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'Six oh-five. Four entering. Three male, one female. Yellow vintage car, make unknown, registration Whisky Hotel Oscar Eight.'

***

Alan watched Oswald on the floor of the editing suite, rummaging through Eve's press pack. He'd seen the contents for himself at the Museum, when they'd been handing out the packs. Glossy photographs of the crew, with biographies on the back; maps of Mars; artist's impressions of what a Mars Colony might look like; description of Mars. Alan saw the piece of paper that he wanted, a glossy card bearing a diagram of a space suit.

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.

46

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 yel ing 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 wil 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.'

'How do you explain the fact that that man is breathing nitrogen and he isn't dead?'

'The Martian atmosphere is breathable. Thin but breathable. Why do you think the British government would invest billions of pounds trying to set up a colony on a planet without a breathable atmosphere?'

'It says that here that they will terraform it.'

'Alan, listen to what you are saying. Even heard of the ozone hole? Mars' atmosphere is one big ozone hole. If British scientists could fix an ozone hole and turn the main greenhouse gas into lovely fresh oxygen, they'd fix the atmosphere we've got down here first.'

Alan ignored him. 'The Mars 97's a fake, like that Di video last year. The whole Mars Project is just another crummy British sci-fi drama. This is the story of the decade.'

A billion people had seen those pictures; he couldn't be the only one to spot that the astronaut hadn't done his suit up properly. He couldn't be the only cameraman who'd spent the last few hours staring at the picture.

He couldn't wait for Eve.

***

They were in the briefing room deep in the heart of the UNIT Offices in London. Bambera had ushered them all down here, where her senior officers - two captains, two sergeants - were waiting.

Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart looked around the room. It was a far cry from his day when budgets were tight and he, Benton and Yates