Deborah Hockney by Jocasta's Gift Page B

benevolent smile on her face, thinking of her younger sister that Jocasta found herself struggling, impossibly, to keep her eyes open as she relaxed into the stasis mode.
    The journey through space proved uneventful. They had to take it in turns to be woken every few days to exercise and eat. On previous trips space crews had discovered that the best way to keep reasonable muscle tone and maintain mental agility was to allow the body to be in torpor for no longer than ten days. Jocasta discovered that she was one of the luckier ones, who didn’t seem to suffer from the cramps nearly as much as everyone else, and the feeling of light-headedness that accompanied each waking passed in a matter of minutes. The vigorous exercise routine however, was decidedly hellish and although their group protested on more than one occasion, their instructor told them it was for their own good and that they would thank him for it when they arrived on Mars with bodies still capable of walking to the cities and ‘not crawling along on your stomachs like the vermin you are clearly trying to emulate!’
    ‘Hope he isn’t one of our Elite instructors,’ Nikki hissed under her breath, during one particularly brutal session. ‘The man’s a miscreant and should be sacked.’
    Unluckily for Nikki, her remarks didn’t go unnoticed and she was given an extra five circuits to complete at the end of that particular period, which left her red in the face with exertion as well as anger. After that she kept her thoughts to herself, but everyone agreed with her sentiments.
    The only real excitement happened during their fourth waking when a solar flare set off a radiation scare. Everyone had to be woken and samgees awkwardly inflated in the confined area, so that every individual could surround themselves in their protection suits. It was a curious sight as different coloured balloon type samgees grew to the size of the owner and then closed around them with a whoosh of air being expelled to fit each person like a second skin. It was just as well that they had practised this manoeuvre several times at the Space Hotel, as to be encased from top to toe in a hybrid of radiation expelling, elasticised synthetic resin and feel its clammy substance blocking every pore was one of the most unpleasant feelings Jocasta had ever encountered. Even with the masks that covered their eyes, noses and mouth it wasn’t an experience she wanted to repeat, ever.
    The descent to Mars took longer than expected as there was a problem with the backlog of spaceships waiting to lock into the new docking system. Tempers were beginning to grow jagged as the eager anticipation turned to frustration amongst the cadets. It seemed they had waited so long for this final part of the journey that any delay was magnified in their minds and seen as a deliberate ploy to test their nerve.
    Their spacecraft orbited the red planet for several more hours, with each rotation taking it ever lower. This gave a few lucky ones with seats next to a window a spectacular view of Earth’s neighbouring planet. A vast orange desert, stark against the oppressive black of cold space, pock-marked and pitted from asteroids; huge craggy mountains that looked not much more than small pleats in a frozen landscape of rock and dust.
    Jocasta’s neighbour, despite becoming increasingly irritable with what he termed ‘a laughable lack of efficiency’, could not help but marvel at the vista that was on show below them. He pointed out one of the four cities that, to Jocasta, looked nothing like the sprawling affairs that covered Earth; teeming with people and harbouring imperfections at every corner. No, this city was the height of efficiency; compact, sleek metal lines and –was that glass? A strange angular shaped building, with smaller dwellings nestled safely under the huge, widely domed cover. Two watchtowers, standing on each side of the city, outside the dome, sported satellites which were lazily following