Mars

1

McMurdo Base reminded Jamie of a cross between a seedy mining town and a run-down community college campus, set on the edge of frigid McMurdo Sound between the snow-covered mountains and the Ross Ice Shelf, a quarter-mile-thick shield of ice that covered most of the Ross Sea. All the buildings looked government issue: curved-roof metal huts and square wooden barracks, even the newer cinderblock two-story administrative offices. There was a farm of oil tanks, endless rows of equipment sheds, a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker anchored in the harbor, and an airfield literally carved out of the shelf of glittering ice that extended past the horizon, covering an area bigger than France.

The streets were plowed clear of snow, but hardly anybody ventured out into the piercing wind. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth had been measured in Antarctica, one hundred twenty-seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

A midsummer overnight low on Mars, Jamie knew.

Inside the hut provided for the Mars Project trainees it was almost comfortably warm, thanks to the new nuclear power system that had been installed the previous year. Old-style environmentalists had protested bringing nuclear power to Antarctica, while the new-style environmentalists protested against further use of fuel oil that soiled the increasingly polluted Antarctic air with its sooty emissions.

Each group of trainees for the Mars mission had to spend six weeks at the Antarctic station learning what it was like to live in a research outpost cut off from the rest of the world, crowded tensely together in barely adequate facilities with few amenities and little privacy, struggling to survive in a barren frozen world of ice and bitter cold.

As Jamie strode briskly down the narrow corridor of the half-buried hut he thought to himself, All project scientists are equal. Except that some are more equal than others. And now Dr. Li is more equal than all the rest of us.

Dressed in his usual thick red-and-black corduroy shirt and faded denim jeans, his western boots thumping against the worn wooden flooring, Jamie headed toward the office of Dr. Li Chengdu, the man who had just been designated to be the expedition commander. No other appointment had been made for the mission, not yet, not officially. But the snow-blanketed base was a buzzing beehive of rumors and speculation about who would be picked to fly to Mars and who would not. The men and women cooped up in the crowded base had set up betting pools. Some of them were even trying to hack their way into the computer’s confidential personnel files.

Tomorrow Jamie and the group he was attached to would fly out of McMurdo and back to civilization, weather permitting, ending their mandatory six weeks. Jamie had spent much of his time in searches for meteorites out on the snow-covered glacier that fed into the ice pack covering the Ross Sea. Antarctica was a good place for meteorite hunting. The perpetual ice and snow of the frozen continent preserved the rocks that had fallen from the sky, keeping them relatively free of terrestrial contaminants. Some of those meteorites were in fact suspected to have come from Mars. Jamie had hoped to find one in his searches of the wind-swept glacier. If I can’t get to Mars, he had told himself, maybe I can find a chunk of Mars that’s come to Earth.

In six weeks he had found four meteorites in the ice, none of them Martian.

For more than three years Jamie had worked and trained with scientists from a dozen different nations in laboratories and field centers from Iceland to Australia. For most of that time he — and everyone else — had known that he would not be selected as the geologist to land on Mars. Father Fulvio DiNardo was the top choice for the mission, not only a world-class geologist but a Jesuit priest as well.

“He’s what we call a ‘twofer,’ ” one of the American mission administrators had explained cheerfully over breakfast, months earlier, when they had been at Star City, outside Moscow. “Fills two slots: geologist and chaplain.”

Tony Reed had agreed, a slight smirk twitching at his lips. “Yes. He can hear confessions and baptize any babies born during the mission. No other geologist could be so useful.”

Jamie reluctantly accepted the reality of DiNardo’s unassailable position. The priest had been involved in planetary studies since the great second wave of space probes had been sent to Jupiter and the asteroids; he had actually helped design some of the instruments they carried. He had been the first geologist on the moon since the Apollo 17 mission, thirty-some years ago. Even now, while the scientists trained for the first manned mission to Mars, Father DiNardo spent most of his time in the isolation laboratory up in the Soviet space station, Mir 5, directing the geological studies of the rock and soil samples returned by the unmanned probes sent to scout the red planet in advance of the human expedition.

It was Father DiNardo’s backup who bothered Jamie. Franz Hoffman seemed to have the inside track, according to all the gossip. The Viennese had been a physicist originally, then had switched to geology only a few years ago. Jamie was certain that it was his Austrian nationality more than his work in geology that placed him in the number-two slot behind DiNardo. And ahead of Jamie.

For months Jamie had felt a simmering anger rising within him. I’m a better geologist than Hoffman, he told himself. But he’ll get the nod to go to Mars as DiNardo’s backup and I’ll stay here on Earth. Because the politicians want a balance of nationalities and there’s no other Austrian in the group. Worse yet, he knew, the politicians are trying their damnedest to keep the numbers of Americans and Russians equal. And they count me as an American.

As he approached Dr. Li’s door he wondered for the thousandth time what he could do to change the situation. Why has he sent for me? Now that Li’s officially been named as expedition commander is he going to act as a scientist or as a politician? Can he help me? Will he, if he can?

Jamie knocked on Dr. Li’s door.

The position of expedition commander had been selected with extreme care by the politicians and administrators. He had to be a highly regarded scientist, a natural leader, an inspiration to the men and women whom he would command on another world. He had to be able to placate wounded egos and solve emotional problems among his sensitive scientists — and astronauts.

Most of all, he had to be from a neutral nation: neither East nor West, neither Arab nor Jew, neither Hindu nor Moslem.

Dr. Li Chengdu was an ascetically lean, sallow-faced man who had been born in Singapore of a Chinese merchant family, educated in Shanghai and Geneva, and was rumored to be in line for a Nobel Prize for his research in atmospheric physics: he had found a way to reverse the depletion of the ozone layer and close the long-dreaded ozone hole in the upper atmosphere. A man in his early fifties, he was young and hale enough to make the long journey to Mars, yet old and respected enough to be the unquestioned leader of the expedition in fact as well as in name.

“Enter please,” came Dr. Li’s voice, only slightly muffled by the thin pressed-wood door.

Jamie stepped into the room that served as Li’s office and living quarters. Li got to his feet from behind the desk that had been shoe-horned in between the bunk bed and the sloping curve of the outer wall. He was so tall that he had to stoop to avoid hitting his head against the curving ceiling panels.

The room had no personality in it at all, no stamp of an individual’s presence. Li had come in only a few days ago and was scheduled to leave with Jamie’s group the following morning. The desk was bare except for a laptop computer that hummed softly, its screen glowing a pale orange. The bed was made with military precision, blankets meticulously tucked in under the thin mattress. The one window was blocked by the plowed snow heaped against the side of the building. A strip of fluorescent lamps ran along the low ceiling, turning Li’s sallow skin tones into something almost ghastly.

When he had first met Dr. Li, two years earlier, Jamie had been surprised at the man’s height. Now he felt surprised all over again. Li was almost six-five, lean to the point of gauntness, a tall scarecrow of a man, with hollow cheeks and long slim fingers. The newly named expedition commander wore a soft velour shirt of deep charcoal that hung loosely on his thin frame.

“Ah, Dr. Waterman. Please sit down.” Li indicated the only other chair in the room, a government-issue piece of worn dull-gray steel with a thin plastic cushion that felt iron hard.

Li took his chair behind the desk once again. For a long moment he said nothing. He peered intently at Jamie, as if trying to see inside him. Jamie returned the gaze calmly. He had watched his grandfather conversing with other Navahos often enough; they were never in a hurry to speak. It was important to allow time for thought, for reflection, for sizing up the other man.

Jamie studied Li’s face. His hair was still dark, though receding from his high domed forehead. Decidedly oriental eyes, hooded, unfathomable; with the drooping moustache they made him look like an ancient Chinese sage, or perhaps the villain in an old-fashioned tale of intrigue. He ought to be dressed in a long silk robe and be living in a palace in Beijing, not stuck in the snow down at the ass end of the world.

There was a slightly cloying odor in the tiny room. Incense? Cologne? It almost smelled like marijuana.

“I have a favor to ask of you,” said Dr. Li at last. His voice had become soft, almost a whisper. Jamie found himself leaning forward slightly to catch his words over the incessant hiss of the air blowing through the heating ducts.

With an almost furtive glance at the orange display screen of the computer on his desk, Li went on, “You have done very good work here — and in your other training activities, as well.”

“Thank you.” Jamie bowed his head slightly.

“I wonder if you would consider staying here for another six weeks?”

“Stay? Here?”

“The group you have been working with is scheduled to go to Utah next, I believe.” Another glance at the computer screen. “Yes, survival training on high desert.”

Before Jamie could reply, Li added, “I would appreciate it if you would remain here at McMurdo and help the next group to acclimatize themselves to the Antarctic environment. It would be extremely helpful to me and to your fellow scientists.”

Jamie’s mind was racing. He’s just been appointed expedition commander. It wouldn’t be smart to refuse his request. But why is he asking me to do this? Why is he asking me?

“Uh… the ten of us have been training pretty much as a unit, you know.”

“I realize that,” said Dr. Li. “But you understand that these groupings made for training will not be the same as the teams selected for the actual flight.”

Jamie nodded, wondering what was going on and why.

“Among the group due to come here next is Dr. Joanna Brumado. She is an excellent microbiologist.”

“I’ve met her.”

Li nodded slowly. In his softest voice he said, “Daughter of Alberto Brumado.”

Jamie leaned back in his chair. Now he understood. Alberto Brumado’s daughter would get special consideration. With the rest of the scientists it was sink or swim, survive the rigors of training or get scratched from the list of possible Mars team members. But with Brumado’s daughter the situation was different. They want to make sure she gets through her six weeks here without packing it in.

Because he did not know what else to do, Jamie said, “I see. Okay, sure. I’ll stay over the next six weeks and help them all I can.”

Dr. Li smiled, but to Jamie it seemed more sad than happy. “Thank you, Dr. Waterman. I am deeply grateful.”

Jamie got up from the chair. Dr. Li extended his hand and wished him good fortune.

It was not until he was halfway down the corridor on the way back to his own quarters that Jamie realized the implications of Li’s request. He would miss the next six weeks of training. He was being asked to act as a special teacher-guide-escort for Alberto Brumado’s daughter.

They had already scratched him from the Mars mission roster. He had been relegated to the status of an instructor. They had no intention of letting him go to Mars.

2

All the scientists under consideration for the Mars expedition had met one another, of course, and often more than once, as their training took them hopscotching around the world. But it had been many months since Jamie had seen Joanna Brumado. He had barely said a dozen words to the woman.

Jamie went to the entrance area of the snow-covered base, more to say good-bye to the men and women he had been training with than to welcome the new arrivals. His group members were already looking at him with pity in their eyes, sympathy for a man who was obviously not going to make it. Some of them almost shied away from him at that last moment, as if afraid to be contaminated by the touch of a loser.

Dr. Li took off one glove and shook Jamie’s hand solemnly, wordlessly, before departing. His hand felt dry and limp, like a dead lizard.

Jamie stood inside the doorway, just out of the cutting wind, wrapped in his bulky parka, and watched his ex-teammates trot out to the waiting bus that would take them to the airstrip scraped out of the ice shelf. The bus was towed by a huge earth mover with a snowplow attached to its front. Overkill, thought Jamie. The base’s streets had been plowed and there had been no snowfall for days.

Ten people, bundled up in hooded parkas so that you could not tell the women from the men, sprinted from the hut’s entrance to the bus, bent against the frigid wind. All of them carried silvered metal cases and floppy garment bags—their precious personal items of clothing and scientific equipment. All except the cadaverous Dr. Li, who carried only his laptop and a small duffel bag. The scarecrow travels light, Jamie thought.

Ten similarly clothed and burdened figures made their way through the snarling wind from the bus to the doorway where Jamie was standing. Jamie recognized tiny Joanna Brumado easily among the ten who trooped into the entranceway, stamping the snow off their boots after the brief run between the bus and the hut’s doorway. He also saw that Antony Reed was among the newcomers.

So was Franz Hoffman.

Without a word Jamie turned toward the wooden stairs that led down into the hut’s main floor and headed for his quarters.

It was not until the new group met in the dining hall, just before lunch, that Jamie worked up the strength to go out and greet them.

The dining hall was the largest room in the hut that had been donated to the Mars Project: big enough to seat fully thirty persons at its long Formica-topped tables. Joanna was sitting at the end of one of them with Tony Reed and Dorothy Loring, a Canadian biologist.

“Mind if I join you?” Jamie asked.

Reed looked up. “Waterman? What are you still doing here?”

Keeping his face impassive as he pulled up a chair, Jamie said, “I’ve been asked to hang around and help get you people acclimatized.”

Reed glanced at Joanna, then quickly returned his focus to Jamie. “I see.”

The word for Antony Reed was “suave.” He looked like the average American’s idea of an upper-class Englishman, which in fact he almost was. A trim, slight frame, the kind of spare figure that comes from tennis and handball and perhaps polo. Handsome face, with elegant cheekbones and a chiseled profile. Neat little moustache, sandy hair that flopped roguishly over his forehead. He wore precisely creased royal-blue coveralls over a white turtleneck and managed to look almost as if it were a jaunty yachting costume. Yet his eyes were too old for his face, Jamie thought. Ice-blue, coldly calculating eyes.

Reed was a physician who had refused to take over his father’s posh practice in London, preferring to join the British astronaut corps as a flight surgeon. When the European Community joined the international Mars Project, Reed immediately applied. He exuded the calm self-confidence of a man possessed of the certain knowledge that he would be picked as the team physician for the Mars explorers.

Jamie sat between the Englishman and Joanna Brumado, who smiled her welcome to him.

“I did not know that you were going to stay on here,” she said. Her voice was a whisper, like a little girl who had been trained to stay as quiet as possible.

“It was Dr. Li’s idea,” Jamie replied tightly. “The base commander will explain everything at the briefing, right after lunch.”

“I wonder if our crafty Chinese has some sort of mano a mano up his sleeve,” Reed mused.

Jamie kept himself from glaring at him.

“Mano a mano?” asked Dorothy Loring. “Like in a bullfight?” She was a big-boned blonde, completely at home in her thick sweater and heavy-duty jeans, a latter-day Valkyrie, a descendant of Vikings who had gone from her family’s farm in Manitoba to a doctorate at McGill and postdoc work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

Reed pointed with his eyes. At the other end of the table sat Franz Hoffman, alone, intently frowning into the display screen of a computer he had set up on the tabletop.

Jamie said nothing.

Neither did Joanna, but her eyes showed that she understood Reed’s implication. They were beautifully soft brown eyes, large and liquid, wide-spaced like a child’s. Joanna was small and round, almost hidden inside a bulky brown sweater. Her face was heart shaped, framed by a dark mass of hair that curled thickly even though it had been cropped short. To Jamie she looked like a waif, a lost child, with her small stature and those big brown eyes that seemed troubled, almost frightened.

“Our Viennese friend,” Reed said in a lower voice, “is not very well liked, I fear.”

“You should not say that,” Joanna whispered.

“Why not?” Reed asked. “Good lord, the man has all the charm of a Prussian drillmaster. And the eating habits to match.”

Loring broke into a giggle, then quickly put her hand to her mouth to stifle it. Jamie, sitting where he looked directly down the table at Hoffman, saw that the Austrian never glanced up from his computer, never acknowledged by so much as a flicker that anyone else was in the room.

3

“I do not understand,” said Franz Hoffman. “Does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant? A Sherpa guide to carry my baggage up the mountain?”

Jamie held onto his swooping temper, just barely. He had decided that there would be no way to avoid Hoffman in the crowded, snow-buried base so he would make a virtue of necessity by offering to help the Austrian to continue the meteorite search out on the glacier.

Hoffman had been unpacking his clothes when Jamie knocked on the half-ajar door to his quarters. It happened to be the same room that Dr. Li had just left. But already Hoffman had turned it into his personal domain. A five-foot-long photomosaic map of Mars was pinned up on the flat wall above the bunk bed. On the curving wall beside the desk the geologist had taped a smaller satellite photo of the Markham glacier, already marked with red circles where meteorites had been located. A framed color photograph sat on the government-issue three-drawer bureau, a round-cheeked young woman with twin babies in her arms smiling dubiously into the camera.

“Look,” Jamie said, leaning against the doorjamb, “Li asked me to help your group through your six weeks here. If you’re interested in continuing the search for meteorites I’m willing to help.”

Hoffman eyed Jamie silently, then went back to taking folded clothes out of a large suitcase on the bed and placing them in precise stacks in the bureau drawers.

“At the very least,” Jamie said, “I can show you which areas I’ve already covered. Save you going over areas where nothing’s been found.”

“That information is in the data bank, is it not?” Hoffman asked.

He was about Jamie’s own age and height, but thin and almost weak-looking where Jamie was solid and chunky. Hoffman was round-shouldered and round faced. His hair was already turning gray, and it was cropped close to his skull. His face was a picture of darkly brooding suspicion, eyes small and squinting, narrow lips pressed firmly together. Jamie thought, Put a monocle in his eye and he’d look like an old-time Nazi general.

“Yes, the computer has a complete file of my treks on the glacier,” Jamie replied evenly. “But once you’re out there on the ice the computer data loses a lot of its meaning. Even the satellite pictures aren’t much help when you’re actually out there.”

“I have done field work,” Hoffman said stiffly. “I was born in the shadow of the Alps. None of this is new to me.”

“Suit yourself,” Jamie said. He turned to leave.

“Wait.”

“For what?”

Hoffman stood in the middle of the room, his fingers drumming unconsciously against the sides of his heavy wool slacks.

“Tell me,” he said, his voice a little less sharp, “why does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant?”

“It’s not…”

Hoffman did not let Jamie finish his sentence. “You did not have an assistant. None of the other geologists had assistants. Does Li think I’m incapable? Does he think I can’t make it on my own? Is this his subtle way of getting rid of me?”

Jamie felt his mouth drop open. Hoffman was just as worried and frightened as he was. Behind the brittle facade was a man who feared he would be left behind, just as Jamie feared.

Shit! Jamie snarled to himself. It would be so much easier to hate him.

4

After lunch and the base commander’s brief orientation lecture, Jamie spent the rest of the day saying hello to each of the newcomers, telling them that he was there to give them any help or advice they required. He felt awkward, more like an unwanted and unneeded accessory than a valued and trusted associate.

His insides were in turmoil over Hoffman. Walk a mile in the other guy’s moccasins, he thought. Sure. Great. No wonder the Indians got swamped by the whites.

By the time he had spoken to the first three of the newcomers, Jamie had worked out a little speech that explained quickly, with a minimum of embarrassment, why he had remained at the base and what he was offering to do. “The newcomers’ reactions varied from Hoffman’s fear of inadequacy to Tony Reed’s cynical smile of understanding.

“Does little Joanna know that you’re to be her personal chaperon?” Reed asked.

“I don’t think anybody’s spelled it out to her,” Jamie replied.

Reed’s lopsided grin turned almost into a sneer. “She’d be a fool if she didn’t figure it out for herself.”

“Maybe,” said Jamie.

He had left Joanna for last, and now, feeling as frustrated and exhausted as he had the winter he had tried to sell magazine subscriptions bicycling through his Berkeley neighborhood, he tapped at the door to Joanna’s room.

She opened the door, looked up at him, and smiled.

“Come in,” said Joanna Brumado in her little girl’s voice. “Sit down.”

She still wore the sweater and jeans she had arrived in. Her room was neatly arranged, emptied suitcases stacked in the far corner, garment bag hanging behind the door. Her laptop computer was open on the desktop but its screen was dark and silent. There were no pictures on the walls, no personal items in sight.

Jamie took the chair that stood by the bunk.

“I’ve told all the others,” Jamie began, “that Dr. Li asked me to stay here at McMurdo to help you and the rest of your group get through your six weeks here as easily and profitably as possible.”

Joanna went to the desk and sat at the chair behind it, turning the desk into a protective barrier.

Her face entirely serious, she said, “We can be honest with one another, James.”

“Jamie.”

Her lips did not curve up into a smile. Her luminous dark eyes were somber. “You are here to make certain that I get through this part of the training. You have stayed behind because I am Alberto Brumado’s daughter and for no other reason.”

Well, she’s no fool, Jamie said to himself. She’s under no illusions. No pretensions.

“Dr. Li asked me to remain here,” he said.

“Because of me.”

“It was his first big decision as expedition commander.”

Her eyes would not leave his. “And what about your training? Your own group is going ahead with its regular schedule, is it not?”

“They’re going to Utah, yes.”

“And you?”

Jamie made himself shrug. “I’ve spent most of my summers in New Mexico. Maybe Dr. Li figures I don’t need any more time in the desert.”

Joanna shook her head. “He asked you to stay here? He himself? Personally?”

“Yes.”

“And you agreed to do it?”

“What choice did I have? Tell Li that I refuse to carry out his first major decision? How would that look on my record?”

She bit her lower lip. “Yes, he did not give you any real choice at all, did he?”

“Well, I’m here and you’re here, so we should try to make the best of it.”

“But you will be throwing away your chance for a position on the mission just for me.”

“I guess that’s already been decided,” Jamie said, surprised at the obvious bitterness in his voice.

“I could call my father,” said Joanna, tentatively, her eyes sliding away from his. “I could tell him what Dr. Li has done to you.”

Jamie tried to probe beneath her words, understand what was churning inside her. She was not angry, yet something was radiating from this elfin woman as she sat behind the desk. Was it fear? Bitterness? A sense of injustice?

“Are you afraid that the others will think you’re getting special treatment?” he asked.

“I am getting special treatment!”

“And you don’t like it?”

“It could cost you your chance to make the mission.”

“But it’s important to your father that you go to Mars.”

Her eyes went even wider.

“Is that important to you?” Jamie asked.

“Important? That I go to Mars?”

“Right.”

“Of course it is important! Do you think I am here merely to satisfy my father’s vicarious desires?”

A part of Jamie’s mind was registering the fact that Joanna was beautiful. Her figure was certainly adult enough; not even the bulky sweater could hide that. It was her face that gave her the lost, defenseless look of a street urchin, vulnerable yet knowing. And that tiny, whispering voice. Her deep brown eyes were large and almost as dark as Jamie’s own.

Jamie looked into those luminous eyes and saw emotions battling against one another. What is she afraid of? he wondered. She says she doesn’t want to be her father’s pawn, yet she certainly doesn’t want to be left behind. That’s unmistakable. She wants to go to Mars. Badly.

“I’ll help you,” he said. “That’s my job assignment now.”

“I will call my father and tell him what Dr. Li has done to you. It is not fair that…”

Jamie silenced her with an upraised hand. “You don’t want to be causing trouble between Li and your father. That would be bad for everybody — and especially bad for you.”

“But you. What about you?”

He made himself smile. “The Navahos believe that a man’s got to keep in balance with the world around him. Sometimes that means you must accept things that you don’t particularly like.”

“That is stoicism.”

“Yep, I suppose it is,” said Jamie, trying hard to mask his real feelings.

5

I do wish Father DiNardo were here, Antony Reed said to himself for the twentieth time that morning. He’s the only one who can keep that Austrian prig in his place.

Reed was at his desk in the small room that served as the base dispensary. The snow had been shoveled away from the room’s only window; pale sunlight drifted in and a milky pearl-gray sky showed through its triple panes. In place of the bookshelves and equipment racks that crammed most of the offices in the half-buried base, the dispensary contained an examination table and medical equipment.

Reed shared the office with the “in-house” physician, a surgeon who looked after the routine medical needs of the base’s regular staff as well as the Mars trainees. Reed’s work was more concerned with the computer on the desktop than with pills and bandages. He was serving in the role of psychologist for the trainees more than medical officer.

The computer screen showed that his next appointment was with Franz Hoffman. Reed loathed the Austrian geologist, loathed everything about him—especially his reputed successes among the women trainees. He kept wondering how any decent, self-respecting female could let herself be touched by that neo-Nazi.

Yet the tales were undoubtedly true. Hoffman had a way with women. A way that Reed found himself envying.

He hunched forward in the creaking swivel chair and flicked his fingers across the computer keyboard. All the details of each trainee’s medical and psychological records were available to him. Perhaps there was something in Hoffman’s background that could be used to disqualify him for the mission.

Reed searched Hoffman’s dossier avidly, the thought of spending nine months in a cramped spacecraft with the Austrian depressing him beyond measure.

Nothing. His record was immaculate. Impressive, even. Doctorates in physics and geology. Excellent health. No psychological history at all; as far as the records showed his only contact with psychologists had been when he had taken standard tests as part of the Mars Project requirements. The test results were dismally normal. Either he’s just as dull as he seems or he’s a mastermind at hiding his true personality, Reed thought.

No mention of his amours, of course. That kind of information seldom got into the record. Unless there was an incident too awful to be hushed up.

“Ahhh!” Reed said aloud. Softly, but aloud. An incident too awful to be hushed up. Perhaps one could be manufactured.

He needed a victim. A woman who would not only be offended by Hoffman’s advances, but who would make a stink about it. And he thought he knew who it should be.

Flicking rapidly through the files he found the woman. Her background and her personality profile were well-nigh perfect. From what Reed knew of her through personal contact she would be frightened and enraged by the Austrian’s boorishness.

“It’s worth a try,” Reed murmured, a crooked little smile spreading across his handsome face. “I could even stand by to console the poor wench afterward.”

He cleared the computer screen and looked expectantly toward the door. Precisely at the hour set for his appointment, Franz Hoffman knocked once, then opened the door and stepped into the dispensary. He looked as if he were ready to receive a knighthood. Round face shaved and scrubbed pink, hair slicked back, crisp fresh shirt and trousers with a crease that could slice bread. Even his shoes were polished.

“Come in, come in,” said Reed happily.

Throughout the perfunctory physical examination Reed had difficulty keeping a straight face. He kept thinking of Browning’s wonderful “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” with its perfect final line: “G-r-r-you swine!”

Reed chatted affably with the Austrian, using his best bedside manner. Hoffman had only two modes of discourse, as far as Reed could tell: either scowling suspicion or smug superiority. Taking Reed’s affable manner at face value, the Austrian responded with infuriating haughtiness. He doesn’t even realize he’s doing it, Reed thought. Which merely damned him further.

As he took Hoffman’s blood pressure and laid him on the table for an EKG and tapped him here and there, Reed slowly, subtly moved their conversation to the subject of women.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Reed said smoothly. “I seem to be all thumbs around a pretty girl.”

“It is the fault of your schooling, I think,” said Hoffman. “You Englishmen are sent to boys’ schools. You never see women until you are graduated from college, except for your mothers and nurses. That is why there are so many homosexuals among you.”

Reed broke into a sunny smile. G-r-r-you swine! he said to himself.

“Most young women are looking for father figures,” Hoffman expounded. “It is not necessary to wine and dine them; merely show them a mixture of authority and kindness and they will fall into your bed.”

“Is that so?”

“It has never failed for me. The only difficulty is that sometimes they don’t know when the affair is over. You must be very expert at getting rid of them. That takes more skill than screwing them in the first place.”

“Hmm, I never thought of that.”

“On this mission, of course, one will have to be very careful, very discreet. And pick the women carefully. There are those who know how to behave and those who don’t.”

“Yes, I see.” Reed hesitated only long enough to prevent himself from bursting out in laughter. “How can you tell which is which?”

Hoffman smiled an oily, scheming smile, and beckoned Reed to lean closer.

“You test your subjects before the flight begins, naturally,” he whispered. “What else would a good scientist do?”

“Test your subjects? Oh, of course. Are you doing that now?”

Something flickered in Hoffman’s eyes. An awareness of danger, perhaps. A realization that he was talking too much.

“A gentleman does not kiss and tell,” he replied, somewhat stiffly.

Reed arched an eyebrow. “Yes, I can see where it might get sticky, dabbling among the women here. And the project managers are very concerned about sex during the mission. They don’t want to disrupt the efficient functioning of the team, you know.”

Hoffman matched Reed’s raised brow. “Perhaps the team would function more efficiently if a certain amount of lubrication was included in the operation.”

“Lubrication! That’s a good one!”

Hoffman looked pleased with himself, but said no more.

“You know,” Reed said, lowering his voice to a conspirator’s whisper, “there’s one woman among the group here who’s been watching you very closely.”

“Oh?”

“She hasn’t said anything to me, you realize, but I can see that she’s fascinated by you. And if ever a young lady looked up to a father figure, it’s her.”

“Who?”

“Why, Joanna Brumado, of course. Didn’t you know?”

6

Jamie delayed going to the dining room until he was certain most of the others had eaten and returned to their individual quarters. Most of the regular McMurdo staff and visiting researchers shared dormitory rooms, but the Mars Project’s one luxury was to afford each of its members a private room. Jamie had spent the day talking with the new arrivals, embarrassing them and himself. He had no desire to speak with any of them further. Not this evening.

Sure enough, the dining room was almost empty. It had been a long day for the newcomers, he realized. The flight in from Christchurch took ten hours even when the weather was good. Unpacking, getting settled in this spartan godforsaken base—the new arrivals were already in their bunks, for the most part. Only a couple of them still sat at one of the long galley tables, tiredly huddled over the remains of their dinners, talking in whispers. Half a dozen of the base’s regular technicians and maintenance personnel sat near the battered old coffee urn, playing cards.

Somebody had put a cassette in the tape player up by the snow-covered window: a softly whining old country lament: “Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…”

Or scientists, Jamie said to himself as he took a tray and walked down the self-service counter. He found that he had no appetite, settled for a slice of soggy defrosted pie and a mug of coffee. Then he went to the farthest corner of the dining room and sat alone at the end of an empty table.

No one paid him any attention. Which suited Jamie fine. He was an outsider now, a pariah, and they all knew it.

Then Joanna came in, wearing a dark green chamois man’s shirt that fit her like a tent: shoulders drooped down almost to her elbows, shirttails around her knees. She had rolled up the sleeves, and beneath it she wore a white tee shirt and nubby running pants. Dressed for comfort, Jamie saw. Yet she did not look sloppy: casual, not unkempt.

She went straight to the coffee urn and poured herself a steaming mug. Then, looking around the nearly empty dining room, she saw Jamie and came to his table.

“I could not sleep,” she said, sitting at the corner of the table just to his right.

Jamie nodded toward the coffee mug. “That’s not going to help you.”

She laughed lightly. “Oh, caffeine never keeps me awake. I was raised on coffee.”

“In Brazil.”

“Yes.”

As if to prove her point Joanna took a long swallow, then put the mug down on the Formica tabletop. Jamie felt as if he wanted to get away, but he did not know how.

Joanna said, “I understand that you are an Indian.”

“Half Navaho.”

“In Brazil you would be called a mestizo. I am a mestizo myself. My father and mother, both mestizos. There are millions of us in Brazil. Tens of millions in Latin America, from Mexico southward.”

“And two here in Antarctica,” Jamie said.

She laughed again, a pleasant happy sound. She seemed less tense than she had been earlier, her voice stronger. “Yes. Two of us here.”

Jamie smiled back at her. They began to talk, easily, quietly. He could feel himself relaxing with her.

She told him about Sao Paulo and Rio, how the poor farmers and villagers had streamed into the cities in such a torrent that they had swollen into a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all.

Jamie found himself telling her about Berkeley and the Bay, beautiful, earthquake-vulnerable San Francisco and the golden fertile valleys of California. And then about New Mexico and his grandfather.

“Al thinks of himself as a Navaho, but he acts like an Anglo businessman. He can go around saying that a man can’t get rich if he takes proper care of his family, yet he owns half the housing developments on the north side of Santa Fe.”

Jamie lost track of the time, talking with Joanna. She asked if he had a girlfriend and he told her that he had been dating a TV anchorwoman back in Houston.

“But it’s nothing serious,” he quickly added. “What about you? Are you married? Engaged?”

Joanna shook her head. “No. No one. There is only my father and me. My mother died several years ago.”

Then she asked, “When did you first become interested in going to Mars?”

“Oh, god, it happened so long ago I don’t even remember… wait, yes I do.” The memory came into clear clean focus. “In elementary school. They took the class on a field trip to the planetarium. The show was all about Mars.”

“Ah,” said Joanna. “With me, of course, it was my father. We talked about Mars every evening at dinner, every morning at breakfast.”

“I started reading everything I could about Mars. Fiction, nonfiction. Pretty soon I found the scientific books much more interesting than the fiction.”

“That is why you became a scientist?”

Jamie thought a moment. “Yep, I guess maybe it is.”

“But why a geologist?” she asked.

With a grin, Jamie replied, “You can’t spend much time in the southwest without becoming a geologist. Have you ever seen the Grand Canyon? Or the Barringer Meteor Crater?”

Joanna shook her head.

“The mountains, the rocks — they’re like picture books that have the history of the planet written on them.”

“And Mars?”

He shrugged. “A new world. Nobody’s touched it yet.”

Jamie had done a double major in school: geology and planetary sciences. He did not want to be just another rock hound or end up working for an oil company. He wanted to find out what makes the world the way it is; not just the Earth, the other planets too.

But there were no jobs in planetary sciences when he left school with his brand-new Ph.D. He accepted a postdoc at CalTech and spent a year hunting for meteorites. When the year was finished he wound up taking an assistant professorship at Albuquerque, thinking that he would have to spend the rest of his life teaching would-be oil hunters and doing field work in the summers. He was in Canada studying astroblemes, the scars from ancient meteor strikes, when the Mars Project sent out its first call for scientists.

“A new world,” Joanna echoed. “Is that why you enrolled for training?”

“My parents were against it. Even my grandfather had his doubts. But I had to give it a shot, had to try. I didn’t want to be just another assistant professor working toward tenure. I didn’t want them going to Mars without…” Jamie suddenly realized where he was and what he had agreed to. “…without me,” he finished lamely.

Joanna placed her hand atop his. A small soft feminine hand, pale against his own, roughened and darkened by years of field work.

“I will write to my father,” she said softly. “Perhaps there is something he can do.”

Jamie said nothing, but he thought to himself bleakly, They’ve already got one part-Indian set for the mission. They won’t need another.

7

It was cold in the helicopter. Cold and noisy. The big chopper clattered and lurched in the gusty wind blowing down from the summit of Mount Markham. Glancing out the window of the rattling, vibrating cargo door Jamie saw the broad white expanse of the glacier stretching below them, glaring reflected sunlight into his eyes, glittering where snow had drifted into mountainous dunes.

“Several of the meteorites found in this area have been proven to be from the moon,” Hoffman was telling Joanna, bellowing to be heard over the roar of the turbine engines.

She was sitting in the middle seat, safety harness buckled tightly across her shoulders and lap, her gloved hands clenched into rigid little fists, her head turned toward Hoffman so that she would not have to look out at the desolate world of ice below them.

Hoffman was lecturing at the top of his voice. To anyone else it would have sounded like the ultimate in arrogance, but Jamie knew that the Austrian was just as frightened as Joanna was. He was talking to stay in control of himself, telling Joanna every last detail about the meteorites that had been found on the glacier.

By me, Jamie reflected sourly. I found the damned meteorites. That part he doesn’t mention.

“Have any of them been definitely identified as Martian?” Joanna yelled back at him.

“Only two have matched comparisons with stones brought back from Mars by the automated probes,” Hoffman hollered. “And those were found more than twenty years ago. None of the meteorites located recently have proved to be of Martian origin.”

“Some of the stones found elsewhere in Antarctica have microflora living in cracks in their surfaces,” Joanna shouted, shifting the subject to her field of expertise to keep the throat-straining conversation going and avoid thinking about being alone out there on the ice.

“Yes, I know,” answered Hoffman. “A form of lichen that protects itself from the wind by living inside the surface cracks.”

“They are close enough to the surface to catch sunlight for photosynthesis.”

“And they also absorb warmth from the rock when it is heated by the sun, do they not?”

“Yes,” Joanna yelled. “They get water from the frost that ices the rocks.”

Jamie had heard all this before. And so had they, of course. He had been out on the glacier before, though, and they had not.

The chopper landed near the site Hoffman had chosen for the day’s search, then took off again in a roaring whirl of snow and ice particles that turned the pristine sky into a kaleidoscope of sparkling rainbow colors. Jamie watched the bird dwindle off into the clear blue until the sound of its engines was lost in the moaning of the wind rushing down the glacier.

The three of them stood there against the crystalline sky in hooded, fur-lined, electrically heated parkas and leggings, face masks and goggles, thickly lined gloves and heavy spiked boots. They carried long-handled picks that doubled as walking staffs. A pallet of equipment, food, and emergency gear stood beside them, mounted on slick Teflon-coated skids that could traverse ice or deep snow with equal ease.

“Mars will be easy after this,” Jamie said. He meant it to sound cheerful, but it came out otherwise.

Four hours later they were plodding across the broken rough ice, leaning heavily on their picks, the two men taking turns dragging the equipment skid behind them.

The wind poured mercilessly down the glacier in a raging torrent, howling like evil incarnate. Their electrically heated parkas and leggings barely kept them going against the buffeting, roaring wind that clawed at them like a furious beast trying to knock them over and suck the life warmth out of them.

Despite the heated suit Jamie felt the cold prying at him, working its freezing fingers in between his face mask and parka hood, worming past his gloves and up his sleeves. The air was so cold that even with the preheating that the face mask provided, Jamie’s nasal passages were getting raw. Each breath hurt.

It would be better if we could use the space suits, he thought. Then we’d be totally encased in their insulated hard shells. But the suits weighed too much to be used on Earth.

For the hundredth time Jamie straightened up and wiped a gloved hand across his frosting goggles. The other two stopped when he did, wordless now, gasping with exertion. Jamie saw the little clouds of steam puffing from their masks. It took a lot of energy merely to keep moving in cold like this.

His two charges were just trying to get through the day. Jamie was searching for a bit of Mars that might have come to Earth. Show me a dark stone, glacier, Jamie pleaded silently. Just one. One that came from Mars. Don’t hide it from me. Let me find it. Soon.

He knew that the glacier held its secrets deep within its icy bosom. There were ancient meteorites hidden out here, chunks of stone and metal that had fallen out of the sky long ages ago and buried themselves in the snow. But once in a while a stone worked its way up to the surface. Jamie scoured the ice field for such a meteorite and prayed to the glacier to be generous.

Don’t hold your secrets from mo, he said silently to the glacier. Show me the stones from Mars. They don’t belong to you; give them up gracefully.

But the glacier was so big. It was a river that had been frozen for millions of years, wider and more powerful than any Amazon of liquid water. It flowed only a few feet per day, yet it was inexorable, unstoppable in its patient journey from the summit of Mount Markham down to the quarter-mile-thick crust of the Ross Ice Shelf.

In all the times he had been out on the glacier Jamie had never experienced such cold. Even with a face mask and goggles and heated parka the raw blustering wind was numbing him down to the bone. Little Joanna had slowed terribly; she seemed barely able to walk. Still, he knew if he called for the helicopter to evacuate them back to the base it would be noted by the administrators and marked against her.

Hoffman seemed to be in better shape, yet he had not uttered a word in the past hour. He and Jamie took turns leaning into the harness that pulled the equipment pallet, but it seemed to Jamie that Hoffman’s turns were getting shorter and shorter.

“How are you doing?” he shouted over the wind.

Hoffman merely nodded from behind his mask and half raised one hand.

Joanna’s voice wavered as if she were losing control of it. “I… am… all right.” He could barely hear her over the wind.

“Is your heater turned up to max?”

“Yes… Of course.”

Why am I putting up with this? Jamie asked himself. Why should I suffer through this kind of agony when I’m not going to be picked for the mission anyway? Then he thought, Suppose I call for the chopper and say that Hoffman is getting too weak to continue? Put the blame on him.

But he knew he couldn’t do it. He had never learned to lie convincingly. “Stay out of the retail trade,” his grandfather Al had often told him. “And never play poker with strangers. Or anybody else, for that matter. Whatever’s on your mind is in your face, Jamie. Some redskin!”

Joanna was a different matter. The daughter of Alberto Brumado had to make it through training. She had to be on the first team, everyone agreed. But why do I have to half kill myself to help her get to Mars?

Maybe more than half kill, he thought soberly. The sky that had looked as clear as a crystal bowl of pale ice blue was turning an ominous milky white. Already the summit of the mountain was lost in billowing mist. Squinting through his goggles, Jamie was certain he saw swirls of snow heading down the glacier’s broad rugged highway toward them.

The thermometer strapped to the cuff of his parka showed that the temperature was dropping quickly. It was down to thirty-eight below zero; with the wind chill it must be more like eighty below or even worse.

“I’m going to call McMurdo for the chopper,” he shouted at Hoffman and Joanna.

“No! Please!” she shouted back, her voice muffled by the mask. “Not for me. I will be all right.”

“You’re freezing.”

She did not answer, but stubbornly shook her head. Hoffman said nothing; he simply stood there, gloved fists planted on his hips, obviously laboring to draw in breath. Jamie focused his attention on Joanna, a tiny miserable bundle inside the bulky hooded parka and goggled face mask.

Uncertain, a tendril of fear worming up his spine, he turned to look back up the glacier toward the approaching storm. Maybe an hour, he estimated. Maybe less.

Then he saw the stone, about the size of a man’s fist, sitting dark and incongruous on the rough cracked expanse of the glacier as if it had been waiting for him, as if someone had placed it there for him to notice.

“Look!” He pointed.

He ran to it, nearly tripping on the broken jagged ice, leaving Hoffman by the equipment pallet, forgetting the exhausted freezing woman standing wearily beside the other geologist.

He knelt on the ice and stared at his discovery. Black, pitted like a missile’s reentry nose cone, the rock was clearly a meteorite. Could it be from Mars? Jamie had picked up four other rocks in his treks across the glacier. They had all been disappointments, nothing more than ordinary “falling stars.”

This one looked different, though. A shergottite, I’ll bet. Blasted off Mars a couple hundred million years ago by a giant meteor strike.

God knows how long it wandered through space before it finally got caught by Earth’s gravity well and plunged into this glacier. Probably been trapped in the ice for millions of years, waiting to rise up to the surface where somebody could find it. Me.

“Is it…?”

Jamie turned to see Hoffman leaning over his shoulder.

“It’s a Martian!” Jamie shouted.

“Are you sure?” The Austrian’s teeth were chattering audibly.

“Look at it! Where it’s not blackened it’s pink, for god’s sake!” he said, unable to hide the excitement he felt. “At the very least it’s good enough to get us home.” Fumbling in his parka’s deep pockets he finally grasped the palm-sized radio and pulled it up to the mouth flap of his face mask. “I’m calling for the chopper. We’ve found something important. This rock is our ticket back to McMurdo.”

No one could fault them for cutting short their time on the glacier. Not with a possible piece of Mars in their gloved hands and a roaring snowstorm coming down the mountain at them.

8

Nearly twelve hours later Jamie was walking tiredly from the geology lab toward his quarters, still feeling chilled inside. The storm that had been marching down the mountain range had enveloped the base at McMurdo Sound, howling outside the thickly insulated walls like an attacking barbarian army, piling snow up to the roof line. The base was snugly warm, though, as Jamie trudged slowly down the narrow low-ceilinged corridor toward his tiny cell of a room. Yet he still did not feel fully thawed out.

Joanna’s room was near his and her door was open. He glanced in. Joanna was at her desk, her fingers flickering over her laptop computer’s keyboard.

She looked up and saw Jamie.

“Please come in,” she said. “I was waiting for you.”

She got up from the desk chair and came toward him. Joanna still looked almost like a child to Jamie. Delicate little hands, big deep brown eyes. But in form-fitting coveralls her body was not childlike. He felt a stirring inside himself as he stepped through her doorway and stood awkwardly before her.

“I was writing a letter to my father to tell him what you did out there on the glacier,” she said. “I wanted to thank you for it.”

“What I did?”

Joanna smiled up at him and Jamie realized how sensuous her lips were.

“You could have called for the helicopter to pick us up hours earlier. You saw how poorly I was doing.”

He did not know what to say. Suddenly his hands were as clumsy as if encased in boxing gloves. He finally settled on hooking his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans.

“If we had to be pulled off the glacier early,” Joanna went on in her whispery voice, “it would have meant the end of my hopes to be on the first team. And Dr. Hoffman’s, perhaps.”

“Not necessarily,” Jamie muttered.

“I appreciate your staying with me and protecting me the way you did.”

He shrugged.

“It would break my father’s heart if I was not on the first team,” she said softly. “He wanted so much to go to Mars himself. If I fail him…”

Jamie wanted to take her by the shoulders and pull her to him and kiss her. Instead he heard himself saying, “They would have sent the chopper to us anyway, what with the storm bearing down on us.”

“Yes. Perhaps.” Her eyes were fastened on him.

“The… uh, meteorite looks Martian, all right,” Jamie said. “Right ratio of inert gas isotopes. High pyroxene content.”

Her brows went up slightly. “Organics?”

“Dorothy Loring is slicing some thin sections for the microscope.”

Turning back toward her desk to shut down the laptop Joanna said, “I must get to the laboratory. She should have called me.”

Jamie stepped back toward the doorway as she flicked through the file of miniature floppy disks on her desk, pulled one out, and slid it into the snug pocket of her coveralls.

Then she looked at Jamie as if she had forgotten he was in the room with her. “I do want to thank you for helping me. I appreciate it very much.”

“De nada.”

She came around the desk again and stopped half a step in front of him. “It was very important to me.”

Looking down into her uplifted dark eyes Jamie brushed his fingertips against her soft cheek, uncertain, tentative.

Joanna flinched and backed away from him, her face reddening. “You mustn’t do that!”

“I didn’t…”

She shook her head. “We cannot get involved emotionally. You know that. They would never allow us on the mission if they thought…”

“I’m sorry,” Jamie said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“It’s just…” Joanna almost wrung her hands. “I cannot get involved with anyone, Jamie. Not now. You understand that, don’t you? It would ruin everything.”

“Sure,” he said. “I understand.”

She wasn’t talking about calling her father anymore. She wasn’t worried about injustice or being Alberto Brumado’s pawn. And there’s no sense in her getting involved with a guy who’s not going to make the team, Jamie told himself silently.

“I’ve got to get down to the lab now,” Joanna said.

He stepped aside and let her pass, then went out into the narrow corridor and watched her hurry toward the laboratory.

At dinner that evening in the crowded dining room Joanna kept her distance from him. When the others congratulated him on having found a Martian rock that actually contained a trace of organic chemicals in it, Jamie muttered his thanks and told them he had been lucky.

“You realize, of course,” said Hoffman, sitting across the table from Jamie, “that since I am the official geologist in this group and you are nothing more than a guide, that I will conduct the further examination of the meteorite. It is my responsibility now, not yours.”

Dead silence fell across the table. Jamie stared into the Austrian’s eyes and saw, deep beneath the arrogant exterior, a sort of pleading, like a drowning man reaching desperately for a hand to help him.

“I thought we would work together on it,” he said tightly.

“Of course, you may assist me,” said Hoffman.

Jamie nodded once, got up, and left the dining room. Get away before you break something. Go off by yourself, like a wounded coyote. He hurried down the dimly lit corridor back to his room and threw himself on his bunk, still fully clothed, feeling like six different kinds of fool while the blizzard raged on outside the snowbound base.

9

“I must speak with you, privately, in your official capacity.” Joanna’s voice was trembling.

Antony Reed looked up from the computer screen. She was standing in the doorway of the dispensary looking as if she would burst into tears in another moment.

“Come in,” he said, rising from the desk chair. “Close the door and sit down.”

Joanna was dressed almost formally, considering the lax standards of the base: tailored white blouse and snug whipcord jeans that emphasized her hourglass figure. She sat tensely on the wooden chair in front of the desk, biting her lower lip.

“I assure you that anything you tell me will remain strictly confidential between us,” Reed said, leaning back in his swivel chair. It creaked slightly.

She was terribly upset, he saw. Nervous and fearful. He realized that Hoffman had gone after her at last. The Austrian has nibbled at the bait.

“What I have to say may have a bearing on our work, on the personnel selected for the mission,” Joanna said.

Reed kept his face perfectly serious.

“I must have your promise that you will not reveal anything I tell you to the project administrators.”

Leaning forward and placing his forearms on the desk, Reed said in his best professionally grave manner, “If what you are about to tell me actually does have a serious bearing on the mission, then you are placing me in an ethical dilemma.”

She nodded and drew in a deep breath. Reed admired the way her blouse moved, even though it was buttoned up to the neck.

“I must be free to speak with you off the record,” she said. “When I have finished we can decide what is important for the mission and what is purely personal. Is that all right?” Her voice was almost pleading.

Leaning back in the complaining chair again Reed said airily, “Yes, yes, of course. That will be fine. I want you to feel free to speak openly.”

Joanna stared at the computer on the desk. Reed smiled, reached over, and turned it off.

“Now then,” he said, “what seems to be the matter?”

She hesitated. Then, “A… a certain member of the group…” She went silent.

Reed waited for a few moments, then prompted, “A member of the group did what? Insulted you? Attacked you? What?”

Her eyes went wide. “Oh, nothing like that!”

“Really?”

She almost seemed relieved. “One of the men tried to make advances, but that was no problem. We have all learned how to deal with that.”

“We?”

“All the women in the group.”

“You’re saying that some of the men make improper overtures to you?” Reed asked.

Joanna actually smiled. “Of course they do. We can handle that. It is not a problem.”

“The men don’t persist? They don’t become threatening?”

She dismissed that idea with a feminine little shrug. “There is only one who makes a real pest of himself.”

“Dr. Hoffman,” Reed prompted.

“How did you know?”

“Has Hoffman bothered you?”

“He has tried. I was a bit concerned at first; he seemed so insistent.”

“And?”

“I have learned to deal with him. We women help each other, you know.”

Reed fought to keep himself from frowning. “What’s your problem, then?”

Joanna’s faint smile disappeared. She looked troubled once again. Glancing around the room before replying, she finally said, “It is Dr. Waterman.”

“Jamie?”

“He has given up his chance to go on the mission in order to help me.”

“As I understand it,” Reed said stiffly, “he did not volunteer for that. Dr. Li ordered him to do it.”

“Yes, I know,” Joanna said. “But still — he is very kind, very helpful. Under other circumstances…”

“Good lord, young lady, you’re not telling me that you’ve fallen in love with him!” Reed was aghast.

“No, no, of course not,” she answered too quickly. “We have only been together a few days. But…” Her voice trailed off again; she looked away from Reed.

Feeling a puzzling confusion roiling inside him, Tony said, “It would be extremely unwise to become emotionally involved with a man you will probably never see again, once your tour here at McMurdo is finished.”

“I know. I understand that.”

“Then what is your problem?” Reed demanded.

“I feel terribly guilty that he is giving up his chance to make the mission because of me.”

“I see.” Reed relaxed, leaned back again and steepled his fingers. “Of course you do. It’s a perfectly natural reaction.”

“What should I do?”

He spread his hands vaguely. “Do? There’s nothing for you to do. The decision to keep Waterman here was not made by you; you’re not responsible for his fate.”

“But I am! Don’t you see?”

Pointing to the computer screen and smiling, Reed said, in his most persuasive doctor-knows-best manner, “My dear young lady, Waterman was picked to help you — and the others, I might add — because Li and the selection board had already decided he would not be included in the Mars team. Do you think for one moment that they would take someone already chosen for Mars and scratch him from the roster merely to help you here? No. Certainly not. Waterman’s fate was already decided. You had nothing to do with it.”

Joanna stared at him for a long wordless moment. Finally she asked, “You are sure of this?”

Nodding toward the silent computer once more, Reed said, “I do have access to all the personnel files, you know.”

She breathed out a deeply relieved sigh.

Watching her blouse, Reed felt seething disappointment burning in his gut. Hoffman’s so inept that he doesn’t frighten her. And now she’s allowed herself to form a romantic attachment to this red man from the wild west. This isn’t what I had planned for her. Not at all.