At the world fair, a stand that reads ‘Trip to Mars - 10¢’ and an old man stood before it wearing a worn tophat and an even more weathered expression. A young feller walks up to the stand.
‘A trip to Mars? How’n earth you do that?’
‘Well for ten cents you can see fer yerself mister.’
‘There’s no way. To Mars, fer real?’
‘Fer real mister.’
‘How? Is this one of them so-called illu-sions?’
‘No sir.’
‘Or one of them moving pictures?’
‘No sir.’
‘Is it cocaine? Do you give a feller a load of cocaine?’
‘For ten cents? No sir.’
‘Well what is it then?’ says the young feller, hands on hips.
The man in tophat scratches his nose. ‘Like I said, for ten cents, you can see fer yerself.’
‘What if you bludgeon me about the head and steal my kidneys?’
‘That is illegal in America, sir,’ says the man in the tophat. ‘Don’t you think we’d have been caught by now if that was the case?’
‘Okay but you take my meaning. What if this is all a trick? I have no way of knowing I’ll be goin to Mars for ten cents. I may just deprive myself of ten cents.’
‘Well that is your decision, mister. Are you goin in or not?’
The young feller deliberates, then sticks his hand in his pocket. ‘Here ye are.’
‘Well thank you sir. Go on in. Enjoy your trip to Mars.’
The young feller leaves the fair and the old man behind as he parts the curtains and enters the wooden hall of the stand. A bulbous contraption made of glass and copper dominates the centre of the room. Tentatively, the young feller steps through an open port and into the contraption.
A switch is thrown from somewhere and the room is pitched into darkness. Then a sudden brilliant light erupts around the young feller and he feels every atom of his person being lifted up and away.
In the swirling kaleidoscope of colours he briefly glimpses the passing moon, the distant stars and all the rich blackness of space. Then, rushing up towards him, the red dot of Mars.
In the next moment the young feller is blinking away his shock as he stands in a strange glass room on the surface of a rust-coloured desert, far from Earth.
‘Holy mother…’ he breathes, placing his hand on the glass and gazing out at the red planet.
Then someone bludgeons him about the back of the head and knocks him out cold. He is dragged along the corridor towards an operating room, where a surgeon prepares his tools for live organ extraction, which is not illegal on Mars.
Paddy Dobson
19th October 2021