Mars Life

Listen to the wisdom of the Old Ones.

The red world and the blue are brothers, both born of Father Sun. Separated since birth, bombarded by fiery Sky Demons, they found their own paths through time and space. The blue world grew large and rich, deep with water and teeming with life. The red world, farther from Father Sun, smaller, colder, also bore life—for a while.

The Sky Demons returned to both brother worlds, howling, burning, destroying with terrifying hammer blows. Many creatures of the blue world died under their mindless fury. On the red world almost all life was annihilated. Almost all.

Man Maker brought The People to the blue world, where in time they flourished. Strangest of all, Coyote—the Trickster—led The People back to the red world. In time.

Data Bank

Mars is the most earthlike planet in the solar system. But that doesn’t mean that it’s very much like Earth.

Barely half of Earth’s size, Mars orbits roughly one and a half times farther from the Sun than Earth does. It is a small, cold, seemingly barren world, a frozen desert of iron-rust sands from pole to pole.

Yet Mars is a spectacular world. The tallest mountain in the solar system is the aptly named Olympus Mons, a massive shield volcano three times higher than Everest, with a base as wide as the state of Idaho. The main caldera at Olympus Mons’s summit could swallow Mt. Everest entirely. Other huge volcanoes dot the Tharsis highlands, all of them long extinct.

Almost halfway across the planet is Hellas Planitia, an enormous impact crater nearly the size of Australia and some five kilometers deep, gouged out when a huge meteor slammed into Mars eons ago.

Then there is Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Mars, a gigantic rift in the ground that stretches farther than the distance between Boston and San Francisco, a fracture that is seven kilometers deep in some places and so wide that explorers standing on one rim of it cannot see the other side because it is beyond the horizon.

The atmosphere of Mars is a mere wisp, thinner than Earth’s high stratosphere. It is composed mostly of carbon dioxide, with traces of nitrogen, oxygen, and inert gases such as argon and neon. The air pressure at the surface of Mars is about the same as the pressure thirty-some kilometers up in the high stratosphere of Earth’s atmosphere, so thin that an uncovered glass of water will immediately boil away even when the temperature is far below zero.

Which it is most of the time. Mars is a cold world. At midsummer noon on the Martian equator, the ground temperature might get as high as seventy degrees Fahrenheit. But at the height of a person’s nose the temperature would be zero, and that night it would plunge to a hundred below or even colder. The thin Martian atmosphere retains almost none of the Sun’s heat: it reradiates back into space, even at noon on the equator.

There is water on Mars, however. The polar caps that can be seen from Earth even with an amateur telescope contain frozen water, usually overlain with frozen carbon dioxide: dry ice. Explorers found layers of permafrost—frozen water—beneath the surface, enough underground water to make an ocean or at least a sizable sea.

There is abundant evidence that water once flowed across the surface of Mars. The entire northern hemisphere of the planet may once have been an ocean basin. Mars was once considerably warmer and wetter than it is now.

But today the surface of Mars is a barren desert of highly oxidized iron sands that give Mars its rusty red coloration. Those sands are loaded with superoxides; the planetwide desert of Mars is more like powdered bleach than soil in which plants could grow.

Yet there is life on Mars. The First Expedition discovered lichen-like organisms living inside cracks in the rocks littering the floor of the Grand Canyon of Mars. The Second Expedition found bacteria living deep underground, extremophiles that metabolize solid rock and water leached from the permafrost.

And the human explorers discovered an ancient cliff dwelling built into a niche high up the north wall of the Valles Marineris. There were once intelligent Martians, but they were wiped out in a cataclysm that scrubbed the entire planet clean of almost all life.

Curious explorers from Earth sought to understand those long-vanished Martians. But others of Earth preferred to ignore them, to pretend that they had never existed. In an irony that stretched across two worlds, the greatest discovery made on Mars led directly to the determined effort to put an end to the exploration of the red planet.

Tithonium Base: Morning

Carter Carleton woke from a troubled sleep. The vague memory of a dream faded in his mind even as he tried to recall it more clearly. Something about the university and the board of regents’ kangaroo court, back on Earth. Better forgotten, he told himself as he pulled the thin blanket off his legs. Better in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, like Shakespeare said.

As he sat up on his narrow bed the aroma of brewing coffee wafted into his cubicle. With it came the nasal twanging of some country-and-western song. “Damned cowboys and their recordings,” he muttered, planting his feet on the floor. Then he grinned inwardly. Those cowboys have doctorates in geology and biochemistry, he reminded himself.

Officially, the base was named in memory of the late Darryl C. Trumball, the Boston financier who had donated a considerable share of his personal fortune to the exploration of Mars. But everyone called it Tithonium Base, situated on the floor of the Tithonium Chasma section of the four-thousand-kilometer-long Valles Marineris, the immense Grand Canyon of Mars.

The floor was radiant-heated but still it felt cold to Carleton’s bare feet. Not as cold as outside, he thought. A glance at the weather readout on the digital clock by his bedside showed the outside temperature hadn’t quite reached ninety below zero yet.

Morning on Mars. Carter Carleton still felt thoroughly out of place among the scientists and technicians who made up the personnel of the Tithonium Chasma base. He was older than any of them, gray-haired and getting pudgy despite his daily toil at the dig. The only anthropologist at the base. The only anthropologist on Mars. The only anthropologist within some hundred million kilometers, for that matter.

Another day, he said to himself, grabbing his towel and toiletries. No, another sol, he corrected. Here on Mars they’re called sols, not days.

“Whatever,” he muttered as he trudged barefoot across his cubicle to the door of the common lavatory.

The Village

In his condo in Albuquerque, Jamie Waterman dreamed also. He knew it was a dream, yet the Navaho side of him also knew that dreams reveal truths hidden during the waking day.

The village stood before him, sturdy dried-brick dwellings three and even four stories high. The street was unpaved, of course: nothing more than hard-packed dirt. The sunlight felt warm and good on his shoulders, and Jamie realized that he was wearing nothing more than an old checkered shirt, faded denims, and his well-scuffed boots. No space suit.

The villagers looked strange, very different from Jamie. Why not? he asked himself. After all, they’re Martians.

Jamie walked among the Martian villagers unnoticed, unseen. They paid no attention to him as they scurried on their daily tasks. I’m just a ghost to them, he realized. I’m invisible. Unseen.

Then he recognized his grandfather Al striding along the bare dusty street toward him, wearing his best black leather vest and his broad-brimmed hat with the silver band circling its crown.

“Ya’aa’tey!” Grandfather Al called out the old Navaho greeting. “Grandfather!” Jamie called to him, astonished. “But you’re dead!”

Al grinned widely at him. “Naw, that was a mistake. I been right here, waitin’ for you.”

Jamie laid a hand on his grandfather’s shoulder. He was as solid as the stone bear fetish Al had given his grandson so many years ago. Jamie still carried it with him wherever he went.

“You’re really here?” Jamie felt tears welling in his eyes.

“Long as you want me to be,” said Al. “And this village? This is the way it was?”

“Naw,” Al said. “This is the way it’s gonna be.” Then he added, “Go with beauty, grandson.”

Tithonium Base: The Cafeteria

By the time Carter Carleton had dressed and come out into the open central area of the base’s main dome, bright sunlight was streaming through the dome’s curving walls. Overnight, a polarizing electric current turned the plastic walls opaque, to keep the base’s interior heat from escaping into the frigid Martian night. By day, the current was turned off and the walls became transparent to allow warming sunshine in.

Sunshine always made Carleton feel better. That’s one advantage that Mars has, he said to himself as he headed for the cafeteria, off on the far side of the open area. There hasn’t been a cloudy day here in millions of years. Except for the dust storms.

The cafeteria was completely self-service. If you wanted eggs for breakfast you cracked open a plastic package of powdered eggs and fried them yourself on one of the hand-sized skillets hanging over the grill. Staff members took turns cleaning up after each meal. It was perfectly ordinary to see a tenured professor of microbiology loading the dishwasher or sponging down the tables.

This early in the morning the scrubbing robots were still scouring the tile floor. One of the squat, round little turtles was buzzing down the edge of the cafeteria counter; it stopped ten centimeters before Carleton’s loafer-clad feet. It beeped impatiently.

“Go around me, stupid,” Carleton muttered.

The robot dutifully maneuvered around his feet and resumed its route along the counter’s edge.

The grill still bore the same CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE sign that had been there the day before. This place is going to seed,Carleton grumbled to himself. The bakery odor of fresh toast tempted him, but instead he chose a bowl of cold cereal and poured reconstituted milk into it. As he was reaching for the fresh raspberries, grown in the greenhouse in the adjoining dome, he heard:

“Dr. Carleton?”

Turning, he saw it was one of the junior technicians. The name tag on her shirt read MCMANUS. She was the base’s only nanotechnician.

“Doreen,” he replied, smiling the way he used to in his classrooms.

She had lovely, thickly curled auburn hair, but it was cropped close in a strictly utilitarian style. Her face was oval, with the large shy eyes of a waif. She was almost Carleton’s height, but so thin and bony that Carleton wondered if she were bulimic. Instead of standard-issue coveralls she wore a mannish long-sleeved shirt and creaseless slacks of pearl gray.

“Do you mind if I join you?” she asked, unsmiling. Her voice was low but sweet; Carleton imagined she was probably a good singer. Mezzo-soprano, most likely. He saw that she was carrying a tray that held only a mug of fruit juice and a slice of toast. Nothing more. The toast looked burnt, at that.

“I’d be glad of the company.”

It was still early enough that only a few of the tables were occupied. Voices murmured; the intercom speakers purred soft rock music. Carleton picked an empty table and put his bowl of cereal down.

Once she was settled in the chair on his right, Doreen McManus asked, “Are you going outside again today?”

Carleton groused, “Are you going to twist my arm again?”

Her expression grew even more serious. “Dr. Carleton, you simply—”

“Call me Carter, please. When you call me ‘Dr. Carleton’ it makes me feel a hundred and fifty years old.”

“Carter, then,” she said, with the beginning of a smile.

“And you are going to twist my arm again, aren’t you?”

“That hard-shell suit of yours is awfully old.”

“It works fine. No complaints.”

“But the nanofabric suits are so much easier to work in.”

He picked up his spoon, hesitated, then put it down on the table again with a tiny clink.

“Everybody else uses the nanosuits,” she said earnestly.

“I’m sorry. I just don’t trust them.”

“But—”

“That doesn’t mean I don’t trust you, Doreen. I just feel safer inside an old, reliable hard-shell suit.”

She looked at him with her big puppy eyes for a long, silent moment. Carleton realized her eyes were an exotic grayish green color. It reminded him of a jewelry stone. What was it called? Tourmaline, he remembered. With an effort, he looked down and started spooning up his cereal.

“Would you mind if I went with you this morning?” she asked.

“In a nanosuit?”

“Yes, that’s what I’d be wearing.”

He grinned at her. “Trying to shame the old man?”

“You’re not old.”

“Old enough,” he said, with a practiced sigh.

“Would it be all right?”

“To come out this morning? Sure. The work’s pretty boring, though. Except for the explosions.”

“I don’t mind.”

“Okay, then.”

“Doreen, good morning!” Carleton looked up to see a dark-haired, thickset younger man approaching them. With a glance at Carleton, he plunked his tray on the table as he asked, “All right to sit here, Dr. Carleton?”

Kalman Torok, Carleton saw: one of the biologists. There were only two hundred and some people at Tithonium Base and Carleton—with his long years of memorizing students’ names—knew most of them on a first-name basis. Name tags helped, of course.

Behind him came an older woman whom Carleton recognized as Nari Quintana, the base’s chief medical officer, a diminutive, spare older woman with a bony, hard-edged face and mousy dull brown hair. She sat down without asking permission and began unloading her tray onto the table.

As he picked up his steaming mug of coffee Torok asked gloomily, “Have you heard the latest? They say they’re going to shut us down and ship us back to Earth.” He spoke in British English with a decided Middle European accent.

“Who says that?” Carleton snapped.

Torok raised his heavy black brows.

“It’s the buzz. Everybody’s talking about it.”

He talks with his eyebrows, Carleton said to himself. They’re more expressive than his whiny voice.

“I don’t believe it,” said Doreen.

“They’re closing the base over in Hellas, but not here.”

“Here,” said Torok, as if he had superior knowledge.

“They can’t shut us down,” Carleton said.

“That would be stupid.”

“Criminal,” Quintana agreed. “I’d have to return to Caracas.”

“Not to Caltech?” Doreen asked. “I thought you were on the medical staff there.”

She shook her head sadly. “I gave up my position at CalTech to come to Mars.”

“And what happens to your work?” Carleton asked Torok.

The biologist sighed. “It would be the end of my experiment on growing plants in the indigenous soil. I would write a paper on it when I got back to Budapest, I suppose.”

“Couldn’t you bring soil samples back to Budapest?” Doreen asked.

“What good would that do?” Torok countered, those thick dark brows knitting. “I’d have to start all over again and the university would never pay to build a simulation chamber large enough to be useful.”

He fell into a morose silence. Quintana picked listlessly at her plate of eggs and soymeat bacon while Torok took a sip from his mug.

“God, what I’d give for a decent cup of coffee,” the Hungarian groused, thumping the mug onto the tabletop. “Instead of this crap.”

“It has to be decaffeinated,” Quintana replied sharply. “Caffeine denatures vitamin C. You know that.”

“Yes, I know. Still—”

“Do you want to come down with scurvy, like they did on the First Expedition? You’re on Mars! Keep that in the front of your mind every day, every minute.”

Torok started to glare at the harsh-tongued physician, but shrugged instead and muttered, “I won’t be on Mars for much longer. Neither will you.”

Trying to make it sound bright, Doreen said, “Well, if we’re sent home you’ll be back with your wife and kids again, Kal.”

Torok’s face grew even more somber. “She prefers to have me here.”

“Oh?”

Carleton asked, “What about you, Doreen?”

“If we have to leave I’ll go back to Selene and work in the nanolab.”

“On the Moon?”

“You can’t do nanotech work anywhere on Earth,” she replied.

“Not legally.”

“And you, Professor?” Torok asked. “Where will you go?”

Carleton still winced inwardly when anyone addressed him by the title that had been stripped from him.

“I’m staying right here,” he said firmly. “And so are all of you. They can’t shut us down. Waterman won’t let that happen.”

San Simeon, California: Board of Education

“Meeting will come to order,” said chairperson Lisa Goodfellow. The four other men and women sitting around the oval table stopped their conversations and turned their attention to the chairperson.

Seated at the opposite end of the table from the chairperson was Oliver Maxwell. While the board members were dressed in California casual clothes—open-neck shirts and relaxed, comfortable jeans—Maxwell wore a sky blue sports jacket over his shirt and tie.

“In deference to Mr. Maxwell, who has a plane to catch, I propose we consider his item on the agenda before anything else. Any objections?”

No one said a word. The chairperson smiled at Maxwell. “The floor is all yours, sir.”

Maxwell remained in his chair, smiling back at the board members. He was a stocky man in his late forties, with crinkles around his deep-set eyes.

“This won’t take long. I represent the Mars Foundation, as most of you already know. The Foundation wants to make its package of learning materials available to the schools of your district.” Almost as an afterthought, he added, “For free, of course.”

“A package of learning materials?” asked one of the board members.

“About Mars. About the exploration work going on there,” Maxwell said. “The life forms that they’ve found. The cliff dwellings. The ancient volcanoes. The kids’ll love it.”

“About Mars,” said the chairperson, almost in a whisper.

“Videos, texts, pictures … the kids’ll love it,” Maxwell repeated.

One of the two male board members, tanned and sun-blond as a beachcomber, knit his brows. “This is science stuff, isn’t it?”

Nodding, Maxwell replied, “The exploration’s being done by scientists, yes. But it’s exciting. It’s an adventure in discovery!”

The beachcomber shook his head. Turning to the chairperson, he complained, “Look, they tried to ram Darwin down our throats years ago. These scientists are always trying to sneak their ideas into the school curriculum. It’s our duty to protect our children from their secularist propaganda.”

“But it’s not propaganda!” Maxwell cried, sounding genuinely hurt. “It’s real. They’re actually searching for the remains of a village that intelligent Martians lived in millions of years ago!”

“Yeah. And I’m descended from a monkey.”

“There’s no proof that intelligent people lived on Mars,” said the woman across the table. “It’s all unproven theories.”

“But—”

The chairperson smiled sweetly at Maxwell once more. “We thank you for the Foundation’s very generous offer. The board will take it under consideration.”

“But—”

“I know you have a plane to catch. We’ll get in touch with you once we’ve come to a decision.”

Reluctantly Maxwell got to his feet and shuffled out of the meeting room. He knew what the board’s decision would be. And he didn’t look forward to the next stop on his itinerary: Salt Lake City.

Albuquerque: Duran Condominiums

Jamie Waterman awoke slowly from his dream about the Martian village. For long moments he lay unstirring in his bed, looking up at the soft eggshell white of the ceiling, his eyes focused on the past.

Al’s been dead more than twenty years, he said to himself, and still I dream about him. Turning his head, he saw his wife sleeping beside him. Vijay’s beautiful dark face looked relaxed, untroubled. Jamie wished he could feel that way.

I was there when Al died, when the Sky Dancers took him away, Jamie remembered. Not like when Jimmy died. Vijay was alone then. I was a hundred million kilometers away. She had to deal with our son’s death by herself.

Slowly he blinked away the memory of his dream, the memories of the dead, and slipped quietly out of bed. Vijay stirred slightly but didn’t wake up, her long dark hair tousled, her lustrous eyes softly closed. I’ll never leave you again, Jamie promised silently. Not for anything.

He padded to the bathroom and shut the door as quietly as he could.

Another day, Jamie thought as he looked into the shaving mirror. Just like yesterday and the day before. Just like tomorrow will be. Going through the motions. The excitement’s gone. Now we’re just trying to hold on, trying to keep them from shutting us down.

Why bother? he asked himself. Why not let the bastards close down the program and bring everybody home? Why fight the inevitable?

His unhappy face stared back at him: broad cheeks, coppery skin, dark brooding eyes. Strands of gray flecked his close-cropped jet black hair. His mouth turned downward unhappily. He saw his father’s Navaho face; his mother’s golden hair and pink skin were inside him, didn’t show.

Jamie showered, then shaved even though he felt he didn’t really need to. When he slowly opened the door to the bedroom, Vijay hadn’t stirred in their bed.

If the shower and the shaver didn’t wake her she must be really out. Good, he thought. She deserves her rest. Putting up with me isn’t easy.

He dressed as quietly as he could in his newest jeans and a crisply starched white shirt. Rummaging carefully through his dresser drawer, he pulled out his best bolo, the silver and onyx one that he usually reserved for formal receptions at the university. Softly, softly he filled his pockets with change and keys and facial tissues. And the bear fetish with the wispy white eagle’s feather that Al had lovingly tied to it just before Jamie left for Mars the first time.

The feather’s looking pretty shoddy, he thought. Worn down by the years. Just like me.

Vijay slept on. Sleep is the best healer, Jamie said to himself. She says she’s okay; she smiles and acts normal and pretends she’s over it. For me. She puts on the good face for my sake. But Jimmy’s death still haunts us. We should’ve done what real Navahos do: we should’ve left this condo and moved someplace else, someplace far away from all these memories.

With his boots in one hand he tiptoed to the edge of the bed. So beautiful, he thought as he gazed down at her. It shouldn’t have happened to her like this. She deserves better.

Help her find her path through this, he prayed silently to gods he didn’t really believe in. With a grimace he added, And while you’re at it, I could use some help myself.

Tithonium Chasma: The Rift Valley

“It’s hard to think of this as a valley,” said Doreen.

Carleton heard her in the earphones built into his suit’s glassteel helmet. “A rift valley,” he said.

She made a little frown. “I’ve had some geology classes, Professor.”

“Please call me Carter.”

“Sure.”

Her nanosuit was transparent. It looked to Carleton as if she were wearing nothing over her coveralls more than a plastic rain suit with an inflated bubble over her head. Even the life support pack on her back looked too small to do its job, flimsy. Yet she was standing out on the surface of Mars in the morning sunlight, snug and apparently perfectly safe.

Carleton felt like a shambling Neanderthal beside her. His spacesuit was a heavy, cumbersome shell of cermet with flexible joints at the elbows, knees and waist. Semiflexible, he corrected himself. I’ll know what arthritis feels like when it hits me, trying to move around in this outfit. He pictured himself like Falstaff, clanking unwillingly into battle inside his heavy suit of armor.

Doreen had volunteered to help him lug his equipment out to the digging site, so he had allowed her to carry the spades and tongs and brushes while he pushed the cart that was loaded with the explosives and detonators.

She’s right, he thought as he looked past her at the cliffs looming over them. It doesn’t look like a valley. The cliffs on Carleton’s left were more than three kilometers high. The valley was so wide that he couldn’t see its other wall: it was over the horizon.

They call Mars the red planet, he mused as they trudged along to the site. Yes, most of its surface is rust red dust. Iron oxides. A red desert, from pole to pole. But look at that cliff face: bands of ochre and pale yellow and light brown along with the iron red. You can’t stand here for ten minutes without wanting to be a geologist.

Several klicks along the cliff face was the sloping ramp of dirt and rocks that Jamie Waterman had used for the first transit down to the floor of Tithonium, back during the First Expedition, more than twenty years ago. The original Mars base had been up on the plateau in those early days. But it was down here on the valley floor that the Martian lichen had been discovered, struggling to stay alive through frigid nights and dust storms that smothered everything in their path.

And in that notch high up in the cliff wall Waterman had found the ruins of buildings: brick structures erected by intelligent Martians more than sixty million years ago. Intelligent Martians who were wiped out by an extinction-level meteor strike, just as the dinosaurs on Earth had been driven into extinction by a killer meteor impact.

There were three buckyball cables running along the cliff face now, to carry people and equipment from the base on the valley floor to Waterman’s village up in the cleft in the rocks. Only, it wasn’t a village. Carleton was convinced of that. Some sort of shrine, more likely. Or a fortress. The village was down here, on the valley floor. Had to be. If only I could find it, he thought. If the damned lichen are smart enough to live down here, where it’s warmer and there’s some moisture from the frost that forms overnight, then the Martians must’ve been smart enough to do the same.

Except that he hadn’t found any village. Not yet, he told himself. It’s here, you just haven’t gone deep enough yet.

“Is that the site?” Doreen asked, pointing with a spade toward the edge of the pit a few dozen meters ahead.

“That’s it,” Carleton said.

“And you think there’s a village buried here?” Doreen put down the spade and the bag of brushes.

They stopped at the edge of the pit. It was fifty meters across and about twenty meters deep, almost square in shape. Its bottom looked freshly swept, cleaned of all debris and dust, nothing but bare jagged rock. To one side of where they were standing rested the tables bearing mesh grids for sifting rubble and the hoist that Carleton used to lower himself into the pit.

As he carefully took his packages from the cart and lowered them to the ground in his stiff-jointed suit, Carleton said, “Ground-penetrating radar showed indications of a gridwork about thirty meters below the surface. Nature doesn’t produce grids; intelligence does.”

“But you haven’t found anything,” Doreen said, not accusingly, he thought. If anything, she sounded sympathetic.

“Haven’t gone deep enough yet. The village is underneath sixty-some million years of compacted dust.” If it’s here at all, he added silently.

“And you excavate with explosives?”

“Beats digging.”

“But doesn’t that blow up the fossils you’re looking for?”

“I’m not down deep enough for fossils yet. When I find something I’ll start digging by hand.”

“Sounds weird, blasting away like that.”

He chuckled at her. “There’s precedent for it. Dart or Broom or one of those paleontologists in South Africa a century or more ago, they used dynamite to excavate fossil sites.”

“It still sounds weird,” Doreen insisted gently.

“Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I sift through the rubble after each blast, to see if there’s anything in it. So far, nothing. It takes a long time, but digging by hand would be really tedious.”

He could see Doreen’s face clearly through the nanofabric bubble of her helmet. She looked intrigued, but he thought he saw doubt in her big doe’s eyes, as well.

“You’re doing this work all by yourself?”

“Nobody’s willing to help me. I’m something of a pariah, you know.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Doreen said. “Some sort of scandal? You had to resign your professorship at Penn?”

“I was set up. The fundamentalists took control of the board of regents and they didn’t like what I had to say about Darwin, so they set me up with a Mata Hari.”

“Mata Hari?” Doreen clearly had never heard of her.

“A spy. A seducer. A whore.”

She looked at him, and he was glad that all she could see in the reflective gold coating of his helmet visor was a mirror image of herself. Good, he thought, feeling his cheeks burning with unrepressed fury at his memories.

At last she said, “I’ll help you.”

“Help me?”

“With your work here. I’ve got nothing much else to do. The nanosuits work fine and they don’t need any maintenance to speak of. I’ll help you dig.”

He was surprised at her offer, but he heard himself reply immediately, “No. You’ll just make difficulties for yourself.”

“They can’t make trouble for me,” she said. “I don’t live on Earth, remember? I’m a citizen of Selene. I’m free.”

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

The paperless office is still nothing more than a distant daydream, Jamie said to himself. No matter how hard he tried to keep his office neat and tidy, the clutter always crept in to drown him. His office was no bigger than any of the others along the corridor of the Planetary Sciences Department building. Its door bore a modest sign:

Inside, the office had space only for a regular university-issue desk of genetically engineered faux maple, littered with papers, a bookcase stuffed with reports and folders, and a single plastic chair for visitors. The room had a window that looked out at the elevated interstate highway that ran through the heart of Albuquerque. This early in the morning, the rush-hour traffic was just beginning to build up.

Jamie had come in early to try to get some work done before his conference call was scheduled. He squeezed around his desk and slid into the swivel chair, booted up his desktop computer. He shook his head at the litter that threatened to engulf him. Got to clean this place up, he thought as the computer ran through its self-check and then announced with a sharp beep that it was ready for work.

Scanning the morning’s schedule, he saw that he had more than two hours before the conference call would come through. He started to review the latest reports from the teams on Mars.

It’s been nearly two years, he realized. Two years since I left Mars. Two years since Jimmy died. Skydiving. Of all the stupid things a teenager could do, he had to get his kicks by jumping out of an airplane. Why? Because his father had, years before. But I did it because I had to: it was part of my training for the Mars mission. I didn’t do it for fun. The Russians wouldn’t okay me for the mission if I didn’t jump. I wasn’t there to guide Jimmy, to make him understand, to protect him. I wasn’t there for my son. Or for Vijay.

I know it’s hit her hard. She tries to put a good face on it, pretends she’s gotten over it. For my sake. She doesn’t want me to see how she’s hurting. But I know the pain is there. I feel it. Mothers get sick when their sons die. They wither away. They get cancer.

He shook his head, trying to clear away the past. Focus on today, he told himself. This morning.

The exploration of Mars was proceeding slowly. Not like those breathtaking heady weeks when they had first landed, when every day seemed to bring an exciting new discovery. Now the exploration went more slowly. That’s the way science works, Jamie told himself. You break through into a new area, new ideas, and it’s mind-blowing. But then you get bogged down digging out the details, searching for the clues, building up the evidence.

It takes time, exploring a whole world.

The original Mars base had been at the edge of the Tharsis highlands, but once they discovered the lichen clinging precariously to life at the floor of Tithonium Chasma, and Jamie discovered the ancient ruins notched into a cleft in the cliffs there, they moved the base to the canyon floor and enlarged it. A smaller base had been established almost halfway across the planet in the enormous impact crater called the Hellas Basin, but Jamie knew that they couldn’t afford to keep it going. Nearly three hundred men and women were working on Mars, resupplied regularly by flights from Earth and the lunar nation of Selene. That’s about a hundred more than we can maintain on our current funding, he admitted silently.

Yet we don’t know much more about the Martians than we did twenty years ago, Jamie grumbled to himself, when I first glimpsed the remains of their cliff dwellings. Just that they’re gone, wiped out in the same cataclysm that killed off the dinosaurs here on Earth sixty-five million years ago.

An intelligent species, destroyed by the impersonal, implacable crash of a meteor big enough to blow away Mars’s atmosphere and wipe out all life more complex than those hardy little lichen.

They never knew what hit them, Jamie thought. Then he corrected himself. They knew. They realized that death had come screaming out of the sky. They were intelligent enough to understand. But they didn’t have the level of technology to do anything about it. All they could do was die.

“Christ,” he muttered, “I’m getting morose in my old age. Death and dying is all I think about anymore.”

At least we’ve got those big telescopes watching for asteroids heading toward Earth. We can spot them years in advance. We can send rockets out to them, divert them away from a collision course. We won’t be wiped out the same way the dinosaurs were. The way the Martians were.

With a shake of his head he turned his attention to the morning’s reports. There was a lengthy analysis of the lichen that lived in the rocks strewn along the valley floor. Jamie scanned the abstract, frowning, then studied the graphs that summarized the authors’ findings. The lichen are dying off, he saw. Slowly, slowly, but there’s less and less water vapor in the atmosphere, less water to keep them alive.

Mars is dying. The whole planet is dying. Jamie leaned back in his chair and rubbed his aching eyes. Who isn’t dying? he asked himself.

His phone buzzed. Startled, Jamie glanced at his desktop clock and saw that more than two hours had passed since he’d arrived at his office. I’ve just pissed away two hours, he scolded himself.

The phone buzzed again.

Thoroughly disgusted with the news about the lichen and his own failing, Jamie tapped the phone’s keypad. The face of the President of the Navaho Nation appeared on the flat screen mounted on the wall to his right. She was older than Jamie, her hair dead white, pulled back off her face and tied into a long queue that draped over her shoulder. She was wearing a plain blouse of light tan, with turquoise and coral beads sewn along the edge of the collar. Her face was wrinkled, as weathered as the mesas of the Navaho land where she lived, but her dark eyes sparkled with warmth and lively intellect. She had the same broad cheekbones and stocky build as Jamie.

He glanced again at the digital clock and grinned, despite himself. She’s right on time. Unusual for a Navaho.

“Ya’aa’tey,” Jamie said, dipping his chin slightly.

“Ya’aa’tey,” she replied. It is good.

“Our friend in Boston is late.”

The president smiled. “He must be learning Navaho ways.” They both laughed.

“Everything goes well for you?” Jamie asked. “Almost everything.”

“Almost?”

With a shrug, she replied, “The Anglos are trying to buy more of the reservation’s land. They say they need it for the people who were driven from their homes by the big floods. If we don’t sell they say they’ll go to court and take the land anyway.”

“Refugees.” Jamie knew that the greenhouse warming that had flooded coastal cities and driven out millions of now-homeless refugees was also bringing rains to the lands of the Navaho people, turning stark brown desert into inviting green pastures. White politicians and real estate developers coveted those newly green acres. The pressure to open the reservation to settlement by the refugees was growing every day, every hour.

“There’s plenty of open land in other places,” the president said, “but they’re putting a lot of pressure on—”

The phone buzzed once more, interrupting her. Jamie touched the keypad and his wall screen split into two images. The new one showed C. Dexter Trumball, in his office high up in one of Boston’s financial district towers.

“Morning,” Dex said curtly.

Each time Jamie saw Dex he was struck all over again by how much the former geologist had grown to resemble his late father. Dex Trumball still had all his hair, but his handsome face had thinned over the years since he and Jamie had worked together on the Second Mars Expedition. And those blue green eyes of his seemed sharper, more penetrating, as if he knew things that no one else knew. His father’s eyes, scheming and demanding.

“How’s the weather in Boston?” Jamie could see a briskly clear blue sky through the window at Dex’s back.

“You haven’t seen the news?” Dex asked. “This morning’s news from Washington?”

“No,” said Jamie.

“The president’s zeroed out the Mars program.”

Jamie felt it like a sharp blow to his heart. “She zeroed out…?”

“What does that mean?” asked the Navaho president.

“It means the U.S. government will stop funding us when the new fiscal year starts.”

“She can’t do that!” Jamie protested.

“She’s done it.”

“Congress won’t let her get away with it,” he insisted, but he knew he was clutching at straws.

Dex’s expression was halfway between a sneer and a scowl of disgust.

The Navaho president said, “Other nations help to fund the program, too. Maybe—”

“America puts in the lion’s share,” Dex said. “Once Washington pulls out the others will do the same.”

“But—”

“We’re sunk,” Dex growled. “Screwed. Dead in the water.”

Not while I breathe, Jamie said to himself. Not while there’s a beat left in my heart.

Tithonium Chasma: The Dig

Carleton would not allow Doreen to handle the explosives. Not that they were actually dangerous, but he would not take any chances. She might be just what she says she is, he told himself, a nanotech engineer with nothing better to do while she’s here on Mars. But she might be another plant by those psalm-singing sonsofbitches, he fumed inwardly as he planted the strips of plastique in a careful pattern across the bottom of his excavation. Who knows? She might be one of those fanatics who’d be willing to blow herself up just to destroy me. Like the old suicide bombers back in the Middle East, years ago.

Still, he was glad of her company. He talked to her as he put down the strips of plastic explosive, absently chatting away as if they were strolling along a campus path back on Earth.

“Everything we know in biology supports Darwin’s concept of evolution through natural selection,” he was saying. “Hell, biologists have even watched populations of fishes splitting into separate species, in lakes in Africa.”

“But so many people are against Darwin,” Doreen said, more to keep him talking than out of conviction, he thought. She was sitting up on the lip of the pit, her nanosuited legs dangling into the excavation.

“Know-nothing fundamentalists,” he grumbled as he worked. It was impossible to bend far enough inside the hard-shell suit to lay down the doughy strips. Carleton had to get down on his knees. As he worked he crawled along the rough base of the pit like an oversized infant encased inside a robot.

“I think they see Darwin as a challenge to their beliefs,” Doreen said.

“I think they don’t think at all,” he groused. “They just follow orders from their know-nothing ministers.”

“Now be fair,” Doreen countered. “If Darwin’s right and we humans are just another kind of animal, it destroys their belief that we’re special, that we were created by God separate and apart from all the animals.”

“Yeah, and given dominion over the Earth so we can slaughter all the other animals and chop down all the trees and just generally screw up the environment.”

“It destroys their belief that God sent his only son to redeem our souls,” Doreen said firmly. “It hits them where it hurts the most.”

“You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not about religion. It’s about politics. It’s about power. Their leaders use religion to keep their followers in line. When you’re told you’re doing God’s work you’re willing to do just about anything they tell you to.”

“But they really believe their religion.”

“Of course they do. That’s what makes them so ruthless. They think they’re on God’s side.”

“Doesn’t everybody?”

He looked up at her, from his kneeling position. “Is that what you believe?”

“It’s what they believe, Professor.”

“And you? What about you?”

She hesitated a long moment before answering, “I’m not certain of what I believe. I know that I don’t have all the answers, that’s for sure.”

“But you’re a Christian.”

“A Quaker.”

Surprised, he blurted, “A Quaker?”

“Society of Friends,” Doreen said.

“I never met a Quaker before,” Carleton admitted.

“There aren’t that many of us. We’ve only got four regulars at Selene.”

A Quaker, Carleton mused silently. William Penn was a Quaker. Philadelphia was founded by the Quakers. The University of Pennsylvania, too, if I remember right. But the university isn’t run by Quakers anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.

He felt the old anger simmering inside him again. Squatting on the floor of the excavation, he craned his neck to see Doreen up on the lip of the pit. A Quaker. Could a Quaker be a Mata Hari? he asked himself. Not very likely, he answered. Or are you just thinking with your testicles again?

Finally he finished laying out the explosive strips and planting the thumb-sized detonators in them. Carleton laboriously slipped the climbing rig’s harness over the shoulders of his hard suit, then pressed the button on it that activated the winch. Through the thin Martian air the winch’s motor sounded like the faint whine of a mosquito.

Once he reached the lip of the excavation Doreen came over to help him out of the harness. Then he took her gloved hand and led her fifty paces from the rim of the pit.

“You’re going to set it off?” she asked.

“Got to call control, back at the base,” he said, pecking at the suit radio’s keypad on his left wrist. “The geologists want to know when I blast, so they don’t get their seismometer records screwed up.”

She watched him as he called the base and told the excursion director he was ready to fire the explosives.

“Hold on while I check with the rock jocks,” the controller’s cheerful young voice came through his helmet earphones.

Doreen started to ask, “Do they ever stop you from—”

“Dr. Carleton? You’re cleared to detonate at 11:15 precisely. It’s now 11:06:33.”

“Eleven-oh-six-thirty-three,” Carleton repeated, his eyes on the digital clock set into the wrist pad. “Check. I’ll blow at 11:15, on the tick.”

The explosion, when it came, disappointed Doreen. It wasn’t a ground-shaking blast: just a little whump followed by a cloud of dust that slowly wafted away from the pit.

She walked beside Carleton to the edge of the excavation. Its floor was covered now with broken, shattered bits of rock.

“Now we start the day’s real work,” he said to her.

It took hours to spade up the rubble, pack it into containers, and hoist it up to the surface. Carleton was impressed with Doreen’s willingness to work. And the fact that she could move so much more easily in her nanosuit than he could in his unwieldy hard shell. The strangely small sun climbed higher in the saffron sky. Temperature’s getting up to twenty below, Carleton surmised as they hauled rock shards to the sifter.

He felt perspiration trickling along his ribs and saw Doreen absently try to wipe her brow, only to bump her gloved hand against the spongy bubble of her inflated helmet.

“You should’ve worn a head band,” he told her. “Keeps the sweat out of your eyes.”

Blinking hard, she said, “I didn’t think I’d be sweating when it’s so cold.”

“The suits keep your body heat in.”

“Now you tell me.”

The sifter rattled away. Carleton stopped it to study the contents of the tray beneath it, running his gloved fingers through the dust, finding nothing more than grains of rusty sand. Then he and Doreen poured still another load of shattered rock and started the machine rattling again. Even in the gentle gravity of Mars his arms were starting to ache.

“So much of science is manual labor,” he said as they strained to lift another carton of rubble onto the sifter’s grid. “Just plain donkey work. Hours of it. Years of it. All for the chance of making a discovery.”

“It’s a lot easier in the nanolab back at Selene,” Doreen said, puffing slightly from exertion. “Nanomachines are teensy little things.”

He laughed. “And the Moon’s gravity is even lighter than Mars’s.”

“We should be using nanomachines here,” she said.

“Here? For what?”

“They could build bigger domes for us, pull out atoms of iron and other metals from the ground and build really strong domes, big as you want.”

Carleton felt impressed. “You could do that?”

“Sure,” she replied, her voice eager. “Back at Selene they build spacecraft out of carbon soot. Nanomachines turn the carbon into pure diamond, stronger and lighter than steel.”

“So you think we could build a bigger, safer base with nanobugs.”

She nodded brightly inside her helmet. She’s really good-looking, he thought. Not much of a figure but her face is pretty, with those big soulful gray-green eyes. Carleton smoothed the rubble over the grid and reached for the switch that would start the sifter working again.

“That’s a funny-looking piece of rock,” Doreen said, pointing to one of the shards on the grid.

Carleton grunted and picked up the odd-shaped rock in his gloved hand. It rested in his palm easily. He held it for a moment, then turned it over and brought it up almost touching his visor so he could look at it more closely.

He goggled at it. He actually felt his eyes bugging out, felt the breath gush out of him.

“Dr. Carleton?” Doreen said. “Carter? Are you okay?”

It took several tries before he could say, “It’s a funny-looking piece of rock, all right. It’s a vertebra! I’ll eat camel dung if it’s not a goddamned mother-loving vertebra!”

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

Let’s put this in perspective,” Jamie said to Dex and the Navaho president. “It doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.”

“The hell it doesn’t,” Dex muttered.

“Most of our funding comes from the Foundation,” said the Navaho president. “The government’s contribution is important, I know, but we get most of our money from private donors, don’t we?”

Dex answered, “Private contributions have been tailing off. It’s harder and harder to get major donations; the big money people have been backing away from us, and now, with the goddamned feds pulling out of the program, it’ll be tougher than ever to get them to come through.”

The president said, “I know we’re not supposed to make a profit out of Mars, but my Council people have been making noises.”

“Noises?” Jamie asked.

“You know, questions. They’re wondering why we can’t get something out of the program.”

Dex started to say, “You’re running the world’s biggest conservation effort, and—”

“The biggest in two worlds,” the president corrected, with a sly smile.

“Three,” Dex immediately countered. “Don’t leave out the Moon.”

Jamie listened to them arguing mildly back and forth, remembering how Dex had originally come to Mars on the Second Expedition, bubbling with plans to make a tourist center of the red planet. Ostensibly a geologist, C. Dexter Trumball had insisted that if private donors such as his father were expected to finance the exploration of Mars they had to be allowed to make a profit out of it. He had his father’s vision of using Mars to make money. But once he saw the ancient cliff dwellings, once he realized that this seemingly barren planet had sustained intelligent life, Dex defied his father and helped Jamie turn legal stewardship of Mars to the Navaho nation.

A friendship had grown between the two men, a friendship that held strong even after Dex returned to Earth to face his furious father.

It was a supreme irony, granting control of the red planet to the red-skinned Navaho, who regarded the guardianship of Mars as a sacred trust and would allow only scientific exploration. The news media trumpeted the story while financial backers such as Darryl C. Trumball howled about betrayal and turned to their lawyers. The International Astronautical Authority upheld the Navaho claim, and so did the World Court—as long as at least one member of the Navaho nation actually lived on Mars. International law prohibited any nation or corporate entity from claiming ownership of a planet or even a pebble-sized asteroid, but anyone could claim exclusive use of a body in space if they were actually working on that body.

So the Navaho nation controlled Mars as long as one Navaho lived and worked on the planet. The scheme had succeeded for nearly twenty years. Mars was being explored by international teams of scientists. Tourism was limited to virtual reality simulations, where paying customers could experience a visit to Mars without leaving their living rooms on Earth, without disturbing the frigid desert sands of the red planet.

With a conscious effort, Jamie returned his attention to the meeting and the problems of the day.

“The VR tours are bringing in a steady income,” the Navaho president was saying, “especially when we open up a new territory to walk through.”

“So what’s the problem?” Jamie asked.

“The Council’s hoping for more income,” she replied, her normally stolid face frowning slightly. “Maybe a bigger percentage of the gross.”

“Christ, you’re already getting everything above our operating costs,” Dex Trumball snapped.

“Your operating costs include a pretty fat fee,” said the president.

“My Foundation people can’t work for free!”

The president sighed. “It’s just like the casinos: you’re making more money out of the VR tours than we are.”

“But you’re not doing anything,” Dex insisted. “You don’t have any costs at all. It’s all pure profit for you.”

Jamie jumped in before the president could reply. “Dex, listen: no matter how much money the VR tours bring in, the Diné will always need more.”

“And my Foundation’s supposed to be an endless source of bucks?”

“We have a lot of legal fees coming up,” the president pointed out. “Washington is making claims on reservation land. Squatters are moving in on us.”

Dex’s youthful face broke into a wicked grin. “We could offer the refugees land on Mars. Like the old Homestead Act, let ’em settle—”

“No!” Jamie shouted.

Laughing, Dex replied, “I was wondering how long it’d take you to yell.”

“You’re not serious,” the Navaho president said.

“Not really,” Dex admitted. Then his expression turned crafty. “Although I bet we could build big domes, pump air into them, bake the oxides out of the soil and start growing crops.”

Scowling, Jamie said, “Don’t even joke about that, Dex.”

But Dex went on, “With the new fusion torch ships the transportation costs wouldn’t be so bad, I bet.”

“Dex—”

“I know, it’s just crazy enough for some politicians in Washington to go for it. Send the refugees to Mars! A trillion-dollar boondoggle.”

“It’s not funny,” Jamie insisted.

“Yeah,” Dex admitted. “I guess not. Wouldn’t work anyway. Even with the fusion rockets it’s too damned expensive to ship millions of people off-planet.”

“So can we get a better break on the revenue income?” the president asked, returning to her point.

“I don’t see how,” Dex replied immediately. “Besides, we’ve got a bigger problem now.”

“Bigger?” asked Jamie.

“With Washington backing out of the program, the Foundation’s going to have to carry the funding load pretty much alone.”

“But there’s the Europeans, the Chinese—”

“And the Russians, I know. They’ll all back away, you wait and see. Besides, what they’re putting into the pot now isn’t enough to lake up the slack.”

“So it’s up to the Foundation,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, but the donations are getting harder to come by. The big money’s going into reconstruction, restoring the electric power grid, new housing for the refugees. Everybody and his brother has their hands out. It’s endless.”

“And Mars is a luxury,” the Navaho president murmured.

“Worse than that,” said Dex. “The religious nuts want to close us down. They don’t want us finding anything else about the Martians. They don’t even want to think that there was another intelligent race on Mars.”

“The New Morality?”

“And the Holy Disciples in Europe and all the rest of them. They don’t like us finding anything that conflicts with their twelfth-century view of the world. They want to forget about Mars. They want everybody else to forget about Mars, as well.”

Jamie sank back in his desk chair. “So they’re putting pressure on you.”

“Not just me. On our donors, our backers. Spend your money here on Earth, they say. Help your fellow human beings instead of poking around on Mars.”

“That’s a strong argument,” said the Navaho president.

Searching for a ray of hope, Jamie said, “But the universities want to continue the exploration.”

“The universities are under pressure, too,” said Dex, with a shake of his head. “And now that the White House has skunked us, it’s going to be tougher than ever to raise new funds.”

Interview

“So how can you possibly keep your team on Mars now that the government has canceled its funding for the program?”

Jamie stared at the interviewer. He had spent most of the day answering questions from reporters. He had appeared on four different network news shows, skipping lunch to sit before their cameras and answer the same questions over and over again.

Normally Jamie enjoyed interviews. He got a kick out of the cut-and-thrust, where the interviewer was trying to dig out something sensational and he was doing his best to get across the points he wanted to make despite the interviewer’s loaded questions. But now, after this long day of interrogation, Jamie felt tired and irritable.

They’re ready to bury us, he realized. Half of them don’t even know that most of our funding comes from private sources, and has for nearly twenty years. Washington pulls out and they think we’re dead.

This interview in the studio of a local Albuquerque affiliate of a major network was being aired live across the nation. Jamie had postponed his dinner to appear in the studio. He had phoned Vijay at home twice to tell her he’d be late and twice gotten the answering machine’s bland response. Has she heard the news? he wondered.

His interviewer of the moment was in Los Angeles, speaking with Jamie over a closed video circuit. Rhonda Samuels was a crafty middle-aged woman with a practiced smile and a cobra’s eyes. Her ash blond hair was so carefully coiffed that Jamie thought it could have been a helmet. Her beige suit fit her trim figure without the slightest wrinkle. Jamie felt distinctly grungy in the shirt and jeans he’d been in since early morning. He was glad he’d worn the onyx bolo.

How can we keep exploring Mars without money from Washington? Jamie fingered the bear fetish in his pocket as he framed his answer.

He remembered how his grandfather Al would sit in silence for long moments while he was dickering with one of the artisans who produced the jewelry and hand-painted pottery that Al sold in his shop on the Plaza in Santa Fe. Al was never in a hurry when he spoke to his fellow Native Americans. “Take some time, Jamie,” he would advise his grandson. “Size up the person you’re talkin’ to. Get the feel of the situation before you open your mouth.”

But this was television, where five seconds is an eternity.

Rhonda Samuels interrupted his silence.

“I mean,” she said, her voice low but hard-edged, “without government funding you won’t be able to keep the exploration team on Mars, will you?”

“Actually, Ms. Samuels,” Jamie said, trying to make it bright despite his inner weariness, “the government was only contributing about a tenth of our total funding. Most of our support comes from private sources.”

Her brows shot up. “Private sources?”

“The Mars Foundation, which is based here in New Mexico,” Jamie explained. “One of our major backers is the Trumball Trust, in Boston. Then there’s—”

“But without the government’s contribution, can you afford to keep those men and women on Mars?”

“I think so. We’re doing the math. And we’re looking for additional donors.”

“Additional donors?” she asked.

“People or institutions that want to help us carry on the exploration of Mars.”

“But in the meantime, if your budget is strained by Washington’s decision, won’t that have repercussions for your exploration team?”

“Repercussions?”

“On their safety,” Rhonda Samuels said. “If you have to cut your budget, won’t that affect the safety of the explorers on Mars?”

Jamie forced a strained smile. “Safety is always uppermost in our minds.”

“Ahead of everything else?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Were you thinking safety first when you were on Mars and you pushed your superiors to allow you to make the first excursion into the Grand Canyon?”

“Nobody died,” Jamie said tightly.

“But there certainly were dangers involved.”

“There are dangers involved in all exploration. You learn to deal with them. We have an excellent safety record.”

“But what if someone was seriously injured, or came down with an illness you’re not equipped to deal with on Mars. What would happen, with the nearest hospital a hundred million miles away?”

Jamie smiled gently. “We’d send a fusion torch ship to take the patient back to Earth. It’s not like the old days, when it took months to travel to Mars. Fusion torch ships can make the trip in less than a week.”

Sharply, she asked, “Why aren’t you on Mars, then?”

Jamie cursed himself for not expecting that one. He lifted his chin a notch and replied, “Personal reasons. Family reasons.”

“Your son’s death.”

Nodding, he said, “He died on Earth, not Mars.”

Shifting slightly in her chair, Samuels asked, “How old are the members of the exploration team? What’s their average age?”

She must think I keep all the personnel files in my head, Jamie said to himself. Aloud, he replied “Mostly pretty young. Postdocs in their late twenties, thirties, for the most part. I guess the oldest person on the team right now is Carter Carleton.”

Her eyes widened. “Carter Carleton? The maverick anthropologist? He’s on Mars?”

“He has been for nearly a year,” Jamie said. “And he’s no more of a maverick than you are.”

Samuels hesitated for the barest fraction of a second, then turned to face straight into the camera. “We’ll be back in a moment. But first this.”

The overhead lights dimmed slightly and the muted monitor screen suddenly showed a housewife staring into a sink full of dirty dishes.

From the larger flat panel that linked to Los Angeles Rhonda Samuels said to Jamie, “You’re doing fine.” A younger woman rushed to her side with a brush in one hand and a spray can in the other.

“I just want you to understand,” Jamie replied slowly, “that we’ll never knowingly endanger our people on Mars.”

She nodded while her assistant fussed with her perfect hair. Jamie thought of Edie Elgin, the TV newswoman he’d lived with when he was in Houston training for the First Expedition. Beautiful, bright, gutsy Edith. She was married now and living in Selene, the underground city on the Moon. Married to Douglas Stavenger, no less, Selene’s founder and de facto leader.

“One thing, though, Dr. Waterman. Call me Rhonda. Not Ms. Samuels. Got it?”

“Got it,” Jamie said, nodding.

“In one!” called the floor director, a hand on the intercom plug tucked into his ear.

Jamie sat up a little straighter and tried to clear his mind as the hairdresser scampered out of view.

The floor director pointed at Jamie and the interviewer turned on her brittle smile again. “Dr. Waterman, let me ask you a different question.”

“Fine, Rhonda,” said Jamie.

“What are we getting out of the exploration of Mars? What have you discovered that’s worth the billions of dollars that have been spent on your program?”

Jamie felt his cheeks flare with sudden anger and hoped the cameras didn’t pick it up. Forcing himself to take a calming breath before speaking, he answered, “That’s sort of like asking how high is up.”

“What have you found?” Samuels insisted. “After all, you’ve spent billions—”

“Life,” Jamie said sharply. “We’ve found the most important thing that’s ever been discovered, Rhonda. We’ve found that ours is not the only world on which life exists. More than that, we’ve found intelligent life. Intelligence arose on Mars, just as it has on Earth.”

“But it’s gone extinct.”

“That’s not the important point,” Jamie said. “The important point is that intelligence is not rare in the universe. We’ve explored two planets—Earth and Mars—and found intelligence on both of them. Two for two. There’s probably all sorts of intelligent species on other worlds.”

“Really?” Rhonda Samuels’s carefully painted face looked almost fearful.

“Really,” said Jamie.

She hesitated, cocked her head slightly to one side. Getting instructions through her earplug from her director, Jamie guessed.

At last she said, “Dr. Waterman, you’ve made the point that you would never knowingly endanger the men and women now on Mars.”

“That’s right.”

“But how can you be sure of that? Aren’t they in danger every day they’re on Mars, every moment?”

Jamie rocked back slightly. “I don’t think they’re in such terrible danger.”

“You don’t? Aren’t you being naive about that? After all, they can’t breathe the air, can’t walk in the open without wearing spacesuits. Do you have adequate medical facilities on Mars? Can you evacuate someone if a medical emergency comes up?”

“We’ve never had that kind of a problem.”

“The people have a right to know just how much danger your team on Mars is in.”

“We know how to deal with the conditions on Mars. We do it every day.”

“Every day,” Samuels repeated, as if it was an accusation.

Then she turned from Jamie to look squarely into the camera again. “I think we owe it to the courage of those fine men and women struggling to survive on Mars to bring them home, now that the budget for exploring Mars has been cut to a dangerously low level.”

Jamie sat there with his mouth hanging open while the floor director shouted, “Okay! We’re out!”

Albuquerque: Duran Condominiums

It was dark by the time Jamie parked his Nissan hybrid in his assigned space next to Vijay’s convertible. It was late summer, monsoon season: his wife hadn’t put the top down on her car in weeks.

There were puddles on the parking lot and lightning flickering beyond the Sandia Mountains, flashing against the clouds in the dark brooding sky. That’s something we never have to worry about on Mars, Jamie told himself. Hasn’t rained there in sixty million years, at least.

When he opened the door to his home Vijay was sitting on the deep leather sofa watching the television news.

“You’re a popular bloke today,” she said, smiling as she got to her feet. Born of Hindu parents in Melbourne, she had never overcome her Aussie accent.

Jamie kissed her lightly. “The White House’s gift to me.”

“It’s a shame, what they did,” Vijay said. “A crime.”

“Yeah.”

“You look tired.”

“I’ve been on the grill all day, just about.” She picked up the remote from the coffee table and clicked off the TV.

“How about you?” he asked. “How do you feel?” Her bright smile lit up her dark face. “Fine. Worried about you, though.”

“You want to go out for dinner? Roberto’s maybe. Or that new sushi place?”

“I don’t really feel up to it, Jamie. I’m sure you’d rather kick off your boots and stay home, wouldn’t you?”

He shrugged.

“There’s hot dogs in the fridge. And I think we still have a few bottles of beer.”

Jamie slipped his arms around her waist and pulled her close, her rich voluptuous body pressing against his. “Fine,” he said. “Hot dogs and beer. Typical American meal.”

She laughed. It was an old joke between them: typical Americans, he a half-Navaho and she a Hindu from Australia.

Dex Trumball was not laughing, He had flown to New York to discuss a tax audit of the Trumball Trust with the director of the Internal Revenue Service’s northeastern regional office. After that grim afternoon he went with his latest trophy wife to sit through a long and boring dinner at the Metropolitan Club in Manhattan, and then endured an even longer and more boring speech by an architect who showed digital images of the new city she was building in the mountains of Colorado. With millions of people driven from their homes by the greenhouse flooding, the federal government was spending hundreds of billions on erecting new cities.

The speech had ended with a plea for donations, of course. The audience was wealthy: most of them were getting even wealthier on government contracts to build housing and roads and all the infrastructure that was needed to shelter the refugees and start them on new lives.

Now Dex sat in the plush quiet bar, nursing a scotch and water, listening to the architect drone on and on. His wife had excused herself and hurried off to their hotel. Thinking of her in bed watching TV as she waited for him, Dex wondered why he was going through the motions of being polite to this bore.

“We’ve learned quite a lot from the life-support systems they’ve developed on the Moon,” she was saying, emphasizing each word with the clicking tap of a manicured finger on the polished mahogany of the bar. She was rail thin and her voice had an irritating nasal twang to it. “We’ll be recycling the water and all the waste systems, turning garbage into electricity.”

Dex nodded absently, wondering how he could escape her determined enthusiasm without being boorish about it. The architect was swiveling slightly on the stool to one side of him; on the other was an old friend of his late father’s, a dimwitted old coot who thought that anyone under the age of eighty was a flighty kid who needed firm direction from his elders.

“You still involved in this Mars business?” the old man asked. Dex thought that a century ago he would have been a poster boy for communist propaganda about bloated capitalists: the man was bald and corpulent, several chins lapping over the black tie of his tuxedo. His eyes were narrow, squinting, piggish.

Nodding, Dex said, “The Trust funds the Mars Foundation.”

“Damn luxury we can’t afford anymore,” the old man said, his voice grating, harsh. “Cut your losses, Dexter, and turn your attention back here to Earth, where it’s needed.”

Dex bit back his first impulse to tell the old fart to go to hell. Instead, he replied mildly, “Mr. Younger, you could afford to fund the entire Mars operation out of your own pocket, you know that?”

“What? Me?”

“The team we’re supporting on Mars costs a lot less than one of the cities Ms. Battista here wants to build.”

“But people need my cities!” cried the architect.

“Sure they do,” Dex said. “And we need to continue exploring Mars, too.”

He wished he believed his own words.

It wasn’t until he and Vijay were sitting together on the sofa and the dishwasher was chugging away in the kitchen that Jamie said, “Pressure’s building to shut down the program.”

“Close it? You mean bring everybody home?”

He nodded, tight-lipped. “We’ve already had to shut down the new base at Hellas.”

Varuna Jarita Shektar had been the physician on the Second Expedition. She and Jamie had met in training, traveled to Mars together, and slowly but irrevocably fallen in love. The two of them stayed alone on the red planet for four months after the rest of the team had left for Earth and before the replacement team had arrived, Adam and Eve in a barren, frigid new world that was to them a Garden of Eden.

“But they can’t shut down the entire operation,” Vijay said, her luminous dark eyes blazing with indignation. “They simply can’t. They mustn’t!”

Jamie wished he could work up such righteous wrath so easily. But he couldn’t. It was all bottled up inside him. Everything. Including Jimmy’s death. Especially Jimmy’s death.

“Vee…” he started to say. But the words caught in his throat.

She was still incensed. “How can they even think about shutting down the program? After all you’ve done, all you’ve discovered.”

“Vijay,” he said, grasping her by the shoulders. “If I hadn’t been on Mars… if I’d been here with you… and Jimmy…”

She stared at him, her eyes wide with sudden understanding. “Jamie, no.”

“If I’d been here, the way a father should’ve been, he wouldn’t have—”

“No!” she snapped. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it!”

“But—”

“It’s not going to bring him back.”

“I know. But still… I feel responsible. It’s my fault.”

It had taken him nearly two years to say those words.

“It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine,” Vijay said.

“Yours? How could it be your fault?”

“I was here. I should’ve kept a better watch on Jimmy. I should’ve…” Her voice faltered and tears misted her eyes.

He pulled her close, heard her sobbing softly, her head on his shoulder.

“Vee, we’ll get through this. Together. The two of us.”

“That’s all that’s left, isn’t it? The two of us.”

“I don’t want to lose you, Vijay.”

“You’ll never lose me, love. We’re one person, the two of us. Together always.”

“You’re all I have in the whole world.”

She pulled away from him slightly, blinking tears away as she smiled sadly and said, “No, Jamie. That’s not true. You have Mars, don’t you, love?”

He couldn’t reply to that. But inwardly he thought, I might not have Mars much longer. They’re going to take that away from me, too.

Tithonium Base: The Fossil

Nearly everyone in the base crowded around the big stereo table. Ordinarily used to show three-dimensional views of Martian terrain, now it was a blank, unlit white—with the palm-sized fossil vertebra resting in front of Carter Carleton. It was light gray, the color of ashes; bits of dirt still clung to it here and there.

Carleton surveyed their eager faces as they pressed close, felt the heat of their bodies, the scent of their excitement. Directly across the table from him stood Chang Laodong, the mission director, bald and dour in his dumpy-looking blue coveralls with their mandarin collar, looking, as usual, as if he’d been sucking on a lemon.

Trying to suppress the supreme delight of this moment, Carleton spread his hands and, smiling, said, “Well, it’s a vertebra. No doubt of it.”

Chang forced a pale smile. “We must obtain verification of your identification from qualified paleontologists.”

Nodding, Carleton replied, “I’ve already sent stereo images of the fossil to half a dozen of the top universities.”

“And to program headquarters in New Mexico?”

“Of course,” Carleton replied. In his excitement he hadn’t initially thought about Waterman, back in Albuquerque, but then Doreen had reminded him of the mission protocol.

Chang stared hard at the fossil, as if he could force it to give information by sheer willpower.

“It certainly looks like a vertebra,” said Kalman Torok, running a hand through his thick mop of hair. “See the ridges?”

“And the central cavity where the spinal cord runs through,” added one of the other biologists.

“What kind of an animal is it from?” someone asked.

“Who the hell knows? This is all brand-new territory!”

“From what I know of physiology,” Carleton said slowly, deliberately working to keep his voice calm, “this looks like it came from a quadruped. Bipedal vertebrae don’t have such thick walls.”

“Then it’s not from a Martian. One of the intelligent species, I mean.”

“How do you know?”

“If it’s not bipedal—”

“Intelligent species don’t have to be bipedal.”

Washington, D.C.: Reflecting Pool

Jamie, you can’t just barge into the Oval Office,” said Francisco Delgado, the president’s science advisor. “Hell, I haven’t seen her myself in three weeks.”

Delgado was a compactly built man with the physique of a former athlete who had gone soft. His brown-skinned face was starting to show jowls, although his hair was still dark and thick, as was his heavy brush of a moustache. He wore a dark gray business suit with a lighter gray sweater beneath its jacket. Jamie had known him since Delgado had been a biology professor from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and a consultant to the crew selection committee for the Second Mars Expedition.

Dressed in stiffly new jeans and a pullover under an old, thin blue windbreaker, Jamie was walking with the science advisor along the Reflecting Pool between the phallic spire of the Washington Monument and the Athenian harmony of the Lincoln Memorial. When Jamie had phoned from Boston to ask to see him, Delgado had suggested a breakfast meeting. Jamie was surprised that breakfast turned out to be a sweet bun and a plastic cup of coffee purchased from a street vendor.

It was a chilly morning, gray, with a hint of rain in the humid air. Only a few tourists were meandering by this early in the day, many of them pushing baby carriages, looking cold and unhappy with the weather.

Delgado walked briskly, paper-wrapped bun in one hand, coffee cup in the other. Jamie kept pace with him and within a few minutes he no longer felt chilled: in fact, Jamie wished he had a hand free to unzip his windbreaker.

“I need to talk to her,” he said. “This new discovery changes everything.”

The science advisor shook his head as he munched on his breakfast bun. “It doesn’t really change a damned thing, Jamie. They’re already talking about reducing the budget for the National Science Foundation.”

“But that’s where most of the university grants come from!”

“Don’t I know it.”

“Cut off the NSF funds and the universities won’t be able to support their work on Mars.”

“Well, that’s where the battle line is now. That’s what I’m fighting to protect.”

Jamie looked into Delgado’s troubled eyes and realized this man was on his side, but struggling against tremendous forces.

“What can I do to help?” he asked.

“Not a hell of a lot, Jamie. They’re not interested in Mars.”

“Let me talk to the president,” Jamie begged. “Maybe I can make her see the situation more clearly. Maybe I—”

“She won’t see you,” Delgado snapped, his tone hardening. “She can’t afford to be seen with you.”

“Can’t afford…?”

“Look: she was elected by a paper-thin majority and now she’s facing the off-year elections with everybody blaming her for the greenhouse floods and anything else that’s happened during her first two years. Those Bible-thumping New Morality zealots already control the House of Representatives. By November they’ll have the majority in the Senate!”

“So she can’t afford to antagonize them, is that it?” Jamie asked.

Delgado turned on his heel and strode away. Crumpling the empty wrapper in one hand while he gulped the last of his coffee, he walked up to a trash receptacle and dumped both. Jamie followed him and did the same.

Over his shoulder, Delgado said, “Come with me, Jamie. There’s something I want to show you. Something you need to see.”

Ignoring the line of taxicabs parked along Constitution Avenue, Delgado hurried up toward the Ellipse. At first Jamie thought they were going to the White House after all, but Delgado veered off at Seventeenth Street and marched Jamie into a glass-walled office building. There was no plaque on the entrance, no sign announcing what the building was or which government agency might be housed in it.

Puffing slightly from the pace the science advisor set, Jamie followed Delgado through the inevitable security checkpoint in the quiet, nearly empty lobby. After they went through the metal detector a sullen-looking overweight guard in a blue National Security Agency uniform handed them identification badges. Jamie eyed the heavy black pistol holstered on the guard’s hip as he clipped his badge onto the front of his windbreaker. Delgado led Jamie into a waiting elevator.

“What is this place?” Jamie asked as the elevator doors closed. To his surprise, it went down, not up.

“It’s a new climatology facility,” the science advisor answered.

“Why—”

“There’s something you’ve got to see. Something that just might put things into the proper perspective for you.”

The elevator went down four levels, then stopped with a lurch. The doors slid open.

There were more people in the corridor down at this level than there had been in the lobby. Still, the men and women seemed to Jamie to be moving at a leisurely pace. Government employees, Jamie thought.

The smooth cream-colored paneling of the corridor was set with a series of doors, all of them blank except for five-digit numbers stenciled on them. Mounted beside each door was a small keypad. Delgado walked Jamie to the end of the corridor and tapped out a security code on the pad next to its double doors. They slid open noiselessly.

Jamie followed the science advisor into a darkened room, lit only by the giant display screens that filled three of the walls. People sat at what looked to Jamie like electronics consoles. The place reminded him of a NASA mission control center, except that the usual crackle of tense excitement was missing.

The wall displays were electronic maps, Jamie saw. He recognized satellite views of the continental United States, Europe, Latin America.

Delgado walked him through the consoles to the display of the United States.

“Take a good look,” said the science advisor. “This is a real-time display, with the cloud cover removed.”

Jamie recognized the image, although as he stared at it he realized it looked slightly wrong, subtly different from the maps he was accustomed to.

Pointing with an outstretched arm, Delgado said, “We’re holding our own along the East Coast, pretty much, although the dams and flood control systems have cost us so much the federal budget’ll be in the red for generations to come.”

That’s why Washington isn’t under water, Jamie realized.

Delgado went on, “But take a look at the Gulf of Mexico. Look at Florida. See how the sea level is moving in.”

Jamie could see that the coastline he was familiar with was no longer there. The Gulf of Mexico was encroaching from Texas to the tip of Florida. He couldn’t find Galveston. Miami was an island, surrounded by the Atlantic.

“That’s the way it is today,” Delgado said, his voice grim. “Now see what happens in five years.”

The image shifted. Most of Florida disappeared under water. The Mississippi River swelled into a connected series of lakes that swallowed entire cities. The Gulf of Mexico grew noticeably larger and covered most of Louisiana.

“That’s what we’re up against, Jamie. And it’s not going to stop. The Arctic is melting down! So’s the Antarctic. Fresh water runoff from Greenland will interrupt the Gulf Stream in another couple of decades. Maybe sooner. When the Stream shuts down, Europe goes into the deep freeze.”

In the greenish light from the wall displays Delgado’s face looked splotched, ghastly. Jamie heard the bitterness in his voice, the anger.

“We’re facing major flooding of the country’s heartland. People in the Pentagon are talking about marching into Canada to take their wheat belt, for god’s sakes! And maybe a new Ice Age to top it all off!”

Jamie stared at him in silence.

“And you want to spend money on frigging Mars? You expect the president to give you a Christmas present, all wrapped up in a bow? Forget it!”

With a silent shake of his head Jamie turned away and started for the door. I won’t forget it, he said to himself. I can’t.

Tithonium Base: Conflict

Chang Laodong looked distinctly uncomfortable as he sat behind his desk facing Carter Carleton. The mission director’s office was small but three of its four walls were covered with smart screens that displayed treasures of Chinese art: silk paintings of misty mountain scenes, statues of powerful arch-necked horses, the inevitable portraits of Buddha and Mao. Otherwise the office was strictly utilitarian, with only Chang’s desk, the chair before it, and a sofa and low table along one wall, flanked by two more small chairs.

As always, Chang was wearing high-collared blue coveralls. He had summoned Carleton to his office to discuss the anthropologist’s demand for field workers to help excavate the village site. In his mind’s eye, the mission director saw all his carefully prepared work schedules being torn apart, his meticulous plans being thrown into chaos.

Two hundred and forty-two men and women were based here at Tithonium, he knew. Biologists studying endolithic lichen and underground bacteria. Geologists studying satellite data of south polar cap melting. Atmospheric physicists investigating decline of moisture in atmosphere. Paleontologists searching for more rock dwellings along the walls of Grand Canyon. And the geysers: spurts of liquid water bursting out of ground. What is the heat source that liquefies permafrost? That is important!

All my responsibility, Chang told himself. All on my shoulders. Their work depends on my leadership, my ability to organize them properly, to bring their work into smooth, harmonious totality.

And this one stubborn anthropologist who’s made a lucky discovery. He sits there smiling, handsome as a video star. What does he care how he upsets my plans? He thinks he has the upper hand over me.

Chang forced a smile. “There is great excitement Earthside over your discovery,” he began.

“Yes,” said Carleton, his own smile broadening. “I’ve received several dozen messages from all over the world. Even China.”

Chang closed his eyes slowly, a tactic he used when he did not want to reveal his inner thoughts. He felt a surge of anger at this upstart who was wrecking his schedules, who was threatening to wrest control of this operation from his hands.

Carleton thought of a lizard basking on a sunny rock as he waited for Chang to open his eyes again. And his mouth.

“Waterman urges me to provide you with all the assistance you may require,” Chang said at last, his eyes still closed.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

Snapping his eyes open, Chang added, “He also tells me that the United States government is canceling all its funding for our operation. We may be forced to abandon our work here and return to Earth.”

Carleton’s head flicked back as if he’d been slapped. Good! Chang thought. Let him understand the consequences.

“We can’t stop the work here!” the anthropologist said. “Hell, we’ve just started.”

“I agree with your sentiment,” said Chang. “But if the Foundation cannot raise enough money to replace funds that the American government is withdrawing, we will be forced to go home.”

“Waterman won’t let that happen. He’ll figure out a way.”

“Let us hope so. In meantime, there is the question of how to adequately assist you in your work.”

“I’ve got plenty of volunteers.”

Chang shook his head slowly. “I cannot allow staff personnel to work for you on a volunteer basis. They are already working eight to twelve hours a day on their assigned duties. More, in many cases.”

“But if they want to—”

“Their eagerness to help you outweighs their common sense. They cannot help you with your digging for several hours each day and still work effectively at their regular tasks. Productivity will decline. People will fall asleep on their jobs. There will be accidents, dangerous accidents.”

Carleton started to reply, hesitated, then offered, “What about the team coming back from Hellas Base? They’re supposed to be shipped back to Earth. What if some of them volunteered to work with me full time?”

“Highly trained geologists and biologists, slaving like coolies in that pit of yours?”

His smile turning almost into a smirk, Carleton replied, “Dr. Chang, may I remind you that I’m a highly trained anthropologist and I’ve been slaving like a coolie for months. By myself. Now I need help, and your superiors Earthside agree that you should provide it to me.”

Chang’s self-discipline snapped. “May I remind you that you are a fugitive from very serious criminal charges on Earth!”

Carleton’s smile evaporated. “Those charges are baseless and you know it.”

“I know that the charges have never been settled. We took you into our program and allowed you to come to Mars despite them.”

Grimly, Carleton said, “That’s got nothing to do with the question at hand. Will you allow me to use some of the people returning from the Hellas base?”

Chang closed his eyes again, thinking, It is a good stratagem. People returning from Hellas are due to be shipped home. A few of them can stay here at Tithonium and work with him. Waterman is urging me to help him. This is how to do that without wrecking all our other work.

“Well?” Carleton demanded.

Opening his eyes, Chang said mildly, “You may ask personnel returning from Hellas. If any of them volunteer to remain here instead of returning to Earth, let it be so.”

Carleton took in a deep breath, as if he’d just accomplished an incredibly difficult feat. “Thank you, Dr. Chang,” he said, his voice low.

“How many hands will you need?” Chang asked.

“Six, for now. More than that and we’ll just get in each other’s way. But later on, as things progress…”

“Six,” Chang repeated. “We can accommodate six additional people here without straining our resources.”

“Five, actually,” said Carleton. “Ms. McManus has already volunteered to work with me.”

“The nanotechnologist? She has her regular duties.”

“She says she can spend at least half her days working on the excavation.”

Chang couldn’t help asking, “And where will she spend her nights?”

Carleton’s face froze. After several heartbeats he replied tightly, “That’s her business, not yours.”

Southwest Airlines Flight 799

As he rode the jet airliner back toward Albuquerque Jamie desperately tried to think of some way, some method of raising support for the Mars program. I’ll have to see New Mexico’s senators, he told himself. Maybe get the people running the spaceport down in Alamogordo to put pressure on the politicians.

I can go to the media, he added. Get Dex to put together a TV special out of all the virtual reality tours we’ve done on Mars. Do a VR show on the fossil Carleton’s discovered! That ought to bring in public support. Maybe we can start a public drive for funds, get ordinary people to contribute to keeping the Mars program going.

He leaned his head against the seat back, planning, thinking, hoping. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the land sliding past, endless miles of dry brittle brown where once there had been green fields of grain as far as the eye could see. The greenhouse warming had cruelly brought both drought and flooding to America’s heartland. The nation’s breadbasket was withering away.

Jamie closed his eyes, feeling overwhelmed by what was happening to the world, to two worlds, to him and everything he cared about. He closed his eyes and immediately found himself on Mars.

In his mind he stood at the edge of the tranquil sea, beneath a clear sky of perfect turquoise blue, while the Sun’s warmth baked into his bare shoulders. The gentle waves lapped at his feet and the water stretched to the horizon and far beyond. Strangely, Jamie felt no misgivings at seeing so much water on Mars. It’s not very deep, he told himself; nowhere near as deep as the ocean basins on the blue world. Then it struck him: Mars was once a blue world, too!

Turning, he looked back across the land. It was not a frigid red desert. The land was golden with grain that waved gracefully in the gentle breeze. Far in the distance mountains rose dramatically, bluish green almost up to their bare granite summits.

Water means life, Jamie knew. Mars is young and alive. He looked up into the cloudless sky, squinting against the Sun’s brightness. But Coyote will send monsters to destroy all this, he knew. This will end. Soon.

“This is First Officer De La Hoya speaking,” a woman’s voice came through the cabin speakers. “We’re approaching the Albuquerque area.”

Jamie blinked and rubbed his eyes, his vision of ancient Mars fading away. Outside the airliner’s window he saw a familiar yet strange landscape sliding by. Rugged mesas and tortuous arroyos—covered with green. The abrupt climate change had bizarrely brought plentiful rain to the stark scrublands of the desert Southwest. The Gulf of California was invading the Colorado River basin. Yuma was already flooded and there were dark jokes about Albuquerque itself becoming a seaside resort town. The lands of the Navahos and other Native Americans farther north were green and burgeoning.

The Navaho side of Jamie’s mind remembered grimly that the Anglos were already making inroads on reservation land. Refugees driven from the flooded coastal cities formed a pressure bloc that was trying to drive The People from their own territory.

“To our left in just about a minute you’ll be able to see a Clippership launch from the New Mexico spaceport near Alamogordo,” the plane’s first officer continued.

Passengers on the right side of the cabin got up from their seats and crowded over the shoulders of those in the left-hand seats for a view of the rocket’s liftoff. Jamie, on an aisle seat, leaned forward and peered through the plane’s oval window.

“There it is!” somebody shouted.

Jamie saw a pillar of white smoke rising fast beyond the distant mountains, up, up into the crystalline blue sky. He knew that the Clippership was a squat cone of gleaming composite plastic carrying up to a hundred passengers across the Pacific in half an hour. Or maybe this flight was going to one of the space stations in orbit around the Earth. He remembered the thunder of the rocket engines on his flights, the bone-rattling vibration of all that power, the press of three times normal gravity squeezing you down into your acceleration couch. And then it all cut off, all at once, and you were weightless, held down on your couch only by the restraining straps, your stomach dropping away inside you.

If you’ve got to fly, he thought with an inward smile, that’s the way to do it.

The jet airliner circled around the Sandia Mountains as the Clippership’s distant exhaust trail slowly dissolved and disappeared. By the time the plane landed there was no trace of it in the sky.

Jamie was surprised to see Vijay waiting for him in the baggage claim area, dressed in slacks that hugged her round hips deliciously and a bright orange blouse with a vivid red scarf knotted around her waist in place of a belt. She stood out in the crowd like a Technicolor goddess in the midst of drab black-and-white mortals.

She ran to him, all smiles, and kissed him as though they hadn’t seen each other in months. Jamie dropped his travel bag and clung to her. Other passengers stared and grinned at them. Somebody whistled appreciatively.

“What’re you doing here?” he asked, once they came up for air.

“Thought I’d surprise you.”

He laughed. “I’m surprised, all right.”

“Want to take me to dinner and tell me about your trip?”

That brought Jamie back to bleak reality. Bending down to pick up his travel bag, he said, “It looks pretty bad.”

Vijay nodded. “I thought as much. Dex was rather evasive.”

As he started toward the luggage carousel to pick up his roll-on, Jamie asked, “You talked with Dex?”

“I phoned when I got your message that you were going to Washington. I was trying to get you but you were already on the plane, I guess.”

Jamie hadn’t had the heart to phone his wife after his meeting with Delgado. On the flight back to Albuquerque he’d spent most of his time wrestling with the decisions he would have to make. He knew what he was going to do, what he had to do, but he didn’t know how to tell her.

Once he’d retrieved his roll-on, they walked past the rumbling carousels and the car rental desks, out into the warm air of early evening. The Sun had set and a cool breeze was sweeping down from the mountains, silhouetted in flaming red against the darkening twilight sky. Jamie saw that they were getting glances from other people. Still the same old prejudices, he thought. Even in a sports jacket and a short haircut they see me as a Navaho. Then he thought that maybe they were looking at Vijay’s dark, beautiful face, her long black hair, her stunning figure. With her voluptuous shape, even in the casual blouse and slacks she was wearing she could stop traffic.

“We’ll take my car,” Vijay said. “I sent yours back home.”

Jamie’s Nissan was equipped with an autopilot and global positioning system that could guide the car without a human driver. He had programmed it to find its way back to his assigned parking slot at the condominium’s parking lot, but he didn’t fully trust the electronics.

“I hope it’s there when we get home,” he muttered. “In one piece.”

Vijay giggled at him. “For a bloke who’s been to Mars several times you have no faith in modern technology.”

“Maybe not,” he admitted soberly.

The top was down on her convertible. Jamie carefully deposited his bags in the trunk while Vijay started the engine. As he got into the seat beside her, she said, “How’s P.F. Chang’s sound to you? They’re celebrating their fiftieth anniversary or something.”

He nodded absently. “Fine.”

As they drove out onto the interstate, Vijay asked, “So how bad is it?”

Jamie watched the traffic zooming past as he tried to think of what to say, how to tell her. Vijay was a good driver, he knew, but she paid no attention to speed limits. Too aggressive, he thought.

“Really bad,” he said at last, almost shouting over the rush of the wind. “We might have to shut down everything and bring everybody back home.”

Vijay glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “But you won’t let them do that, will you?”

“Not if I can help it.”

She pulled smoothly off the highway and wound around the confusing roadways of the huge shopping mall in which the restaurant was located. In silence. No more questions, not for a while. Jamie studied her face as Vijay maneuvered the convertible into a parking space and turned off its engine.

How can I tell her that I’m going back? Jamie asked himself. That I’ve got to go back?

He looked up at the darkening sky. Through the glare of the shopping mall’s garish lights it was hard to see more than a few of the brightest stars. One big bright one hung low over the mountains to the west. Venus, he guessed. He turned in his seat and searched, but he couldn’t find Mars.

Vijay opened her door and started to get out of the car.

“Going to leave the top down?” he asked.

“No rain in the forecast, love. Monsoon season’s finished, they claim.”

“Still…”

With a laugh, she swung her legs back into the car, closed the door, and pressed the button that started the fabric top rising. The electric motor whined until the top locked itself in place with a pair of firm clicks.

“Feel better?” Vijay asked.

“Yep.”

She started to open the car door again but he reached for her.

“Vijay…”

She melted into his arms, leaning over the transmission stick in the console between them.

“You’re really wonderful,” he said.

“I’m glad you noticed.”

“Are you trying to cheer me up?”

She shook her head. “Why would I have to do that?”

“Then how come…?”

“You’ve made up your mind, haven’t you, Jamie? You’re going back.”

There it was, out in the open.

“I didn’t know myself until halfway back to Albuquerque. But you knew before I did, didn’t you?”

“Once Dex told me how bad things are I knew what your reaction would be.”

In the shadows of the car’s interior he could still see the anticipation on her face, the glow in her eyes.

“Jamie, you’ve been moping around for more’n two years now,” Vijay said softly, “blaming yourself for what happened to Jimmy. Now they’ve hit you with this and—”

“And I’ve got to go back to Mars. I can’t let them close down the program.”

“Do you think your being on Mars will make any difference?”

“I don’t know. But I’ve got to go.”

“Of course,” she said. “And you do want me to go with you, don’t you?”

“You’re willing to go?”

He could hear the smile in her voice. “Hey, mate, we lived all alone on Mars for four months, di’n’t we? Time for a second honeymoon, don’t you think?”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure as taxes, love.”

For a long moment he couldn’t say a word. Then, “Do you think we can put Jimmy’s death behind us?”

“No,” she replied, her voice dropping lower. “We’ll never put Jimmy out of our minds. But we’ll move on, Jamie. We’ll move on.”

“To Mars.”

“To Mars,” she agreed.

In the shadows of the car he tried to look into those fathomless jet black eyes of hers; he felt all the wonder that always astonished him whenever he realized that this incredible woman actually loved him as much as he loved her.

“Okay,” he said. “On to Mars.”

“Fine,” said Vijay. “But right now let’s get to the restaurant. I’m starved.”

Tithonium Base: Celebration

They held an impromptu celebration—of sorts—the night that the personnel from Hellas Base returned to Tithonium. No one planned it, no one was really in a celebratory mood. It took three trips in one of the broad-winged rocketplanes to bring all twenty-three of the men and women with their personal effects back to Tithonium. They were downcast, subdued, dejected at the realization that they had to abruptly leave their work, cut short the studies they’d been undertaking at the vast impact crater of Hellas.

As soon as their leader, Yvonne Lorenz, set foot inside the base’s main dome, Chang bustled her into his office and closed the door firmly.

Seeing the dispirited expressions on the new arrivals, Kalman Torok said loudly, “What’s the matter? You don’t want to go back home?”

A few of them shot annoyed glances at the biologist. “Like packing up and leaving in the middle of a program is a good career move?” one of the women snapped.

Torok shrugged good-naturedly. “Come on and have a drink,” he said. “I’m buying.”

Officially there was nothing stronger on the base than fruit juice, but most of the men and women kept private stashes of some sort. One thing led to another, and soon most of the people in the base had gathered in the cafeteria section of the dome. Several had brought bottles or flasks from their private quarters and splashed the various liquors into the plastic cups of juice—with one eye on Chang’s closed door. The mission director enforced the rules with iron rigidity. Or tried to.

Carleton, in his makeshift workshop, heard the growing chatter and laughter across the dome. He looked up from the plaster cast he had lovingly made of the fossil vertebra.

“Sounds like a party,” he said to Doreen McManus, who was watching him work.

She got up from the spindly stool she’d been sitting on and slid the door open a crack.

“It is a party,” she said. “Looks like everybody who isn’t on duty is in the cafeteria.”

“Want to join them?” Carleton asked.

“Are you finished?”

He lifted the white plaster cast from the work table. “Isn’t she a beauty? A lot better than those stereo images the computer generates.”

He held it out to her and Doreen took it in her hands. “It is a beauty,” she agreed, with an approving smile.

“The first of many,” said Carleton as he took the actual ash-gray fossil and tucked it into a plastic specimen case he’d appropriated from the biology storeroom shelves. He closed its lid with a firm snap.

“Let’s show it off,” Doreen suggested.

Carleton grinned at her. “Why not?”

Soon the gathering that was spilling beyond the cafeteria’s neatly arranged rows of tables was toasting Carleton and his discovery. The crowd’s mood had lifted considerably since the drinking had started.

One of the astronauts who had ferried the team in from Hellas loudly insisted on calling the fossil “Carleton’s clavicle,” even when several of the others pointed out that it was actually a vertebra.

“Clavicle,” the buzz-cut astronaut shouted, in a voice that drowned out everyone else. “It rhymes better.”

Basking in the warmth of their approval, Carleton shook his head and laughed. He saw tall, gangling Saleem Hasdrubal stumbling through a tango with one of the women technicians. How can someone get drunk on fruit juice? he wondered. Sal’s a Muslim, he doesn’t drink liquor. Maybe Black Muslims don’t abstain from alcohol. Or maybe fruit juice is enough to set him off.

Downing the last of the drink in his hand, he realized that Doreen was no longer at his side. Looking around, Carleton saw that she was chatting with a tall, lean young man who was wearing a denim shirt and chinos. The Navaho kid, Carleton remembered, brows knitting: Billy Graycloud. A computer geek.

Suddenly seething with anger, the liquor’s warmth fueling him, Carleton marched through the crowd toward them.

“Goodbye, Raincloud,” he growled.

Doreen looked startled, the Navaho more so.

“Uh, it’s Graycloud, Dr. Carleton. Billy Graycloud, sir.”

“Whatever.” Carleton grasped Doreen’s wrist. “The A team has arrived. Go back to your tepee.”

And he towed Doreen away from the youngster. Graycloud stood there dumbfounded, his coppery cheeks flaming deep red.

“That was cruel,” Doreen said, barely loud enough over the noise of the ongoing party for him to hear it.

“Fuck him,” Carleton snapped.

“Is that what you were afraid I’d do?”

He turned on her angrily. “Now look, if you think—”

Just then Chang’s office door slid open and the mission director stepped out, with Yvonne Lorenz behind him. Carleton stopped in midsentence. All the laughter snapped off as if a switch had been clicked. Everyone froze where they stood. In the abrupt silence Carleton could hear the soft footfalls of Chang’s slippersocks against the plastic flooring.

Furtively trying to hide their liquor bottles and flasks, the crowd in the cafeteria melted away before him as Chang strode into their midst, arms stiffly at his sides, hands balled into round little fists.

“Carter Carleton, I too wish to congratulate you,” Chang said. “You have made an important discovery. You will be honored for it.”

Blinking with surprise, Carleton said, “Why, thank you, Dr. Chang. Er… would you like some juice?”

With the slightest dip of his pudgy chin, Chang said, “Yes. I want to offer a toast.”

Doreen, standing at Carleton’s side, picked up an empty cup and poured a splash of the nearest fruit juice into it, then wordlessly handed it to the mission director.

Chang raised his cup and proclaimed, “To Dr. Carleton. May your discovery be the first of many. May we uncover a village of ancient Martians and learn much about them.”

Somebody shouted, “Hear! Hear!” But Chang impatiently waved them all to silence.

“I am not finished,” he said.

Turning to Yvonne Lorenz, Chang went on, “To you who have been forced to abandon your work at Hellas site I offer my thanks for your toil and my regret that your effort has been terminated. I have added my highest recommendations to each of your personnel files.”

They murmured thanks.

Chang half-turned and gestured to Dr. Lorenz. She was a short, slim Provencal with dark hair that was streaked with gray, a lean face that ended in a pointy chin, and eyes the color of a polar sea. Like almost everyone else, she wore coveralls, but hers were carefully tailored to her petite figure.

In a low but firm voice she said, “I believe we should all thank Dr. Chang for his generous recommendation. I realize most of you are disappointed to be sent home. I know that I myself am.”

“I won’t miss living in that damned camper,” said one of the astronauts. No one laughed.

Lorenz said, “I must admit that our living accommodations were… eh, what is the word?”

“Rugged.”

“Crowded.”

“Piss poor—especially when the toilets broke down.”

That brought a chuckle. But Lorenz said, “No, the word I wanted is ‘Spartan.’ Our living conditions were Spartan.”

“You can say that again.”

“She already did.”

“Please,” Lorenz said, making a silencing motion with both her tiny hands. “Hear me out. Dr. Carleton has asked for five volunteers to help him excavate the village. Five of us may remain here if we are willing to assist Dr. Carleton.”

For a moment no one spoke. Then one of the men asked, “What kind of work would this be?”

“Manual labor,” Carleton answered, raising his voice so that they could all hear him clearly. “For the most part it’ll be digging and hauling a lot of dirt and rock. Not glamorous. Hard physical labor.”

They looked at one another. Carleton knew exactly what was on their minds: How will this look on my resume?

He added, “Of course, we’ll also be sifting through the digging to look for fossils. Even artifacts, eventually.”

No one said another word. They shifted uneasily on their feet, thinking, weighing, pondering.

“If any of you wants to talk to me individually,” Carleton said, “I’ll be happy to go into as much detail as you like.”

Lorenz said, “Five of you will be able to stay on Mars. Your work will not be the same as you have been doing, but you may have an opportunity to help uncover great discoveries.”

Chang added, “You have five days to make your decisions. In five days rocket from Earth will take up orbit above us. By then you must decide if you wish to remain to assist Dr. Carleton or return home.”

“Can we get credits in anthropology out of this?” one of the younger men asked.

Carleton smiled at him. “If you like I’ll give colloquia on anthropology.”

Doreen piped up, “I might be able to arrange for Selene University to give course credits for working on the dig.”

“Very good,” said Chang. “Five days to make a decision.” He put his cup down on the corner of the nearest table and glanced at his wristwatch. “It is late. Past ten o’clock. We all have much work to do tomorrow.”

With that, the mission director turned and walked back through the crowd, heading for his private quarters.

“He is right,” said Yvonne Lorenz. “We shall have to unload the plane and prepare for departure in five days.”

The crowd started to break up and drift toward their individual cubicles. Doreen stood uncertainly beside Carleton. He could see the doubt in her eyes.

Drawing in a breath, he said, “I’m sorry about my boorish behavior. I just didn’t like the way that kid was looking at you.”

She smiled a little. “You were awfully gruff with him.”

“Maybe,” he acknowledged.

“Possessive.”

“The word you’re looking for is dominant.”

She didn’t reply, but she allowed Carleton to lead her across the floor of the dome to the flimsy accordion-fold door of his compartment. All the others were entering their own spaces, most singly, although there were several couples. Doreen scanned the area for Graycloud but didn’t see him. The others pointedly ignored Carleton and Doreen McManus as he stood in front of his door, gazing steadily into her wide, gray green eyes.

“They’re all going to know about this,” he said to her, almost solemnly.

She made a little shrug. “Everybody knows about everybody here. It’s okay.”

“I’m an accused rapist, back Earthside.”

“That’s a hundred million kilometers away,” Doreen said.

He said, “Eighty-three million, two hundred thousand klicks, as of this morning. I checked.”

Doreen smiled up at him. “You want to, don’t you?”

He smiled at her. “When love speaks,” he quoted, “the voice of all the Gods makes heaven drowsy with the harmony.”

Holding her arm gently, he slid open the door of his cubicle with his other hand, glad that he had put clean sheets on his bunk that morning.

Albuquerque: University of New Mexico

The day after Jamie returned from Washington the terrorist attack struck the campus.

He was in his office, on the phone with Dex Trumball, trying to make arrangements for his flight to Mars.

“You want to go back?” Dex asked, his image on the wall screen showing the disapproval that he tried to keep out of his voice.

“I have to,” said Jamie.

“Why? To preside over the funeral?”

“To try to keep the program alive. There isn’t going to be any funeral, not if I can help it.”

Dex shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense, Jamie. There’s nothing you can do there that you can’t do here.”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Don’t get mystical on me. And don’t—”

Three explosions rocked the building, so close together they sounded like the beats of an enormous ceremonial drum. The window of Jamie’s office cracked, the room shook as if struck by a sudden earthquake. Books slid off the shelves.

“What the hell was that?” Dex hollered.

Jamie saw black smoke billowing above the campus buildings outside his window, then heard the wail of sirens. Footsteps pounded by in the corridor outside his door.

“Jamie, are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Jamie answered shakily, staring at the rising smoke. “I’ll call you back, Dex.”

He rushed to his door and yanked it open. The corridor was empty now. Hurrying downstairs, Jamie saw that the lobby of his building was a blackened, smoking ruin, windows shattered, doors punched in, ceiling tiles dangling precariously. In a few minutes, firefighters and campus police officers were hauling bodies outside, where ambulances were pulling up. People were screaming, crying, bleeding.

Jamie helped lift the bloodied, mangled bodies of students and staff people out into the sunshine. A crowd was growing outside the yellow tapes the campus police were stringing across the parking lot. City police were arriving. A SWAT team van squealed to a stop.

“Goddamn towel-heads,” one of the campus cops muttered as they tenderly laid the dead body of a young female student on the concrete. Her legs had been blown off. Jamie fought down the urge to throw up.

It seemed like hours, but Jamie’s wristwatch told him that hardly thirty minutes had passed since the explosions. Television vans were pulling up. Helicopters thuttered overhead. The lobby of the Planetary Sciences building was a twisted, shattered mess.

His pocket phone jangled. Straightening up, he fumbled in his jeans pocket for it, flipped it open.

“Are you all right?” Even in the phone’s minuscule screen he could see the wide-eyed fright on Vijay’s dark face.

“I’m fine, honey,” he said, wiping at his sweaty brow.

“You’re not hurt?”

“No. They bombed the lobby. I was in my office.”

“They said on TV that four people were killed.”

Jamie glanced at the bodies laid out in a row. “It’s more than that.”

“But you’re okay?”

Nodding, he replied, “Yes, I’m fine.”

“Your face looks bruised.”

He almost smiled at her. “Dirt, more likely. I’ve been helping get the bodies out of the lobby area.”

“Come home, Jamie. That’s where I’m heading, right now.”

“The police’ll probably want to ask me some questions. I’ll get home soon’s I can.”

“I love you, dear,” said Vijay.

“Same here, love.”

He clicked the phone shut, returned it to his pocket. And felt the bear fetish that Grandfather Al had given him all those years ago. It didn’t make him feel any better, any safer.

One of the paramedics came up to him, pulling off his latex gloves. “That’s the last of the bodies. Thanks for your help.”

He took the man’s proffered hand, then walked off a ways, feeling stunned, numb. Who would do this? he asked himself. Why?

A city policeman stopped him to take his name and phone number. “The investigators’ll wanna talk to you. You’re not plannin’ on leavin’ town, are you?”

Jamie couldn’t help a wry grin. “Only to Mars,” he murmured.

“Huh?”

“No,” he said, more distinctly. “I won’t be leaving town in the next couple of weeks.”

“Okay, good,” said the police officer.

“Any idea of who did this?”

The policeman shook his head. “Hasn’t been anything like this since the troubles in the Middle East, back when I was in the Army.”

“Was this the only building hit?”

“They got the astronomy building, too. Over on the other side of the campus. And one other. Three, altogether.”

And then Jamie realized who had set off the bombs. Oh my god, he repeated silently as he walked stiff-legged alone around the Planetary Sciences building to a side entrance. Oh my god. It wasn’t Islamic fundamentalists. We have our own fanatics right here at home.

He picked his way through the litter in the hallways and entered his own office. It was messier than usual, but otherwise undamaged except for the obvious crack that ran the length of his window. I’m on the far side of the building, Jamie told himself as he sank slowly into his swivel chair. The blast didn’t carry this far.

A knock on his door made him look up. The president of the university stepped in, looking grim.

Minor T. Halberson had been a star football player for the University of New Mexico’s Lobos. Now he was a bishop of the New Morality movement and president of the university. He was a big man, still trim and tanned despite the distinguished gray flecking his temples. He was handsome, in a rugged, athletic way. He knew how to raise money, which was the primary qualification for a university president.

“You’re not hurt?” Halberson asked, without any preliminaries.

“No, I’m okay,” said Jamie.

“You look kind of grimy, if you’ll pardon my saying so.”

Jamie said, “I’ll wash up when I get home.”

“May I?” Halberson gestured toward the chair in front of Jamie’s desk.

“Sure.”

“This is terrible,” said Halberson as he eased his bulk onto the squeaking plastic chair. “I never thought I’d see the day when terrorists would strike here.”

“Neither did I.”

“Car bombs.” Halberson’s normally smiling face was grave, ashen.

“The police told me they hit the astronomy building, too.”

“And bio.”

“All science buildings.”

“Twenty-two killed, altogether.”

“In the name of god.”

Halberson looked sharply at Jamie. “You know I’m a Believer, Jamie, but this… this has nothing to do with God.”

“The people who set off the bombs think it does. They think they’re doing God’s work.”

“That’s a perversion of everything that Christianity stands for.”

“Tell them.”

Halberson drew in a deep breath. “I don’t blame you for being angry, Jamie. This has been… soul-shattering.”

Jamie nodded, tight-lipped. Don’t blame him for this, he warned himself. He’s just as shook up about it as you are.

“It seems clear,” Halberson said slowly, “that these attacks were aimed at the scientific work being done here on campus.”

“But why?” Jamie wondered. “Why are they so set against exploring Mars?”

“Because you threaten their faith,” Halberson answered.

“We found the remains of another intelligent race and that threatens their faith?”

“Their narrow definition of it, yes. I think this news about finding a fossil tipped them into violence.”

Jamie shook his head wearily. “I don’t get it. We’re uncovering facts on Mars. You can’t make facts go away. You can’t blast facts out of existence.”

“They think they can,” Halberson said. “Believe me, Jamie, I’ve had to deal with these fundamentalists in the church. They want everyone to forget that you’ve found intelligent life. They want to erase all traces of your discovery and return to where we were before you ever went to Mars.”

“That’s stupid! It’s impossible!”

“They don’t believe so. And they’re willing to die in order to destroy you and everything you’ve learned.”

Jamie fell speechless.

“It’s obvious that they want to pressure the university into dropping our Mars program.”

“Obvious,” Jamie agreed.

“You yourself might be a target, Jamie.”

Jamie felt a jolt of surprise. “Me?”

“You’re the scientific leader of the program. If these terrorists want to stop the Mars program, what better way than to assassinate its chief?”

Or murder his wife, Jamie immediately thought.

“I’m ordering a security detail for you,” Bishop Halberson said.

“And for my wife, too?”

“Yes, if you want it.”

“I do.”

“Is there anything else I can do? Just name it, Jamie. I know we don’t agree on religious faith, but I’m just as infuriated by this barbarism as you are.”

He’s sincere, Jamie realized. Looking into Halberson’s sorrowful eyes, Jamie believed that he could trust this man.

“It’s all right,” he said gently. “You won’t need to protect me for very long. I’m going back to Mars as soon as I can make the arrangements.”

“And your wife?”

“She’s going with me. It’s safer on Mars than it is here.”

Depew, Florida: Longstreet Middle School

Thirteen-year-old Bucky Winters stared disconsolately at the tabletop model he had spent so many hours constructing.

“But… zero?” he asked. “No credit at all?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Mr. Zachary.

Andrew Zachary was not only Bucky’s art class teacher, he was head of the Longstreet Middle School’s Arts and Achievement Department. Known to the students as an easy marker, Zachary was in his midforties, his face round and pleasant, his dark brown hair just starting to recede from his forehead. The students liked him; he tried to come across as their friend while still teaching them how to value their self-respect through using their hands to create art works.

Bucky was small and skinny, his face all bones and big blue green eyes with dark rings beneath them from the allergies that racked his existence. Like all the students, he wore the school uniform: a white tee shirt bearing the school’s emblem of an extinct Florida panther, and a pair of shorts that sagged below his knees.

The teacher and his student were standing on opposite sides of the big display table in the middle of the arts room. On the table was a model of the Tithonium Base on Mars: three removable papier-mâché domes set on a large photo image of the Martian red, barren ground. Inside the domes Bucky had painstakingly drawn the outlines of the base’s laboratories, living quarters, offices, cafeteria and airlocks. He had even drawn in the beds and other furniture of the individual living units.

“But you said we could do anything we wanted to get special credit,” Bucky reminded his teacher.

Zachary sighed. “The Mars project is not on the school’s curriculum, Bucky. You don’t study Mars in your science class, do you?

“No. But I thought…” Bucky’s voice trailed off into a hurt silence.

Zachary came around the table to stand beside Bucky. He almost put a comforting hand on the boy’s shoulder, but realized that such contact could be considered sexual harassment if his student reported it.

“It’s good work, Bucky. It really is. But it’s not in an area that we can consider for class credit.”

Bucky wanted to spit. He’d spent long hours at his computer at home to get all the details of the Mars base right. He’d thought he’d get an A-plus for his work.

“What’s wrong with Mars?” he asked, almost in desperation.

Zachary spread his hands in a gesture of futility. “The school board decided that Mars shouldn’t be part of the curriculum.”

“How come?”

“Well… the scientists on Mars claim they’ve discovered the remains of intelligent Martians who lived millions and millions of years ago.”

“So? That’s great, isn’t it?”

“Well, not really. You see, Bucky, there’s no real proof that there were actual living people on Mars. It’s just one of the scientists’ theories, really.”

“If they found buildings, isn’t that proof?”

Zachary wrung his hands unhappily. “The school board feels that if we start teaching about Mars, then we’ll have to get into Darwin and evolution and all that other controversial material. It’s much easier to skip the entire business and stick with the curriculum as the school board has approved it.”

“Darwin?” Bucky asked, puzzled. “What’s Darwin?”

Clippership Robert Truax

Jamie felt distinctly uncomfortable as he and Vijay stepped from the access tunnel into the passenger compartment of the Clippership. The thought of riding the squat, conical rocket craft into orbit didn’t bother him at all: it was the destination, not the journey, that made him jittery.

A young male attendant in a snappy royal blue and silver uniform showed them to their seats in the circular compartment. There were no windows in the curved bulkhead; thick insulation seemed to smother all sounds. It reminded Jamie of walking into a hushed planetarium chamber. He noted that fewer than half of the fifty seats were occupied.

“First class,” Vijay murmured as they clicked their shoulder harnesses into place.

“Dex paid for the tickets out of his personal pocket,” Jamie said. “He claims the Foundation can’t afford any luxuries.”

“That was nice of him.”

Jamie grinned at her. They both knew that Clipperships had two passenger decks but only one class of accommodations. Everybody rode first class. Someday, Jamie thought, when Clippership travel becomes more popular, they’ll start squeezing in more seats and cutting down on the services. Enjoy the first-class treatment while you can.

Each seat had its own foldout display screen that could show entertainment videos, educational documentaries, or real-time views from the cameras mounted on the ship’s exterior. Vijay opted for the outside view of the servicing trucks scurrying around the Clippership’s launch pad. Jamie leaned back in his plush reclinable chair and closed his eyes.

This is going to be tricky, he told himself for the thousandth lime.

Douglas Stavenger was the acknowledged leader of the lunar nation of Selene. He had the influence—if he chose to wield it—to convince Selene’s governing council to take over the task of providing the Mars explorers with the supplies they would need to keep going in spite of the cutoff of funding from the U.S. government.

Jamie had never met Stavenger. To get to him, Jamie had turned to Stavenger’s wife, Edith Elgin. Edith and Jamie had lived together in Houston nearly thirty years earlier, when Jamie was in training for the First Expedition. He had left for Mars and never saw her again; she had climbed up to a top position in the broadcast news industry, covered Selene’s brief war of independence, and stayed on the Moon to marry Stavenger.

Edith had agreed easily enough to setting up a meeting with her husband when Jamie had called her from Albuquerque. He didn’t know whether he should feel surprised, pleased, or alarmed. So instead he worried.

“This is your captain speaking.” The confident male voice coming through the intercom speakers startled Jamie out of his anxiety.

“We’re cleared for liftoff in ninety seconds. You’ll experience eight minutes of acceleration forces; two and a half gees. Then we’ll coast into orbit and rendezvous with Space Station Wilson. IAA regulations require that you remain in your seats at all times with your safety harness buckled. You can play around in zero gee once you’re inside the station. For now, please lower your seats back to the full reclining position. Thank you.”

“Too bad we won’t be spending an overnight at the station,” Vijay teased as they cranked their seats down.

Jamie knew she was referring to making love in zero gravity. There was even talk of building a “honeymoon hotel” in orbit.

“On the way back,” he told her. “I’ll change our tickets.”

“We’ll have to wait that long?” She put on a pout.

“Business before pleasure.”

“Five seconds,” the ship’s computer-synthesized voice called out. “Four… three…”

Jamie gripped Vijay’s hand. The rocket engines roared with the hot breath of a thousand dragons but inside the cabin their bellowing was muted, distant. The heavy hand of acceleration squeezed Jamie down into the cushions of his couch. He could see on Vijay’s display screen the ground hurtling away, then the view was obscured by the smoky exhaust of the rocket engines.

The compartment quivered, but it was nothing like the bone-rattling vibration he remembered from flights into orbit in the older-style rocket boosters. They’ve improved the ride, Jamie said to himself. Too bad there aren’t more paying passengers to enjoy it.

The noise dwindled and then the pressure cut off abruptly. Jamie’s arms floated up off the seatrests, as did Vijay’s. He heard passengers cooing and sighing with delight as all sensation of weight dropped away. They raised their seatbacks and looked around. Then somebody coughed and gagged. There’s always one, Jamie thought as he reached for the air blower control and dialed it to maximum. Sure enough, someone behind them was throwing up noisily. Hope she made it to the retch bag, he said to himself. One vomiting passenger started a chain reaction; soon several of them were heaving loudly and Jamie started to feel nauseous himself.

One of the uniformed flight attendants hurried down the aisle past them as Vijay patted Jamie’s hand and said, “Put in the earplugs. It’s better if you can’t hear ’em.”

It’d be better if I couldn’t smell them, Jamie thought. He grabbed the plastic bag containing earplugs from the pocket built into the chair’s armrest while bile burned up into his throat.

By the time the Clippership made its rendezvous with the space station fifty-four minutes later, the passengers had calmed down and the stench of vomit had been cleared from the cabin’s air. A female flight attendant ran a short video that advised the debarking passengers not to try any acrobatics in zero gee.

“You will feel a stuffiness in your sinuses as your body fluids adjust to the lack of gravity,” said the cheerful white-smocked woman on the screens. “This is perfectly normal. Your body is adapting to the microgravity environment.”

Vijay and Jamie didn’t see much of the space station. The terminal where the Clippership docked was designed to accommodate arrivals who were not accustomed to the nearly zero gravity of the orbiting station. Passageways were thickly carpeted and narrow enough for passengers to grip the handrails set on both sides of the bulkheads so that they could proceed cautiously, hand by hand, to the reception area.

Jamie’s head felt stuffy as he shuffled along in the slowly moving line. Vijay was just ahead of him, apparently handling the microgee with no trouble at all. A young man several places up the line, wearing the gray coveralls of a technician, laughingly allowed himself to float off the floor and rise until his crewcut hair bumped gently against the overhead.

Several of the older passengers groaned at the sight.

“Please don’t attempt any gymnastics in this confined space,” called the female attendant from the head of the line.

“Get down, Grabowski,” a rougher voice demanded. “Don’t start with your wiseass crap.”

Jamie laughed softly. The temptation to show off was irresistible in some men. Especially if they were young and there were young women present to show off for.

Moving carefully, Jamie and Vijay left the other arrivals and followed the illuminated arrows along the bulkheads that led them lo the docking port where the lunar shuttlecraft would depart for Selene. A pair of smiling attendants were at the port and guided I hem through the open hatch of the shuttlecraft.

The shuttlecraft’s passenger compartment was less than half the size of the Clippership’s, and much more utilitarian. Jamie and Vijay found their seats and strapped in.

“Whew!” Vijay gusted, her expression halfway between a grin and a grimace. “I’d forgotten how snarky zero gee can be when you’re not used to it.”

Keeping a straight face, Jamie replied, “You’re not reneging on our overnight stay on the way back, are you?”

She started to shake her head, but thought better of it. “I don’t know about you, love, but I’m out of training.”

Very seriously, Jamie said, “Might take a few nights to get our sea legs back.”

Vijay smiled impishly. “Well, if you’ve got the time…”

“We’ll see,” he said. “Depends on how things go with Stavenger.”

Selene

Jamie and Vijay never saw the outside of the lunar shuttlecraft. The passenger compartment was small, only a dozen seats, but every one of them was filled. They looked like business people, Jamie thought as he surveyed the other Moon-bound passengers. Suits, mostly dark in color although there were a couple of bright sports coats in the lot. Not scientists or techies: no jeans or pullovers, except for his own.

The shuttlecraft accelerated at nearly a full g halfway to the Moon, then turned around and decelerated the rest of the way to the surface of the huge crater Alphonsus. The g force was enough to keep everyone’s stomach reasonably in place for the five-hour-long trip. They even had a meal in transit with no more difficulty than sipping the wine from covered containers. An animated video showed the passengers the details of the shuttlecraft’s trajectory and its highly efficient plasma propulsion system.

“It took the Apollo astronauts more than three days to make the trip from Earth to Moon,” explained the video’s voice track. “Today it takes only a few hours to travel the same distance.”

The thrust was enough to banish the woozy feeling of zero gee. Jamie felt almost normal by the time the shuttlecraft settled down on the dusty concrete landing pad at Armstrong Spaceport.

“Here on the Moon you are now in one-sixth of normal terrestrial gravity,” the safety video warned. “Please use extreme caution when walking or moving about. Weighted boots are available at the visitors’ center for a nominal rental fee.”

Neither Jamie nor Vijay bothered with the boots. They headed out of the shuttlecraft in the slow shuffling strides they both remembered from earlier visits to the Moon. Other passengers stumbled and staggered in the low gravity.

They rode the automated electric bus through the long tunnel that connected the spaceport to the city proper. It looked like an oversized golf cart, roofless, with ten rows of double seats. Jamie used his pocket phone to pull up a map of Selene and locate the hotel.

“This place has grown, even in the few years since I was here,” he said, showing Vijay the labyrinth of tunnels that made up the underground community.

“People come up here to retire,” she said. “The low gravity and all that.”

All that meant escaping from Earth’s problems, Jamie knew: from the crime and poverty and the disastrous flooding and climate changes that racked the world.

“Pretty expensive retirement,” he muttered.

“The rich always run away,” Vijay said. “They use their money to insulate them from troubles.”

Is that what we’re doing? Jamie asked himself silently as the bus rolled smoothly, quietly through the shadowy tunnel. Running away to Mars? No, he immediately answered. We’re exploring a new world, we’re searching for new knowledge. Which is why the fundamentalists hate us.

“I don’t know if I could live in these tunnels,” Vijay said. “Not full time.”

“Aussies do,” Jamie said. “In Coober Pedy.”

“The opal mines,” she murmured. Then she added, “But they can go up on the surface any time they want.”

Jamie said, “There’s the Grand Plaza, under the dome. Plenty of trees and greenery up there. They even have a swimming pool.”

Nodding, Vijay murmured, “Still…”

By the time they reached their hotel room, guided by the electronic maps on the corridor walls, their two travel bags were already on the king-sized bed.

Jamie glanced at his wristwatch. “Hungry? It’s just about dinnertime.”

“Let’s unpack first,” she suggested.

It didn’t take long. Soon they were walking up the gently sloping ramp that led to the hotel’s restaurant. There were no stairs in Selene: too tricky for newcomers to the low lunar gravity.

“This is lovely,” Vijay said once they were seated at a small table. The restaurant was almost full, but the patrons’ conversations were quiet, muted. Soft music purred from the speakers set into the ceiling, something classical that sounded vaguely familiar to Jamie. Human waiters in dark jackets moved among the tables, together with flat-topped little robots that carried the food and drinks.

“Big day tomorrow.” Vijay smiled brightly, trying to make it sound cheerful.

“Right,” Jamie agreed. Inwardly he wondered what it was going to be like seeing Edith again.

Once they had ordered and the human waiter was walking away from their table, Jamie started to say, “Um, Vijay, you know that Edith and I…”

“I know,” she said, her dark eyes on him. “You told me years ago.”

“I haven’t seen her since then,” he muttered. “I wonder what she’s like now.”

“We’ll soon find out, won’t we, love?”

Selene: Stavenger Residence

Like almost all of Selene, the home of Douglas Stavenger was in one of the underground corridors that made up most of the city. Up on the airless surface of the Moon, temperatures could swing from two hundred degrees above zero in sunlight to nearly two hundred below in shadow. Hard radiation from deep space bathed the barren lunar surface, and a constant infall of micrometeoroids peppered the ground, sandpapering the mountains over eons of time into tired, rounded humps.

Underground was safer, the deeper the better.

“I couldn’t live here,” Vijay said, frowning slightly as she and Jamie walked along the corridor, following the path mapped out on his pocket phone.

“You said that before,” Jamie reminded her.

“Yes, but now I’m certain of it.”

“You lived on Mars,” he said.

“But there we had a dome, we could move around, we could look outside. We could work outside—”

“In spacesuits. Or in an enclosed tractor.”

“But it wasn’t like this… This is like being a mole or a wombat, living in tunnels.” She shuddered with distaste.

Eying a trio of coverall-clad people coming up the corridor toward them, Jamie half-whispered, “Better not let them know how much you don’t like it here.”

Vijay smiled at them as they approached. They noted Jamie’s western-cut shirt and jeans, the colorful scarf Vijay wore knotted at her throat over her poppy red blouse.

“Can we help you?” one of the men asked.

Jamie said, “I think we’re in the right corridor. Level four, corridor A?”

The man nodded, smiling. “Looking for Doug Stavenger’s place? It’s right down the corridor.” He pointed.

Jamie thanked them and they went their separate ways.

Vijay shook her head. “I don’t understand how they can live like this. It’s so completely… artificial.”

“Maybe we ought to ask Dex how he does it.”

“Dex lives in Boston.”

“He spends a lot of time in New York. That’s a completely artificial environment, too.”

“At least you can walk out in the open.”

“If you’re carrying a weapon,” Jamie countered.

At last they came to a plain door, no different from the others spaced along the corridor, except that it was marked STAVENGER.

“This is it,” Jamie said, taking in a breath. Edith’s in there, he thought. I wonder—

The door opened before he could find a buzzer to push. A solidly built young-looking man smiled at them. His face was handsome, his skin darker than Jamie’s, lighter than Vijay’s. Jamie realized that he was taller and wider of shoulder than himself, but his compact physique disguised his true size. He was wearing a soft velour pullover of deep blue and comfortable light gray slacks.

He smiled and put out his hand. “Welcome. I’m Douglas Stavenger.”

His grip was warm, strong without being overpowering.

“Jamie Waterman,” he introduced himself. “This is my wife, Vijay.”

“Come on in,” said Stavenger, with an ushering swoop of his arm.

They stepped into an unpretentious living room tastefully furnished with a pair of sofas facing each other, an oval metal coffee table between them. A pair of cushioned armchairs were placed on either end of the low table. The floor was carpeted, grass green. The pictures on the wall looked like actual paintings, not flat-screen images, mostly landscapes from Earth.

“Make yourselves comfortable,” Stavenger said, gesturing to the nearer sofa. “My wife will be—”

At that moment Edith entered from an open doorway on the far side of the living room. She seemed to light up the place, radiantly blond and smiling bright as a Dallas cheerleader, big wide eyes the color of Texas bluebonnets, wearing a short-skirted sleeveless frock of white patterned with golden yellow flowers.

Jamie felt suddenly tongue-tied.

“Hello, Jamie,” she said, striding straight to him.

“Edith,” he managed.

She bussed him on the cheek, then turned to Vijay. “You must be Varuna Jarita.”

“Vijay, please. It’s easier.”

“Vijay,” Edith acknowledged, taking both Vijay’s hands in her own. Dark and light, Jamie thought. They couldn’t look more different if they came from different worlds.

Then he realized, “My god, Edith, you haven’t changed a bit. You look as if you haven’t aged at all.”

Edith flicked a glance at her husband. “We’re aging, but a lot slower than most folks.”

“Nanomachines,” Vijay guessed.

“Yes.”

“You, too?” Jamie asked.

Edith smiled, almost demurely. “Me, too. Doug wants to keep me just as young as he is.”

“It’s a bit incredible, i’n’t it?” said Vijay.

“It certainly is.”

Stavenger gestured again to the twin sofas. “Sit. Relax. Would you like something to drink? Wine? Rocket juice?”

Jamie laughed. “No rocket juice, thanks. I’ve heard about that.”

“Some wine, then?” Edith suggested. “It’s new and kind of thin.”

“Our first vintage,” Stavenger explained.

Jamie and Vijay sat on one of the sofas, Edith on the facing one, while Stavenger ducked behind the counter that separated the living room from the kitchen.

“How do you like living here?” Vijay asked.

“It’s fine,” said Edith.

“Doesn’t it bother you to be underground all the time?”

“You didn’t grow up in west Texas, honey. This is a whole lot better, believe me. ’Sides, we’ve got the Grand Plaza any time you want to see trees and some flowers.”

Jamie listened to them chatter and realized the two women were communicating on a level far beyond his male power of understanding. They’re sizing each other up, he thought; getting to know each other in some subliminal way.

Stavenger carried in a metal tray bearing a frosted bottle of wine and four stemmed glasses.

“We make these in our glass factory,” he said as he poured for them. “Bricks for construction, too.”

Jamie sipped at the wine. It was thin and slightly tart. They do a lot better in New Mexico, he said to himself.

“So,” Stavenger said, setting his glass down on the coffee table, “Edith tells me you need to talk to me.”

Jamie nodded. “We need your help.”

“ ’We’ being the Mars program?”

“That’s right. You’ve heard about Washington zeroing Mars out of the federal budget.”

“That’s a blow, isn’t it?” Stavenger said softly.

“It’s not just Washington’s cutoff. It’s becoming increasingly hard to get private donors. Several of our biggest contributors have backed away from us.”

Vijay interjected, “They’re all under pressure to help alleviate the problems from the climate shift.”

“Those are serious problems,” Stavenger murmured.

“I know,” said Jamie. “But we mustn’t let them stop the exploration of Mars.”

“Why not?” Stavenger asked, with a smile.

“Why not?” Jamie snapped.

Raising his hands almost defensively, Stavenger said, “I’m playing devil’s advocate for the moment. Why shouldn’t the exploration of Mars be stopped? Aren’t the greenhouse disasters on Earth more important?”

Jamie glanced at Vijay, who nodded encouragement to him. If you want help from this man, he thought, you’ve got to be honest with him. You’ve got to bare your soul to him.

Taking a deep breath, Jamie began, “First, I don’t see it as an either-or situation. We can work on the greenhouse problems and explore Mars, too. They’re not mutually exclusive.”

“Everyone else seems to think they are,” said Stavenger.

Shaking his head, Jamie went on, “The greenhouse crisis is being used as an excuse to kill the Mars program.”

“Used as an excuse?” Edith asked, her blue eyes widening. “Who by?”

“The fundamentalists. The New Morality and their people in government. They don’t want us to learn more about the Martians. They want to bury everything we’ve discovered, forget about it forever. They’ve got control of the government, they’re scaring the big money into lining up with them. Everywhere I turn to, there’s this big invisible enemy all around me, stifling me, pushing me down. I feel like I’m drowning.”

Stavenger looked at his wife for a moment, then turned back to Jamie. “So you’re asking Selene to take up the funding burden for you?”

“I don’t think of it as a burden.”

“A poor choice of words. But you need financial help, don’t you?”

Jamie hesitated, then admitted, “Yes. It boils down to funding.”

“Always does,” Edith murmured.

Stavenger reached up and scratched at his dark brown hair. The gesture made him look suddenly boyish.

“Look,” he said. “Selene isn’t prosperous enough to spend billions on something that won’t bring us any return.”

“It won’t cost billions,” Jamie said.

“No?”

“Basically, what we need is help with transportation. I plan to ask the men and women on Mars to stretch out their stays an extra year, so we can cut our transportation costs just about in half.”

“Except for life-support supplies,” Vijay interjected.

Jamie suppressed an urge to scowl at her. “Supplies are a major part of it, yes.”

Stavenger asked, “How much of your life-support requirements do you generate from Mars itself?”

“We take oxygen and nitrogen from the atmosphere to make breathable air,” Jamie replied. “Water from the permafrost. We grow some of our own food hydroponically.”

Nodding, Stavenger said, “But you need protein, medical supplies, that sort of thing.”

Impressed with Stavenger’s understanding, Jamie said, “Right.”

“We’ve been there. We’ve worked damned hard to make Selene as self-sufficient as possible. We use aquaculture to raise protein: fish, shellfish, frogs.”

“Gives us a lot more protein for the energy inputs than a herd of cattle would,” Edith added.

“Or even rabbits and smaller land animals,” said Stavenger.

“You understand what we’re up against, then,” Jamie said.

“Yes,” Stavenger replied, “but the question that needs to be answered is still, what’s in it for Selene? We can’t afford to be philanthropic.”

“We’re talking about exploring a new world!” Jamie said, trying to keep his tone even, reasonable. “A world that once bore intelligent life.”

“I know that. But that exploration costs money. That’s why you’re here.”

“Yes,” Jamie admitted.

“I’m willing to do whatever I can to help you,” Stavenger said. “But I’ve got to bring something reasonable to our governing council.”

“Reasonable,” Jamie muttered darkly.

“If there was some hope of a payback, some kind of return on our investment—”

“Exploring Mars isn’t a profit-making operation,” Jamie snapped. “Science doesn’t give you a payback, not right away.”

“I know that, but still—”

“But still, you’re going to sit on your backside and let them close down the Mars program. The same people who tried to take over Moonbase, the same know-nothings and power brokers who’ve banned nanotechnology, who sat there for fucking decades and let this greenhouse disaster roll over them, you’re going to let them shut down the exploration of a new world without lifting a finger to help us!”

Jamie realized he was on his feet, standing in front of Stavenger, glowering down at him, while Vijay pulled at his sleeve.

I’ve got to apologize, Jamie told himself. I lost my temper. I shouldn’t antagonize this man. I shouldn’t be yelling at him.

But before Jamie could force a word past his lips, Stavenger smiled up at him.

“That’s what I needed to see,” Stavenger said, his voice mild, pleased. “I needed to see some passion. You’re entirely right: this isn’t a matter of profits and money. It’s part of the struggle between knowledge and ignorance, between those who want to push back the frontier and those who want to control people.”

Jamie stammered, “I didn’t mean to…”

Vijay tugged harder at his sleeve and Jamie sat down on the sofa beside her with a thump.

Edith was smiling too. “I told you it was in his blood,” she said to her husband.

“So I see,” Stavenger murmured. Looking across the low table at Jamie, he said, “The frontier is where new knowledge comes from, whether it’s the intellectual frontier of a laboratory or the physical frontier of an unexplored territory. Selene is a frontier nation.”

“So you’ll help us?” Jamie asked.

“Let’s see just how much I can coax out of the governing council.”

Jamie stared at him, openmouthed.

“Thank you,” Vijay said for him.

Stavenger’s smile thinned a little. “Just don’t expect a lot. Don’t hope for miracles.”

Boston: Trumball Trust Headquarters

This is stupid, Dex Trumball said to himself. I’m acting like some asshole sneak thief.

It was past midnight. The offices of the Trumball Trust, on the top floor of the Trumball Tower in Boston’s financial district, were empty and dark. Even the cleaning crew and their busy little robots had gone for the night. Everything was dark and quiet, except for Dex’s office.

His office was unlit except for the big smart screen on the wall opposite the drapery-covered windows. The screen showed an image of the Grand Canyon in Arizona.

Sitting in the shadows behind his desk, Dex muttered to the silent image, “You’re nothing but a little scratch in the ground, pal. Put you on Mars and you’d be just a minor alleyway compared to the real Grand Canyon.”

But there was a complex of buildings on the rim of the Arizona canyon, and a spidery bridge arching across the chasm. People paid good money to visit and goggle at the canyon and drive across that bridge. They paid for rides on muleback down to the canyon’s bottom. Good, steady money.

The desk phone said, “Mr. Kinnear on line one, sir.” Dex realized he was biting his lips. He opened his mouth, hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “On screen two, please.”

Roland Kinnear’s round, pleasantly smiling face appeared on the wall next to the picture of the Grand Canyon. He looked youthful, but Dex knew that was from cosmetic therapies. His hair was still light blond, and seemed a bit thicker than Dex remembered from their last meeting. A pencil-thin moustache adorned his upper lip.

“Hello, Dex,” said Kinnear amiably. “It’s been a long time.”

Dex smiled back at the screen. “Hi, Rollie. Going on seven years, according to my files.”

Kinnear laughed. “Still writing everything down, are you?”

“I guess,” said Dex, trying to look relaxed. He had known Kinnear since they had attended Harvard Business School together, decades earlier.

“Must be past midnight in Boston,” said Kinnear.

“Twelve twenty-two.”

“We’re just getting ready for our sunset cocktail here.”

Kinnear was at his home on Hawaii’s Big Island, Dex knew. Relaxed. Easygoing. But Rollie had a steel-sharp mind for business underneath his smiles and pleasantries.

Looking past Kinnear’s image to the breeze-tossed palm trees and the surf rolling up on the beach, Dex said, “So, are you really retired or is this just a smoke screen?”

Laughing, Kinnear said, “I’m no more retired than you are, Dex. You and your Mars Foundation.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Oh?”

“I want to run an idea past you. Do you mind?”

Without an instant’s hesitation, Kinnear said, “Go right ahead.”

“I was thinking about that tourist operation you run in Arizona.”

“The Grand Canyon operation? It’s a money-loser. The Parks people won’t let me expand the facility. Took years to get them to okay the bridge, and we still get protesters now’n then. Some day the bastards’ll blow up the bridge, you wait and see.”

“How’d you like to work with the Navaho Nation instead of the feds?”

“What’re you planning to do, build housing on their reservation land?”

“No, no. Tourism.”

“Tourism?”

“On Mars.”

For the first time Dex could remember, Kinnear went absolutely speechless.

Dex went on, “We’ve got a Grand Canyon on Mars, you know. A hundred times bigger than yours.”

“On Mars?” Kinnear echoed.

“Transportation’s easy,” Dex said, stretching the truth. “The new fusion ships get you there in a few days. You’re not in zero gee at all, hardly: it feels like regular Earth gravity most of the way.”

“Dex, have you dipped into the cooking sherry? On flickin’ Mars? Who the hell’s going to pay the kind of money that’d take?”

Be careful with him, Dex warned himself. Don’t let him know how desperate you are.

“Listen,” he said lightly. “When space tourism started, people paid twenty million bucks, American, to spend a few days on a space station in Earth orbit.”

“How many people?” Rollie asked. “Five? Six?”

“More than that. But within a couple of years guys like Branson were selling tickets for rides into orbit for twenty thousand bucks apiece. He made millions on it.”

“And now people go for vacations on the Moon,” Kinnear murmured.

Dex realized his old friend had done some homework, after all. Good. Now reel him in slowly.

“How much do you think people would pay for a two-week vacation on Mars?” he asked.

“Anybody can make a virtual reality visit to Mars for a few dollars, Dex. You sell ’em, remember?”

“How much would you pay for a real visit to Mars?” Dex asked, dangling the bait. “Walk through the buildings in the cleft in the valley wall. See the remains of the village that they’re digging up. Plant your footprints where no human being has ever stepped before.”

Kinnear looked thoughtful. “It’d be strictly a high-end operation. Very expensive. Only a small market.”

“But a highly profitable market. Big ticket price.”

“The scientists will allow it? I thought they’re keeping Mars off-limits to tourism.”

“I’ll handle the scientists,” Dex said.

“And the Native Americans?”

He has done his homework, Dex realized. He replied, “They want to make money out of Mars just as much as we do. They’ll go for it, if we control the operation carefully.”

“Visit Mars,” Kinnear mused. Then he broke into a beaming grin. “Could be the big prestige item among the glitterati, couldn’t it?”

“We could invite some big shot politicians,” Dex suggested.

“Go for stars instead. Better publicity. Might get lucky with some of those big-busted twits.” Kinnear laughed.

Same old Rollie, Dex said to himself. He hasn’t changed.

Then he thought: But neither has Jamie.