The Worst Man on Mars

In the cockpit, watching the CCTV images of the events unfolding in and around the space elevator, Lieutenant Willie Warner experienced a wide range of wholly negative emotions. First, the sight of the space colonists filing, and then piling, into the second-hand lift compartment filled him with an overwhelming, all-consuming, gut-wrenching resentment that these people ... these people, for goodness sake! ... would be the first to walk on Mars and, worse, the first to encounter the 12-foot alien bird-people that he alone had discovered.

“Where’s the justice in that?” he moaned aloud even though there was no one there to hear or sympathize with him. Although Willie had been the youngest of seven boys, the other six all high achievers, and had known injustice his entire life he had, sadly, never quite grown accustomed to it or learnt how to accept it.

“Look at them!” he wailed, pulling at his thinning hair in frustration. How was it fair that those morons, would soon be making History while he, grade A* space academy cadet, was to be left alone on board. Three years of intensive astronaut training and, now that the big moment had arrived, here he was: relegated to bag-boy. If only he’d completed another year, maybe they would have let him wash and iron their space dungarees.

Just the sight of Dugdale, hovering outside the lift door, drove Willie to distraction. “Him! Representing Mankind? I ask you!”

Willie studied each of them in turn, wondering who had battered Penny Smith to death and for what reason.

He knew full well that the very pictures he was watching would be winging their way back to Earth, to be beamed directly into the homes of billions of people worldwide. What he was seeing, everyone on Earth would be seeing a mere 6 minutes later.

Willie put his head in his hands. There was no way of stopping the images reaching Earth and preventing the World witnessing the British way of space exploration and how a once-proud nation was making a total balls-up of one of the most important moments ever. It seemed a painfully long time before the lift doors closed for the final time and departed, plummeting towards the surface of the Red Planet.

Willie closed his eyes and moved his hands up to clutch the top of his head. On screen could still be seen the floating clothing and, at the end of the corridor, the full-sized blow-up doll bobbing about as though resentful at having been left behind. Not as resentful as Willie, though. Particularly as he knew he’d be the one having to clear up the mess.

His mind suddenly filled with bad thoughts, wicked thoughts. Wishes for disasters, evil hopes that things might go horribly, tragically, fatally wrong. Perhaps the lift would crash, or burn up on re-entry, or would be met by an army of hostile 12-foot bird-people who would merciless peck the crew and colonists to death. Mankind’s future in space would then lie with himself, Lieutenant William Hilda Warner. Ah, if only.

“Such a shame my space training never covered this,” muttered Willie through gritted teeth as he plucked various items of female apparel out of the air in the corridor – camisoles and corsets and cami-knickers and suspenders and crotch-less panties. As he folded each item and popped it through the narrow opening in the trunk, he tried desperately not to picture Emily Leach wearing it. Not easy but, for the sake of his sanity, necessary. Particularly the crotch-less panties. No man in the Solar System deserved that particular image in his head.

Willie had taken the precaution of wearing latex gloves. The thought of his bare skin making contact with any of these lacy, frilly, highly-perfumed things made him shudder. He wondered what additional precautions he’d need when it came to dealing with Dugdale’s underwear when he went to pack the commander’s suitcase.

Once all garments and personal nick-knacks had been packed in the trunk, he faced the problem of Mr Darcy. The doll was hovering at the far end of the corridor and seemed to be in ‘Simmer Mode’, eyeing Willie like some sort of unwelcome love rival.

Willie eyed him back. “Hmm, an inflatable literary character,” he mused. “What a brilliant invention. Five million years of evolution for ... that.”

He approached the doll warily. Somewhere there had to be a valve to deflate it, but Willie hardly fancied groping the doll from head to foot to locate it. Indeed, as he came closer the doll’s simmer mode switched to a more threatening demeanour.

He decided on a softly-softly approach. “My, my Mr. Darcy, how handsome you look, with your tousled hair, frilly wet-look shirt and tight riding britches. I can barely resist kissing you myself.”

Perhaps Willie should have realized that the inflatable doll’s program was not sophisticated enough to comprehend sarcasm. So, the moment Willie got close enough, Mr Darcy stretched out his rubber arms and switched to ‘Stage 1 Lover Mode’, wrapping himself around the lieutenant.

Maybe it was the romantic corridor lighting, or the subliminal eroticism of having just handled a trunk-full of female underwear, or because Willie had never actually been kissed before, but the young lieutenant was lost in the moment, and when Mr Darcy gently slipped his moist gel tongue into his mouth, Willie reciprocated.

But even a rubber sex doll has standards. Once the Mr Darcy doll had fully registered Warner’s ugliness at close quarters, he recoiled and, an instant later, flipped open the cap of his own deflation valve.

“Bastard!” screamed the rebuffed Warner as Darcy withered in his embrace and, once again, Willie was left to consider his romantic shortcomings.

*

Grim though the experience of packing Miss Leach’s trunk had been, the experience of packing Dugdale’s stuff promised to be far worse. The items floating in the commander’s cabin looked a lot less wholesome than those he’d just been dealing with. They were larger, greyer, more frayed and holey, more prominently stained, and emanating odours that were as far from the delicate scents of Miss Leach’s perfumes as Mars is from the other end of the galaxy. Warner took one look and closed the door, gagging slightly at the memory of what he had just witnessed. The worst part was that Dugdale’s suitcase was floating on the other side of the room, meaning he would need to battle his way through the aerial slurry of the commander’s garments to get to it.

“What a joy life is,” he muttered.

After a few deep breaths of clean, corridor air, he managed to summon the courage to open the door again and enter the cabin.

Carefully he threaded his way through the clothing, as though swimming through a densely planted minefield, shuddering every time anything touched him. But, as most of his efforts were directed at protecting his face, it was inevitable that legs, trunk and elbows brushed against soft things which immediately clamped themselves onto him, like overfriendly limpets.

Then, as he approached the suitcase, some hard object clunked against his skull. Willie turned to see what had whacked him and found himself staring at a floating cricket bat. The more he surveyed it, though, the less he cared about the minefield of soft menswear around him.

For, on the edge of the bat, was what looked like a bloodstain. The bloodstain instantly became the focus of all his attention.

“Penny Smith?” he wondered in a croaking voice. “Could this be Penny’s blood? And this the murder weapon?”