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  “Oh,” said Des, to no one in particular, in a low voice, “shit.”

  WRONG PLANET

  Tom Holt

  “Bugger,” said the first man to set foot on Mars, a fraction of a second before his toe touched the dust. “Wrong planet.”

  35 million miles away, Mission Control nearly swallowed its mike.

  “Mission control to Excelsior,” it said, trying to sound unconcerned, “we’re having trouble reading you, please clarify. Repeat –”

  “Oh, be quiet,” snapped the first man on Mars. “And for pity’s sake stop calling me Excelsior. My name’s George. You should know that by now.”

  The thought of ten billion eavesdroppers on seven continents didn’t do much for mission control’s composure. Not good television, it thought, staring dumbly at a screen that showed a hazy space-suited figure apparently booting a small pebble across a chartreuse desert. “Well, um, George,” was all it could think to say. “And how does it feel to be, like, the first man on Mars?”

  “Disappointing.”

  “Ah.” The hazy figure was, apparently, turning round and heading back to the landing module. “You wouldn’t say, for instance,” persisted mission control, “that it was a small step for a man but a giant . . .”

  “Wild goose chase. Yes, that puts it pretty bloody well.” A million-dollar boot stepped onto the first rung of the ladder. “Not to mention a rather spectacular waste of money. Hey there, all you people watching this at home, have you the faintest idea how much this is costing you? Well, to the nearest billion –”

  All over Earth, TV screens went blank; and a moment later, a slightly hysterical voice explained that due to technical problems the uplink to Excelsior was temporarily offline, but it was being fixed; in the meanwhile, here’s a favourite episode of the Mary Tyler Moore Show . . .

  After that, life was interesting for a while in Houston, Texas. The President of the United States, calling in for an update, was politely informed that his call was being held in a queue, he could either hold or try again later. Representatives of the major TV networks and high-ranking Pentagon officials met to discuss the feasibility of blasting Excelsior out of the heavens with a stockpiled Reagan-era laser-beam as a damage limitation exercise. The slipstream caused by plummeting aerospace shares roared through the streets of New York and Tokyo like Dorothy Gale’s cyclone. In Fleet Street, editors roared “Hold the second page!” across frantic newsrooms (the front page, of course, was reserved for SEX CHANGE VICAR IN GAY ROMP WITH TV VET, thereby demonstrating that one nation, at least, retained a sense of perspective).

  Back on Mars, the first man clambered back into the module and flopped down on his bunk. Serves me right, he thought, for getting my hopes up. Should know better by now. Oh, well, never mind. At any rate, it helped pass the time.

  “You are starting to feel sleepy,” said the voice. “You are completely relaxed. Your toes are relaxed. Your feet are relaxed. Your ankles are relaxed . . .”

  Alice gritted her teeth. Compared to her, a cheesewire was limp spaghetti. The more the voice told her to relax, the more she wanted to scream –

  “Your calves are relaxed,” the voice lied to her, “your kneecaps . . .”

  Oh, sure, Alice thought. If I relax any more, I’ll strangle myself with my own neck tendons. Not, she added, that I’m hostile or anything; and I really do want this to work or I wouldn’t be here, I mean, this is costing me sixty quid of my own money, dammit, sixty pounds just to be told the little hairs in my nose are relaxed when they palpably aren’t – sod it, you could play my nose like a bloody violin, so how dare he say I’m feeling relaxed when it should be perfectly bloody obvious – “Your wrists are relaxed,” the voice said, obviously not aware how close it was getting to being shoved down its owner’s neck, “your fingers are relaxed . . .”

  On the other hand, Alice forced herself to remember, I haven’t had a cigarette now for, oh, thirty-five hours. Thirty-five hours, sixteen minutes and twenty-three seconds. No make that thirty-five hours, sixteen minutes and twenty-six seconds; thirty-five hours, sixteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds –

  Whereupon her eyes suddenly went blank, her head lolled sideways and she began to breathe deeply and regularly, like someone else’s cat on the lap of a cat-hater. The voice, which had just got past her collar-bone, was silent for a moment.

  Zwz, thought Alice. Hwa . . .?

  “Now you’re fast asleep,” the voice said, in a slightly brisker tone. “Now I want you to think about how nasty your mouth tastes first thing in the morning, when you’ve just woken up. . . ”

  “Who’re you?”

  The owner of the voice sat up sharply. He didn’t know who’d said that, but he was morally certain it wasn’t Alice Fennel, his patient, even though the words had sort of jostled their way out of her mouth. Completely different age, accent, inflections –

  The hypnotist grinned. One of them, he thought. Yay.

  He glanced down at his watch; forty minutes before the next patient was due. It’d take, what, two minutes to do the usual nasty-smelly-cigs routine (which reminded him, he was gasping for a smoke; add on three minutes for a cough and a drag out on the fire escape between appointments); that left him at least half an hour to explore the regressive personality he’d just apparently stumbled on. He just hoped Ms Fennel wouldn’t turn out to have been Cleopatra in her previous existence – that would make sixteen Cleopatras this week, and a man can only stand so many barge-trips down the Nile.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “Alice,” replied the voice. “Who’re you?”

  “That’s not important,” he replied soothingly, “it’s you that’s interesting. What year is it?”

  The other Alice was quiet for a heartbeat or so. “I’m not sure, actually,” she said. “Let’s see; King Richard died the year before last –”

  “Excuse me. Which King Richard?”

  “The King Richard of course, silly. King Richard of England. How many king Richards do you think there are?”

  Three, the hypnotist didn’t reply. Instead he said, “You mean Richard the Lion-Heart, don’t you?”

  Other-Alice giggled. “We don’t call him that in our village,” she said. “We’re supposed to call him that, or at least the priest tells us to, but we don’t, not when he isn’t listening. We call him Richard Got-His-Balls-Bit-Off-By-A-Camel –”; at which Other-Alice laughed so much he was afraid she might wake up.

  Hey, said the hypnotist to himself, authentic twelfth-century humour. Gosh, aren’t I the lucky one, to be sure. “That’s really funny,” he said aloud. “All right, can you tell me where you live?”

  “In the village.”

  The hypnotist scowled. Ask a twentieth-century question, get a twelfth-century answer. Served him right. “And what’s the village called?” he said.

  “Birmingham.”

  “Right. Is it a big village?”

  “Oh, yes. Huge. There’s more’n thirty houses.”

  “Wow,” the hypnotist said, “that’s a lot. Can you tell me how old you are?”

  “Course I can,” said Other-Alice. “I’m seven. But quite soon I’ll be eight.”

  Children. Another damn child. Why can’t I ever get a bloody grown-up?

  “That’s a very good age to be,” he said. “All right, what’s your daddy’s name?”

  “George.”

  “What a nice name. And what does your daddy do?”

  “Sits around a lot.”

  “I see. And how old is your daddy?”

  Other-Alice hesitated, as if rehearsing a difficult speech. “Two thousand, five hundred and six,” she said, “come Michaelmas.”

  “I see,” said the hypnotist patiently. “Well, there we are, then. Have you got any brothers and sisters?”

  Over the course of the next half hour, the hypnotist learned something he hadn’t realised before; namely that eight-hundred-year-old seven-year-olds are just as hard to have intelligent conversatio
ns with as their modern counterparts. All in all, he was glad when the time was up and he could fill Ms Fennel up with the usual anti-weed stuff, wake her up and boost her out into the street without feeling guilty about not making the most of a unique transtemporal opportunity. Thanks to this wormhole in chronology, he’d learned that Alice had two brothers and a sister, didn’t like boiled leeks and had a pet rabbit called Fern. It was almost as good as having a time machine.

  “Zwz,” muttered Ms Fennel, as she came round. “Is that it? Did it work?”

  “Let’s hope so,” the hypnotist said.

  “Right,” grumbled Ms Fennel. “My left arm’s gone to sleep.”

  “Try rubbing it. That’ll be sixty pounds, please.”

  Standing in a fuzz of blue smoke on the fire escape, watching Ms Fennel in the street below frantically searching her pockets for her lighter, the hypnotist sighed. It’d made a pleasant change from all those confounded Cleopatras, and the sheer triviality of it all convinced him it was genuine; but was it too much to ask that once, just once –

  My daddy’s two thousand five hundred and six years old. An odd thing for a child from any era to come out with; but that’s kids for you. Say any old thing, kids. It was probably her way of saying he was the wrong side of thirty. Oh well.

  His next client wasn’t there yet, so he went into the back office and switched on the little portable TV, to check Ceefax for the long range weather forecast. Just before the screen changed, he caught the tail end of some story about the mysterious disappearance of one of the Mars astronauts. He grinned, remembering the Mary Tyler Moore Show; nothing too mysterious about that, he thought. If I’d pulled a stunt like that, I’d be putting an advert in the Exchange and Mart for a forged Bolivian passport and growing a beard right now. That was one guy whose brain he’d love to unpack – what was it he’d said? Disappointing? The first man on Mars?

  The hypnotist frowned. He’d also said wrong planet – now there was a thought to conjure with (Oh, Mr Porter, far beyond the stars; I wanted to go to Jupiter but they’ve taken me on to Mars . . .) Assuming that it wasn’t a simple case of falling asleep on the bus, what the hell had he meant by that? There was, of course, a perfectly rational explanation; but after twenty years in the brain trade, he could generally spot an eccentric-as-a-hatter in the first eighth of a second. The first man on Mars may have been many things, but insane? No.

  If anything, the reverse. Possibly to excess . . .

  She didn’t see him until the last moment. Correction; she didn’t see him until the moment after that – by which point he was halfway up her windscreen and accelerating dramatically.

  She stood on the brake; and the car, after trying its best to fold up like a concertina, dug its tyres in and stopped. The windscreen was frosted with shatter-lines.

  A small, obnoxious voice in the back of her mind proposed the motion that she should start the engine, punch a hole in the screen to see through, and drive away. The man, whoever he was, was most decidedly dead; there was nothing she could do for him. Running away was about the only thing in the universe that could make matters worse than they already were. She got out of the car, shivering. Somebody had repossessed her knee tendons, which made walking difficult.

  Absolutely no excuses. None. She’d not been looking at the road, because she’d been looking down, lighting a cigarette (a cigarette she shouldn’t have been attempting to light, not after going to the hypnotist; the small, obnoxious voice, her inner lawyer, tried to make out a case for it all being the hypnotist’s fault, but nobody was listening). Well, she thought, that’s that. My life, down the drain. Shame, dishonour, prison. And it can’t have been all fun and games for him, either.

  “Don’t just stand there, you stupid bitch,” said a voice. “Help me out.”

  It was as if the angels were singing to her. “Hello?” she squeaked, her throat too tight for anything except Piglet impersonations.

  “Help me out,” the voice repeated.

  It was coming from a gorse bush at the side of the road; into which, she discovered, a man had been inserted. All the engineers in the world, she couldn’t help thinking, would be hard put to it to duplicate the experiment; he’d gone in head-first, like a high-diver, and was hanging upside-down, his weight marvellously supported by thousands of gorse-prickles lodged in his clothing. It was like something from the ashram of a Yoga master, a position symbolising opposing forces poised in space, or something of the sort.

  “All right,” she said doubtfully. “I – It’s a bit awkward,” she said.

  At this point she noticed the lack of something; namely, blood. A man who’s just been hit square-on by a Ford Fiesta doing 60 m.p.h. and thrown thereby into a dense tangle of thorns oughtn’t to be quite so blithely monochromatic. Either the shock had made her temporarily colourblind, or he wasn’t bleeding.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, peering.

  The man laughed. “It’s all right,” he said, “private joke. Look, are you going to help me out of here or do I have to wait till my clothes rot?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, quite truthfully, although she was beginning to find him rather annoying. The fact that she effectively owed him her life for not being dead and that her immortal soul was presumably in his debt for the next twenty thousand years still didn’t mean she had to like him. “I’m really sorry, but I don’t know what to do.”

  “What? Oh, forget it, then.” His manner and tone of voice were definitely getting on her nerves. “Just stand back and don’t get in my way, all right?”

  He sort of wriggled; then he squirmed a couple of times in a thoroughly scientific manner; then he somehow fell out of the gorse bush onto the palms of his hands, did a double handstand and landed neatly on the soles of his feet about eighteen inches away from her. She stared at him.

  “How the hell did you do that?” she asked.

  He sighed. “Years of practice,” he replied, examining some of the more spectacular rips in his jacket sleeves. “Bye.”

  He was walking away.

  He was also – she’d already noticed it, but the information had taken its time registering – the most amazingly, stunningly, breathtakingly, incredibly handsome-looking man she’d ever seen in her entire life.

  “Wait,” she burbled.

  He turned his head, flashing a profile that surely couldn’t be legal in peacetime. “What?” he said, and frowned.

  She still didn’t like him very much, but she had to say something. “I’m – well, I’m sorry,” she said. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “Never felt better. Is that it?”

  He sounded as if he was talking to something he was in the act of wiping off his shoe. Not a nice man, in spite of the profile. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?” she mumbled.

  “The way you drive,” he said, “I think I’ll pass. Try looking at the road this time. It’s the long, darkish-grey thing with the white stripe up the middle.”

  “Yes, all right,” she replied. Her inner lawyer was urging her to smack him round the head, and for once was not without a degree of support. But she couldn’t stop staring. “Well,” she said, “I’d better let you get on, then.”

  “Jolly good,” he said.

  “At least let me pay for the suit.”

  He stopped again. “That’s terribly sweet,” he said, as if talking to a small, irritating child, “but you can’t afford it, and I can. Secretary, right?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t be. It’s an honourable calling, and if you stick at it for twenty years you might just make office manager. Meanwhile, any suit you could afford to buy me I wouldn’t be seen dead in. Another private joke,” he added, “don’t worry about it. Run me over again in 2026 and then maybe we can do business.”

  Possibly, just possibly, he was being deliberately objectionable out of a chivalric urge to smother her natural feelings of distress and guilt and replace them with good, healthy loathing. But he didn’t seem the
type. “All right, then,” she said. “If you’re sure.”

  “No, I only said it to practise my vocabulary. Now please go away and ram a tree or something.”

  He was moving away again. She ran after him and grabbed his sleeve, which came away in her hand.

  “Neat trick,” he said. “But I’m still not letting you buy me a new one.”

  “Why aren’t you hurt?” she shouted at the top of her voice. “You went flying up in the air. You smashed my windscreen.”

  “Ah. Now there’s something I could buy for you.”

  “Stop being so bloody annoying and answer me!”

  He looked at her, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Keep the sleeve.”

  “You . . .”

  “I think you’d better move your car,” he said. “There’s people trying to get past.”

  “What? Oh . . .”

  Of course she couldn’t see anything through the screen, and when she tried to bash a hole in it she hurt the side of her hand quite badly. In the end, she guessed, and kept on creeping forward till she came up against something – a tree or a fence-post, she couldn’t care less. When she climbed out again and ran up the road after him, there was no sign of anybody.

  “Damn,” she said, looking around. There were a couple of field gates he could have hopped over, but the thought of wading around in muddy fields looking for him was more than she could cope with. On the way back to the car she picked up a reasonable-sized stone that made a perfectly adequate porthole in the windscreen and also helped her relieve her feelings to a moderate extent. Of course, the driver’s seat was now covered in bits of glass, but that was probably the least of her problems.

  Maybe I imagined the whole thing, she thought, as she sat and looked at the world through the frosty-edged hole. Maybe I’m still three parts hypnotized, and having hallucinations. A moment later she noticed a lit cigarette between her fingers; she threw it out through the hole, and lit another one a second or so later. If I imagined the whole thing, what happened to the car? Hit a tree? Suppose I must have done. Either I knocked a drop-dead gorgeous, invulnerable pain in the bum into a gorse bush, or I hit a tree. I think I must have hit a tree.