Mars Life

The Old Ones prophesied that The People would live in the blue world and prosper there. Through many trials they endured, and learned the ways of the blue world, and grew in strength and wisdom. But always they turned their eyes to the red world and wondered. Always their dreams were haunted by visions of the red world and what it once was.

Dreams bear their own wisdom, and in time some dreamers strive to bring them into the waking world.

Depew, Florida: Longstreet Middle School

The English class was watching The Return of Zorro on the big flat screen up at the front of the room. Bucky Winters sat toward the rear with his own notebook open on his lap, where the teacher couldn’t spot it. She was half dozing up at her desk anyway, Bucky saw.

If she catches me I’m toast, he told himself. But half the class was either daydreaming or furtively watching their own notebook screens. Only a handful of students were actually following the adventures of the masked swordsman up on the big flat screen. The sound track, in Spanish with English subtitles, was loud enough to rattle the classroom windows.

Bucky was watching a forbidden video on his notebook screen. He had the sound track muted because he dared not risk letting the teacher see him using the earplug. So he followed the documentary about Mars without the sound, using the Spanish subtitles that the program offered.

Some guy was holding a piece of bone in his hand. At least, it looked like a bone. Bucky’s understanding of Spanish was limited to street talk and restaurant vocabulary, but the words scrolling along the bottom of the screen seemed to be saying that this was once the backbone of a Martian animal.

Bucky wondered why this video was banned. He had recited the pledge in church along with his family and everybody else, but he thought it was stupid to promise not to watch any videos from Mars. So he’d kept his fingers crossed while he solemnly swore that he would not watch any documentary produced by the Mars Foundation.

This stuff is interesting! Bucky realized. He was fascinated by the gigantic valley on Mars, the red cliffs and the rocks that had tiny creatures living inside them. And the buildings up in that niche in the cliffs. Did Martians really build them or were they built by the explorers just to fool people? Bucky knew that Native Americans built dwellings in cliffs like that somewhere out west.

Now the explorers claimed they had found a whole village where real Martians used to live. Bucky wondered what it would be like to go to Mars and explore a whole world.

The class ended before the movie was finished, so the teacher promised they would see the end of it tomorrow. She turned off the screen and the overhead lights brightened. Everybody closed their notebooks and shuffled out into the corridor, heading for the next class.

One of Bucky’s friends, Jimmy Simmonds, sidled up beside him. “Know what I found on the Net?” he asked, grinning broadly. “Girls! Naked girls screwin’ their butts off!”

“You would,” said Marlene Chauncy, one of the brightest girls in the school. “I found a docudrama about Judy Garland.”

“Who’s she?”

“She was an actress,” Marlene said, trying to make it sound dramatic. “She led a very tragic life.”

“Never heard of her,” said Jimmy.

“What about you, Bucky? You didn’t watch that drippy Zorro show, did you?”

“No, I—”

“You don’t have to ask him,” Jimmy said, laughing. “Bucky went to Mars again, didn’t you?”

Bucky nodded, while the other kids laughed.

“Mars boy.”

Even Marlene laughed.

Tithonium Base: The Mission Director

For several days Jamie looked for a way to tell Dr. Chang that Monsignor DiNardo would soon be arriving at the base.

“Why not simply tell him?” Vijay suggested. They were eating dinner in the crowded cafeteria, heads bent close over the table so they could speak without raising their voices above the clatter and chatter around them.

Before Jamie could reply, Vijay went on, “You’re the scientific director, love. You outrank him, don’t you?”

“It’s not a matter of organization charts,” Jamie said. “I don’t want this to be a confrontation. I’ve got to find a way to get Chang to accept this without feeling threatened or angry.”

Vijay smiled lightly. “He prob’ly already knows about it. He’d be a pretty poor mission director if he di’n’t.”

“Even so, I’ve got to tell him. I can’t let DiNardo just pop in here without telling Chang about it first.”

“Well, mate, you’d better break it to him soon. The resupply flight’s due to arrive in a few days, i’n’t it?”

“Four days.” Jamie nodded, tight-lipped.

Vijay looked past his shoulder. “There he goes now. Whyn’t you grab the chance?”

Turning, Jamie saw Chang weaving his way through the cafeteria tables, holding a loaded dinner tray in both hands. He spoke to no one and no one tried to speak to him.

“Looks like he’s heading for his office,” said Vijay.

“He spends most of his time in there,” Jamie said. “His fortress.”

“Go get him,” she urged. “I’ll wait here.”

Jamie took a deep breath, then got up from his chair and hurried after the mission director. He caught up with Chang halfway across the dome, well clear of the cafeteria tables.

“Dr. Chang?” he called. “Can I talk with you for a moment, please?”

Chang slowed his pace but did not stop. “Dr. Waterman? Is something wrong?”

“No, not really,” Jamie said. “I just need to speak to you for a few minutes. In private.”

Dipping his chin slightly, Chang said, “In my office, then.”

Jamie walked alongside the mission director and even slid open his office door for him. Chang placed his dinner tray on the low table in the corner of his office, then wordlessly gestured to one of the chairs next to it.

Once they were both seated, Jamie looked for a way to open the conversation.

“This is about the priest, I presume,” said Chang.

“Yes,” Jamie said, grateful that the subject was broached. “I wanted to tell you personally about his coming.”

“That is kind of you. DiNardo arrives on the resupply flight. I saw his name on the manifest that Boston sent.”

“Our decision to allow him to come was based on a number of factors.”

“He is rather old for such rigorous work. Almost as old as Dr. Carleton.”

“He’s been thoroughly examined. His health is fine.”

Chang nodded.

Jamie went on, “I don’t want you to feel that Monsignor DiNardo’s presence here in any way impinges on your authority as mission director.”

“He is a fine geologist. I know his reputation and have studied his curriculum vitae. I met him once, at a conference in Taipei.”

“Good,” said Jamie.

“He will make fine addition to our geology group.”

“Yes, but the reason we decided to allow him to come here is that he can be a powerful voice against the fundamentalists who are opposed to our work on Mars.”

“I understand. You are struggling against those who wish to stop our work here and force us to return home. A geologist who is also a priest can be useful against them.”

“That’s why we decided to let him come,” Jamie said, thankful that Chang was being reasonable.

Chang’s usually impassive face worked itself into the beginnings of a smile. “I welcome a fellow geologist,” he said, as if he actually meant it. “There is much work for him to do here.”

“I’m delighted that you see it this way.”

“How else would I feel?”

Jamie hesitated, then plunged, “I was afraid you’d be upset, unhappy perhaps, because we didn’t include you in the decisionmaking loop.”

Chang shook his head slowly. “It was not my decision to make. You are the scientific director. I am the mission director. Once Dr. DiNardo is here, he will report to me.”

“Yes, of course.”

“That is as it should be. I will ask Dr. DiNardo to participate in heat-flow studies. He can coordinate measurements of satellites and ground instruments. He need not leave this base.”

“That will be fine,” Jamie said gratefully.

“He will not,” Chang went on, emphasizing the negative, “work with Dr. Carleton. Not at all.”

And Jamie suddenly realized why Chang was being so cooperative. He wants to use DiNardo as a counterbalance to Carleton, Jamie told himself. He’s a pretty crafty politician, underneath it all.

Tithonium Base: The Resupply Flight

Jamie could barely concentrate on the map displayed on the lighted stereo table. He kept glancing at his wristwatch, mentally counting the minutes until the resupply flight was due to establish itself in orbit around Mars.

Billy Graycloud stood beside him at the edge of the table, tall and gangling, his silent face focused on absorbing every word that Dr. Chang was uttering. Carter Carleton was on the other side of the table, beside Chang, looking almost amused as the mission director pointed out features on the map with his stubby fingers.

“We have traced the course of the ancient river bed up to this point,” Chang was saying, indicating the spot where Rosenberg and Hasdrubal had reached weeks earlier. There was no mark on the map display to show where the hopper had exploded.

Sweeping his hand down the winding track of the buried river bed, Chang went on, “Detailed imagery of cliffs along this part of the valley shows no additional structures in the cliff face.” The mission director looked squarely at Jamie. Almost accusingly, Jamie thought.

“The imagery doesn’t show any large niches in the cliffs, does it?” Jamie asked, trying to make his voice sound conversational, not confrontive.

“Small niches,” Chang answered, still bending over the table. “None as big as here, where the buildings are.”

Carleton nodded and said, “I’m willing to bet we’ll find other dwellings in the cliffs farther up the river.”

“You told us they were not dwellings,” Chang said. With a grin, Carleton said, “Touché. I misspoke, for lack of a better word.”

“Dwellings or not,” said Jamie, “it seems clear that the Martians lived in villages along the banks of the river.”

“Agreed,” Chang said, straightening up and squaring his shoulders. “Question: should we put more resources into tracing the buried riverbed farther along valley, or concentrate on excavating the village here, by our base?”

Jamie glanced at Carleton, then said, “I wish we had the resources to do both.”

“We do not.”

Tapping the lighted map display with a forefinger, Carleton said, “I say we put everything we have into excavating the village here.”

Chang did not turn toward the anthropologist. Still focusing on Jamie, he said, “Dr. Waterman, you are the scientific director. This decision you must make.”

Jamie remained silent for several moments, even though he had known this question was coming and knew what his answer had to be. Yet he hesitated, hoping to mollify Chang at least a little.

“As I said,” he began at last, “I wish we had the resources to do both. But we don’t, as you pointed out, Dr. Chang.”

“So?”

“So I believe we should use our available manpower to excavate as much of the village as we can, and continue mapping the riverbed and seeking evidence for other villages with the deep radar imagery from the satellites.”

Chang seemed almost to be standing at attention, eyes still riveted on Jamie.

“Very well,” he said. “That will be done.”

The mission director pivoted and strode back toward his office, hands at his sides clenched into fists.

Carleton let out a low chuckle. “He didn’t like that, let me tell you.”

“Neither did I,” said Jamie. “Neither did I.”

Jamie started back toward his own cubbyhole of an office, checking his wristwatch as he went. Graycloud walked beside him, slouching slightly.

The public address speakers set up in the dome’s rafters announced, “RESUPPLY FLIGHT OH-EIGHT-ONE HAS ESTABLISHED MARS ORBIT.”

A ragged, halfhearted round of cheers went up across the dome. Whoever was in charge of the PA system put on the “Going Home” movement from Dvorak’s New World symphony.

Jamie grimaced as he stepped into his narrow cubicle, Graycloud was right behind him.

“I guess some of the guys are happy about leaving,” the younger man said as Jamie slid around his improvised desk and sat down.

“I guess so,” Jamie replied absently, thinking about DiNardo’s arrival and the departure of twenty-six needed men and women. There would be four new people arriving with the priest: two from Selene and two from Earth. Twenty-six leaving, four coming in. We’re shrinking, he said to himself.

Graycloud shifted from one foot to the other by the doorless entrance, looking uneasy.

“Don’t tell me you want to go back, too, Billy.”

“No, not me!” The youngster looked genuinely alarmed. “I’ll stay as long as you want me to, Dr. W.”

“That’s good, Billy. Good.” Jamie turned his attention to his desktop screen and called up the logistics program. Graycloud didn’t leave, though, he simply stood by the entrance, fidgeting silently.

Jamie glanced up at him.

“It’s just that…” Graycloud’s voice tailed off, but the expression on his face looked urgent.

“What?”

“The writing. Those pictographs on the wall of the building. Would it be all right if I took a crack at translating them?”

Taken completely by surprise, Jamie suppressed his impulse to say, “You?” Instead, he merely leaned back in his springy little chair and waited for Graycloud to go on.

“I could do a computer analysis of the frequency of each symbol, then assign arbitrary meanings to each of the symbols and see if any sense comes out of it.”

The kid’s totally serious, Jamie realized. I’m trying to hold this operation together and he wants to tackle a problem that’s stumped the best experts in the world.

“Hasn’t anybody already done that?” he asked softly.

Graycloud shook his head. “I’ve read everything in the literature. A couple guys at Carnegie Mellon took a crack at it, but they didn’t even try to guess at what the individual symbols mean. They just did a statistical analysis of the frequency of each symbol.”

Despite himself, Jamie felt a glow of interest. “But how can you know what the symbols stand for? I mean, that’s the whole point of the exercise, isn’t it, trying to determine what they represent?”

“I’ll just guess,” Graycloud said, pulling up the only other chair in the cubicle and folding his lanky body into it. “The computers can rattle through thousands of guesses per second, y’know. If I guess wrong, we won’t get any sense out of it. But if I guess right…”

Unconvinced, Jamie said, “That’s a brute force way of going at it.”

“Right! Exactly! But with enough computer power the brute force way might give us something!”

Jamie could see the enthusiasm shining out of the youngster’s eyes. “How much computer power do you have access to?” he asked.

Graycloud actually glanced over his shoulder before answering. Hunching closer to Jamie, he lowered his voice as he replied, “At night I can put most of the units in the base together in parallel. We’ve got two supermodels and dozens of office and lab stand-alones. I can program them together. That’s more teraflops than a whole university department!”

“You have your regular duties, Billy. When would you sleep?”

“That’s the beauty part! Once I slave them all together they can chug along all night long on their own. All I have to do is check their results each morning.”

“This wouldn’t interfere with anyone’s regular work? You wouldn’t want to screw up anyone’s computer.”

“Nobody even needs to know about it,” Graycloud said, practically twitching with eagerness.

Jamie shook his head. “No, I don’t want you sneaking behind anybody’s back on this.”

Graycloud nodded, but without much enthusiasm.

“Write out a program plan, just a page or so will do.”

“And try to get Chang to approve it?”

“He’ll approve it,” Jamie said. “I’ll see to that.”

“Really?”

“Really. As long as you can absolutely promise us that this won’t foul up any of the work the computers are already programmed to do.”

“No sweat! I guarantee it, Dr. W!” Graycloud shot to his feet.

Grinning at the lad’s enthusiasm, Jamie got up from his chair and took Graycloud’s hand in his own.

“Go write that program plan,” he said.

“Yessir! Right away!”

As the youngster stumbled through the cubicle’s entryway, awkward in his haste, Jamie heard himself lapse into the old Navaho saying, “Go in beauty, son.”

He stood there for a moment, wondering if Graycloud heard that. Then, with a shrug, he went back to the logistics program. The kid wants to run with his idea, Jamie said to himself. As long as it doesn’t bother anybody—

The PA system announced, “THE L/AV HAS MADE RENDEZVOUS WITH RESUPPLY OH-EIGHT-ONE. L/AV LANDING IS EXPECTED IN TWO HOURS, GIVE OR TAKE A FEW MINUTES FOR THE CARGO LOADING.”

Mars Orbit: Transfer

Monsignor DiNardo was in the midst of his morning breviary when the command pilot called him over the ship’s intercom, “Father DiNardo, we’re ready to transfer you to the L/AV.”

DiNardo’s compartment was as small as a monk’s cell, but more comfortably furnished with a soft bed and modern plumbing.

He put his rosary beads down on the metal dresser that was built into the curving bulkhead and touched the intercom keyboard.

“I am ready,” he said. Ready to go down to Mars, he thought, his heart thumping.

He had already packed his meager belongings in his single black travel bag. Stuffing the beads into one pocket of his gray coveralls and his prayer book into another, he reached for his travel bag. And thought of a colleague in the seminary, ages ago, who would skim through his breviary by saying, “All the saints on this page, pray for me,” over and over as he flicked through the pages.

DiNardo smiled to himself at the memory as he slung the bag over his husky shoulder and slid open the door of his compartment. The bag felt featherlight. Of course, he thought: the ship is spinning at only one-third normal gravity now. I weigh only thirty-some kilos. The best diet I’ve ever been on!

He headed along the narrow passageway toward the main airlock, careful to grip the safety bars on both sides as he adjusted his stride to the lighter Martian gravity. During the four days of the flight from Earth the wheel-shaped torch ship had spun at a rate that produced a feeling of almost normal gravity. Now that they were in orbit around Mars, the spin rate had been cut down to one-third of a g.

The command pilot was still on the bridge, overseeing the transfer of the last of several tons of cargo to the landing/ascent vehicle. One of the other astronauts, a gangly, long-legged African-American woman with a lantern jaw and dark hair cut so short it looked almost like a skullcap, was waiting for him at the airlock hatch.

“You’re almost there, Padre,” she said, in a west Texas twang.

“Yes,” DiNardo replied softly, his voice almost choking in his throat. “Thank you for a very pleasurable flight.”

The astronaut chuckled. “You call sittin’ in that bitty li’l compartment for four days and eatin’ what passes for food on this bucket pleasurable?”

“It has brought me to Mars.”

She sobered. “Oh. Yep, that it has. Good luck, Padre.”

“God bless you, my child.”

The airlock was connected to the L/AV’s airlock, so there was no need to cycle it. DiNardo simply stepped from the torch ship into the tubular segment that linked it with the landing/ascent vehicle, much as an airliner passenger would go from the airport terminal gate through an access tunnel and into the airplane.

No windows, no view of the red planet outside. Another astronaut—male, short and wiry—greeted DiNardo inside the L/AV, showed him to a bucket seat. The seat’s thin padding looked threadbare, worn. Four others were already buckled in: one woman and three men, fresh and fuzzy-cheeked as teenagers in DiNardo’s eyes.

“We’ll be on the ground in about half an hour,” the astronaut said. “The ride ought to be pretty easy, but you’ll have to stay strapped in until we touch down.”

DiNardo nodded and started to pull his prayer book from his coveralls pocket, to resume his morning devotions.

“Would you like to go up to the cockpit?” the astronaut asked. “Just for a minute or so, but you can see outside from there.”

DiNardo jumped out of his chair so quickly that he stumbled into the astronaut in the light gravity. Laughing, the man led him past the empty seats, up a short ladderway and through a hatch.

And there was Mars.

DiNardo’s breath caught in his throat. He had seen thousands of images of Mars, pictures taken from orbit and from the surface. But this was no photograph. Through the curving window of the L/AV’s cockpit he could see the red planet gliding past his goggling eyes. That’s Olympus Mons! DiNardo realized. The largest mountain in the solar system, its massive flanks sheened with ice, its gaping caldera dark and mysterious. Close enough almost to touch! And that mass bulking up on the horizon must be Pavonis Mons.

He was gasping, he realized. And the pain had returned to his chest.

“You okay, Father?” asked the astronaut, his face suddenly taut with concern.

The other astronaut, seated at the craft’s controls, turned to look up at him. “Don’t sweat it, Reverend, this creaky old bird’ll get you down on the ground all right.”

“I’m fine,” DiNardo lied. “Fine. It’s… the excitement. I’ve waited… twenty-three years… for this.”

The astronaut’s expression eased and he showed DiNardo back to his passenger’s seat and helped him strap in. Once the astronaut climbed back up to the cockpit, DiNardo dug the bottle of pills From his pocket and swallowed one of them dry. He had lots of experience doing that, furtively taking the heart pills so that no one knew he needed them.

After several minutes the astronaut called from the cockpit, “Separation in three minutes, folks. We’ll be on the ground in fifteen.”

On the ground, DiNardo thought. On Mars.

The pain in his chest eased, and DiNardo tried to resume his breviary prayers. But he closed the well-thumbed little book as soon as he felt the gentle surge of thrust that meant that the landing vehicle had separated from the torch ship.

I’m on my way, he told himself. Deo gratias. Thanks be to God for allowing me to reach Mars. The pain of the heart is a trifling price to pay for such a privilege. Glory be to God.

His chest constricted again and he reached for the bottle of pills once more.

“L/AV LANDING IN TEN MINUTES,” the public address speakers blared.

Jamie looked through the opening in the partitions that formed his office and saw that a couple of dozen people were milling about the open area of the dome, waiting to leave Mars when the L/AV departed again. Their luggage was piled in a disorderly heap near the main airlock.

He knew he shouldn’t feel this way but he couldn’t help thinking of the departing men and women as traitors, turncoats, cowards who were running away from Mars rather than staying here to push the exploration further.

You’re supposed to be scientists, Jamie berated them silently. You’re supposed to seek out new knowledge, new understandings. Instead you’re running away. When the going gets tough, you run away.

But then the Navaho part of his mind spoke: They have to find their own paths, seek their own goals. Look at that Hungarian, Torok: his marriage is falling apart and he has to go back to salvage what he can. No two lives follow the same course, no two lives arrive at the same destiny. You’ll have to explore Mars without them. In time, there will be others to help you.

In time, Jamie thought. In time we could be shut down completely. The exploration of Mars could come to an end.

“Not while I live,” Jamie whispered to himself. “Not while there’s breath in my lungs or a beat in my heart.”

He thought he could hear Coyote laughing, out on the frigid, bleak red desert of Mars. Laughing at him.

“L/AV LANDING IN FIVE MINUTES.” The PA system broke into his thoughts.

Almost reluctantly Jamie got up from his chair and walked toward the small crowd shifting restlessly near the main airlock. What can I say to them? he asked himself. Nothing, he realized. They’ve made their choice. They’re running away.

He spotted Kalman Torok among the others, looking edgy, running a hand through his dark hair.

Walking up to him, Jamie put on a smile and stuck out his hand. “Good luck in Budapest,” he said softly.

Torok looked mildly surprised. “Thank you, Dr. Waterman. I hope I can come back here after I get this legal tangle straightened out.”

Jamie nodded, not trusting himself to say more. He went from one person to another, shaking hands, smiling tightly, holding back the urge to plead with them to stay. We couldn’t afford to keep them all, he knew. We couldn’t feed them or pay their salaries.

Still, he felt betrayed. It’s not their fault, he told himself as he went through the little group. It’s mine. I should have paid more attention to the funding problems. I should have worked closer with Dex and the board in Boston. I’ve been sleepwalking the past few years while the program’s been strangled.

He saw Carter Carleton in the crowd, standing beside Doreen McManus. They both looked grim, almost angry.

Carleton’s morning had begun badly and went downhill from there.

When he awoke, Doreen was already up and dressed in a freshly cleaned set of coral pink coveralls.

“Your flight suit?” he asked, putting as much sarcasm into the words as he could.

She frowned at him. “I’m leaving, Carter. Let’s not make our last morning together a battle.”

“No,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed. “Of course not.”

Once he was finished in the lavatory and came back into the bedroom she was gone. He dressed swiftly and strode out toward the cafeteria, looking for her. Good tactics, he thought. Get out in public where we won’t make a scene. She’s a smart little bitch.

But she was sitting alone at a table for two, off in a far corner of the cafeteria. Only about half the tables were occupied; most people had already taken their breakfasts. Carleton poured himself a mug of coffee from the one urn that was working, then went and sat across the table from her.

“You’re really going through with this?” He wanted to sound firm, accusatory. It sounded almost pleading.

She put down her spoon and looked at him squarely-. “I’ve got to go, Carter.”

“But why? I still don’t understand why.”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

Leaning closer to her, he whispered, “Is it because I haven’t said I love you? All right, I love you. Does that make you feel better?”

“Not really.” She turned her attention to her fruit salad again.

Carleton grasped her wrist hard enough to make her drop the spoon. “What the hell do you want from me?” he snarled.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

“I need you, goddammit!”

Doreen took a breath. Then, “Carter, you don’t need me. You just want some compliant woman to go to bed with you.”

“No, it’s more than that.”

She dropped her eyes for a moment, then looked at him again. “Carter, I accessed the files of your hearing at the university.”

“Those files were sealed!”

“You know better than that. It didn’t take much to hack into them.”

“That’s private information,” he growled.

“And you don’t think enough of me to share it,” said Doreen, almost sadly.

“It’s… painful.”

“They said you abused that girl. There are pictures of her bruised and battered.”

“I didn’t do it. You’ve got to believe that.”

“I’d like to.”

“So that’s why you’re leaving? You’re afraid I’ll batter you?”

Strangely, she smiled. “No, Carter. I’m not afraid of you.”

“Then what?”

“Carter, you don’t care about me. You don’t care about my ideas, my work. You don’t care about anything but yourself!”

“That’s not true,” he muttered.

“Yes, I’m afraid it is,” she said. “Don’t you understand? Can’t you see it?”

He felt totally confused and more than a little angry. “You’ll have to explain it to me,” he said.

Doreen’s eyes seemed to be searching him, seeking something that wasn’t there.

At last she said, “Our relationship has been all one way, Carter. I give and you take. I know you’re trying to protect yourself, that you’ve been terribly hurt and you’re frightened of exposing yourself to more pain—”

“What do you think you’re doing to me now?”

She reached across the table and put her slender hand on his. “I know it hurts. It hurts me, too. Did you ever think of that?”

He pulled away and got to his feet. “Come on,” he said coldly. “I’ll walk you to the airlock.”

Tithonium Base: Arrival

The L/AV landed with a thump that almost chipped Monsignor DiNardo’s clenched teeth.

“Sorry ’bout that,” came the pilot’s voice over the intercom speaker. “Damn retros hiccupped.”

Somewhat shakily DiNardo unstrapped and got to his feet. The four other passengers also got out of their seats, grinning expectantly, chattering to one another. The other astronaut clambered down the ladder and strode past him, toward the hatch, muttering, “Any landing you can walk away from…” His grin looked slightly forced.

It took a few minutes for the access tube to connect to the L/AV’s airlock. When the astronaut finally pushed the hatch open, he gestured DiNardo through. Age before beauty, the priest thought, with a glance at the four younger arrivals.

Jamie Waterman was standing in the tube, smiling warmly at DiNardo.

“Welcome to Mars,” he said, extending his hand.

DiNardo felt his own face beaming back at Waterman. He took the proffered hand and squeezed it firmly. “I am happy to be here, at last.”

There was a crowd at the other end of the access tube, just inside the dome’s main airlock. For a moment DiNardo thought they were there to welcome him, then he quickly realized—with a flush of embarrassment—that they were the men and women who were departing, taking the L/AV back up to orbital rendezvous with the torch ship that would carry them back to Earth.

Jamie introduced DiNardo to Dr. Chang, who bowed stiffly and offered formal words of welcome to Tithonium Base to the new arrivals. They were silent now, a little awed as they looked around al the big dome that would be their home for the next year or more.

A pair of experienced hands took the newcomers in tow and led them toward their assigned quarters. But Chang pulled DiNardo away from them.

“I look forward to working with such a distinguished geologist,” the mission director said, unsmiling, dead serious. “I assume you have a program of research in mind.”

DiNardo glanced at Jamie, then made an Italian shrug. “I haven’t had time to organize my plans, Dr. Chang. This has all happened so quickly. I would be glad to follow your direction and help in whatever way I can.”

Chang’s impassive face thawed a little. He dipped his chin slightly, then said, “We must discuss our ongoing operations, then. I will be most interested in your comments and suggestions.”

“Thank you,” said DiNardo, unconsciously bowing back to the mission director.

Jamie said, “Let’s get you unpacked and settled in your quarters first.”

“Of course,” said Chang. “I will be in my office. Feel free to call me there when you are ready.”

“Thank you,” DiNardo said again.

DiNardo hefted his travel bag and let Jamie lead him across the emptying dome. “That’s Carter Carleton over there,” Jamie said. “You ought to meet him.”

“Yes, certainly.”

Jamie called to Carleton, but the anthropologist took no notice. He looked grim, absorbed in his own inner thoughts.

“Dr. Carleton,” Jamie called again, louder. “Carter.”

Carleton turned toward them, his face grim, scowling. “What?” he snapped.

Approaching him, Jamie said, “I’d like you to meet Monsignor DiNardo. He just arrived and—”

“Oh, yes, Dr. DiNardo.” Carleton’s expression softened a little. “Good to meet you.” His hands remained at his sides.

“It is a pleasure to meet you,” said DiNardo. “I congratulate you on your discovery.”

“Yes. Thank you.” Carleton turned and walked away, head bent forward.

DiNardo watched his retreating back. “There is a man with much on his mind.”

“He and one of the women here have just broken up,” Jamie said. “She’s going back to Selene.”

DiNardo nodded as they resumed walking toward his living quarters. “I wonder if it would be possible for me to say mass. There must be some Catholics here, and non-Catholics will of course be welcome.”

Jamie seemed to think it over for a few paces before he said, “I don’t see why not. Will you need anything special?”

Smiling, DiNardo replied, “Only some goodwill.”

That evening Jamie and Vijay invited DiNardo to have dinner with them.

“The food’s not bad,” Vijay joked as they went through the cafeteria line. “Best on Mars, actually.”

DiNardo smiled. The hot dishes were unidentifiable soy derivatives of one sort or another. The vegetables looked fresh, though, and there was a variety of fruit juices available. There was a tang of something spicy in the air; DiNardo reasoned that the cooks used spices liberally to disguise the lack of variety in the basic menu.

Once they were seated and had unloaded their trays onto the table, Vijay asked, “Is it proper to call you Monsignor DiNardo?”

Absently touching the purple on his clerical collar, DiNardo said, “Proper, but a bit pompous, I think. Why don’t you simply call me Fulvio.”

“I’m not sure I could do that,” Vijay said.

“Please.”

“Okay, I’ll try. And I’m Vijay.”

“And I’m Jamie.”

“Very good,” said DiNardo. He raised his glass of grape juice, “Here’s to teamwork on Mars.”

“On Mars,” Jamie and Vijay echoed.

Once they started eating, Vijay asked, “If you don’t mind me snooping, why’d you decide to come to Mars? I mean now, after all these years.”

“I want to help,” DiNardo answered.

“With the geology research?”

The priest shook his head. “Not merely that. I want to help show that science and religion are not enemies. I want to help you to continue the exploration of Mars.”

Jamie sighed. “We can use all the help we can get, Fulvio.”

New York: Grand Central Station

Dex Trumball shouldered his way through the crowd booming through the enormous terminal. Looking overhead he saw the magnificent mosaic set into the ceiling: the mythological beasts and gods and heroes of the starry constellations—all backwards, reversed left for right. Whoever did the tile work got it the wrong way round. But nobody noticed, nobody gave a damn. Dex saw that none of the scurrying commuters or gawking tourists even glanced up at the ceiling so far above them.

What caught their eyes were the huge animated advertisement screens mounted on the walls, hawking everything from cameras to salvation through Jesus. Wonder if we could put up scenes from Mars, Dex asked himself. Maybe clips from DiNardo’s documentary. Probably too expensive; not cost effective.

With an inward shrug he pushed his way through the crowd and started up the short flight of marble steps toward the hotel that connected underground with the terminal. You could spend your whole life underground in Manhattan, Dex thought. Like living on the Moon. He himself hadn’t been up at street level since he’d stepped aboard the maglev train at Boston’s South Station.

The hotel lobby was quieter, less crowded. Dex glanced at his wristwatch and saw that he was running several minutes late. He looked around the lobby, peaceful and nearly empty at this time of the morning. There was Andersen standing in front of the men’s shop window, looking at a display of Italian silk jackets.

Dex shook his head. Quentin Andersen didn’t look like the sharpest publicist in New York. He was grossly overweight, his face florid and sheened with perspiration, his multiple chins lapping down over the wilted collar of his tailor-made shirt, his unbuttoned coat sagging around him like the flag of a defeated battalion. An Italian silk jacket won’t do him any good, Dex thought. Rumor had it that Andersen was dying of cancer, but that rumor was at least ten years old and the man was still at the peak of his profession.

Walking up next to him, Dex muttered an apology for being late: “Train was held up coming out of Boston.”

Andersen smirked. “Jesse James rides again?”

“No. A demonstration that blocked the tracks. Something about—”

“Protest against the church-and-state separation,” said Andersen. “I heard about it.”

He’s got his ear to the ground, Dex said to himself. The lean, handsome mannequin wearing the silk jacket suddenly stirred to life, raising one hand and asking, “Would you like to try something on, sir?”

Dex was startled, but Andersen chuckled as he pointed. “Sensor set into the window alongside the speaker. You stop for more than thirty seconds and the program activates.”

“We have an excellent selection of…”

Andersen turned and started walking away from the window. Dex followed him.

“Uses technology your people developed for Mars, I betcha,” Andersen said, still laughing quietly at Dex’s surprise. “Hasn’t that gotten to Boston yet?”

“Don’t know,” said Dex. “I shop electronically. I haven’t been inside a store in ages.”

As they walked slowly across the hotel lobby Dex asked, “Speaking of Mars, what about our documentary? Will you manage the publicity campaign for it?”

“ ’Fraid not.” Andersen lowered himself slowly into one of the lobby’s plush armchairs. To Dex it looked like a massive load of cargo being carefully deposited by an invisible crane.

Taking the chair next to him, Dex pressed, “You want more money?”

“Money’s not an issue, Mr. Trumball.”

Dex could feel his brows knitting. “Look, we need somebody who can stir up a buzz about our documentary. It’s on the Internet but we’re hardly getting any hits on it.”

Andersen said nothing.

“We’ve got a priest from the Vatican talking about Mars, for chrissake! The controversy alone ought to be newsworthy but the goddamned networks won’t touch it.”

“Can’t say I blame them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Andersen turned his fleshy face toward Dex. “Mr. Trumball, the word is out. Every mother-loving church in the country, just about, has told its congregation not to look at your documentary.”

“That ought to make people run to see it,” Dex said. “The kids, especially.”

“You wish. The faithful go home from church and block your documentary so that their precious little darlings can’t access it.”

“But that’s illegal! It’s against the First Amendment.”

Andersen pulled out a huge white handkerchief and ran it under his collar as he explained, “The First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting freedom of expression. It doesn’t say diddley-squat about faithful God-fearing citizens doing it on their own volition.”

“Their own volition,” Dex snapped. “They’re a bunch of brainless automatons. That mannequin in the store window has more intelligence than they do.”

“The mannequin’s not watching your show, either.”

Feeling desperate, Dex urged, “That’s why we need you! We need to create some buzz about the documentary, make noise about it, get people curious enough to look at it.”

But Andersen shook his head, a slow ponderous back-and-forth wobbling of all that flesh. “You’re flogging a dead horse, Mr. Trumball. The churches are against you. Even the Catholic parishes have told their people not to watch it. I’m not going to go against that kind of tide. It’d be suicide. I’d just be taking your money under false pretenses.”

“You’re just going to let the New Morality push our documentary into oblivion?”

“You got to know when to hold ’em, and know when to fold em.” Andersen struggled to his feet. “Sorry you had to come down horn Boston just to hear bad news, Mr. Trumball. But, believe me, I’ve looked at all the angles. Your documentary is a dead issue. Maybe some private schools will look at it, but don’t expect a big audience.”

Dex muttered a heartfelt, “Damn.”

As he watched Andersen waddle off through the hotel lobby, Dex knew that his worst fears had been realized. The New Morality and their fellow fundamentalists were working hard to strangle the exploration of Mars.

He had only one card left to play. With a sigh, he pulled out his pocket phone and called for his limo. He wasn’t looking forward to riding through the choking traffic all the way out to JFK airport. But Kinnear was in Hawaii, and if Dex was going to close a deal for bringing tourists to Mars he had to go to Kinnear.

I’ll get it all signed and sealed, he told himself as he impatiently waited for the limo to show up. I won’t breathe a word of this to Jamie until the money’s on the table.

Tithonium Chasma: The Cliff Dwellings

“Fulvio, are you all right?” Jamie asked, alarmed. He could hear the priest’s labored breathing in the headphone clipped to his ear.

“Yes,” DiNardo answered, puffing. “I’m just… a little… out of breath.”

They had ridden side by side up the cable lifts from the valley floor to the cleft where the ancient buildings stood. It had taken DiNardo three floundering tries to get his boots on the floor of the cleft. In the end, Jamie had to throw him a tether and reel him in.

Through the inflated helmet of DiNardo’s nanofabric suit Jamie could see the priest’s face was flushed, whether from exertion or embarrassment he couldn’t tell.

“I have never been a mountaineer,” DiNardo said, with an apologetic smile, as he unclipped the climbing harness.

“It’s my fault,” Jamie said. “We pushed you through without all the necessary training.”

“I’m all right now. I simply needed to catch my breath.” Jamie nodded and held out one hand, as if to steady his companion.

DiNardo looked past him, and his mouth sagged open. “This is it,” he whispered, eyes widening.

Jamie felt himself break into a broad smile. “This is it. The cliff dwellings.”

The structures stood ghostly pale against the ruddy tones of the overhanging rock, but straight and clean-lined, created by an intelligence that knew how to build for the ages.

As they began to walk toward the buildings, Jamie went on, “Carleton says they weren’t dwellings. The Martians lived down on the valley floor. These buildings were some sort of temple, he believes, used for ceremonial purposes.”

“They came here to worship?”

“Maybe.”

They ducked through a low doorway and straightened up again inside the building. Sunlight filtered down from the light well that ran through the core of the structure.

“Do you think this was truly a place of worship?” DiNardo asked, his voice hardly above a whisper.

Heading for the ladder that led to the upper floors, Jamie said, “The Anasazi back in Arizona built storehouses for grain high up in rock clefts. They used the sites for protection against their enemies.”

“Did these Martians have enemies among them?”

“Damned if I know.”

DiNardo chuckled softly. “Be careful of the words you speak. I had a teacher, a stern old Irish Jesuit, who always warned us that we should not use such language. ‘God might grant your wish and damn you for all eternity,’ he would tell us.”

“I can’t believe that God would be so spiteful,” said Jamie.

“Neither could I,” said Monsignor DiNardo. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “Yet he did away with the Martians, did He not?”

Jamie looked at the priest. His face was etched with something beyond the kind of burning desire to know that drove Jamie. His eyes looked infinitely sad.

Vijay, meanwhile, was in the midst of a tutorial by Carter Carleton.

She had deliberately sought him out at lunch, and found him at a table with eight others. They made room for Vijay to sit across the table from Carleton, between a professor of geophysics and a postdoc cellular biologist. Carleton spent the mealtime discussing the work at the dig, although he did almost all the talking while the others listened and nodded.

He’s handsome, Vijay thought. Handsome and basking in the attention everyone’s giving him. Four of the eight others were women, three of them quite young. Vijay memorized their names from the tags on the coveralls and made a mental note to check their dossiers.

It’s all part of my psych profiling, she told herself. I’ve got to know everyone’s background as thoroughly as I can.

But it was Carleton who fascinated her. She had looked up his file as soon as she had gotten Nari Quintana’s agreement for the psychology study. Carleton was by far the most interesting personality among the scientists and technicians. He had been chairman of the University of Pennsylvania’s anthropology department, but had resigned under a cloud of accusations and recrimination. Vijay had pulled up news media reports of the scandal: a female student had accused him of sexual assault. The university’s official records never mentioned the word rape, but the tabloids did, plentifully.

Fascinating, thought Vijay. Carleton came to Mars as a virtual refugee from the affair, claiming he’d been set up by religious fundamentalists because of his teaching about evolution. Now he was leading the effort to excavate the long-buried Martian village. And reveling in the attention it brought him.

He’d been shacked up with one of the younger women, Doreen McManus, Vijay had learned. But she’d gone back to Selene. If Carleton misses her, he certainly doesn’t show it, she thought.

On the other hand, she mused, there’s definitely tension between Carleton and Chang. Negative tension. Chang doesn’t like the anthropologist, he sees Carleton as a challenge to his authority.

“Come on over to the stereo table,” Carleton said to the group, “and I’ll show you what I mean.”

They dutifully left their half-finished lunches on the table and trooped across the dome. Halfway there Vijay realized that Carleton had come up alongside her.

“Are you really interested in this?” he asked, smiling at her. He was slightly taller than Jamie, she realized, and several centimeters taller than she. Slim, with a tight gut. On Earth he’d be deeply tanned from all his outdoors work. Here on Mars no one got sunburned, not inside the suits they had to wear.

“It’s fascinating,” Vijay replied. Carleton beamed, thinking that she referred to his work.

Carleton called up the three-dimensional display of the dig, then spent the rest of the lunch hour showing what they were uncovering.

“These along here are the foundations of what might most likely be living quarters.”

“Houses?” asked one of the women students.

“Houses,” Carleton said.

“Or not,” said one of the older men. “Mustn’t jump to conclusions.”

Carleton nodded perfunctorily. “Yes, but look at the way they’re grouped around what can only be a central plaza.”

“Kind of small for a plaza.”

“A miniplaza, then.” Carleton’s tone went harder. “I’m willing to bet that’s where they had a communal fireplace. We’ve found traces of ash in a central stone-lined pit. That’s where they cooked their food.”

Another of the students, male, said, “They must have had fairly extensive fields of crops nearby.”

Brightening, Carleton agreed. “We’ll look for those once we’ve excavated the entire village. Croplands don’t leave all that much for us to find, though. Seeds, maybe petrified parts of plants. Not like the foundations of these structures.”

A tone chimed, echoing through the dome.

“Lunch hour’s over,” said Carleton. “Time to suit up and get back to work.”

The group began to head for the main airlock, where their nanofabric suits hung waiting for them.

“Would you like to join us, Mrs. Waterman?”

Vijay was only half surprised by his question. “Me? I don’t know anything about digging up old ruins.”

“That’s all right. I can show you what to do.”

“Really?”

“If it interests you.”

Thinking it over swiftly, Vijay said, “I have to check in at the infirmary. Would it be okay if I came out a little later?”

“Certainly. I’ll look forward to it.”

He gave her a brilliant smile, then turned and headed toward the airlock.

Vijay stood at the stereo table, thinking, A narcissist. He’s definitely a narcissist. But is he also a rapist?

She thought not.

Tithonium Chasma: The Dig

It was midafternoon by the time Vijay finished her notes, suited up, and walked out to the dig. She recognized Carleton, standing in a bulky, grimy old hard suit by the big sifter on the edge of the pit with a pair of others in nanosuits flanking him on either side.

He recognized her, too.

“Mrs. Waterman!” she heard in her earphone. “Welcome!”

Vijay walked up to the anthropologist and they shook gloved hands. “Please call me Vijay,” she said.

“Sure. Great. And you can call me Carter.”

She peered over the edge of the excavation. “Those actually do look like the foundations of buildings.”

“That’s exactly what they are, Vijay.”

For the next ten minutes Carleton pointed out to her the houses, the plaza, the street that ran straight toward the old riverbank, just as he had outlined them »on the stereo display. Seeing the ancient remains in actuality, though, was different. Vijay felt an excitement that stirred her. Jamie was right. Real, actual people lived here, worked here, raised families here.

And died here, she realized. More than sixty million years ago.

“They were a lot shorter than we,” Carleton was saying. “Built close to the ground.”

“How can you tell?” she asked.

“We’ve made some measurements of the door frames. Reconstructions, actually, since the frames are all collapsed. But we have intact doorways up in the cliff structures.”

“I see.”

The setting sun was casting long shadows across the valley floor before Vijay realized that she had spent almost the entire afternoon with Carleton at the dig. The excavation was completely shaded now. The workers were climbing up out of the pit on the ramp that had been cut into one side of it.

“Another day older and deeper in debt,” one of the postdocs wisecracked as he shut down the sifter’s motor.

Carleton waggled a finger at him. “Wrong attitude, Lonzo. Another day finished and we’re closer to having the whole village excavated.”

“And what then?” Vijay asked.

He put a hand on her shoulder and turned her toward the dome. “By then we should know a lot more about the Martians than we do now. What they ate, how they lived—”

“What they looked like?”

He nodded inside the inflated bubble of his helmet. “Yes, I think we should even get a fairly good idea of what they looked like.” Then, grinning, he added, “It would help if they left a few pictures around. Decorated their homes. Put up a sign or two.”

“Do you think you’ll find something like that?”

He shrugged inside the nanosuit. “Maybe they were iconoclasts. Maybe making images of themselves was forbidden.”

“Like Muslims,” Vijay murmured.

“Burial sites,” Carleton said. “That’s where we’ll find out the most about them. We haven’t found their cemetery, not yet.”

Vijay wondered if the Martians buried their dead. Some cultures on Earth preferred cremation, she knew. Primitive peoples often left dead bodies out in the open to be consumed by scavengers.

“Can you have dinner with me?” Carleton asked.

Surprised, Vijay blurted, “I have meals with my husband.”

“Bring him along. I’m broad-minded.”

Once she had finished vacuuming her nanosuit and hanging it on the rack by the main airlock, Vijay hurried across the dome to her quarters. Jamie wasn’t there, so she walked to his office. He wasn’t there, either.

Puzzled, almost worried, she stood outside the entrance of his cubicle and wondered if she should ask the excursion controller where her husband was. Then she saw him and Monsignor DiNardo walking slowly from the airlock, deep in conversation.

Feeling relieved, Vijay headed back toward their quarters. He’ll come there before dinner, she told herself.

But Jamie spotted her from halfway across the dome and beckoned to her. She hurried to him.

“I didn’t realize how late it was getting,” Jamie said. “We spent lire whole day up in the cliff structures.”

“It is my fault,” the priest said, with an apologetic smile. “I’m afraid I have taken your husband away from his duties.”

Before Jamie could reply, Vijay said, “I went out to the dig. With Carter.”

“Oh? I thought you were working with the medical staff.”

“I played hooky this afternoon. Just like you.”

DiNardo’s brows knit. “Hooky?”

“Carter’s asked us to have dinner with him,” Vijay said to Jamie.

He turned to the priest. “I thought we’d eat with Monsignor DiNardo tonight. We have a lot to talk over, about the documentary that Dex made. We’re going to add a segment from up in the cliff dwellings.”

Vijay started to bite her lip, caught herself, then said, “Well, whyn’t you two do what you need to, and I’ll eat with Carter. Okay?”

Jamie glanced at DiNardo, then nodded. “Okay.”

Vijay felt strangely disappointed.

Tithonium Base: Dinner

“You’re husband’s a busy man,” said Carleton, smiling across the small table at Vijay.

She made herself smile back as she glanced past Carleton’s shoulder at Jamie and DiNardo sitting at the next table, huddled over their untouched dinners, talking intently. Jamie’s back was to her.

“He’s fighting to keep them from closing down our work here,” Vijay said.

“Good for him,” said Carleton. “But I suppose that doesn’t leave him enough time for you.”

Vijay marveled at the man’s self-centeredness. I was right, she thought: he’s a complete narcissist.

Misreading her silence, Carleton said, “I shouldn’t be poking into your personal life, I suppose.”

Vijay picked up her fork and surveyed the slices of soybeef on her plate. “We all live in each other’s pockets here, don’t we?”

“I suppose we do.”

They ate in silence for a few moments. Then Carleton said, “God, what I wouldn’t give for a decent glass of wine!”

“It’s a sacrifice we make for working here,” she said.

“I suppose so. But still…”

Is he angling to see if I’ve got some booze stashed? Vijay wondered.

As if in answer, Carleton said, “I brought six bottles of single malt with me, but they’re almost all gone now.”

“Alcoholic beverages are forbidden by mission regulations.”

He grinned at her. “Everybody brings something in their personal belongings. The bio boys cook up some interesting pharmaceuticals in their labs, you know. I’ll bet even Chang has some rice wine stashed away somewhere.”

Vijay chewed on the underdone soymeat, then asked, “You don’t like Dr. Chang much, do you?”

With a shrug, Carleton replied, “As long as he doesn’t get in my way he doesn’t bother me.”

“Does he get in your way?”

“He tries to, now and then. It doesn’t do him any good.”

She speared a leaf of lettuce from her salad. “He is the mission director, after all.”

Carleton hmmphed. “He’s a bureaucrat, not a scientist. He’d make a perfect mandarin bureaucrat for some Chinese emperor.”

“Dr. Chang’s a world-class geologist.”

“Was. He hasn’t done any geology in years. Decades.”

Vijay fell silent, digesting Carleton’s assessment. Sooner or later I’ll have to get Chang’s reading on Carleton, she told herself. That should be illuminating.

Next to them, Jamie and DiNardo were discussing the video broadcast they wanted to make from the cliff dwellings.

“If people could see the structures,” Jamie was saying earnestly, “understand that they’re real, that living, thinking creatures made them while dinosaurs were living on Earth, then…” His voice trailed off.

“Then you think that they would give more support to our work here,” DiNardo finished for him.

“That’s what I’m hoping.”

Gently, DiNardo shook his head. “I hope so, too. But I do not expect it.”

“You don’t? Why?”

“Mars is not important to them. It is that simple.”

“Not important?”

“As horrible as that may seem to you, I believe it to be the truth. Most of the people on Earth simply do not care about Mars. Their concerns are much closer to home.”

“The greenhouse warming,” said Jamie.

“And even more personal problems. Crime. War. Half the people of Earth don’t have enough to eat. Food is a very real worry for them.”

“I suppose so,” Jamie admitted.

“It is an old, old problem,” DiNardo said. “Galileo had trouble finding money to support his work. Leonardo da Vinci wrote job application letters to the rich and powerful.”

Jamie made himself smile at the priest. “Today we write grant applications.”

“But the problem is still serious. In democracies such as the U.S.A. the people are the ultimate decision makers. And I am afraid that the people think Mars is a luxury that only a small elite band of scientists cares about.”

“But don’t you find,” Jamie asked, “that there’s a concerted effort to downplay what we’re doing? An organized campaign to belittle our work, to keep it out of the public’s eye?”

“An organized campaign against us?”

“By the New Morality and other fundamentalist groups. Even some ultraconservatives in the Catholic Church.”

Jamie feared he had gone too far, but DiNardo looked thoughtful for a moment, then replied, “There are ultraconservatives in the Curia, this I know. I have to deal with them.”

“That’s why you’re so important,” Jamie said, some urgency returning to his voice. “You can show the people that there’s no basic conflict between religion and science. Show them that we’re not a bunch of atheist monsters trying to destroy their religious faith.”

DiNardo glanced down at his half-finished meal before replying, “I am not so certain of that, I’m afraid.”

Jamie blinked at him.

“Mars is testing my faith,” said DiNardo, looking suddenly bleak. “Testing it severely.”

Slowly, patiently, Vijay swung their conversation to Carleton’s relationship with Doreen McManus.

“I’m overwhelmed with what a rumor mill this place is,” she said as they worked on their desserts: a fruit cup for her, a lemon tart for him.

Carleton said, “It’s like a university campus, only worse. We’re smaller. As you said, we’re all living in each other’s pockets.”

“Or pants,” she said, grinning to show she meant it to be humorous.

“There is that,” Carleton agreed, smiling back at her.

“It’s a pressure cooker in here, all right.”

Carleton nodded.

Vijay plunged, “Doreen McManus went back to Selene, di’n’t she.”

Carleton’s face went taut for an instant, but he quickly regained his composure. “Good for her.”

“The word is that you two were a couple.”

“She’s just a kid. She got too emotional to stay here.”

“Too bad.”

Vijay waited for Carleton to say more, but he concentrated on mopping up his lemon tart.

She decided to push a bit. “Do you miss her?”

Carleton looked up and made a crooked little smile. “It was fun while it lasted. At least she didn’t accuse me of rape.”

Vijay asked, “Can I ask you—”

“No,” he snapped. “I’ve talked enough about that. It’s over and done with.”

“I suppose so,” she said weakly.

“A moment ago you called this place a pressure cooker,” Carleton said, almost accusingly. “But it’s worse than that. It’s Coventry.”

“Coventry?”

“A place of exile. A place where they send troublemakers to get rid of them.”

She blinked with surprise. “That’s how you think of Mars?”

“That’s what this is. You, me, all of us here—we’re exiles, outcasts. We don’t belong here. We can’t survive here without this dome. We can’t even breathe the air outside or walk out in the open without spacesuits. We’re aliens. Exiles.”

“Most of the people here worked their bums off to get here,” Vijay protested.

“And now that they’re here,” Carleton retorted darkly, “they all wish they were home.”

“No!”

“Yes. They may not admit it, but there isn’t anyone here who wouldn’t prefer to be back on Earth.”

“You, too?”

He folded his hands in front of his face, half hiding his expression. At last he admitted, “Me, too. But I can’t go back. I’m really exiled.”

Vijay thought it over swiftly. “I can think of one person who prefers it here.”

“Your husband.”

“Yes. Jamie wants to be on Mars. He’s at home here.”

“He’s a madman, then,” said Carleton.

Vijay started an angry reply, thought better of it, and said nothing. Carleton returned his attention to the remains of his dessert. A tense silence stretched between them.

She could see him struggling to regain control of himself. He’s let his mask slip, Vijay thought, and now he wants to get it back in place.

At length, Carleton’s smile returned. He pushed his chair back and got to his feet. “I still have some single malt back in my room. Care to have an after-dinner drink with me?”

Vijay automatically glanced at Jamie, sitting with his back to her.

“I’m not sure that—”

Something exploded out in the night. The dome shook, glasses and dishware rattled, Vijay’s tea sloshed in its cup. People jumped to their feet, staring, looking around. Someone knocked his chair over with a crash.

“What the hell was that?”

Suddenly everyone remembered that they were on Mars, millions of kilometers from help, with the thin cold air outside keening like an alien beast.

Exiles, Vijay thought. He’s right. We’ve exiled ourselves.

Tithoniae Fosse: Hammer Blow

Half the people in the cafeteria were on their feet. Everyone was staring, wide-eyed, fearful.

Chang bolted out of his office and looked up at the dome’s structural support beams, lost in shadow.

“Something exploded!”

“I didn’t see a flash.”

“Nothing’s on fire.”

“Are you sure?”

Jamie headed for the monitoring center. Check the life-support consoles first, he told himself. He noted that the dome didn’t seem to be punctured. There was no rush of air, not even the high-pitched whistling of a pinhole leak. My ears haven’t popped, he said to himself. Air pressure’s holding okay.

The monitoring center was the largest cubicle in the dome, packed with consoles that kept constant real-time watch over all the sensors and observation equipment on the ground and in orbit high above. Four people were sitting in the middle of all the screens, earphones clamped to their heads, eyes focused on their displays.

Before Jamie could ask, their chief, standing near the cubicle’s entrance, said, “Got a satellite image of a big flash up on Tithoniae Fosse, ’bout a hundred, hundred-ten klicks from here.”

“Up on the plain?” Jamie asked.

“Right.”

Chang pushed past Jamie. “Life-support systems?” he asked sharply.

“All in the green,” said the chief technician calmly. “No problems.”

Chang gusted out a pent-up breath.

“Might be a meteor strike,” Jamie said. “A fairly big one.”

“Goddamn seismograph gave a big lurch,” the chief technician said, pointing to one of the screens.

“Let me see,” said Chang.

The nearly flat line of the seismograph record spiked sharply, Jamie saw. An impact. The technician monitoring the satellite sensors powered up a blank screen. Standing to Chang’s side, Jamie saw a false-color infrared view of the plain spreading northward from the rim of the valley: Tithoniae Fosse.

Several others were crowding up at the cubicle’s entrance.

“It’s okay,” Jamie said, raising his voice. “Seems to be a meteor strike up on the plain.”

Izzy Rosenberg wormed his way through the gang at the entrance. “A meteor strike? Where? How far? How big?”

Chang pointed to the monitor screen in front of him. “Repeat it,” he said to the technician.

The satellite imagery flared with a sudden burst of light that blanked out the screen. Christ! Jamie thought. If that had hit here, even if it only hit the greenhouse—we’d all be dead.

“It overpowered the camera’s sensitivity,” Rosenberg muttered.

“Must have been a big one,” Jamie repeated.

Sal Hasdrubal’s voice called out, “Let’s go out and see it!” Turning, Jamie saw the tall man looming over the heads and shoulders of the crowd jammed at the entrance to the cubicle.

“It’s night,” someone objected.

“The rock hit up on the plain,” someone else observed.

Undeterred, Hasdrubal said, “We can ride up on the cables; they go to the top.”

“And what do you do then, walk a hundred kilometers?”

“In the dark?”

“There’s two campers in the old dome up there,” Hasdrubal said impatiently. “Power ’em up and let’s go!”

“No,” said Chang. He said it quietly but with the firmness of the Rock of Gibraltar. All the other voices stilled. “We send a rover, not people. Monitor the rover from here.”

“But it would take half a day to program a rover,” Rosenberg objected.

“And somebody’d have to carry it up the cliff to the plain,” Hasdrubal added.

Jamie said, “Dr. Chang, I think sending a small team would be faster and more effective.”

“Mission protocol does not allow excursions at night,” Chang said, scowling. Jamie knew that he was right, almost. Camper missions had gone out for days, even weeks at a time. They weren’t supposed to drive at night, but Jamie remembered Dex and Possum Craig and others who had bent that rule out of shape.

Rosenberg jabbed a finger at the mission director. “Dr. Chang, that strike was big enough to blast out a new crater! It must’ve heated the ground considerably, melted the permafrost! We’ve got to get to it before the area freezes over again!”

Chang remained unmoved. “No excursions at night. Besides, the campers stationed at the old dome cannot run at night. The batteries are flat and need sunlight to recharge.”

“But we could get to the dome tonight,” Jamie heard himself say, “and have the campers ready to run by sunrise.”

Chang glared at Jamie, then seemed to relax. His shoulders slumped slightly. His expression lost a bit of its rigidity.

With the merest of bows, Chang said, “If the scientific director recommends such a procedure, I will ask for volunteers to assist him.”

Jamie realized he’d just been appointed head of the excursion. Fingering the bear fetish in the pocket of his coveralls, he said to himself, All right. That’s the path I’ll have to take.

“Now we’ll see how well the nanosuits protect against the cold,” Jamie said to Vijay, trying to sound unruffled and fearless.

They were back in the cafeteria, pulling together enough food to take care of the three men who had been picked for the excursion: Rosenberg, Hasdrubal and himself.

“I’ll monitor your life-support sensors,” Vijay said as she shoved shrink-wrapped sandwiches into the insulated case Jamie was carrying.

“Good,” he said.

She gripped his arm, forcing him to turn and look at her. “If I tell you to stop and return to base, you stop and return. Understand?”

Nodding, “Sure. Right.”

“I mean it, Jamie. I want you to promise me.”

He was staring into her eyes. Then he broke into a slow, almost shy smile. “I promise, Vijay. I’ll come back to you.”

She made herself smile back at him even though she felt terribly worried about this sudden mission into the hundred-below-zero cold of the Martian night.

As they went to the airlock and the rack of nanosuits stored there, Vijay saw that half the dome’s people were gathered there, milling, buzzing. She glanced at her wristwatch: barely half an hour had passed since the meteor had hit.

Then she saw Carter Carleton off to one side of the crowd, looking more amused than anything else.

Jamie was moving through the crowd, which made way for him like the Red Sea parting for Moses. He saw Hasdrubal already in the extra-large nanosuit that he used, medical sensors attached to its inner lining.

Reaching for one of the medium-sized suits, Jamie asked, “Where’s Rosenberg?”

“Not coming,” said Hasdrubal. “He’s been replaced.”

“Replaced? What do you mean?”

“Outranked by our senior geologist,” said Hasdrubal, pointing.

Turning, Jamie saw Monsignor DiNardo pulling a nanosuit over his black coveralls.

“You’re going out?” Jamie exclaimed, surprised.

DiNardo said, “This is what I came for.”

“But…”

“You think I am too old for such an adventure?” DiNardo grinned at Jamie. “I am not so much older than you, Jamie.”

Hasdrubal let out a grunt. “The geezer squad.”

DiNardo waggled a finger at him. “I prefer to think that I will give our little excursion a closer link with God.”

Jamie tried to smile. But he thought, Coyote will be waiting for us out there in the dark. Coyote the trickster, the destroyer. We’ll need DiNardo’s God. We’ll need all the help we can get.

Night

Vijay wanted to kiss Jamie before he left, but there were too many people crowded around the airlock and once Jamie pulled up the hood of his nanosuit and inflated it into a bubble helmet it was impossible anyway.

So she watched him and the priest and Hasdrubal trudge to the airlock hatch. Jamie waved to her before stepping through. She waved back, feeling suddenly alone and afraid.

The hatch closed. The telltale lights on its control panel cycled from green, through amber and to red.

They’re outside now, she thought. They’re walking to the cable lifts.

The crowd broke up. Dr. Chang walked briskly toward the monitoring center, hands at his sides, shoulders bunched forward.

“You look like a lady who could use a drink.”

Carter Carleton was standing beside her, looking bemused. “I still have that single malt in my quarters,” he said.

“No,” Vijay said firmly. “I have work to do.” She started toward the infirmary, where the medical monitors were.

“They’ll be perfectly fine,” Carleton said, walking beside her. “Those suits are good to nearly two hundred below.”

“Are they?”

“They test them with liquid nitrogen, I’m told.”

Vijay shuddered at the thought of stepping into a vat of liquid nitrogen, suit or no suit.

Carleton reached for her arm, but Vijay kept striding determinedly.

“Look,” he coaxed, “they won’t even get to the cable for another ten minutes. You have time for a quick drink. Just one.”

“Not tonight, Carter,” Vijay answered, thinking, Not ever. Not with a man who tries to move in when my husband’s out risking his butt.

“When they come back then,” Carleton said easily. “We’ll have a celebratory drink together then.”

Without another word, Vijay left him standing in the middle of the open dome as she headed for the infirmary. He doesn’t give up easily, she said to herself. You’ve got to give him that.

Jamie knew it was only his imagination, but he felt cold in the nanosuit. Just a couple of molecules separate me from unbreathable air that’s close to a hundred below zero, he kept thinking. Just a couple of molecules.

They walked along the well-trodden ground, three little pools of light from the lamps built into the shoulders of their suits bobbing in the enormous empty black night of Mars. Overhead hung the stars, silent and solemn, spread across the sky so thickly Jamie could barely make out the familiar shape of Orion. The Milky Way flowed leisurely across the heavens, and one bright blue star beckoned to him: Earth, the blue world.

Jamie couldn’t reach into his coverall pocket to feel the bear fetish, but he knew it was there. Guide me, Grandfather, he prayed silently. Help me get through this.

“There’s the cables.” Hasdrubal’s voice in Jamie’s earphone sounded tense. He could hear DiNardo puffing, but the priest said nothing.

“We’ve reached the lift,” Jamie reported on the radio frequency that linked to the excursion controller. He pictured in his mind the group clustered around the controller’s console: Chang, Rosenberg… would Vijay be there or in the infirmary?

As if in answer, Vijay’s voice came through. “All your medical readouts are fine. No worries.”

Jamie still shivered involuntarily as he helped DiNardo clip the climbing harness across his barrel chest, then checked Hasdrubal’s harness.

“Hey, who checks you?” Hasdrubal asked.

Coyote, Jamie almost said aloud. Instead he answered, “I’ve been doing this since you were in diapers, friend.”

The three of them rode up on the cables side by side in almost complete silence. Jamie had expected Hasdrubal to make some chatter, but the lanky biologist kept his thoughts to himself. He thought he heard DiNardo mumbling something, praying perhaps. They were facing the cliff, which whisked by in a blur of strange, almost menacing shadows in the weak light of their shoulder lamps while their booted feet dangled in empty air.

It took almost fifteen minutes to reach the top of the cliff. Thanking the nanosuits for their flexibility, Jamie swung over and planted his boots on the solid rimrock. Hasdrubal did the same, then the two of them helped DiNardo get himself set on the ground and out of his harness.

Jamie held up his left arm to peer at the greenish glow of the GPS readout among the instruments on the pad he wore on his wrist.

“The dome’s this way,” he said, starting off toward the horizon.

“We have you on the positioning system,” came the voice of the excursion controller. “You’re exactly five hundred and seventy-two meters from the dome.”

The original dome from the First Expedition had been sited more than a hundred kilometers to the northwest, on the other side of the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands. When it became obvious that the main base for the explorers should be down on the floor of the rift valley, Jamie had approved the geologists’ insistence that they keep a pair of campers up on the plain for excursions to the Tharsis Bulge highlands and their massive shield volcanoes.

Now we’re going to examine an impact, Jamie said to himself as the rounded hump of the dome rose like a sharp-edged black shadow against the starry sky. That’s something different from the blue world, Jamie thought as they walked toward the dome: there’s hardly any haze on Mars, especially at night, when the temperature’s so cold. No foliage or buildings, either. You can see the stars right down to the horizon.

The dome was powered by a small nuclear reactor, buried half a kilometer away. It had provided electrical power for nearly twenty years; Jamie remembered that it would need refueling in another five years or so.

The dome’s airlock was big enough for all three of them to squeeze in together. Its dim red lighting still seemed bright to Jamie after spending nearly an hour out in the night.

Once they stepped through the airlock’s inner hatch, though, the dome lit up brilliantly. Jamie blinked and suppressed an urge to laugh out loud.

“Well, the lights work,” said Hasdrubal. He stepped quickly to the monitoring console that sat next to the airlock.

“The heat, too,” DiNardo said. “Gratia Dei.”

Jamie realized he wasn’t the only one who had felt cold out in the night.

Hasdrubal scanned the console screens. “According to the readouts, the air’s okay. Kind of chilly in here, though, not quite up to twenty degrees Celsius.”

Jamie grinned. “That’s better than outside.”

“Amen,” said Monsignor DiNardo.

The three of them pulled down the hoods of their suits as they looked around the dome. It was a spare facility: one row of cubicles for sleeping quarters, a compact galley that hadn’t been used in months, consoles that monitored the life-support systems, a communications console, and across the open floor sat the two campers.

Big enough to carry four persons in relative comfort, the campers were cylindrical in shape with big bug-eye windows up front. They rested on eight sets of springy wheels that always looked to Jamie as if they were too fragile to support the weight. But on Mars they were fine. Their once-gleaming aluminum skins were caked with red dust; it made them look rusty, hard used.

Glancing at his wristwatch, Jamie said, “Let’s check out the campers, then get some sleep. Big day tomorrow.”

“Dontcha think we should call base and let ’em know we’re here?” Hasdrubal suggested.

Jamie knew it was strictly routine. Their monitors back at the base watched them every step of the way. Still, he called back to Dr. Chang. I’ll call Vijay once I’m in one of the sleeping cubicles, he told himself.

Los Angeles: Campaign Headquarters

“I’m not going to kiss ass for those yahoos!”

Malcolm Fry wasn’t angry, but he was upset as he paced across the room they had set up to be his private office. As a candidate for the U.S. Senate, Fry spent precious little time at his campaign headquarters. He was on the road constantly, crisscrossing the state by plane, bus, and his personal hydrogen-fueled minivan.

Fry was “black enough” to entice the minority vote, but not so liberal that he frightened the conservatives. He had made his money the old-fashioned way, in construction and real estate, and now was spending a considerable portion of it in this exhausting campaign.

He was a big man, his hands still calloused from his early days as a construction worker. His smile had charmed voters—especially women voters—since he’d first gotten into politics, as a city councilman in Pasadena. He had climbed the greasy pole up to the point where the news media claimed he had an excellent chance to become California’s next senator. There were even whispers of him running for president later on. He was young enough for that.

But now he glowered at his campaign manager as he paced the spacious office, from its shuttered window to the big desk in the corner and back again.

His campaign manager, Howard McChesney, sat in a tense bundle of nerves in the armchair in front of the desk, his head swiveling back and forth, following his candidate’s pacing. McChesney was a wiry, edgy type, with a lantern-jawed face and cold blue eyes.

“They may be yahoos,” he said, his voice scratchy as fingernails on a chalk board, “but they can throw the election into your lap. Or into Gionfriddo’s.”

“The Mafia candidate,” Fry muttered bitterly.

“Mal, you’ve got to let them have their way with this,” McChesney insisted. “If you don’t, you lose the election. It’s that simple.”

Fry stopped his pacing and fixed McChesney with a look that had terrified labor gangs and corporate directors.

“Howie,” he said in a quietly intense voice, “they want me to withdraw my support for science courses in the public schools. I can’t do that! Hell, when I was on the school board I fought to keep science in the curriculum. They tried to slit my throat over that! Now you want me to buddy up to them?”

“If you want to be senator,” McChesney replied.

“I can’t do it.”

“You mean you won’t do it.”

“That’s right, I won’t.”

McChesney drew in a breath, then said, “Let me paint a picture for you, Malcolm.”

Fry sat on the edge of his desk and folded his arms across his chest. When McChesney called him “Malcolm,” he knew things were getting grim.

“So you stand up to the fundamentalists,” McChesney said, his head tilted back as if he were talking to the ceiling. “You insist on pushing for more funding for science courses in public schools.”

Fry nodded.

“The New Morality, the Catholic Church, and every Christian sect in this crazy state votes against you. You lose the election. Gionfriddo wins. What’s the first thing he does when he gets to Washington?”

Sullenly, Fry answered, “He votes to cut federal funding for science classes.”

McChesney spread his arms. “So there you are. What have you accomplished, except to lose the election?”

“I still don’t like it.”

“Neither do I. But there it is. It ain’t going to go away. Those yahoos, as you call ’em, will work night and day for years and years to get what they want. They’re patient, they’re organized, and they’re absolutely certain that they’re right and anybody who’s against them is wrong. They’re certain that God’s on their side.”

Fry seemed to sag in on himself. “So I either give in to them or lose the election. Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“There’s got to be some other way! Got to be!”

McChesney said nothing for several moments while Fry stared at him, silently pleading.

“Well, maybe…”

“What?”

The campaign manager pressed his lips into a thin line, gazed up at the ceiling again, then finally said, “Maybe we could try to outflank ’em.”

“What do you mean?”

“The ultraconservatives are all worked up about this Mars business. They want to stop the program and bring all the scientists home.”

“Stop the Mars program,” Fry murmured. “Yeah, I’ve heard them bitching about how much it costs.”

McChesney said, “It’s more than the money. They don’t like the scientists talking about finding intelligent life on Mars.”

“It’s extinct, isn’t it?”

“Even so. They want to get everybody off Mars and forget the whole thing.”

Fry shook his head. “Damn yahoos.”

“Maybe so, but if you come out strong against Mars maybe you can finesse the science class issue.”

“Against Mars?”

Breaking into a wide smile, McChesney explained, “The beauty of it is that it doesn’t mean a thing. The government’s already cut all the Mars funding to zero. So you can make a big splash about bringing those people back from Mars without making any difference at all to what’s really happening.”

Fry was silent for several moments, thinking. At last he asked, “I just make some noise against Mars and sidestep the school issue.”

“Could work,” McChesney said hopefully.

Another few moments of silence. Then, “Okay, let’s do it.”

McChesney slapped his hands together. “Good. I’ll get Tilton and her people working on a statement for you to make. And I’ll schedule a meeting with the head of the New Morality’s California organization.”

Fry gritted his teeth, but said, “Okay. Do that.”

Tithoniae Fosse: The Crater

Jamie’s pocket phone was buzzing. He snapped awake and looked around, confused for a moment. Then he realized, I’m in the dome up on the plain. He sat up on his bunk and reached for the phone, buzzing away on the metal nightstand beside the bunk.

Vijay’s smiling face filled the tiny screen, brilliant teeth against shining dark skin, big luminous eyes. “G’day, mate,” she said brightly. “This is your six a.m. wake-up call.”

“Good morning,” Jamie said, yawning.

“How’d you sleep?” they asked simultaneously. Then laughed. As they chatted, Jamie heard coughing and snuffling from one of the other compartments, then water running.

“Time to get to work,” he told Vijay.

“Me, too. One of the geologists came down with a bit of the jitters after you left. He started thinking about the meteor hitting the dome here. I had to sedate him.”

“How’s Billy Graycloud doing?” Jamie asked, and wondered why.

“Graycloud? Solid as a rock, that one. Like you, a stoic Navaho.”

“No problems with the rest of the staff?”

“Nothing big enough to involve the resident psychologist,” Vijay replied lightly.

“Okay,” he said, pulling his legs out from under the twisted blanket and sheet. “Guess I ought to get to work.”

“Go in beauty, Jamie.”

He blinked with surprise, then smiled. “We’ll make a Navaho out of you yet, Vijay.”

It took three hours in the camper, trundling along full-out at thirty kilometers an hour, to reach the new crater. Jamie drove all the way, while DiNardo sat in the right-hand seat beside him and Hasdrubal hunched over them both.

“There it is!” DiNardo shouted, excited.

“Christ, it’s steaming!” Hasdrubal blurted.

DiNardo shot an unhappy scowl at the American’s blasphemy as Jamie braked the camper to a halt. All they could see of the impact crater was a raised rim of reddish gray stones. And a delicate wisp of steam rising from it and dissipating in the thin, clear air.

DiNardo felt his pulse thundering in his ears so loudly that he barely heard Jamie mutter, “I’ll call back to base, let them know we’re here.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hasdrubal said impatiently. “Let’s get out there and start setting up the instrumentation.”

The biologist hurried back toward the camper’s airlock, where their nanosuits were stored. Jamie made a swift, perfunctory call to the excursion controller, then pushed out of the driver’s seat and also went to the rear of the camper.

DiNardo wondered if his legs would hold him erect. He had taken two of his heart pills once they’d bedded down in the dome, after the exertions of the climb up the cliff face and their hike through the bitter black night to the dome. Then he’d set his wristwatch alarm for two hours before sunrise so he could say his breviary before either of the other two woke up. Now he felt dull, dense and slow. I’ve got to be at my best, he said to himself. Lord, lend me strength.

Jamie felt excited, almost trembling with anticipation as he waited for Hasdrubal to close the seals on his nanosuit and inflate its hood into a helmet. Once the lanky biologist worked his long arms through the shoulder straps of his backpack, Jamie checked his suit and backpack connections, then started pulling on his own suit.

Monsignor DiNardo came slowly up the narrow aisle between the folded-up bunks and reached for the third suit. He looked pale to Jamie, his expression… what? Jamie asked himself: apprehensive, expectant, scared?

“Are you alright, Fulvio?” he asked.

DiNardo made a tight smile. “Yes. I am fine. Excited, of course.”

Jamie made a mental note to ask Vijay about DiNardo’s medical readouts. But Hasdrubal was already ducking through the airlock’s inner hatch, eager as a child at Christmas to get outside and see the new crater.

Jamie ushered DiNardo into the airlock once Hasdrubal was outside. Then, finally, he went through himself.

The two men were standing on the circular rim, goggling down into the crater. Jamie stepped up to them, noting that some of the rim rocks were blocky, squarish. Then he looked down into the crater itself. It was a lot smaller than the Meteor Crater in Arizona, barely a couple of football fields across and only about twenty, twenty-five meters deep. Almost perfectly round. The rock must have come straight down at nearly ninety degrees, he thought. Steam was coming up from one slope, near the bottom, a weak little breath rising upward that disappeared almost immediately on the gentle breeze wafting by.

“Heat,” Jamie murmured, although the Navaho in him thought the delicate cloud might be the spirits of dead Martians rising to join Father Sun at last.

“From the impact,” said DiNardo.

Hasdrubal nodded inside his bubble of a helmet. “That rock dumped a helluva lot of kinetic energy into the ground.”

“It penetrated to the permafrost layer,” Jamie said.

“And it has remained hot enough to melt the permafrost even after the overnight cold,” DiNardo agreed.

“Let’s get the instruments planted,” Jamie said. “And we’ll need to bring back samples for the biologists.”

“Damn straight,” said Hasdrubal, fervently.

DiNardo turned sharply toward Jamie. “Do you think there might be organisms down there?”

“Or their remains,” Jamie replied. “Either way, the bio people would crucify us if we didn’t bring back samples for them to look at.”

“Damn straight,” Hasdrubal repeated.

“Yes,” DiNardo agreed, his stubble-jawed head bobbing up and down. “Yes, of course.”

“Wait a minute,” Hasdrubal said. “Before we do anything we oughtta give this hole in the ground a name.”

“A name, yes,” said DiNardo.

“Or three names,” Hasdrubal said, pointing to himself and the two others in turn.

“It should be your decision, Jamie,” said DiNardo. “You are the senior among us.”

Jamie knew instantly what he had to do. “Chang,” he pronounced. “I name this crater for Dr. Chang Laodong.”

DiNardo nodded. Hasdrubal muttered, “Rank has its privileges, don’t it.”

So much of science is physical labor, Jamie said to himself as he lifted a spadeful of dirt from the bottom of the crater and let it slide into one of the biology sample cases. Hasdrubal was a few meters away, worming sensor poles into the ground, unfolding their solar panels, actually singing to himself in a deep baritone as he worked. DiNardo appeared up at the crater’s edge; the priest was trudging back and forth, carrying armfuls of sensor poles and sample cases from the camper to the crater rim.

He looks tired, Jamie thought as he looked up at DiNardo. For an older guy, he’s doing his share of the dogwork. He hasn’t said much, but he’s actually smiling.

The sun was almost at the horizon when Jamie closed the last of the six sensor boxes.

“If you find any microbes in this dirt,” he said to Hasdrubal, “you’re going to have to figure out if they’re native to Mars or were carried in on the meteor.”

“That’s a good problem,” Hasdrubal said, grunting as he pushed one of the sensor poles into the churned-up slope of the crater. “That’s the kind of problem a man could rest his career on.”

“I’ll give you a hand,” said Jamie, reaching for one of the poles lying at the geologist’s feet. He stepped carefully, as if trying to avoid treading on the spirits of the dead. “We don’t have much time It’ll before it gets dark.”

Hasdrubal straightened up and said, “She’s not steaming anymore.”

Peering at the thermometer on his wrist pad, Jamie said, “Temperature’s almost forty below. It hasn’t been above freezing all day.”

“Well, I’m sweatin’,” Hasdrubal said.

“Me, too. I guess the suits give us enough thermal protection, after all.”

“Guess so.” Hasdrubal picked up one of the poles and began worming its pointed end into the ground, working it back and forth, back and forth. “We’ll smell pretty gunky when we take these suits off tonight.”

Jamie started pushing another pole into the ground. “Guess so. The badge of honor for working so hard.”

“The priest must be takin’ a break,” Hasdrubal said, looking up. “Haven’t seen him for damn near a half hour.”

At that instant Vijay’s voice came through Jamie’s earphone, taut and anxious. “Jamie, Father DiNardo’s heart readouts have spiked and then dropped into the red! I think he’s flatlining!”

Tithoniae Fosse: Death Stroke

Despite reciting the rosary over and over again as he trudged wearily back and forth from the camper to the lip of the crater, Monsignor DiNardo found no peace, no solace, none of the tranquility that the repeated prayers usually brought him.

It was a foolish mistake to put on the nanosuit without putting the vial of pills into one of the suit’s capacious thigh pouches, he realized. Now the pills rested in the hip pocket of his coveralls, mere centimeters from his grasp, but he could not reach them. Not without opening the suit, which was impossible out here in the open.

Excitement about the crater had smothered his usual good sense. Like a schoolboy, he admonished himself. You rushed out here to see the crater without thinking, without planning ahead. You allowed your enthusiasm to overpower your intelligence. A mistake. A serious mistake. The crater isn’t going to disappear! You should have been more careful, more thoughtful, before pulling on the nanosuit and rushing out to see it.

He had volunteered to be the donkey, carrying instrument poles and sample cases from the camper to the crater’s rim. Easy work, he thought. Waterman and Hasdrubal gave him the easiest task. I can recite the rosary as I walk back and forth. I can keep my loads light and walk slowly, deliberately, across the sands of Mars.

Still, his pulse thudded in his ears. He blinked beads of perspiration from his eyes, felt sweat trickling down his ribs. Yet he felt cold, clammy and cold.

The rosary, he told himself as he pulled another armload of sensor rods from the camper’s exterior cargo bay. Do it in Latin. Pater noster…

I could go back inside the camper, take off the suit, and get to the pills. I don’t really need them, I’m fine at the moment. But it would be a relief to have them within my grasp.

And then what? he asked himself. Once you come outside again, how can you swallow a pill with this ridiculous plastic bubble over your head? Open it for a second and you’ll die of decompression.

He lay the sensor poles on the ground at the crater’s rim. It had stopped smoking, he saw. Peering down into the pit he saw Waterman and Hasdrubal laboring to set a network of sensor rods in the churned-up ground. A half-dozen insulated specimen cases lay off to one side.

“Father DiNardo?” The woman’s voice in his earphone startled him.

“I am here,” he replied, looking up into the cloudless butterscotch sky. Not entirely cloudless, he realized. Three little wisps floated high, high above. Like the Holy Trinity watching over him.

“Your readouts show a good deal of exertion.” It was Mrs. Waterman’s voice, he recognized. Of course. She is a physician. “Perhaps you should stop what you’re doing and take a brief rest.”

“Yes,” he said gratefully. “Thank you.”

I’ll go back inside the camper and take a pill, DiNardo told himself. Then I’ll be fine.

But halfway back to the camper he felt a sudden white-hot stab of pain at the base of his skull. He tried to call out, to scream, but his voice froze in his throat. I can’t move! He willed his booted feet to take him to the camper but instead his knees buckled and he sank to the ground. The pain overwhelmed him.

He lay on the red sand on one side, his backpack preventing him from rolling onto his back. He couldn’t move. His arms, his hands, paralyzed. He tried to wiggle his toes inside the boots. Nothing. He lay there and stared at the distant horizon, reddish bare hills and endless barren wasteland.

Mother of God, he thought, I’m going to die on Mars.

Jamie scrambled up the slope of the crater, knocking over a couple of sensor poles as loose stones rolled under his boots.

“Father DiNardo!” he shouted. “Fulvio! Are you all right?”

No response.

He reached the lip of the crater and saw the priest’s body crumpled on the ground, halfway to the camper.

“He’s collapsed!” Jamie called to Hasdrubal.

Vijay’s voice came through his earphone, taut but calm. “It might be a stroke. Get him into the camper right away.”

Jamie ran to the priest, Hasdrubal a few steps behind him. In the slanting light of the setting sun he peered at DiNardo’s face. It looked ashen, sweaty.

He scooped up the body in his arms and trotted toward the camper.

“Lemme take his legs,” Hasdrubal said, coming up beside him.

“It’s okay. I’ve got him. Get the hatch open.”

Hasdrubal sprinted to the camper, long legs covering the ground in loping strides as Jamie carried DiNardo’s inert body. In the easy gravity of Mars the priest weighed only about thirty kilos. He pushed the body into the open airlock, then clambered up the little ladder and squeezed into the chamber with him.

Hasdrubal eyed him as Jamie slammed the control panel. It seemed to take hours for the hatch to close, the airlock to cycle, and the inner hatch finally to pop open.

“We’re in the camper,” he called to Vijay. “What should I do?”

She didn’t answer.

As he opened DiNardo’s helmet and unsealed the front of his nanosuit Jamie asked again. “Vijay! What should I do?”

“There’s nothing you can do, Jamie,” her voice replied. “According to these readouts, he’s dead.”

A part of Fulvio DiNardo’s mind was angered at the silliness of it. I can see, I can hear, but I can’t move, can’t speak, can’t even blink my eyes. This would be terrifying if it weren’t so stupid.

He realized that he was about to die. The specialist he had seen privately in Rome had warned him more than a year ago that he was at risk for a cerebral hemorrhage. That’s what the pills were for, weren’t they?

But to die on Mars. What a cosmic irony. You spend half your life working to reach this place and you have a fatal stroke within a week of your arrival. What a test of faith this is!

Waterman is shouting at me. I can’t make out the words. He’s speaking in English, of course, but his voice seems slurred, distorted.

And I’ll die without ever finding out why God wiped out the Martians. I’ll have to ask Him personally. Assuming that I get to heaven. Of course I will. But that’s the sin of presumption, isn’t it. What did that American humorist say: It’s not over until it’s over. The devil waits, always. Satan bides his time and seizes the opportunity to drag souls down to damnation.

He had the feeling that they were carrying him, laying him down on one of the cots, straightening his legs and arranging his arms across his chest. I’m not dead, he tried to tell them. Not yet.

But they could not hear him.

Why did you kill them, Lord? They were intelligent. They must have worshipped You in some form or other. Why kill them? How could You—

And then DiNardo understood. Like a calming wave of love and peace, comprehension flowed through his soul at last. As Waterman and Hasdrubal fussed about him DiNardo finally understood what had happened on Mars and why. God had taken the Martians to Him! Of course. It was so simple, so pure. I should have seen it earlier. I should have known. My faith should have revealed the truth to me.

The good Lord took the Martians to Him. He ended their trial of tears in this world and brought them to eternal paradise. They must have fulfilled their mission. They must have shown their Creator the love and faith that He demands from us all. So He gave them their eternal reward.

DiNardo tried to blink his eyes. The light was getting so bright it was difficult to see Waterman and the other one. Glaring. Brilliant. I thought it would all go dim at the end, the priest thought, but it’s getting brighter and brighter. Dazzling. Brilliant. Like staring into the sun. Like looking upon the face of…

Jamie straightened up, his arms and back aching after trying to pound DiNardo’s heart back to life.

“It’s no use, Vijay,” he said.

“I can see that,” she answered through the communicator still clipped to his ear. “You might as well give it up.”

Jamie heard Hasdrubal, standing behind him, make a little grunt. “He looks peaceful enough. Almost like he’s smiling.”

Boston: Trumball Residence

Commonwealth Avenue had gone through many cycles of urban evolution, from posh residential neighborhood for Boston Brahmins of the nineteenth century to seedy rundown apartments for students and welfare families, dangerous with drugs and street crime. Now, in the middle of the twenty-first century, the area was on the upswing again: the stately old houses had been gutted and remodeled; the wealthy and prominent had driven out the poor and needy.

Dex Trumball owned a whole block of residences on Commonwealth Avenue and used one of them himself as his town house. It saved him the helicopter commute from the family estate on the North Shore, near Marblehead, to the downtown financial district where he ran the Trumball Trust.

He sat in his darkly paneled entertainment center, surrounded by wall screens, nursing a tumbler of scotch as he watched the documentary segment that Monsignor DiNardo had recorded from the excavation site on Mars.

The priest was standing in the pit, amidst the low dark rows of building foundations that the digging had uncovered. Through the bubble helmet of DiNardo’s nanosuit, Dex could see that his swarthy, stubble-jawed face was smiling happily. His hands were behind his back. To Dex he looked like a kindly uncle who was about to present a surprise gift to a favorite niece or nephew.

“I am on Mars,” DiNardo said. “That is why I must wear this protective suit. The air here is too thin to breathe. Besides, it contains very little oxygen.”

Turning slightly, DiNardo gestured with one hand while keeping the other behind him. “This once was a village where Martian people lived. They built their homes here and grew crops nearby. A stream flowed past their village. They raised families and went about their daily lives here, in this place.”

Dex nodded to himself. Good. He’s being very positive, very firm about it. No maybes or probablies. Good.

The priest took his hand from behind his back and opened it. The camera view closed in on the object he held in his palm.

“This is a fossil. It once was part of a Martian’s backbone. Once, some sixty-five million years ago, this was part of a living, breathing, intelligent Martian creature.”

Terrific, thought Dex.

“What happened to these people?” DiNardo asked rhetorically. “They were wiped out in a cataclysm that destroyed nearly all the life on Mars, some sixty-five million years ago, long before human beings arose on Earth. At the same time, a similar cataclysm struck the Earth and destroyed many, many living creatures, including the mighty dinosaurs. Giant meteors struck both worlds, bringing death and devastation.”

We’ll need to splice in some computer animation, Dex said to himself. Show the village as it was before the meteors struck. Show what the Martians probably looked like.

The camera view had pulled back to show DiNardo’s face again. “On Earth, more than half of all the creatures on land and sea perished, driven to extinction. On Mars, the people who built this village and every other form of life more complex than lowly lichen was wiped out.”

Okay, Dex urged silently. Now get to the point.

“I am a priest of the Roman Catholic Church,” DiNardo said, as if in answer. “I am here on Mars to learn more about God’s creatures. To me, searching the universe to understand the works of God is a form of worship. The twenty-fourth psalm begins with, ‘The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein.’ To the men who wrote the Bible, the Earth was the only world they knew. To you and me, the universe is much larger, much grander, and God’s immense creativity inspires us to seek out His handiwork wherever we may find it.”

“Terrific!” Dex shouted as the screen went blank. “Just what we need.” He thought about calling the priest, checked the computer’s display of the local time at Tithonium Base. Five-fifteen in the afternoon there. Good enough.

But as he started to instruct the voice recognition phone system lo put through a call to the base on Mars, it interrupted him.

“Incoming call, sir,” the phone announced with the carefully modulated voice of a polished British butler. “From Dr. Waterman.”

“Put him on,” Dex said, leaning back in his stress-free recliner and reaching for the half-finished scotch with one hand.

Jamie’s face looked awful. Dex immediately knew that something was terribly wrong.

“Dex, Monsignor DiNardo has died. He had a stroke. He was outside on an excursion with me and one of the biologists and he just sort of keeled over and died. There was nothing we could do for him.”

Dex felt a sudden surge of hot anger. Dead? The priest’s dead? How the hell are we going to use his footage if Mars killed him? Of all the stupid goddamned fucked-up asshole things to do, the dumb bastard dies on us!

“We found a bottle of pills on him,” Jamie was going on, “and more pills in his personal effects. Heart medication of some sort, Vijay thinks. We’re checking into it. Whatever his condition was, he kept it secret from us. He got through the physical exams without letting us know about it. We wouldn’t have let him come to Mars if we’d known, of course.”

Great! Dex smoldered. Just motherfucking great! Once the news media finds out that we let a sick priest go to Mars and he died there, we’re toast. The whole fucking program will be just as dead as that idiot priest.

Tithonium Base: Funeral Rites

“I’ve made arrangements with the Vatican,” Jamie was saying softly. “They’ll beam a funeral mass to us. The Pope himself will say it.”

Chang asked, “When?”

“Tomorrow morning. Nine a.m., Rome time.”

“Eight in the morning here,” said Nari Quintana.

Despite the fact that the Martian sol was slightly more than forty-one minutes longer than a day on Earth, Tithonium Base and all space operations kept to Zulu Time, the standard clock setting for Greenwich, England. The extra minutes were added each night, while most of the base personnel slept.

Immediately upon returning to the base Jamie had asked Chang to call Quintana and the team’s contamination expert for a meeting to decide what to do with DiNardo’s body. Now they sat glumly in Chang’s office, in the sofa and chairs around the low serving table. Jamie had been surprised to realize that Hasdrubal was the top contamination expert.

“I’m the man,” the biologist had admitted, with a rueful smile. “Ustinov beat it back to Russia on the resupply flight last month.”

“We have to decide,” Jamie said, looking from Hasdrubal to Chang, “what to do with the body.”

“Catholics prefer burial,” said Quintana, unconsciously fingering the silver crucifix she wore around her neck.

“No way,” Hasdrubal snapped. “We can’t let his body decompose in the ground out there. I’ve got enough of a contamination problem with that garden Torok left.”

Jamie felt surprised. “The garden’s contaminated?”

“Other way ’round,” said Hasdrubal. “I gotta make sure no terrestrial organisms get loose in the local environment.”

Chang said, “I agree that we must not bury Dr. DiNardo outside.”

“There are no scavenger microbes in the Martian soil,” Quintana said.

“You know that for a fact?” Hasdrubal challenged.

Quintana’s expression hardened. “None in the shallow layer in which we would bury the man. Besides, we could seal him into an empty cargo container.”

Hasdrubal shook his head stubbornly. “Look, we gotta think about the long term here, centuries. That body already contains armies of microbes that’ll decompose him. Those microorganisms will eventually worm their way out of whatever container you put him in.”

Jamie almost grimaced at the word worm.

Quintana glared at the biologist. “Do you honestly believe that terrestrial microbes could survive in the superoxides that pervade the ground out there? Without water? Without oxygen?”

“We can’t take the chance. Hell, bacteria have survived for years out on the Moon’s surface without water or air!”

“I know that, but—”

Jamie broke into their growing argument. “The Vatican has asked that the body be shipped to Rome.”

Chang looked relieved. “Of course. He must have a family.”

“Or the Jesuits want him.”

“There is a resupply flight due in two months,” Chang said. “He can be sent home then.”

The last resupply flight for a long time, Jamie knew. Most of the base personnel will have to go home on that one. All except fifteen of us. Unless I can come up with some alternative.

“We can’t keep the body here for two months,” Quintana said. “We have no means of embalming him.”

“He’ll rot away,” Hasdrubal grumbled.

“That will be a health hazard inside the dome,” Quintana pointed out, tapping a finger on the cushioned arm of the sofa. “We’ll have to place him outside.”

“Can’t do that,” Hasdrubal countered. “It’s a contamination risk.”

“Better to risk contamination than endanger the health of everyone here.”

“No!” Hasdrubal insisted. “We have to protect the local environment. We can’t spread terrestrial microbes out there!”

“And I will not permit his body to be kept here,” Quintana declared, equally inflexible.

Chang scowled at them both. “The only alternative, then, is to burn the body.”

“The Vatican’ll love that,” said Hasdrubal. “Besides, burning might not kill off all the microorganisms in his body. If even only a few survive we’ll have problems.”

“You’re being foolish,” Quintana said to the biologist.

“I’m doin’ my job, lady.”

Jamie suddenly grinned, understanding what they must do. “Wait,” he said, raising his hands to calm them. “There’s another alternative.”

Chang turned toward him questioningly.

“Put the body in orbit until the resupply ship from Earth arrives,” Jamie said.

“In orbit?” Quintana looked doubtful.

“Place him in a cargo container and fly him into orbit in an L/AV. Leave the container in space. The cold will preserve the body, won’t it?”

A slow smile crept across Hasdrubal’s face. “Like dunking him in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Better, even.”

“Cryonic preservation,” Quintana murmured.

Chang nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Waterman. We should have seen that possibility earlier.”

Jamie grinned at the mission director. “Forests and trees, Dr. Chang. Forests and trees.”

Mars Orbit

Chuck Jones let his arms float weightlessly up from the lander/ascent vehicle’s instrument panel.

“Orbital insertion,” he said into the headphone clipped to his ear.

“Copy orbital insertion,” came the voice of the mission controller, back at the base.

Turning to his copilot, Kristin Dvorak, Jones grinned and said, “Okay, let’s unload the priest.”

Dvorak was a Czech, so diminutive she barely made the minimums for an astronaut. Like Jones, she was wearing a nanofabric space suit, although neither of them had pulled the inflatable helmets over their heads. Her hair was the color of straw, thickly curled. Jones kept his thinning brown hair trimmed down to a buzz cut.

She slid out of the copilot’s seat and floated toward the cockpit’s hatch. Jones went after her.

“Never thought I’d preside at a funeral,” he said as she slipped through the open hatch that led into the L/AV’s cargo bay.

“This is not a funeral,” Dvorak said, in heavily accented English. “We are merely placing his body in cold storage until the next flight from Earth arrives to take him home.”

The cargo bay was empty except for a solitary cylinder, ordinarily used to hold supplies.

Jones was almost too big to meet the specifications for an astronaut. He always thought about one of the first Americans to go into space, Scott Carpenter: when informed that the height limit for astronauts was six feet, he wrote in his application form that he was five feet, thirteen inches tall. And he got away with it.

As they unhitched the cylinder from the straps holding it to the deck and floated it into the airlock, Jones mused, “You know, maybe when I die I’ll have my body sent into space.”

“Not buried?” Dvorak asked.

“Nah. Why stick yourself into the ground when you can go floating out to the stars?”

“Recycling,” she said.

He shook his head. “I think I’d rather go into space.”

Dvorak smiled slightly. “It makes no difference, really. Once you are dead, nothing matters.”

As he swung the airlock hatch shut, Jones admitted, “Maybe so. But still…”

Once they sealed the inner hatch shut, Dvorak asked, “Will you return to Earth on the next resupply flight?”

Jones said, “No. I’ll wait it out.”

“We will all have to go back sooner or later.”

“I guess so.”

“I have applied for a job with Masterson Aerospace. At Selene.”

“You want to live on the Moon?”

“Why not? It would be more interesting. Not so many jobs for astronauts on Earth.”

“I’ll go back to Florida,” Jones said. “After a year on Mars, I want some sun and swimming.”

“More jobs at Selene,” Dvorak insisted.

“More women in Florida,” said Jones, with a leer. “In bikinis.”

She smiled back at him. “Higher ratio of men to women at Selene. Intelligent men, scientists and engineers.”

Laughing, they went back to the cockpit and launched the mortal remains of Dr. Fulvio A. DiNardo, S.J., into orbit around Mars.