, away from the MEM.

Everything was strange, all the world’s familiar elements distorted, here on Mars – on this Mars. The sun was shrunken but bright, and the rocks around him cast sharp shadows across the dusty crimson plain. Frank might have been standing in a high desert on Earth, but the air was thinner here than at the top of Everest. Even so this world was relatively clement. It wasn’t as bad as the real Mars – Datum Mars. It was cold, the air was thin, but not that cold, not that thin.

The sky was brownish towards the horizon, but a deep blue if Frank tilted back to see the zenith, though that was tricky in his surface suit with its warm padded layers and enclosing facemask. Somewhere in that sky should have been Earth, a morning star close to the sun. Not here. Not in the universe of the Gap.

He tried another step.

Moving was dreamlike, somewhere between walking and floating. After weeks of weightlessness he was taking time to recover. His body fluid distribution was all off, and his muscles felt feeble despite the hours on the treadmill. His sense of balance was off too, so that this strange new world swam around his head, uncomfortably. But with every step he took, he felt that little bit stronger. This was Frank Wood, aged sixty-one, walking in the Mangala Vallis, an equatorial site with a name given it by NASA mappers from the Sanskrit word for the planet Mars, and if Indo-European was the root of most western languages it might be the oldest surviving name for Mars of all . . . The first human on Mars! A Mars, anyway. Who’d have thought it? This was a moment that made up for all the years of disappointment when the space programme had shut down after Step Day, and the strain of the flight itself, the weeks of the cruise with no company save a semi-psychotic father-and-daughter tag team, and finally the hair-raising descent to the ground in the Mars Excursion Module, an untried aircraft descending into a virtually unknown atmosphere. None of that mattered, for he’d lived through it all, and he was here. Frank whooped, and he did a little jig, and his boots kicked up Martian dirt. And he was not going to screw the pooch.

Sally’s voice murmured in his earpiece. ‘Hey, Tom Swift. Follow the checklist.’

Frank sighed. ‘Copy that, Sally.’

He got to work.

First he turned to face the MEM.

The lander was a so-called ‘biconic lifting body’, a fat-bellied plane sitting on frail-looking skids, its heatshield tiles and leading edges scorched from the atmospheric entry. Frank walked back to the ship and took a small TV camera from a fold-down platform, and after some fumbling fitted it to a mount on his chest. He took out the flag kit, a fold-out pole and the flag itself in a polythene bag.

Then he set off again, pushing mankind’s exploration of this new Mars a few paces further. ‘I’m walking away from the lander now. I’m going to work my way over into the sunlight.’ Once he was out of the MEM’s long shadow he turned around, letting his camera pan across the landscape.

‘The picture’s a little blurred, Frank. You’re going too fast on your sweeps.’

Obediently Frank slowed his rotation. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under his boots. Out here he could see no signs of disturbance from the landing, no dust thrown up by the big wheels. The soil under his feet was virgin: the sands of Mars, by God.

Away to the west Frank saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from him. Maybe the lip of a crater. Frank walked that way, further from the MEM.

‘Don’t get out of sight,’ Sally warned.

Frank stopped at the lip of the crater. A few dozen yards across, the crater was a shallow, regular bowl, its rim sharp and fragile. In its base ice glinted, looking as if it was a crust over liquid water. And all around the pool were lumpy forms like footballs, smooth-skinned, tough-looking, and faintly green under a patina of rusty dust.

‘They’re like cacti,’ Frank said excitedly. ‘Are you seeing this, Sally? Just as we glimpsed in the lander photos – obviously hardy, desiccation-tolerant – but no spikes.’ That strange feature struck him immediately. ‘I guess there are no Martian critters likely to run up and chomp them for their moisture.’

‘You’re off the checklist again, Frank.’

‘Is that all you can think of, even now?’

‘It’s your checklist. I’m just following it.’

‘All right, dammit.’

It took him only a moment to set up the telescopic flagpole, and to drive its sharpened tip into the compacted ground. Then he took the Stars and Stripes from its bag, folded it out, and fixed it to the pole. The flag was the enhanced holographic kind, symbolizing the US Aegis. This was a good enough site for the little ceremony, overlooking this Martian garden. Frank set his TV camera on the ground facing him, and made sure he was in the eyeline of the MEM. ‘Can you hear me, Sally?’

‘Get it over with.’

Frank straightened up and saluted. ‘March 15, AD 2045. I, Francis Paul Wood, do hereby claim this land, and all the lands and stepwise footprints of this Mars, as legal territory of the United States of America, to be a dominion of the United States of America, subject to its government and laws—’