Solaris Rising (31 page)

In that movie, instead of blasting off for Mars three astronauts are suddenly whisked away to a desert base where their journey and their explorations will be simulated. That’s because at the last moment the life-support system on their ship is found to be faulty. For reasons of national prestige, the mission must still be seen to go ahead. Two years later, the returning empty re-entry module – supposedly with the astronauts on board – burns up in Earth’s atmosphere, posing a big problem. What’s to be done with the astronauts who are actually alive in that desert base?

We weren’t in America, where our return could perhaps be hushed up – along with new identities for us similar to the witness protection program, so that we could disappear to avoid major national embarrassment.
But also where we couldn’t be snuffed out and buried in unmarked graves.
Had our alien rescuer been aware of that aspect? Did his ‘people’ watch Sci-Fi movies? Maybe, if they bought German deli-style sandwiches.

As Pablo led us down the gritty slope, I said quietly, “Guys, we’d better be careful what we tell people.”

We entered the Wild West town by way of its picket-fenced cemetery, low wooden crosses askew. Nearby on a raised platform stood a gallows, a stool waiting underneath a dangling noose. Several Hispanic cowboys who were feeding horses stared as Pablo led us along the sandy main street. We passed a bank built of adobe, then the red brick and barred windows of a Sheriff’s Office. Opposite, a clapboard-sided barber’s and an undertaker’s, so said the weathered signs.

Just then the undertaker’s door opened and out stepped a tubby man sporting a Stetson and sunglasses, camera slung round his neck, accompanied by a tubby woman in a long pink-striped dress and baseball cap. The man promptly began taking photos of us while the woman called back inside, “May, will you come and see this!” A moment later May appeared, cameraphone in hand, visibly the woman’s sister.

The undertaker’s must be a mini-hotel where tourists could stay Western-style, authentically as it were. Other buildings along the street might be likewise.

Led by Pablo, we tramped through batwing doors into a big saloon in our Kubricky spacesuits. What looked like an unkempt outlaw in a long duster coat lounged against the bar, cradling a rifle, his blond hair long and tangled. Beside a stage a quartet of young women dressed as cancan dancers were chatting and giggling. The outlaw glared at us menacingly, acting in character I supposed. The cancan girls advanced on us, as though they were the local talent bent on relieving Jim, Chuck and me of our hard-earned silver dollars. Stairs led up to a balcony running around three sides of the saloon. Could it be, when the saloon got into full swing, that a cancan girl might take a guest up to a private room? No: two kids kitted out as junior cowboys came romping downstairs, firing blanks at each other, before gawping at us. Family entertainment here.

We took off our helmets and placed those in a row on the bar as if we were bikers, almost.

“You want drinks?” asked the thin-faced barman in English, an unlit cheroot in his mouth, silver armbands on his shirt sleeves like a croupier.

“I’m sorry,” said Juno, “but we don’t have any money.”

Pablo laughed. “They not take dollars to Mars. Drinks for them obsequio de la casa. On the house.”

“We’d better have Coca Colas,” Juno said.

“Me, I’m for a beer,” Chuck said.

“Count me in,” agreed Jim.

“But it’s only morning,” I pointed out, as mission commander. “And it’ll be your first alcohol in over a year. Surely it’s wiser to stick to Coke or juice.”

“We just escaped
death
,” said Chuck. “Champagne might be the order of the day.”

“I got good cold champán,” said the barman.

Compared with the likely effects of champagne, beer seemed safer if Chuck and Jim insisted, so I pointed at the beer tap. “Two of those. Coke for me.”

“Yeah,” said Juno.

“Me too,” from Barbara.

“Hey mister, hey mister,” clamoured one of the kids, unmistakably American, “are you actors in a space movie?”

“No, we are
not
actors,” Barbara said.

“You look actors,” piped up a cancan girl.

At that point up bustled a plump, tanned, beaming middle-aged woman in jeans and a billowy yellow blouse.

“Boys, go and play in the street,” she instructed. “Chicas,” to the cancan dancers, “help with the drinks, las bebidas okay? Pablo ¿qué pasa?”

Pablo spoke rather quickly in Spanish, the woman nodding and saying
Si
from time to time.

“I have to sit down.” Juno headed for a big round empty table, us four others following gladly.

Joining us at the table, the woman told us in a British accent, “I’m the wardrobe mistress of Texas Hollywood. My name’s Rachel. Where
did
you get those spacesuits? They’re so authentic looking. Is there a commercial I don’t know about?”

“It’s pretty hot in these,” complained Juno.

“They from planet Mars,” Pablo told her. “Hace muy frio… makes very cold on Mars.”

A couple of the cancan girls brought our drinks, then Rachel shooed them away.

“Look now,” Rachel said in a motherly way, “if you’ll just step over the street I can fit you all out in something much more comfortable. Your spacesuits will be perfectly safe over there. May as well take your helmets with you too.”

Chuck drained his chilled beer in one go. “I guess we oughta borrow someone’s mobile… You know, phone the US embassy. That’ll be in Lisbon, I guess. No, Madrid.”

“Why would you want to do that?” asked Rachel. “Phone your director, your producer.”

“We don’t have those,” said Chuck. Was his voice slurring already? “We have Mission Control.”

“They say they brought back from Mars, not say how.”

“Oh God, it’s so awful,” said Rachel quickly. “I watched on TV. I’m so sorry for your countrymen, those brave astronauts.”

“We
are
those astronauts,” said Chuck. “This is real. A flying saucer – ”

“No,” I hissed.

“– a flying saucer brought us back in –
three
hours
, can you believe it?”

“I think he has heatstroke,” I said. “In these suits. Or maybe it’s the beer.”

Rachel rose. “Come on, all of you. Over the street.” She herded us.

Within twenty minutes we were arrayed for the Wild West, the gals in ankle-length sleeveless striped dresses, me as a corporal in the US Cavalry in blue uniform, yellow neckerchief and chevrons. Chuck was a Marshall with pointy silver badge, Jim an ordinary cowpoke. Necessarily we’d abandoned our thermal long-johns cum long-sleeved vest combos, so we lacked underwear, which the wardrobe room didn’t stock. On impulse I transferred the clingfilm with its bit of evidence to my new uniform.

Back to the table we went with Rachel, Chuck taking his Mars camera along as though he too had become a tourist. More beers and Cokes appeared.

Juno aired herself, and smiled at Rachel. “Sure feels a lot better.”

“So, hombre,” our cowboy said to Chuck, “not spaceman now, feel different?”

Chuck drank then yawned. “We still gotta phone.”

“Phone American embassy, they believe you? Send black helicopters?”

I shook my head. “They’ll be unlikely to believe us at first.”

“So we phone Houston,” said Chuck. “They know our voices.”

“You have the number on you?”

Chuck looked frustrated. “Look, we don’t have money, passports, anything of the sort. Just our suits. And cameras, datapads. I can show you us on Mars,” he said to Rachel. So that was why he’d brought the camera. “Look, look,” presenting images on the camera’s screen, of us in a stony reddish desert, the big landing module standing there, a metal cabin on legs that looked like a model.

Without our noticing, more tourists had arrived in the saloon, mostly distinguishable from authentic pretend cowboys by cameras and pallid or lobster-red faces. One silvery-bearded crewcut fellow, who’d been here already, was shifting his chair ever closer to our table.

“Excuse me for butting in,” he said. “You seen that conspiracy movie about how the Apollo 11 Moon landing was simulated? The White House was worried there mightn’t be live TV from Apollo 11 on account of technical problems, so to be on the safe side they got Stanley Kubrick to simulate the video secretly on the set of
2001
. Flew over to England with moon suits and a spare lunar exploration module that Armstrong and Aldrin had practised with. Allegedly.

“There’s footage of Kissinger and other White House big-wigs authorising the plan –
except
if you pay close attention they’re merely talking about
a
plan, unspecified. It’s the voiceover that says this is about Apollo 11. And there’s an interview with Kubrick’s widow Christiane, and her brother, what’s his name, Harlan, Jan Harlan, that’s it, talking about how impressed Kissinger was – Christiane mentions Kissinger by name, but again it’s the voiceover that says this is about Kubrick shooting a simulated Apollo-on-the Moon in England. England, of course, because Kubrick lived near London and wouldn’t fly. Clever bit of editing, that film! I’m a connoisseur of conspiracy theories. And
do
I seem to be in on the ground floor here and now!”

“But
look
.” Chuck displayed more images for him. “These are
real
photos.”

“They’re real electronic photos, there’s no denying. Kubrick’s genius was in making
2001
look real with the technology of the late Sixties. Boy, have we moved on from there!”

Chuck put the camera on the table and slumped.

Our busybody went on: “I couldn’t help overhearing you saying about having no documents or money, only those spacesuits and, before you went off to get changed, I’m sure I heard
flying saucer
. That’s a beautiful touch, if I’m reading this correctly. So who’s your director?”

“There ain’t no director,” I told him.

“You mean it’s an amateur production, like
Indiana Jones
reshot in a garage? Just you five guys on your own?”

“Mister, it’s
real
. What kind of movie has no cameraman?”

The bearded fellow winked. “Who needs a cameraman? Soon as you came into town, folks would be uploading vids of those spacesuits to YouTube. Those vids will go viral, so you don’t even
need
to make a movie yourselves – very astute. Tell you what – I’m Mike Appleton, by the way – those suits looked worth three grand apiece.”

“More like a hundred K each,” Juno said hotly. NASA hadn’t stinted on our Mars environment gear.

Appleton stroked his chin. “That sounds a bit greedy, but I’d go to twenty-five K for the complete set. Me being, as I say, keen on conspiracy theory movies and associated paraphernalia, and you do keep insisting you need money. Unless,” and he darted a wary glance at Rachel, “there’s a higher offer on the table.”

Rachel was indignant. “Five supposed astronauts walk into a bar and tell a tall tale to a naïve wardrobe mistress. Then a total stranger, who happens to be conveniently present, pipes up, ‘Wow, what great Sci-fi Costumes! I’ll pay you tens of thousands of Euros.’ I wasn’t born yesterday!”

“That was dollars,” corrected Mike Appleton.

“So the silly wardrobe mistress promptly says, ‘I’ll raise you five thousand,’ and she empties her bank account. Away walk five happy actors with their accomplice.”

“Rachel,” I said gently, “we are
not
acquaintances of this gentleman.
Mister
Appleton
, you are spoiling our hitherto cordial relationship with this good lady who has been kind enough to help us out.”

“And isn’t it a bit of a coincidence,” persisted Rachel, “your Mr Appleton being so knowledgeable about that hoax film by Kubrick?”

“Alleged hoax,” said Appleton. “That’s the beauty of it. My offer stands.”

Chuck seemed to have gone to sleep, and Jim was looking half-canned. The beer, and the fact that about five hours ago we’d been destined to die on Mars.

“Mister,” said Barbara, “if we sell you our suits, at a ridiculous garage sale price, what do we do next? Use our five thousand dollars each – that would have to be cash, by the way, in the circumstances – to fund a new life in Spain with no ID? Fuck!” she cried. “I’m forgetting all about our families, who must be going through hell at this moment believing that we’re gonna die!”

“That,” I pointed out, “is because our spouses aren’t exactly in the forefront of our minds.”

Appleton seemed like an accomplice of whatever had returned us to Earth so near to this film-set theme-park where he happened to be staying, his intervention pushing us towards a route and a way of thinking that not long before I’d have regarded as absurd. Appleton was the mechanism by which a major part of our physical proof might be removed from us while we were in a disoriented state of mind!

“Five K each could get us back to America,” went on Barbara, “but we can’t board any plane without ID. We’d have to smuggle ourselves by boat to Mexico, sneak over the border like illegals, catch a Greyhound and turn up on our own doorsteps at midnight…”