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.