Mars

1

Jamie was in Galveston when the long-awaited, long-feared final decision was unmade.

Ever since he had joined the Mars Project, Houston had been as much of a home as he could claim. Although he had spent months on end in training sites all across the globe, nearly half a year in Antarctica, week after week in Florida, and even weeks aboard space stations orbiting the Earth, always he returned to Houston. And Edith.

Edie Elgin was the co-anchor of the seven and eleven o’clock news at KHTV in Houston. She had interviewed Jamie when he had first arrived at the Johnson Space Center. A dinner invitation turned into a relationship that both of them knew was temporary, at best.

“I’m not even thinking about marriage,” Edith often told him. “Not until I get to New York and a job with one of the networks. Maybe not even then.”

“I don’t know where I’ll be a year from now,” Jamie said to her regularly. “If I don’t make the Mars team I’ll probably head back to California for a teaching job.”

“No commitments,” she would say.

“Couldn’t make any even if we wanted to,” he would reply.

Yet whenever he returned to Houston he returned to her. And although she never spoke of how she spent the time while he was away, she seemed always glad to see Jamie. They made a strange couple: the dark, taciturn, stocky half-Navaho and the blonde, vivacious, ever-smiling TV anchorwoman. She was recognized wherever they went, of course. And although she was known as Edie to everyone who watched television, to Jamie she was always Edith.

She claimed to be a natural blonde and one hundred percent Texan, a cheerleader in high school, a beauty pageant queen at Texas A M, where she had studied electronic journalism. She could not spell very well, but she could smile with perfect teeth even while announcing a disastrous earthquake or an airliner crash. There was a crafty brain behind the pretty smile; she knew opportunity when it arrived and she was wise enough never to let down her guard in the company of anyone even remotely connected with the news industry. With Jamie, though, she could be serious and tell him about her plans for her career. He could relax with her and forget about training and Mars and the men who stood between him and the assignment he cherished.

Jamie had just returned from three weeks aboard the Mir 5 space station, working with Father DiNardo on the rock samples returned from Mars by the unmanned ships that had been landed on the red planet.

He had thought that DiNardo had been given the power to make the final decision as to who would back him up on the Mars mission. The Jesuit disabused him of that notion just before he had to board the shuttle that would return him to Florida.

DiNardo had asked him to come to the geology lab before he boarded the shuttle. The priest was waiting for him there, looking solemn, hanging weightlessly a few inches above the metal grillwork of the laboratory floor, his face so puffed up from the fluid shift that happens in near-zero gravity that he looked more like an Indian than Jamie himself. DiNardo shaved his balding scalp completely, yet there was a dark stubble across his jutting chin.

“The board of selection has made its decision,” DiNardo said softly, the faintest hint of Italian vowels at the end of each word. From the tone of the man’s voice Jamie knew the news was bad.

The two of them were alone in the space station’s geology lab, hovering weightlessly in the apelike half-crouching position the human body normally assumes in microgravity. A carefully sealed glass-walled cabinet behind DiNardo held row upon row of reddish soil samples and small pink rocks from the surface of Mars. Jamie felt his stomach sinking.

“I am afraid,” DiNardo went on gently, “that the choice has gone to Professor Hoffman.”

Jamie heard himself ask, “And you concur?” His voice sounded harsh, tense, like a bowstring about to snap.

“I will not oppose the decision.” DiNardo made a sad little smile.

“Personally, I would rather have you travel with me. I think we would get along much better. But the selection board must consider politics and many other factors. For what it is worth, the decision was the most difficult choice they had to make.”

“And it’s final.”

“I am afraid that it is. Professor Hoffman will be the number-two geologist on the mission. He will remain in the spacecraft in orbit about Mars and I will go down to the surface.”

Fuck the two of you, Jamie wanted to say. Instead he merely nodded, lips clamped together so hard that an hour later he could still feel the imprint of his teeth on them.

From Cape Canaveral Jamie had flown immediately to Houston, and from there he and Edith had driven to Galveston in her new, sleek, dark-green Jaguar. In her form-hugging jeans, tightly cuffed silk blouse, and racing-style sunglasses she looked like a movie star, especially with her blonde hair blowing in the breeze.

“It’s a Ford Jaguar,” she shouted over the rushing wind and the growl of traffic, trying to cheer his dark mood. “Got a Mercury six and transmission under the hood. Looks like a Jag, but I don’t need an English mechanic riding in the backseat all the time!”

As they roared along Interstate 45 Jamie said barely a word. The Friday afternoon traffic was heavy, but Edith weaved through the trucks and the other weekenders as if the highway patrol would never even try to stop her. Jamie knew that this was the last weekend he and Edith would spend together. On Monday he would start packing his things. He wanted to be away from Houston, away from the space center, away from everything connected with the Mars mission. As far away as possible.

Where? Back to the university at Albuquerque? Back to teaching geology to students who would spend their lives searching for oil? Back to spending summers picking at ancient meteor craters while others were exploring Mars? Back to Berkeley and his parents?

Their hotel room in Galveston was high up in one of the towers that overlooked the Gulf of Mexico.

“It’s a beautiful view, isn’t it?” Edith said, reaching one arm around Jamie’s waist as they stood together by the sliding glass doors that opened onto a narrow patio. She nestled her head against his shoulder.

“Until the next hurricane,” Jamie said.

“Yeah. We cover the storm damage every year, and every year they build more of these high-rises.”

Jamie turned back to the bed and began to pull the shaving kit from his dark-blue nylon travel hag.

“Which side of the closet do you want?” Edith asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“You’re really down, huh?”

“Down for the count,” Jamie said, taking the kit to the bathroom and placing it on the shelf above the sink without bothering to open it up.

She was at the doorway, more serious than he had ever known her to be.

“We got a release from the Mars program office that they’ll announce the departure date Monday morning at a press conference in Geneva.”

Jamie nodded. “And the crew list.”

“You won’t be going.”

“I won’t be going to Mars,” he said.

Edith forced a shaky smile. “Well… you been saying all along that you didn’t think they’d pick you.”

“Now I know for certain.”

The smile faded. “Now we both know.”

They’ll go to Mars without me and I’ll disappear into oblivion, he said to himself, unable to speak the words aloud. I’ll become just another university geologist, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing. He looked at his face in the mirror over the sink: anger smoldered in his dark eyes. All you need is some war paint, he said to the somber image.

Edith knew him well enough to realize he had no more words for her. She turned and went back to the sliding patio doors, tugged one open. It stuck halfway along its track.

“Damned rust,” she muttered, slipping through the narrow opening and out onto the patio. “Air’s pure salt out here.”

Jamie crossed the carpeted room and leaned against the reluctant door, then pushed with all his strength with both hands, suddenly furious. It screeched and popped off its track as it slid all the way back. Jamie snorted and glared at it hanging lopsided from its top rollers. Then he stepped through onto the patio. Going out of the air-conditioned room was like going from ice cream to hot soup. He felt perspiration instantly dampening his armpits.

Edith ignored his explosion of brute force. “Looks pretty,” she said, gazing out at the tranquil Gulf. “Between hurricanes, that is.”

Grasping the railing beside her with both hands, Jamie tried to force his mind away from the pain and anger. “Ever seen the Pacific?”

“Just on tapes.”

“The surf is incredible. This is a milk pond by comparison.”

“You ever surf?”

“Not really,” he said. “Never had the time for it.”

“I like sailing. Got a friend with a Hobie Cat. They’re fun.”

Jamie took a deep breath of salt air. “The first time I saw the ocean, I must have been four, five years old. My parents had just moved to Berkeley from New Mexico and I thought the Bay was all the water in the world. Then they took me to the beach and I saw the Pacific. Damned breakers scared the shit out of me.”

“What’re y’all gonna do now?” Edith asked, forgetting her diction lessons.

Jamie kept his eyes on the calm water, the ripples of waves riding across the pastel green-blue water to foam briefly against the sand beach. From this height he could barely hear the hiss of the gentle surf.

“Look for a job, I guess.”

“At the university or in private industry?”

“What the hell could I do in private industry that a kid ten years younger can’t?” he snapped, then immediately regretted it. More calmly, “University. But not here. I don’t want to be this close to the Mars mission. Not now.”

“Up in Austin…?”

“Maybe. California might be better. More likely Albuquerque.” He turned to her. “I don’t know. It’s too soon.”

“But you’re gonna be leaving.”

“Yes. I think so.”

He realized that she was trying to hide the pain that she felt. Pulling her to him, Jamie held her tightly. Edith did not cry, but he could feel the tension constricting her body. He wished she would cry. He wished he could himself.

It was two in the morning when the phone call came.

The buzz of the phone jangled Jamie awake instantly, but for several blurry moments he did not know where he was. The phone shrilled again, insistently. He realized Edith was beside him, stirring now, mumbling into her pillow.

His eyes adjusting to the glow of the digital clock on the dresser, Jamie reached across her naked body and lifted the phone from its base.

“Hello.”

“James Waterman?”

“Who wants to know?”

“Come now, Jamie, this is Antony Reed, in Star City. Do you have any idea how long it’s taken me to track you down?”

“Christ, it’s two in the morning here. What the hell do you want?”

“DiNardo’s in hospital. A gall bladder attack. He’ll need surgery.”

Jamie sat up rigidly in the bed.

“What’s happening?” Edith asked, awake now.

“Did you hear me?” Reed asked. It was the first time that Jamie had ever heard the Englishman sound excited.

“Yes.”

“There’s a godawful row going on upstairs. Brumado’s flying in from the States, from what I hear. He wants to meet with the selection board and Dr. Li.”

“So Hoffman’s moved up to number one and I’ll be his backup?” Jamie asked, surprised at the tremor in his voice.

“Can’t be certain of anything right now,” Reed answered. “The entire question is going to be reviewed this afternoon or Sunday.”

“What is it?” Edith was excited now too. “Have they changed their minds?”

“Whatever you do,” Reed was saying, “stay in close touch with Houston. You may have to fly out here on Monday. Or perhaps go straight up to the space station. We were supposed to start shipping up there tomorrow, but everything’s been put on hold temporarily.”

“Okay,” Jamie said shakily. “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Nothing to it, old boy. Most of us would much rather have you aboard than that prig Hoffman.”

“Thanks.”

“Good luck!” The line clicked dead.

“What is it?” Edith asked, sitting up beside him.

Jamie realized his hands were trembling. “Father DiNardo’s been taken sick. He’s going into surgery. It looks like I’ll be going on the mission after all.”

“Hot spit!” Edith dove out of the bed and began rummaging in her shoulder bag resting on the chair next to the curtained window. Jamie watched her slim naked figure as she bent over the bag, muttering to herself.

“Hah! Got it!”

She bounced back into the bed with a palm-sized tape recorder in her hand.

“What the hell?” Jamie wondered.

“This is an on-the-scene interview with geologist James Fox Waterman, who has just been informed that he has been selected to be on the team that flies to the planet Mars two months from now.”

He laughed, but apparently Edith was completely serious.

“Dr. Waterman, how do you feel about being selected to be part of the first human expedition to the planet Mars?”

Jamie blurted, “Horny. Very horny.”

He took the tape recorder from her hand and placed it on the night table beside her. The tape ran out long before they finished making love.

2

As the cab pulled up to the curb in front of his parents’ home Jamie realized for the first time how undistinguished the house was. Genteel poverty was the facade for university professors, even those who had inherited old money.

He had hitched a ride in the backseat of a T-18 jet with one of the NASA astronauts who was dashing home to the Bay area for a quick weekend. Now, as he paid the cab driver and got out onto the sidewalk, he felt almost as if he had stepped onto a movie set. Middle-class Americana. A quiet suburban street. Unpretentious little bungalows. Kids on bicycles. Lawn sprinklers cranking back and forth.

He went up the walk, nylon travel bag in one hand, feeling a little unreal. How would Norman Rockwell paint this scene? Hello, Mom, just dropped in for a few hours to tell you that I’m off to Mars.

Before he could reach the front door his mother was there waiting for him, a smile on her lips and the beginnings of tears in her eyes.

Lucille Monroe Waterman was a small woman, pert and beautiful, who had been born to the considerable wealth of an old New England family that dated itself back to the Mayflower. The first time her family had allowed her to venture west of the Hudson River was the summer she had spent on a dude ranch in the mountains of northern New Mexico. There she had met Jerome Waterman, a young Navaho fiercely intent on becoming a teacher of history. “Real history,” Jerry Waterman told her. “The actual facts about the Native Americans and what the European invaders did to them.”

They fell hopelessly, passionately in love with each other. So much so that Lucille, who had not given much thought to a career, entered the academic life too. So much so that they were married despite her parents’ obvious misgivings.

Jerry Waterman wrote his history of the Native Americans and it was eventually adopted as the definitive text by universities all across the nation. Success, marriage, the comfort of a dependable income, the insulated life of academia — all these mellowed him to the point where Lucille’s family could almost accept him as their daughter’s husband. And Jerry Waterman found that he wanted to be accepted. It was important to Lucille. It became important to him.

Lucille won her doctorate in English literature and then they had a baby: James Fox Waterman, the “Fox” being an ancient family name from Lucille’s mother’s side of the clan. Although he could not know it, Jamie was the grandson that brought about the true reconciliation of the New Englanders and their Navaho son-in-law.

Lucille clung to Jamie, there in the doorway of their Berkeley home, as if she wanted never to let him go. Then his father appeared, smiling calmly from behind his pipe.

No one would recognize Professor Jerome Waterman as the fiery young champion of Native American history. His hair was iron-gray and thinning so much that he combed it forward to cover his high forehead. His face showed what Jamie might be like in thirty years, fleshy, puffy from a sedentary life. Dark-rimmed glasses. Open-necked sports shirt with its manufacturer’s logo embroidered discreetly on the chest. There was no more fire in Jerry Waterman’s dark eyes. It had been a long time since he had been in a fight more strenuous than arguing with a dean over class size. He had won his youthful battles and over the years had become more like his former enemies than he could possibly admit to himself.

“I can only stay overnight” were the first words Jamie actually spoke to his parents.

“On the phone you said they were sending you to Mars?” His mother looked more frightened than proud.

“I think so. It looks that way.”

“When will you know for sure?” his father asked.

They walked him into the book-lined library, where the bright sunshine was blocked from the window by a tall azalea bush that threatened to undermine the house’s foundation one day.

“Monday, I guess. I won’t have a chance to get away once they make their final decision.”

The house was much as Jamie remembered it: comfortable, disordered, books and journals scattered everywhere, upholstered chairs and chintz-covered sofas that bore the imprint of his mother’s and his father’s bodies. Mama Bear has her chair and Papa Bear has his, Jamie remembered from childhood.

He sat on the edge of the library sofa, tense and nervous. Mama and Papa took their individual chairs, facing him.

“You really want to go?” his mother asked for the thousandth time in the past four years.

Jamie nodded.

“I thought that priest was the one they picked,” said his father.

“He came down with a gall bladder attack. Too much wine, I guess.”

None of them so much as smiled.

The afternoon and evening inched along. Jamie could see that his mother did not want him to go, that she was desperately trying to think of some argument, some reason that would keep him safely near her. His father seemed bemused by the whole matter; pleased that his son was at last finding some measure of success, but uncertain about the wisdom of the entire effort.

Over dinner his father said, “I’ve never been able to satisfy myself that Mars is worth all the money we’re spending on it.”

Jamie felt a wave of relief wash through him. It was easier to debate national policy than to watch his mother struggling to hold back tears.

They went through all the arguments, pro and con, that they had disputed back and forth with his every visit home. Without rancor. Without polemics. Without raising their voices or stirring their blood. Like a classroom exercise. As he discussed the question of Mars in calm debater’s logic Jamie realized that his father had become the compleat academic: nothing really touched him anymore; he saw everything in the abstract; not even the obvious pain of his wife, sitting across the table three feet from him, could shake him out of the comfortable cocoon he had woven around himself.

My god, Jamie thought, Dad’s gotten old. Bloodless and old. Is that the way I’m going to be?

It was not until long after dinner was finished, as he started upstairs toward the bedroom he had slept in since childhood, that his mother asked:

“Must you leave tomorrow? Can’t you stay just a little longer?”

I can’t take another day of this, Jamie knew. As gently as he could he told his mother, “I’ve got to be at the space center first thing Monday morning.”

“But you don’t have to leave so soon, do you?”

He hesitated. “I want to see grandfather Al.”

“Oh.” The one syllable carried a lifetime of grief and distaste.

His father overheard them and came into the hallway. “You’d rather be with your grandfather than with your mother?” he asked sharply.

Jamie was surprised at that; almost glad of it.

“He’s the only grandparent I’ve got left. It doesn’t seem right to go without saying good-bye to him.”

Jerome Waterman huffed, but said nothing more.

3

Jamie had to be satisfied with a commercial flight from Oakland International to Albuquerque. Al was waiting for him at the airport. With a rental helicopter and pilot.

“What’s this all about?” Jamie asked as he clambered into the little glass-bubble chopper.

Al was grinning broadly, his leathery face a geological map of happiness.

“You only got a few hours here, right? Thought we’d take a run up to Mesa Verde instead of sittin’ around the house.”

“Mesa Verde?” Jamie yelled over the whine of the copter engine start-up. “You’re not going mystical on me, are you?”

Al laughed. “Maybe. We’ll see.”

The first snow of the season was already on the mountains and Jamie felt cold in his lightweight windbreaker as he and Al trekked through the well-marked trail from the helicopter landing pad to the rim of the canyon.

“I should have brought a couple of coats,” Al muttered. He was in a worn old denim jacket and jeans.

“It’s okay. The sun’s warming things up.”

The sky was cloudless blue. Big dollops of wet snow were melting out of the ponderosas and pinons, dropping like scoops of ice cream to splatter on the gravel trail. Jamie’s high-tech Reeboks were getting soaked. Al wore his usual boots, tough and comfortable. And his drooping, broad-brimmed hat protected his head from the falling snow. Jamie, bareheaded, had to keep an eye on the trees and dodge the falls.

The air was thin up this high. Jamie heard his grandfather wheezing. He had seen the Anasazi ruins before, of course, but for some reason Al wanted him to see them once again before he took off for another world.

They reached the crest of the high ridge, walked along the edge for a few silent, puffing minutes, then stepped out from behind a stand of pine.

Across a bend in the ridge, a hundred feet down, the old ruins huddled in a cleft of the ancient solid stone. Even to this day the adobe brick dwellings were protected from the wind and snow by the overhanging rock. Reddish brown sandstone, Jamie knew. Almost the same color as Mars.

“Your ancestors built that village five hundred years before Columbus was born,” Al said quietly.

“I know,” said Jamie.

“Son, when you go to Mars, you’ll be taking them with you. The Old Ones. They’re in your blood.”

Jamie smiled at his grandfather. “By god, Al, you are going mystical.”

His grandfather’s face was entirely serious. “It’s important for a man to know who he is. You can’t be in balance without that. You can’t know where you’re heading for if you don’t know where you’ve come from.”

“I understand, Grandfather.”

“Your father…” Al hesitated. The old man had never called him his son as long as Jamie could remember. “Your father turned his back on all this. He wanted to be accepted by the whites so badly! He turned himself into an Anglo. I don’t blame him. It’s my own fault, I guess. I didn’t teach him half of what I’ve taught you, Jamie. I was too busy then, with the store and all. I didn’t take the time to raise him like I should have.”

“It’s not your fault, Al.”

“I think it is. I wasn’t as good a father to him as I’ve been a grandfather to you. I can see why he felt he had to take the path he did. But I want you to remember who you are, son. You’ll be traveling where no one has gone before. You’ll be facing dangers no one’s ever dealt with. It’ll go better for you if you remember all this, keep it in your mind always.”

Looking out on the ancient adobe village, the square dwellings with their empty windows, the brick-walled circles of kivas where the men held their religious ceremonies in the heady smoke of precious tobacco, Jamie nodded to his grandfather.

“I knew you would go to Mars,” Al said, his voice almost cracking. “Never had the slightest doubt that you’d go.”

“I’ll remember this,” Jamie said. “I’ll keep it in my heart.”

Al reached into the pocket of his denim jacket. “Here,” he said. “A reminder.”

Jamie saw that his grandfather was offering him a carved piece of jet-black obsidian in the totem shape of a crouching bear. A tiny turquoise arrowhead was tied to its back with a leather thong, with a wisp of a white feather tucked atop it.

A fetish, Jamie realized. A protective piece of Navaho magic.

“That’s an eagle feather,” Al said, unable to suppress his shopkeeper’s pride.

Jamie took the fetish. It was small in his palm, but weighty, solid, strong.

“I’ll keep this with me every minute, Grandfather.”

Al grinned, almost embarrassed. “Go with beauty, son.”

4

Jamie made it back to Houston Sunday night and crawled into his apartment bed emotionally exhausted. While he slept his future was decided, more than ten thousand kilometers away, in Star City.

Alberto Brumado dozed in the limousine that had met his plane on its arrival in Moscow. Alone in the spacious backseat, jet-lagged by his supersonic flight from Washington, Brumado paid no attention to the lines of tall apartment blocks and low gray clouds that stretched eastward toward the true steppe country of Russia. For more than an hour the car sped along the wide concrete highway; traffic thinned away until there was little more than the occasional massive tractor-trailer rig, diesel engine belching sooty exhaust plumes into the air.

Past Kaliningrad they drove, past woods and lakes and over a railroad crossing, heading toward Star City.

The actual name of the community is Zvyozdniy Gorodok: literally, “Starry Town.” But ever since the first cooperative Soviet-American space venture, the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975, a slight misinterpretation by a NASA translator turned it into Star City, and so it has been called by the western media ever since.

Once it had been a town, nothing more than a handful of apartment blocks and a dozen big concrete buildings that housed the cosmonaut training center, deliberately placed in the barren emptiness between a thick pine forest and a scattering of small lakes. Now, as Alberto Brumado’s car drove past the guard post at the perimeter fence, it had grown into a sizable city. Scientists and astronauts from all over the world trained here for Mars. The world’s media focused their attention here. A true city had grown around the clear blue lakes, homes for workers who served the training center, shops and open-air markets and entertainment complexes. Close by the main gate of the training center itself stood the Space Museum, a gracefully sweeping concrete form that captured the spirit of flight.

Brumado had learned the traveler’s secret years earlier: sleep whenever you can. Now, as the limousine pulled up to the main office building at the training center, he roused himself from his nap, ready to step out and face his responsibilities, alert if not actually refreshed.

Dr. Li Chengdu came almost loping down the front steps of the building on his long legs to greet Brumado and guide him to the office that the Russians had set aside for his use. Dr. Li was wearing an expensive-looking running suit of maroon and slate gray. The white pinstripe down the legs made him look even taller and leaner than usual. His face seemed strained, grayish, almost ill. Perhaps it’s that maroon top, Brumado thought. It’s not good for his coloring. He himself was still in his Washington clothes: a dark blue business suit. He had removed the tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket hours earlier. The shirt was limp and wrinkled from his long trip.

The office to which Li escorted him was big enough to contain a broad polished conference table, Brumado saw. Good. And its own lavatory. Even better. The second rule of the inveterate traveler: never pass a toilet without using it.

Three minutes later, his bladder emptied, his face washed, and his hair freshly combed, Brumado pulled out a chair from the middle of the conference table, ignoring the massive desk and the high-backed swivel chair behind it. Brumado felt he was here to help solve a sudden problem, not to impress others with the trappings of power.

Besides, he told himself, I have no real power here, no authority over these men and women. My strength lies in moral persuasion, nothing more.

Dr. Li was pacing the office from the draped windows to the head of the conference table and back again, more nervous than Brumado had ever seen him.

“Please sit here next to me,” Brumado said mildly. “It hurts my neck to look up at you.”

Li’s thin ascetic face looked startled momentarily, then apologetic. He took the chair next to Brumado’s.

“You seem very upset,” Brumado said. “What is wrong?”

Li drummed his long fingers on the tabletop before answering. “We seem to have a virtual mutiny on our hands. And your daughter, sir, is apparently the ringleader.”

“Joanna?”

“Once it became clear that DiNardo could not make the mission, your daughter — and others — demanded that Professor Hoffman be replaced as well.”

Brumado felt confused. Joanna would never do such a thing. Never!

“I don’t understand,” he said.

“Your daughter and several other scientists here have refused to go on the mission if Hoffman is included. It is mutiny, pure and simple.”

“Mutiny,” Brumado echoed, feeling dull, stupid, as if his brain could not grasp the meaning of Li’s words.

“We cannot announce the final selections for the mission, we cannot begin transporting the scientific staff to the assembly station in orbit, if they refuse to go.” Li’s voice was high and strained, nearly cracking.

Brumado had never seen Li like this, close to panic.

“What can we do?” Li asked, raising his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “We cannot tell Professor Hoffman that he has been removed from flight status because a cabal of his fellow scientists don’t like him! What can we do?”

Brumado took in a deep breath, unconsciously trying to calm Li by calming himself. “I think the first thing I should do is speak to my daughter.”

“Yes,” Li said. “Certainly.”

He sprang up from the chair, all six and a half feet of him, and nearly sprinted to the desk where the phone was. Brumado wormed out of his jacket and tossed it onto another chair. He was rolling up his shirtsleeves when Joanna stepped into the office. She too was wearing a softly comfortable running suit, butter yellow and muted orange. Brumado wondered idly what the Russians thought about this craze for American fashion.

“I will leave the two of you alone,” said Li softly, nearly whispering. He scurried from the room like a wisp of smoke wafted away on a strong breeze.

Joanna came over to her father, bussed him on both cheeks, and sat in the chair that Li had used earlier.

Brumado studied her face. She looked serious, but not upset. More determined than fearful.

“Dr. Li tells me you are leading a mutiny among the scientists.” Brumado found himself smiling at her as he said it. Not only did he find it difficult to believe such an outrageous story, but even if it were true he could not be angry with his lovely daughter.

“We took a vote last night,” Joanna said in their native Brazilian Portuguese. “Out of the sixteen scientists scheduled to fly the mission, eleven will not go if Hoffman is included.”

Brumado brushed his upper lip with a fingertip, a throwback to his youth when he had sported a luxuriant moustache.

“The sixteen includes Hoffman himself. Did he vote?”

Joanna laughed. “No. Of course not. We did not ask him.”

“Why?” her father asked. “What is the reason for this?”

She made a small sigh. “None of us really likes Hoffman. He is a very difficult personality. We feel that it will be impossible to work with him under the very close conditions of the mission.”

“But why wait until now? Why didn’t you say something sooner?”

“We thought that Father DiNardo could keep Hoffman under control. Hoffman admired DiNardo, looked up to him. But the thought of having Hoffman without Father DiNardo — having him as the prime geologist for the mission — we realized we could not stand that. He would be insufferable. Unbearable.”

Brumado said nothing, thinking: I’m not going into space with them. I’m not going to be cooped up inside a spacecraft for nearly two years with someone I can’t stand.

“Besides,” his daughter went on, “Hoffman was chosen mainly for political reasons. You know that.”

“He is an excellent geologist,” Brumado replied absently, thinking now about the difficulties he was asking his daughter to face. Two years in space. The stresses. The dangers.

“There are other geologists who have gone through training with us.” Joanna said, leaning slightly closer to her father. “O’Hara is from Australia. He can move up. And there is that Navaho mestizo, Waterman.”

Brumado’s attention suddenly focused on his daughter’s eyes. “The man who stayed on at McMurdo to help your group through your Antarctic training.”

“And the following groups. Yes, him.”

“And O’Hara.”

“Waterman has done extensive work on meteor impacts. He even found a Martian meteorite in Antarctica, although Hoffman took the credit for it.”

“Is he the man you want?”

She pulled back again. “I think he is the best-qualified person, isn’t he? And everyone seemed to get along with him very well.”

“But he’s an American,” Brumado muttered. “The politicians don’t want more Americans than Russians. Or vice versa.”

“He’s an American Indian, Papa. It’s not really the same thing. And O’Hara will make the Australians happy.”

“The politicians wanted Hoffman to help represent Europe.”

“We already have a Greek, a Pole, and a German to represent Europe. As well as an Englishman. If Hoffman goes on the mission there will be trouble,” Joanna said firmly. “His psychological profile is awful! We have tried to work with him, Papa. He is simply unbearable!”

“So you took a vote.”

“Yes. We have decided. If Hoffman is chosen there are at least eleven of us who will resign from the program immediately.”

Again Brumado fell silent. He did not know what to say, how to handle this situation.

“Ask Antony Reed,” Joanna suggested. “He has had more training in psychology than any of the others selected for the mission. It was his idea to take the vote.”

“Was it?”

“Yes! I didn’t do all this by myself, Papa. Most of the others cannot stand Hoffman.”

Brumado got up slowly and went to the desk. Picking up the telephone, he asked the man who answered to find Dr. Reed. The Englishman opened the office door before Brumado could return to the conference table. My god, he thought, they must all be sitting in the outer office. I wonder if Hoffman is there too.

Reed seemed faintly amused by it all.

“None of us can get along with Hoffman,” he said, smiling slightly as he sat relaxed in a chair across the table from Brumado and his daughter. “Frankly, I think bringing him along to Mars would be a disaster. Always have.”

“But he passed all the psychological tests.”

Reed arched an eyebrow. “So would a properly motivated chimpanzee. But you wouldn’t want to live in the same cage with him, would you?”

“You’ve all been filling out cross-evaluation reports for the past two years!” Brumado heard his own voice rising with more than a hint of anger in it. He forced it down. “I admit that the reports written about Professor Hoffman have not been glowing, but there has been no hint that he was so disliked.”

“I can tell you about those evaluation reports,” Reed said, almost smirking. “No one ever expressed their true feelings in the reports. Not in writing. There is enormous psychological pressure to put a good face on everything. Every one of us realized straight from the outset that those reports would be a reflection on the person who wrote them as much as on the person they were writing about.”

Brumado thought, We should have realized that from the beginning. These are very bright men and women, bright enough to see all the possibilities.

Reed continued, “To borrow a phrase from Scotland Yard, we understood that anything we wrote in those evaluation forms might be taken down in evidence and used against us.”

With a shake of his head, Brumado said, “I still can’t understand why you waited until this very last moment to bring your opposition out into the open.”

“Two reasons, actually,” said Reed. “First, we all expected that DiNardo could keep Hoffman under control. Our good priest seemed to have a calming effect on the Austrian, rather like old Hindenburg had on Hitler.”

Joanna barely suppressed a giggle.

“Second, I suppose that none of us actually faced up to the awful possibility of spending nearly two years living cheek-by-jowl with Hoffman until this very weekend. With the final decisions made and DiNardo packing off to hospital — well, I suppose it suddenly dawned on us that Hoffman simply wouldn’t do.”

“How do I tell this to Professor Hoffman?” Brumado asked softly.

“Oh, I’d be willing to tackle that chore,” Reed said at once. “I’d be almost happy to do it.”

Brumado shook his head sadly. “No. It is not your responsibility.”

He dismissed Reed and asked Dr. Li to come back into the office.

With Joanna still sitting beside him, Brumado said wearily, “I suppose there is no way around it. Professor Hoffman will have to be told.”

Li seemed to have calmed down considerably. His mask of impassivity was in place once more.

“It is my duty to inform him,” Li said.

“If you like, I will explain it to him,” said Brumado.

With a quick glance at Joanna, Li murmured, “As you wish.”

Hoffman looked as tense as a stalking leopard when he entered the office. He stood a moment at the door, eyeing Li, Brumado, and Joanna with unconcealed suspicion. Short, round-shouldered, his round pie face pale with tension. He was wearing a powder-blue cardigan sweater buttoned neatly over a shirt and tie striped yellow and red. His slacks were dark blue, almost black.

“Please,” called Brumado from the conference table, “come in and sit down.”

Li was standing at the end of the table, as far from the door as possible. Joanna still sat next to her father, turned toward Hoffman so that Brumado could not see her face.

As if stepping through a minefield Hoffman walked across the carpeted floor and pulled out the chair at the head of the table. He sat down.

“We have run into a difficulty,” said Brumado, trying to smile disarmingly and not quite making it.

“They are all against me. I know that.”

Brumado felt his eyebrows rise. “We must think of the good of the mission. That is our paramount duty.”

Hoffman’s face twisted. “I was chosen by the selection board. I demand that their choice be upheld!”

“If we uphold that decision the mission will be wrecked. More than half your fellow scientists have refused to go, I am sorry to say.”

“More than half!”

Brumado nodded.

“This is an affront to the entire nation of Austria!”

“No,” said Dr. Li, from the other end of the table. “It is entirely a personal matter. There are no politics involved here. It is all personalities.”

“Yes, I see.” Hoffman jabbed a finger toward Joanna. “She wants that American Indian by her side, so I am to be thrown off.”

Brumado felt his jaw drop open.

“What are you saying?” Joanna demanded.

“I know very well how you and the Apache or Navaho or whatever he is… the two of you, at McMurdo…”

“Nothing happened between us,” Joanna said. Turning to her father, “He’s lying. There was nothing…”

Brumado raised his hand and she fell silent. To Hoffman he said, “I can see that there are stresses here and strained relationships that could cause a disaster for the mission to Mars.”

Hoffman glared, his face reddening.

“I know it is an enormous sacrifice, but I must ask you to resign from the mission,” Brumado said.

“Never!” Hoffman snapped. “And if you try to force me out I will tell the world’s media that you have thrown me out in favor of your daughter’s lover!”

Joanna looked stunned, stricken, speechless.

One of Alberto Brumado’s traits was that the angrier he became, the more icy calm. Anger that would drive another man to tantrums or violence merely made him colder, keener, more deliberate.

“Professor Hoffman,” he said, clasping his hands prayerfully on the tabletop, “if you ask me to choose between your claim and my daughter’s denial, do you think for an instant that I would believe you?”

“They were lovers, I am certain of it.”

“You have proven, merely in these few minutes, that it would be disastrous to include you on the Mars team.”

“I will appeal to the board of selection! And to the media!”

As patiently as a physician detailing the risks of surgery, Brumado said, “The board of selection cannot and will not override the wishes of the exploration team. And if you go to the media we will be forced to reveal that most of the scientists on the team dislike you so much that they have refused to go on the mission if you are included.”

Hoffman’s nostrils flared. His eyes glittered with rage.

“Whatever happens, what do you think the effect on your reputation will be? How will your university react to such notoriety? Do you know what it’s like to have the media hounding you night and day?”

The Austrian looked away from Brumado, glanced at Li, then turned his gaze toward the ceiling.

“I urge you,” Brumado said, reasonably, placatingly, remorselessly, “to tender your resignation. For the good of your career. For the sake of your wife. For the sake of this mission. Please, please, do not allow pride or anger to ruin the human race’s first attempt to explore the planet Mars. I beg of you.”

Li said, “We can see to it that your university gets first priority in analyzing the soil samples and rocks returned from the mission.”

“Or, if you wish,” Brumado added, “we can help you to get an appointment at the university of your choice, and you can analyze the samples there.”

“You are offering me a bribe,” Hoffman growled.

“Yes,” said Brumado. “Quite frankly, I would offer anything I could to save this mission.”

“It is in your hands,” Li said in a near whisper.

Brumado saw that the shock on his daughter’s face had been replaced by something deeper than anger. Hatred, he realized. He put a calming hand on her shoulder and felt the tension that coiled within her.

Hoffman muttered, “My wife never wanted me to go to Mars.”

“You can have a very prestigious position,” Dr. Li coaxed. “Leader of the scientific analysis of the Mars samples.”

“No announcements have been made about the final team choices,” Brumado reminded him. “There will be no embarrassment for you.”

Suddenly tears sprang from Hoffman’s eyes. “What can I do? You are all against me. Even my wife!”

His head drooped to the tabletop, cradled in his arms, and he began to sob uncontrollably. Brumado turned toward Li, feeling like a torturer, a murderer.

“I will take care of him,” Li said softly. “Please go now, both of you. And send in Dr. Reed, if he is still outside. Otherwise, ask the secretary to summon a physician.”

Brumado pushed his chair back and slowly rose to his feet. His daughter still showed nothing but contempt for the sobbing man huddled at the head of the table. The mission is saved, Brumado found himself thinking. That is the important thing. The mission will go on despite this poor, wretched man.

5

It was still dark when the phone woke Jamie. He struggled up from a dream of ancient men trying to build a tower on the windswept top of a bare grassless mesa. The bricks kept melting away in the hot sunshine, the tower never rose higher than his own reach.

The phone buzzed insistently. Jamie finally opened his eyes, remembered that he was back in his own apartment again, alone, and groped for the telephone on the bedside table. The digital clock read 6:26 a.m. There was no hint of sunrise through the drawn blinds of the bedroom window.

“Dr. Waterman?” a man’s voice asked crisply.

“Right.”

“This is an official message from Kaliningrad. I am Yegorov, personnel section.”

“Yes?” Jamie was instantly wide-awake.

“You are to report to the Johnson Space Center at eight hundred hours local time and receive your orders for immediate transportation to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there you will board the space shuttle for transport to the orbital assembly facility.”

“You mean I’m going to Mars?” Jamie shouted into the phone.

“Oh, yes. Did you not know? You have been selected as geologist on the first landing team. Good luck.”

Jamie’s first impulse was to give an ear-splitting war whoop. But instead he merely said, “Thank you.”

He hung up, suddenly feeling hollow inside, empty, as if he had finally pushed through a door that had been locked against him and found that it opened onto thin air.

He got out of bed, showered, shaved, repacked his well-used travel bag, and drove out to the center. Sure enough, there was a team of grinning men and women at the travel office waiting for him.

“A plane will be ready for you at the airstrip in about half an hour.”

“What about my car?” Jamie suddenly realized he had made no plans about the car, the apartment, his furniture. Absurdly, he wondered what to do with his magazine and journal subscriptions.

“We’ll take care of all the details. Just sign these forms.”

Jamie scribbled his name without reading the forms. Fuck it, he thought. They can have the car and everything else. Won’t need it on Mars!

They drove him to the airstrip, the whole roomful of clerks piled into one gray agency station wagon, pressing against Jamie, wanting to be as close as they could be to the man who was going to Mars. Jamie did not mind the closeness, he was thankful for the ride; he (lid not trust himself to drive. The excitement was getting to him. Mars. Geologist on the first landing team. Mars.

Edith was standing at the entrance to the hangar, in jeans and a light sweater. Obviously not her working clothes. He suddenly felt ashamed for not phoning her.

“How’d you know?” he asked, travel bag in one hand.

She grinned up at him. “I have my sources. I work in news, y’know.”

“I…” Jamie did not know what to say. The clerks who had driven him here, the airplane mechanics, there were too many people watching them.

Edith’s grin turned rueful. “Well, we knew it wouldn’t last forever. It was fun, though.”

“I think the world of you, Edith.”

“Only this world, though. Now you got another one to think about.”

“Yes.” He laughed, feeling shaky, unsure.

She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly. “Good luck, Jamie. Best luck in two worlds to you.”

All he could think to say was, “I’ll be back.”

She answered, “Sure you will.”