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

Melissa interrupted my reverie. “What are you grinning at?”

I glanced at her.

“Am I grinning?”

“Like a Cheshire cat!”

I laughed, put my arm around her and hugged her.

“I was just thinking how much I’ve missed flying. I know, after spending six months flying to Mars you would think I’d be well and truly sick of it, but I’m not. Besides, that long flight also had many memorable moments, as I recall.” Then I wiggled my eyebrows at her and said, “I’ve been grounded for two and a half months, more or less, and that is the longest time I have spent on the ground since I was nineteen years old. Now here I am, blazing through space at the helm of a hot-rod alien spacecraft on my way back to Earth to rescue six stranded astronauts and take them back to Mars, with a beautiful and sexy woman at my side, and I am loving every second of it! I’ve certainly come a long way”—I chuckled—“from being a Tasmanian sheep farmer!”

Mel laughed and hugged me,

“How did you become a sheep farmer anyway?”

“I was born as one, but I was also born to fly. My parents owned a sheep farm; it was a good farm, but it didn’t make enough for them to be able to hire farmhands to help Dad, so when I was old enough to help I was the unpaid farmhand. Every day when I got home from school, and all day on school holidays and weekends, I spent most of my time working on the farm. Then one day I went to an air show at the Sale Air Base in Victoria. My best mate and I had saved our pocket money for a very long time to pay for that trip. I had always loved the idea of flying, but after seeing the jet fighters being put through their paces that day I marched straight into the recruitment office and signed up for a three-year hitch. I’ve been flying ever since.”

“How did your parents get by without your help after you signed up?”

“I knew a couple of blokes who were two years below me at my old high school who wanted part-time work. I introduced them to Dad, and he hired them. The farm went from strength to strength after that; they loved the place and the work, and my Dad wound up employing them full time toward the end.”

“What do you mean toward the end?”

“My mother passed away six years ago, and Dad died almost five months later. I’ve been told that it isn’t that uncommon for a surviving member of a close couple to pass away within six to eight months of the other. I know Dad was devastated by Mum’s death, so much so that I extended my leave by another three weeks to keep him company and help him around the farm.”

“What happened to the farm after he passed away?”

“I sold it to the two farmhands who were working on it; they loved the place as much as Dad did, but they didn’t have the finances to pay me up front, so I gave them a mortgage over it when I went home for Dad’s funeral. That was the last time I ever went home.”

I looked down at Melissa.

“Guess I’ll never see any of that money now.”

I received an elbow strike to the ribs from her, but it was relatively gentle.

“Drew, your humor can be quite black and distasteful at times,” she said.

“We each deal with tragedy in our own personal way. Making jokes, however inappropriate they may be, is how I deal with it.”

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. I told the ship to open the intercom channel and told the crew that we were ready to fly. As they entered the bridge, I commanded the ship to start its engines, which it did immediately.

I gave the command to rise one meter, retract and lock the landing gear, and proceed down the taxiway and out the hangar doors. As we passed under the staging room windows, I snapped to attention and saluted Nick. He returned my salute and, after first checking to make sure that Sammy wasn’t watching, flipped me the bird. Without checking to see if Mel was watching, I returned the gesture just before we passed out of his visual, and I received an elbow jab to the ribs from Melissa for my mistake. I suspected Nick found it very amusing. We passed through the hangar doors into Mars’s atmosphere, and I commanded the ship to rise to 220 meters and hover. I warned the crew to prepare themselves for launch, and they reacted immediately by doing absolutely nothing. I then gave the silent command: “Launch!”

We leaped off the planet and into space. I checked the rear view monitors and saw Mars shrinking in our wake as we blasted away from it. Then I looked out the bridge windows. It hadn’t been an illusion when we flew this ship around Mars yesterday. The stars were blurred due to our speed. Where have you been all my life? I thought to the ship. She was a truly remarkable machine.

ANOTHER BIT FROM THE PAGES OF 'REACH FOR MARS' :

There was a large staging room (terminal, you could say) on the hangar level with its own airlock to the hangar area, and therefore, direct access for the personnel and passengers to and from the starships parked in the hangar. This was of course where we had most of our meals and gatherings because it was where most of the supplies were stored and you may recall that I had named it the Spaceport Cafe. I parked the buggy behind the others and walked into that large room, which had huge bay windows on one side overlooking the hangar area where people could watch incoming and outgoing flights. I found the rest of the crew in there saying their goodbyes to the third of the crew that was remaining behind on Mars. I walked up to Sammy and said goodbye. She gave me a hug and wished me a safe journey. I turned to Nick and shook his hand. He looked directly into my eyes and said,

“Make sure you’re back in six weeks, or I’ll come looking for you.”

I laughed and replied,

“It’s a big universe. I’m sure I could find a planet big enough to hide behind. I’ll be back in five to six weeks, given fair and favorable (solar) winds.”

With a wave of my hand, I led the rest of my crew out of the room to our buggies. I followed the crew through the hangar doors and pushed the button on the dash to close the inner airlock doors as I passed through. I saw and heard the doors closing as I followed the rest of the crew to the ship. I drove the buggy into the cargo hold of the starship. There was no way that I could see to batten the buggy down, but as I knew the physical flight characteristics of the ship I wasn’t worried, I just made sure the handbrake was firmly applied. Mel and I took the elevator to the flight deck level and put our bags into the captain’s quarters. It was a large, luxurious suite with a door connecting straight to the flight deck. After dropping the bags, I walked through the connecting door onto the bridge and put on a headset. The ship came to life. I told it to retract the ramp and close, lock, and seal the outer hull door. I could hear by the electrical whines, buzzes, and thumps that the ship had complied with my commands.

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I still firmly believed in the arguments I had used to Nick against the necessity of carrying a firearm to rescue these people from the ISS, Still, with deep feelings of self-disgust and shame, I rose to my feet, grabbed the bullets out of the dresser, reloaded the gun, and put it back in my bag. I finished my coffee, grabbed my bags, threw them into the back of the buggy, and drove through the city to the hangar.

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I watched him walk down the drive and turn toward his house before I went to the bag, and removed the holster. I took out the gun and removed its magazine. Then I thumbed the rounds out of it, pulled back the slide action to eject the live round from the chamber, and put the bullets in a drawer in the dining room cabinet. I slammed the empty magazine back into the gun, returned the gun to its holster, and put it back in my bag.

I made myself a cup of coffee and contemplated the mission I was about to attempt. This led me to think about my conversation with Nick earlier. He did have a point: I didn’t know any of the people I was about to fly halfway across the solar system to pick up and transport back to Mars. I had no idea what psychological pressures they had had to endure or how those pressures may have affected their powers of reasoning. True, our crew had also witnessed the rampant and irrational destruction of our home planet and our people—and we weren’t homicidal maniacs. But then we had witnessed it all from far out in space, and on a television monitor, so the impact would have been considerably less than watching it all happening just below you through the windows of the space station.

There was also another consideration to ponder: the slow but relentlessly growing realization on the part of the space station crew that they were doomed to die themselves, slowly but surely and no doubt horribly, when their remaining supplies were exhausted. There would be no hope of help or rescue from Earth or anywhere else in the universe, so they had undoubtedly had to face the fact that they were alone in a sardine can for the rest of their very short lives. They would have been carrying these thoughts with them for a very long time, until a chance radio transmission from them reached across the void of space and was intercepted and answered from an extremely unexpected corner of the universe. Mars! I could only imagine (but didn’t want to) the extreme rollercoaster ride of emotions and thoughts they had endured to this point and how adversely it surely would have affected them.

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I was busy packing the next morning when there was a knock on the door. I opened it to find Nick standing there with a bag in his hand, I turned and walked into the lounge room with a jerk of my head and said over my shoulder as I went,

“Don’t tell me you want to come along as well or has Sammy finally given you your marching orders—or both.”

When we arrived in the room, I turned to face him as he put the bag on the side table, unzipped it, and pulled a Colt .45 Desert Eagle semiautomatic pistol from it.

“Do me a favor and take this with you,” Nick said.

“In God’s name, why, Nicholas? I’m flying there to save them, not exterminate them!”

“You don’t know these people. They had front row seats when the human race decided to destroy each other in an orgasm of fire. They may have become mentally unhinged by the ordeal! I’m pretty sure I would have been.”

“Mate, you’ve always been mentally unhinged. Do you have any idea what would happen if you fired a gun in an oxygen-rich environment such as the inside of a spaceship? The whole damn thing would probably explode! Even if it didn’t, the bullet piercing the hull would cause a massive decompression, which would cause the ship to implode, and I wouldn’t want to be on that ship when either, or both, of those things happened.”

“Just humor me and put it in your bag. I would feel happier if you did. If you don’t have to use it, well and good. But if you do, aim very carefully,” he advised.

“Yeah all right, but I don’t see any of them attacking the people who are saving them from certain death,” I insisted.

“Good, I feel a lot happier about it. Not that I give a rat’s ass about your sorry butt, but if the rest of the crew got murdered, Sammy and I would have to do all the work around here! You don’t do much around here anyway.”

“Screw you and the ship you flew in on, Nick!”

Nick and I had a talent for adjusting derogatory and insulting epithets to suit our circumstances.

“ That’s spaceship, you idiot. See you at the staging area in three hours,” he said over his shoulder as he left, chuckling to himself.

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“Yes as a matter of fact I think I do. While you were flying the starship around the planet I located the engine room and had a look inside. The engine is very similar to the Torus engine on the shipwreck and so I wouldn’t worry about running out of fuel. I also have a question for you, Drew.” Dick said. “Would it be OK if Courtney came along with us?”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nick flash his smartass, triumphant grin at me, which I pretended not to see. Then he chimed in,

“Sure, Dick! I don’t see any problem with that, do you Drew? After all, you’re taking Mel with you! It’ll be a nice holiday for you all!” Then he broke into song,

“We’re all going on a summer holiday, no more worries for a week or two…”

At least the rest of the crew chimed in with me when I exclaimed,

“Shut up, Nick!”

He tried to look crestfallen, but that look is very difficult to pull off convincingly when you’re chuckling to yourself and writhing about in your chair.