Chapter Six

Alan and Oswald pulled it out, placing it alongside the screen grab he'd printed off. He ran his finger along the blurred image. Oswald showed Alan the air line. A corrugated white tube, the diameter of a vacuum cleaner hose. A hose that on the picture in front of him had come free from its socket and was flapping about.

It was a single frame of videotape. With the air line disconnected, the next few seconds should have seen the astronaut collapse, gasping for air. His blood vessels would have burst, and his eyes would have started to bulge as though he was being strangled. His colleagues should have bounced over, trying to keep themselves from panicking. They'd be slotting the pipe back into place, pulling him back to the Lander, knowing that it was already too late to prevent permanent brain damage.

That wasn't how it had happened. The astronaut had bounced out of shot like a kid in a playground, live on a billion television screens.

'See?' Oswald said excitedly. 'Whatever that guy is breathing, it didn't come from the tanks on his back.'

'The pictures are fakes,' Alan said incredulously. These pictures of British astronauts that they'd all been watching on TV a few hours ago weren't taken on Mars at all.

'That's not true. The Mars 97 is real enough, in fact those pictures prove it. The Apollo missions were faked by Disney, sure, everyone knows that, but - '

Alan rounded on him, almost yelling the information on the press sheet he had just found.' "The Martian atmosphere is chiefly carbon dioxide, with virtually no oxygen or hydrogen. Some scientists believe that it might, in the long term, be possible to make the Martian atmosphere like that of Earth. This process is called 'terraforming', and a number of experiments will be carried out on the Mars 97 mission." Explain that.'

Oswald snorted. 'You believe that propaganda?'

Alan turned on him. 'As a matter of fact, yes I do believe a wealth of scientific evidence over some fruitcake who thinks that the world's flat and that Elvis had crash-landed at Roswell.'

'I love you too, Alan.'