The Skull (15 page)

The screen went blank instantly and there was a fizzing, buzzing sound as the liquid soaked through the keys and started to burn through the hard drive. Fumes began to rise in front of the skull's snout.

Dad was staring at the laptop in horror, his mouth hanging open. ‘What have you done?' he screamed, rushing towards the corroded computer.

Carl barged into his father, blocking his way. From behind him he felt a heat on his back like the breath of a dinosaur. Dad pulled back one arm, clenching his fist. Carl closed his eyes.

Nothing happened.

He slowly opened his eyes again. Dad was standing in front of him, head and shoulders down. He was shaking.

‘I… I'm sorry,' he started. ‘I'm so, so sorry.'

Carl paused. ‘I've ruined your laptop,' he said.

Dad shook his head. His eyes were full of tears. ‘It's OK. There was nothing important on it anyway.' He reached out his arms and held Carl for a long time.

‘Come on,' he said eventually. ‘It's time to go home.'

At the door, Dad stopped and looked back at the skull, still staring down at them. ‘My grandfather discovered it, you know,' he said.

‘I know.'

‘I just wanted to add something to it. You understand?'

Carl shrugged. ‘Sort of,' he said.

‘I hope your mother will take me back,' Dad said finally, after another long pause. ‘I've been an idiot.'

I hope so too
, thought Carl.

People were always asking John Marchant what it was like to be the first Martian. He never really knew how to answer them. The truth was, it wasn't like anything. It was just his life. He was born here on the base. It was as simple as that. He didn't know what it was like
not
to be the first Martian.

He made a pointing gesture inside the mechanised suit and it reacted instantly, uncurling one long metal finger. He made a tapping movement and the finger's chisel-like end stabbed at a piece of rock, splitting it neatly along its seam so that it opened up like a billion-year-old book.

He examined the inside of the rock. It was smooth, featureless. Just another blank page in Mars' history.
He tossed the rock away. It bounced high in the low gravity and toppled down the side of the crater, sending up flurries of dust.

He looked over his shoulder at his parents, who were digging a little further down the slope. None of them had been able to resist one last dig before they left, probably forever. John turned back to look at the base.

When he was very small, the base consisted of six domes growing just enough food to feed him, his parents and a couple of other scientists. They had needed constant supplies from Earth, which roared in on shuttles every couple of months, bringing strange surprises like toys and chocolate. It had always seemed to John that Earth was a far more interesting place than Mars and yet, oddly, everyone he got emails from seemed fascinated by their cramped little home.

Slowly, the base had grown. Day and night the automated foundry churned out iron and clay bricks of different sizes, and everything from buildings to toothbrush handles were built from them. The blocks were solid, interchangeable and on Mars, they were light enough to build almost anything with. They were the secret of the base's success, and meant that the old glass-roofed domes were being slowly
crowded out by windowless and mostly empty cube-shaped buildings.

They were self-sufficient in most things now. Food, fuel – there was even a pod for growing synthesised meat, although John was constantly told that it didn't taste like the real thing. What held up the base nowadays wasn't a lack of space or food. It was electronics. That was why many of the new buildings stood empty. The base just didn't have the processing power available to manage their temperatures and work their doors.

Nowadays, the traffic from Earth had slowed and most of the transports were in the opposite direction, Mars exporting materials rather than importing them. So no more chocolate. And tomorrow, they would export John and his parents.

He looked back at his dad, hacking out and smashing one rock after another before tossing it into the crater, and his mother picking slowly and deliberately through every stone in front of her. He knew neither of them would leave if it were up to them. This was
his
decision, and they'd agreed for the sake of his future.

John lifted another small slab of rock and split it. Nothing unusual. He threw it away. There never was
anything. Or at least there never was
the
thing. Every day since he could remember, his parents or the other scientists on the base had gone out to the crater, and chipped away at the ground there. Even today, on their last day on Mars, they couldn't resist the urge to go back out.

Over fifteen years, his parents had excavated the rocks that told the history of the planet in layers. Every day they had learned more about that history and returned with more samples to analyse in the labs. They rarely even spoke about what they were really hoping for.

Every few years, someone would find something. A microscopic pattern embedded in the rock that could have been a fossil. A different kind of rock that might have once been organic. But each time it had been examined, it had come to nothing. There were no fossils on Mars. At least, no undisputed ones. Except the old megalosaurus in the centre dome. The skull was always present, glowering down from a plinth to remind them why they were there.

John stepped back and looked at the side of the crater, which swept out in a huge wide curve. Whatever had hit the ground here had carved a great scoop out of the side of the planet, and around its
edge layers of rock, each a subtly different colour from those above, were exposed. The further down the crater you went, the further back in time you could explore.

The base concentrated its effort on a few layers of rock from a time when oceans had flowed here. Thick bands of dark red-brown ran around the edge of the crater, broken by landslides and cliffs.

As John stood back, he could suddenly see that the layer he'd been working on was actually two similar coloured bands separated by a third thin layer of pale rock in the middle.

Why hasn't anyone spotted this before
? he wondered. He followed the broken, pencil-thin line. It was faint, but he could see it. Another type of sediment, different to what was above and below it. A few million years of unexplored time.

He grasped a loose rock from the pale band, edged it out of the crater wall and tapped it lightly. As it fell easily into two flat plates, John stared at it, unable to believe what he was seeing.

On the inside edge of one of the pieces, a long, snaking line made its way in loops through the rock. It looked like a tiny trail tunnelled into soft mud before the rock set hard.

‘Dad…' he whispered. Then he shouted, ‘Mum, Dad, over here!' His parents looked up, and lumbered over in their clumsy suits.

‘I've never seen anything like it,' Dad's radio hissed in his ear, ‘at least not
here
.'

‘Is it – ' started John.

Dad interrupted him. ‘It's not a good idea to start guessing about what it is and what it isn't,' he said, but his eyes were huge. ‘We'll take it home. There'll be some people with opinions there, no doubt.'

It was funny how Dad always called Earth ‘home', despite not having lived there for fifteen years. As he looked down at the stone with its mysterious looping tunnel, it occurred to John that he was probably the only person who didn't call Earth home, and that was probably what it was like being the first Martian.

John pushed hard with both legs and levered the iron weight into the air. He held it for a count of five, let it fall back, and pushed again, just as he'd been taught. This exercise was hard work, but it got him away from everyone else, and that was where he wanted to be right now. Too much going round in his head.

Besides, with a journey of six months in an enforced coma ahead of him, his muscles would have to be in top shape for him to have a chance of even being able to stand when he got to Earth. And John was absolutely determined that when the hatch opened, he would walk out of it, not be ferried out on a stretcher as everyone assumed he'd be.

John was well aware that on Earth he was quite a celebrity. And there was no way he was going to disappoint his fans. First impressions were important. And when you were starting a new school on an alien planet, he imagined they were vital. He clenched his teeth and pushed his legs out. The iron weight creaked upwards. He counted slowly to five, watched by the skull's great, empty eye, and then relaxed.

To John, the skull was the only object in the base that seemed genuinely natural. Its huge eye sockets were sculpted into complex but perfect curves. Its teeth were detailed with tiny serrations, every tooth different from every other. Each part of the skull had its own purpose, unique and yet fitting exactly with every other part, built and shaped by an impossibly intricate and brutal form of evolution. The skull, unlike anything else around him, could never have been invented. There were no standard-sized bricks here.

It sat in the centre of the dome, raised on an iron plinth. Its presence was symbolic: it was a mascot, a trademark and a connection to the Earth and its history. It felt to John as out of place on Mars as he would be on Earth. It was such an impossible, impractical object to ship to Mars. John thought that was probably why Dad had done it.

As he stared up into its enormous jaws, he was suddenly struck by how fragile it was. How alone.

That was when he heard the sound. It was a noise like cracking ice and he knew instantly what it was. It was the sound that everyone on the base feared and to which everyone was trained to react. The outer dome was breaking.

The hardened glass was arranged as a tough network of hexagonal pieces, but occasionally a rock whipped up by the fierce Mars winds could break one of the pieces and cause the dome to de-pressurise.

John looked up. One hexagonal piece was marked with a thin line, and the fracture was splitting out across the surface in a widening star. Instantly, sensors detected the danger and there was a metallic clang as all doors into the rest of the complex were locked down.

John was trapped.

Any second, the glass would shatter and all the air, followed by everything that wasn't fixed to the ground, would be sucked out through the hexagonal hole. He frantically looked around.

He had one chance. He leapt towards the outside door. His suit stood where he'd left it, like a robotic sentry. He could hear the crack in the glass widening as he hauled himself inside and started to fasten the catches around his legs and arms.

The cracking sound turned into the roar of escaping air. John felt himself being pulled upwards. The suit was magnetised and anchored itself to the floor, but only one of the catches was fully fastened around his leg and he could feel himself being wrenched upwards and out of the suit. Using all his strength, he dragged his arms down and grabbed the other catch, forcing it closed.

As he hauled first one arm, then the other into the suit, plants were being uprooted all around him and were flying up towards the ceiling. His exercise machine was shaking from side to side, the weights detaching themselves one by one and hurling themselves upwards.

As he fought with the final catch which would seal the suit around his head, John could feel the air being
sucked out of his lungs. Everything in the room was spinning around him, and the blood rushing around his skull made his head swim. Fighting against blacking out, he finally managed to close the last catch.

The sound from outside was cut off, and there was a gentle hiss as air was fed into the bubble around his head.

Outside, the dome was a silent vortex of swirling plants and iron and ceramic blocks. Everything spun around and upwards, like a bath emptying through a plughole.

John fought to calm his breath, and as he looked into the centre of the vortex, he suddenly saw the skull. It was moving. The creature's head was rocking back and forth on its mountings. The great eyes stared straight at him, but the jaw was tipping back, gaping wider and wider as the rushing air tore at it.

It was stone, but it was brittle. If it came loose, it would be smashed to pieces. John looked across the dome. Where he stood, he was safe, shielded by the outside doorway. If he stepped into the centre of the room, his suit could be hit by any of the flying debris, dislodged from the floor, or punctured. But if he didn't move, the skull would be destroyed.

Somehow, he couldn't be its executioner.

He stepped forward into the vortex. An iron table flew at his head and he ducked. It bounced into the side of the dome and rolled upwards. He took another step and almost lost his footing in the clumsy suit.

Centimetre by centimetre he edged forward. The skull was rocking alarmingly now. Three of the four bolts holding it down had rattled free, and it was pitching loosely from side to side. John could see the final bolt beginning to tear from its mounting.

Suddenly, it gave way. The skull toppled forward, its gaping mouth lurching toward him. He took a huge step forward and raised both hands, grabbing the jaw and the top of the eye socket. The suit's motors ground, adding just enough to his own strength to hold the stone structure steady.

He locked the hands of the suit in place and held on while the vortex around him slowly calmed. He was still in the same position when his parents and the rest of the crew finally sealed the dome and rescued him.

When the shuttle was loaded for the journey back to Earth, it had an extra passenger. The beds in which
John and his parents were due to spend the voyage had to be hastily re-positioned further from the cargo doors, and the shuttle's computer was instructed to re-calculate its weight, speed and fuel estimates to take into account the additional mass of a fossilised megalosaurus skull. With the leisure dome damaged, the museum that had loaned the skull to the Martian base quickly came to the conclusion that they wanted it safely back on Earth.