Voyage

Book Six MANGALA

Through the airlock’s small window, Natalie York could see stars, embedded in a black sky.

There was Jupiter, high in the sky, a good third brighter than as seen from Earth, bright enough to cast a shadow. And in the east there was a morning star: steady, brilliant, its delicate blue-white quite distinct against the violet wash of the embryonic Martian dawn. That was Earth, of course. The twin planet was close to conjunction — lying in the same direction as the sun — and was about as close as it ever got to Mars; just now it was actually a crescent in the Martian sky, with its shadowed hemisphere turned to Mars.

The constellations themselves were unchanged from the familiar patterns of her childhood. It was a sobering reminder of what a short distance they’d come: the stars were so remote that they reduced this immense interplanetary journey — achieved at the very limit of human technology, far enough to turn Earth itself into a starlike point — to a child’s first step.

The MEM had already been on the surface for three days. The crew had had to spend that precious chunk of its stay time adapting from zero G.

As she’d been warned, York had found herself a few inches taller and about fifteen pounds lighter than when she’d left Earth. At first, she’d had trouble walking around the MEM’s tight compartments; she’d kept walking into walls and forgetting which way was down. And she had the scrawniest pair of “chicken legs.” Rapid aging, huh, Adam, she thought. You were right. We’re three old people, stuck here on the surface of Mars. But anyhow, chicken legs were all she needed in Mars’s one-third gravity.

But after three days on the Martian surface, she still felt disoriented, as if the Jupiter-lit landscape beyond the window was just another plaster-of-paris sim mock-up.

When she walked out there, though, it would become real.

Stone joined her at the port. Stone, like York, was wearing thermal underwear, with his Cooling and Ventilation Garment over the top. The cooling garment was a corrugated layering of water coolant pipes. York had her catheter fitted, and Stone wore his own urine collection device, a huge, unlikely condom. The two of them looked bizarre, sexless, faintly ridiculous.

“Pretty view, huh,” Stone murmured. “You know, Ralph claims he can see the Moon with his naked eye.”

“Maybe he can. It’s possible.” The Moon ought to look like a faint silver-gray star, circling close to its master.

Stone had brought over York’s Lower Torso Assembly; this was the bottom half of her EVA suit, trousers with boots built on. “Come on, York; enough rubbernecking.”

She stared at the suit with a feeling of unreality. “That time already, huh.”

“That time already.”

She hooked the sleeves of the cooling garment over her thumbs; the hook would stop the sleeves from riding up later. She looked at her hands, her own familiar flesh, with the plastic webbing over the balls of her thumbs; it was the first step in the elaborate ceremonial of donning the suit, and the simple act had made her heart pump.

She stepped into the Lower Torso Assembly. The unit was heavy, the layered material awkward and stiff, and it seemed to wriggle away from her legs as Stone tried to pull it up for her. She found she was tiring rapidly, already.

Next she fitted a tube over her catheter attachment. It would connect with a bag large enough to store a couple of pints of urine. There was nothing to collect shit, though; she was wearing a kind of diaper — an absorbent undergarment — that would soak up “any bowel movement that cannot be deferred during EVA,” in the language of the training manuals.

York planned to defer.

Then it was time for the Hard Upper Torso. Her HUT was suspended from the wall of the airlock, like the top half of a suit of armor, with a built-in life support backpack.

She crouched down underneath the HUT and lifted her arms. She wriggled upward, squirming into the HUT. In the darkness of the shell there was a smell of plastic and metal and lint, of newness.

She got her arms into the sleeves and pushed her hands through; the cooling garment’s loops tugged at the soft flesh around her thumbs. Her shoulders bent backwards, painfully. Nothing about this process was easy. Still, these suits were a hell of a lot simpler than the old Moon suits; the Apollo crew members had had to assemble their suits on the lunar surface, connecting up the tubes which would carry water and oxygen from their backpacks.

Her head emerged through the helmet ring. Stone was grinning at her. “Welcome back.” He pulled her HUT down, jamming it so that it rubbed against her shoulders, and guided the metal waist rings of the two halves of the suit to mate and click together.

Then she helped Stone don his suit.

York and Stone had already been inside the cramped airlock for two hours. Challenger’s atmosphere was pressurized to 70 percent of Earth’s sea level, with a mix of nitrogen and oxygen, but to stay flexible their suits would contain oxygen only, at just a quarter of sea-level pressure. So York and Stone had had to prebreathe pure oxygen to purge the nitrogen from their blood.

It was a tedious ritual. And EVAs on Mars could last only three or four hours, at most. Apollo backpacks had been capable of supporting seven hours of surface working. But Mars’s gravity was twice as strong as the Moon’s, and Mars suits had to be proportionately lighter, and could therefore only sustain much briefer EVAs. There would also have to be a long tidy-up period after each EVA: the suits would have to be vacuumed clean of Mars dust, which was highly oxidizing and would play hell with their lungs if they let it into Challenger.

The brief EVAs, with the surrounding preparation and cleanups and anticontamination swabbing, were going to occupy most of each exhausting, frustrating day on Mars.

York fixed on her Snoopy flight helmet, and over the top of that Stone lifted her hard helmet, with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at her neck.

The last pieces were her gloves; these were close-fitting and snapped onto rings at her wrists.

Stone flicked a switch on her chest panel, and she heard the soft, familiar hum of pumps and fans in the backpack, the whoosh of oxygen across her face. He rapped sharply on the top of the helmet and held up a gloved thumb before her clear faceplate. She nodded out at him and smiled.

She held up her arm; there was a reflector plate stitched into her cuff, allowing her to see the panel on the front of her chest which gave her a readout of oxygen, carbon dioxide and pressure levels, and various malfunction warnings. She could see her oxygen pressure level stabilizing.

Stone tested out the radio link. “Hi, Natalie. Able Baker Charlie…” His voice sounded soft and tinny, echoed by muffled sound carried through the thick glass of her faceplate.

She checked the small plastic tubes protruding from her helmet’s inner surface; she sipped out little slugs of water and orange juice. The OJ was okay, but the water was too warm. It didn’t matter. She pushed her suit’s internal pressure up to maximum, briefly, to test for leaks. She fixed her little spiral-bound EVA checklist to her cuff.

When they were through with the suit checkout they studied each other. Stone’s suit was gleaming white, with bright blue Mars overboots, and the Stars and Stripes proudly emblazoned on his sleeves.

Stone asked: “Are we done?”

She was sealed off from Challenger: locked inside her own, self-contained, miniature spacecraft. She took a deep breath of cool, blue oxygen. “Yes. Let’s get on with it.”

“Roger.” He looked away from her to talk to Gershon, who was up in the ascent stage. “Ralph, we’re waiting for a Go for depress on time.”

“Rager, Phil; you have a go for depress.” Gershon would monitor this first EVA from the ascent-stage cabin.

Stone closed a switch on the wall; York heard sound leak out of the air, and the internal noise of her own breathing seemed to grow louder, more ragged, to compensate.

“Roger,” Stone said. “Everything is go here. We’re just waiting for the cabin to bleed enough pressure to open the hatch.”

The gauge, York saw, showed the pressure already down to two-tenths of a pound.

Gershon said, “I’m reading a real low static pressure on your lock. Do you think you can open the hatch yet?”

Stone said, “I’ll try.”

The exit from the airlock was a small hatch, close to the floor. The handle was a simple lever. Stone bent down, twisted the handle, tugged. York could see the thin metal of the hatch bow inward. The hatch stayed shut.

“Damn it.”

“Let me try.” She crouched down and picked at the corner of the hatch, where it protruded from the wall. Her gloves, of metal mesh and rubber, were clumsy; her hands felt huge and insensitive. But she managed to get a little flap of the hatch peeled back.

Through the sliver she’d opened up between the hatch and its frame, she could see ocher light.

“I think I broke the seal.”

Stone pulled at the handle, and this time the hatch opened easily.

York saw a little flurry of snow as the last of their air escaped into the Martian atmosphere.

They both had to back away to let the hatch swing back.

Then York could see the porch, the platform fixed to the top of Challenger’s squat landing leg, onto which Stone would back out in a moment. The porch was coated in brown grit, thrown up by the landing. And beyond the porch, she could see the surface of Mars: it looked like sand, and it was streaked with radial lines pointing away from Challenger, showing the effects of their descent engine’s final blast.

It was just a scrap of landscape; on Earth it would look so commonplace she wouldn’t even perceive it. But it was Mangala Vallis: and there were only a few feet of thin Martian air separating her from the surface she’d been studying all her adult life.

“Natalie,” Stone said.

She turned; in contrast to the brown of Mars, in the mundane kitchen-light of the airlock, his suit seemed to glow white.

“There’s something we forgot,” Stone said. “From the checklist. We didn’t fix these.” Stone had taken his red EV1 bands from a suit pocket. Stone, as the leader of the first EVA, was in charge of the operation; York was, officially, his backup, and Stone would wear the red bands around his arms and legs for identification by the TV cameras.

But he was holding the bands out to her.

“I don’t understand.”

He was smiling again. “I think you do. Put on the bands.”

She held out her hand, and he dropped the bands into her palm. Through her clumsy gloves she couldn’t feel the bands’ weight.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

He said testily, “Look, I’m not asking you to land the goddamn MEM. You’ve done this in the contingency sims. All you have to do, on this first EVA, is to walk around and scratch a few rocks, and talk to the folks at home about it.”

She didn’t feel any pleasure, or pride, in his startling offer. All she felt was irritation. That damn roller coaster again. “This doesn’t make sense, Phil. You’re passing up the chance to become the first human to walk on Mars, for God’s sake. What kind of asshole does that?”

“This kind,” he said, annoyed. “This is important, Natalie. I discussed it with Joe Muldoon before the launch. We have to get this right — this first EVA most of all — for the sake of the future. The next few minutes are maybe the point of the whole damn mission. Even more than the science — though I don’t expect you to agree with that. Natalie, it’s going to be a long time before anyone comes this way again. But we’re changing history here; even if we fall back, now, people will be able to look up at Mars and say, yes, it’s possible, we can get there, live up there. We know, because somebody did it.

“Look, I know I’m no Neil Armstrong. You’re more — articulate. And this is your place; your valley. Your planet, damn it. You know your way around here better than anyone alive. I think you’d do a better job of communicating this than me. And besides…”

“What?”

He smiled. “I have this feeling. I might be remembered longer for being the man who passed up the chance to be first.”

“I hope she’s obeying orders,” Gershon called.

“About as much as she ever does.”

They’ve plotted this. I’ve been set up.

“And take this,” Stone said.

She held out her hand; Stone dropped into her palm a small disk, like a coin, less than an inch across. It was the diamond marker. “I think it’s more appropriate for you to place it. For Ben. And the others.”

He reached out with two hands, and closed her fist over the marker. He was looking into her eyes.

He knows, she realized suddenly. About Ben and me. He knows. They all knew, all the time.

She dropped the marker into a sample pocket on her suit. Then, numbed, she pushed the red bands over her arms and legs, and dropped her gold visor down over her face.

Stone held the hatch aside. York got down, clumsily, to her knees, and backed up ass-first to the hatch. She started to crawl backwards, out onto the porch.

“Here we go. You’re lined up nicely, Natalie. Come toward me a little bit. Okay, down. Roll to the left. Put your left foot to the right — no, the other way. You’re doing fine.”

She could feel where her sides scraped against the hatchway. Coolant tubes dug into her knees.

Blood hammered in her ears.

“Okay, I’m on the porch.” She reached out and grabbed the handrails, to either side of the porch.

She looked up. The white paint of the outer hull was stained with landing dust, and tinged yellow by the quickening Martian morning. She had gotten so far out that could see the whole of the hatchway before her; it was a rectangle of brilliant fluorescent light, set within the skin of Challenger. Inside the rectangle Phil Stone had crouched down, peering out at her, nodding inside his helmet.

She continued to move backwards, still crawling over the porch, feeling out with her right leg; eventually, her toe hit the top rung of the ladder.

Holding on to the handrails, she straightened up.

She was emerging into the shadow of Challenger, the rising sun was hidden by the bulk of the craft, and the sky above her was still black, though the stars were washing out. She turned, stiffly. To left and right she could see a flat, sharp, close horizon, delimiting a plain of dust and rocks. Everything was stained rust brown, like dried blood, the shadows long and sharp.

The change of scale was startling. She’d spent months inside the confines of the Mission Module, where everything in the universe had been either a few feet away — enclosed by the tight, curving walls — or at infinity. The sense of height and depth, of scales opening out around her, was profound, disorienting; nothing in her training had prepared her for this. For a moment she felt as if she would fall backwards, and she hooked her hands around the handrails of the porch.

“Natalie?”

“I’m okay, Phil. It’s just—”

“I know,” Stone said. “A big moment, right?”

“Yeah.”

Gershon asked, “Natalie, have you gotten out the MESA yet?”

The MESA, the Modularized Equipment Storage Assembly, was a panel on the descent stage, to the left of the ladder. York reached out and opened a latch; the panel swung down like a drawbridge, bearing a TV camera.

“Ralph, the MESA came down all right.”

“I copy that, Natalie. I’m turning the TV on now.”

The lens of the camera was dark, clean, watchful; she saw the camera swivel as Ralph worked its servomotors, focusing on her. She felt absurdly self-conscious.

Gershon said, “I’m waiting for the TV. Man, I’m getting a picture. There’s a great deal of contrast in it — it’s just splashes of color — and currently the damn thing’s upside-down. But I can see a fair amount of detail and — I’ve got it, it’s corrected itself. Natalie, I can see you at the top of the ladder.”

York nodded to the camera. But they can’t see my face behind this visor. She waved.

She made her way down the ladder, rung by rung. They were big steps, and in the stiff suit she found the best way to go was to let herself drop from step to step.

The last rung was three feet from the ground, and she pushed herself away from the ladder and let herself fall. Her descent was distinctly slow-motion; it took nearly a second, she guessed, to cover that last yard. On Earth, it would have taken half that.

Her blue boots came to rest on the white metal of the descent stage’s three-foot-wide footpad. It was still so dark in the shadow of Challenger, that it was actually quite difficult to see.

She held on to the ladder with her fat-gloved hands, and tried to step back up to the ladder’s bottom rung. She had to make sure she could get back home. But the suit was too stiff, and she couldn’t lift her feet that high.

“Fucking dumb design.”

“Hot mike at this time, EV1,” Gershon said blandly.

She gave up trying to make the step. She bent down a little and jumped. Her knees were stiff, inside the suit, and all her mobility came from her toes and ankles. The Martian gravity pulled her back, but feebly, and she overshot the bottom rung. She fell against the ladder with a clatter, but she managed to get her feet hooked over the rung.

Breathless, she dropped back to the footpad again.

She looked past the pad to the Martian surface.

“Okay. I’m at the foot of the ladder. The MEM’s footpads are depressed in the surface a couple of inches, maybe three; the sides of the depressions they’ve made are quite distinct, sharp and clear. There’s little water here, of course, and I guess the soil’s cohesion is electrostatic…” Don’t analyze, York; tell them what it looks like. “The surface soil looks a little like beach sand. Wet sand. But as you get close to it it’s actually much finer-grained than sand, and it’s evident that it bonds well together. Here and there it’s very fine, powdery.” She reached out her leg and kicked gently at the regolith, leaving furrows in the soil. “It’s easy for me to dig little trenches with my toe. I have the impression that the surface material is a duricrust. That is, dust particles cemented together by the upward seepage of water in the soil, with salts being precipitated out on evaporation.”

There had been a little Martian dust on the footpad, she saw, and when she lifted up her boot, she could see that a little of that had already transferred itself to her. “The dust is clinging in fine layers to the sole and sides of my boot. So it’s both cohesive and adhesive. It looks as if it will take a slope of around seventy degrees…”

Now Ralph Gershon said, “Natalie, I need you to get back facing the TV camera for a minute please.”

“Say again, Ralph.”

“Rager. I need you facing the field of view of the camera. Natalie, Phil, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you.”

Stone replied for her. “That would be an honor, Ralph.”

She checked her cuff checklist. Reagan was right on cue. Trust an old actor.

She turned toward the MESA.

She imagined the TV pictures of herself on their way to Earth: she would be a stiff, angular figure, posed on the footpad, her outline fuzzed by false colors against the crimson of Mars.

She took a still Hasselblad camera from the MESA platform. After some fumbling, she fitted the camera to a mount above her chest panel.

She turned around slowly, letting the camera snap a panoramic mosaic. Then she picked up a small TV camera, and fixed that in place on her chest, beside the Hasselblad.

The quality of the radio link changed; a Houston capcom came on the line. “Go ahead, Mr. President. Out.”

Natalie and Phil, I’m talking to you by a radio linkup from the Oval Office at the White House.

Reagan’s gravelly voice was lively, interested. He sure plays the part well. She found herself drawing a little more upright, as if coming to attention.

Now, the NASA technical people tell me that it will take four minutes for my words to reach you, and four more before I get to hear your reply. So I figure we can’t have much of a conversation. I just want to say this, as you talk to us from the Valley of Mangala. Our progress in space — continuing to take giant steps for all mankind — is a tribute to American teamwork and excellence. And we can be proud to say: We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free.

America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We have reached for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to the planets and to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific gain…

York — standing on the pad in the reality of the glowing landscape, and with the weight of her pack heavy on her back — endured the remote, distorted voice.

…Now I’m going to shut up, Natalie and Phil, but I want you to indulge us with just a couple of minutes of your time. Please tell us how it feels to be, at last, on the surface of Mars.

Reagan fell silent, and the radio link hissed.

Stone said: “Thank you, Mr. President. It’s an honor and a privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States, but all of mankind. Natalie…”

Natalie, tell them how it feels.

The oldest question in the world, the most difficult to answer — and, maybe, the most important, she thought.

The one question the Apollo astronauts could never answer.

Now I must try.

In the pink sky, the sun was continuing to strengthen, and the world was a bowl of shades of red and brown, of light scattering from the dust on the ground and suspended in the air. The light from the hatchway shone as brilliantly white as before, incongruous.

“Okay, sir. The MEM is standing here on the flats north of Mangala Vallis. It’s a late-fall morning — we’re only about eighty days away from the winter solstice, here in the northern hemisphere of Mars. The sky is uniformly ocher. The dust suffuses everything with a pale, salmon hue. The red planet isn’t really so red: the dominant color is a moderate yellow-brown, reflected from the land. There’s no green, or blue, anywhere. If humans ever colonize Mars for good — no, make that when — we’ll have to invent a lot of new words for shades of brown.

“I’m almost on the Martian equator. To give you some reference, the great Tharsis Bulge, with its three huge shield volcanoes, is a couple of thousand miles to the east of me; and Olympus Mons, the greatest volcano in the Solar System, is about the same distance to the north. But I can’t see the volcanoes, or the Bulge, from here; although this is a small world, Martian features are too huge, overwhelming on a human scale.

“We’re close enough to Tharsis for this region to have been affected by the uplift of the Bulge. So, although the surface here looks as flat as a beach at low tide, I know that when I look away from the MEM I’m probably looking down a slope of a few tenths of a degree.”

She took a long, slow look around at the panorama of Mangala Vallis.

“The MEM is standing on a surface which is littered with rocks. The rocks, I would say, range in size from maybe half a yard up to two yards. The rocks show vesicles. That is, there are small bubbles in the surface of the rocks; it means the rocks are probably bits of frozen lava, and the bubbles were caused by the escape of gases from within the molten rocks. Gases lost maybe a billion years ago. The rocks are uniformly pitted and fluted, I would guess by wind erosion. I can see smaller formations that look like pebbles, but I’m pretty sure they are duricrust aggregate. Just bits of the surface stuck together. The surface is not like sand; it’s evidently much finer-grained. The grains are no more than a micron or so wide. I’m sure that the dust is the result of the slow weathering of the rocks, with much oxidation having occurred; the rocks have the characteristic deep red-brown coloration of smectite clays…

“I can see how geological processes are continuing to shape this landscape. The surface has clearly been scoured by wind: the landscape is eroded, and the dust under my feet has surely been transported from around the planet. From a geological point of view, there is clearly a sequence of events represented here: impact, wind, volcanic activity, possibly flooding, probably ground ice.

“The Moon is an old world; we think its story ended, essentially, a billion or more years ago. But it’s obvious to me, standing here, that Mars, like Earth, is still evolving. Still alive.”

There was a long silence on the radio link.

“Natalie,” Stone said gently. “Are you all right?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine, Phil.”

She thought of her words dispersing, radiating away to Earth and beyond; she wished she could call them back. It’s not enough. It could never be enough.

But, I guess, it was the best I could do.

It was time.

She said, “I’ll step off the footpad now.”

She held on to the ladder with her right hand and leaned out to the left. She raised her left boot over the lip of the footpad, pushed it out a little way, and — silently, carefully — lowered it to the dust.

Nobody spoke; Stone, Gershon, remote Earth. It was as if the whole of creation was focused on her, on this moment.

She tested her weight, bouncing on her left boot in the gentle gravity. The Martian regolith was firm enough to hold her. As she had known it would be.

She was standing with one foot on this clumsy artifact from Earth, the other on the virgin terrain of Mangala. She looked around, briefly, at the empty landscape, framed by the rounded rim of her faceplate, and she could see the play of soft ocher light over her nose and cheeks, the flesh of a human face, here on Mars.

Holding on to the ladder, she placed her right foot on the ground. Then, cautiously, she let go of the ladder. She was standing freely on Mars.

She took a step forward, then another.

Her boots left clear, firm prints, which showed the ridging of the soles. She wished she could take her shoes off, press her bare toes into the sand of this Martian beach, feel the fine, powdery stuff for herself.

Her suit was comfortable, warm. She could hear the whir of the 20,000-rpm fans in her backpack. She had 180-degree vision through her faceplate; she had no sense of enclosure, of confinement.

She took a few more steps.

She bounced across the surface. Moving on Mars was dreamlike, somewhere between walking and floating. She had no real difficulty in moving around. In fact it was easier than the sims she’d performed on the ground. But she was very aware of the mass of the equipment on her back, and she had to lean forward to maintain her balance. It was difficult to bend at the knees, so that her movement came mostly from her ankles and toes; she suspected her legs would tire quickly. But my monkey toes are strong, pawing through this Mars dust.

Oddly, she felt as if the shades of Armstrong and Muldoon were beside her, as if she was echoing their first, famous expedition. It was a thought that somehow diminished this moment.

She turned to face Challenger. The MEM was an angular pyramid, huge before her, silhouetted against the light of the shrunken sun, and propped up in an unlikely fashion on its six fold-down legs. She was still in the shadow of Challenger. The ambient light was like a late sunset, with Challenger drenched in a weak, deep pink color; against that, the rectangle of fluorescent light from the hatch, framing Stone, was a harsh pearl-gray, startlingly alien.

The dominant red tones came from dust suspended in the air. There was about ten times as much dust, she knew, as over Los Angeles on a smoggy day. And no rain, ever, to wash it out.

She walked away from Challenger then, working her way over into the sunlight, moving along the shadow of Challenger, toward the west. The MEM’s shadow was a long, sharp-edged cone on the rocky surface before her.

She passed beyond the edge of the shadow and into the light.

She turned. Sunlight shone into her face, casting reflections from the surfaces of her faceplate.

Sunrise on Mars: the sky here was different, the way the light was scattered by the dust…

The sun, rising above the silhouetted shoulders of Challenger, was surrounded by an elliptical patch of yellow light, suspended in a brown sky. It looked unreal.

The sun was small, feeble, only two-thirds of its size as seen from Earth.

She shivered, involuntarily, although she knew that her suit temperature couldn’t have varied; the shrunken sun, the lightless sky, made Mars seem a cold, remote place.

She turned around, letting her camera pan across the landscape. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under her boots.

She stepped farther away from Challenger, her line of footprints extending on into the virgin regolith. She felt as if the long, thin line of communications attaching her to Challenger and her home planet was growing more attenuated, perhaps fraying, leaving her stranded on this high, cool plain.

The land wasn’t completely flat, she saw now, as the light continued to increase; there was a subtle mottling in the shading. And she made out what looked like low sand dunes, off to the west. But the dunes were more irregular than terrestrial sand dunes, because, she guessed, of the small size of the surface particles; the dunes were actually more like drifts in the dust.

Away to the west, she saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from her.

She walked forward, farther from the MEM.

After perhaps fifty yards she came to the ridge. It turned out to be the lip of a small crater, quite sharply defined, a few dozen yards across, embedded in the floor. But the crater walls were worn, and there was a teardrop-shaped mound behind it.

That mound had to be an erosional remnant, streamlined like the remnants found in terrestrial braided streams. And she thought she could see stratification in the sides of the remnant. It was just like the scablands, after all.

She began to step down into the crater, clumsily; her legs were stiff, and dust swirled up around her, sticking to her legs and her HUT.

Her faceplate was misted up, her breath rapid. She leaned forward.

In the lee of the crater rim, something sparkled, something that finally banished the lunar ghosts of Armstrong and Muldoon from this moment, something that made her feel that her life’s circle had closed, at last. I guess I got to step into the picture after all.

It was frost.

She leaned sideways, and stretched down to the crater’s floor, awkwardly. She scraped at the dust with her fingers. Her fingers cut easily into the surface, leaving sharp trench marks. I’m like a kid, digging on a beach. A planetwide beach. Everywhere she dug, she found the same soft, powdery surface, the same cohesiveness, what looked like pebbles.

She lifted her glove to her face, to get a closer look at the dirt. It was oddly frustrating. The bit of regolith was very light, so light she couldn’t even feel its weight. She couldn’t even feel its texture because of the thickness of her clumsy suit. And the glare of the rising sun in her glass faceplate made it difficult to see, and the whir of pumps, the hiss of the radio, cut her off from whatever thin sounds were carried by the Martian winds.

She had a sense of unreality, of isolation. She was here, but she was still cut off from Mars. It wasn’t like a field trip at all.

She closed her fingers over the sample; the little “pebbles” burst and shattered. They were just fragments of a calichelike duricrust.

She tipped her hand and let the crushed dust drift back to the surface; much of it clung to the palm of her glove, turning it a rust brown.

She took the diamond marker out from the sample pocket on her suit. She held the little coin in her hand; it caught the sunlight and refracted it, turning its glow to a bright scarlet, jewellike, against the ocher of Mars.

She felt a sudden, and unexpected, surge of pride. She distrusted patriotism intensely; and maybe this expedition, these few days of scrambling over Mars like rabbits, really was all a grand technocratic folly. But the fact was that her country had — in little more than two centuries of existence — sent its citizens to walk on the surfaces of two new worlds.

And if some calamity were to wipe Earth clean of life before anyone decided to come again, this little marker, with its flag, would still be here, as a monument to a magnificent human achievement: this, and the remnants of Challenger, and three Lunar Module descent stages on the surface of the Moon.

And to think we nearly didn’t come here; to think, after Apollo, we might have closed down the space program.

Carefully she dropped the marker and let it float through the weak gravity down into the hole she’d dug, where it lay, sparkling, in the base of the crater.

Then, silently, she reached into her pocket again. With some difficulty, she drew out a small silver pin. Its 1960s design was tacky: a shooting star soaring upward, a long, cometlike tail.

For you, Ben.

She dropped the pin into the little ditch, after the diamond marker. Then she kicked dust back into the hole, and scuffed over the surface.

The footprints Armstrong and Muldoon had left behind on the Moon’s surface were still there — would remain there for many millions of years, until micrometeorite erosion finally obliterated them. But it was different on Mars. The prints she was making today would last for many months, perhaps years; but eventually the wind would cover them over.

In a few years her footprints would be erased by the wind, the first little pit she’d dug all but untraceable.

“…Natalie?”

She hadn’t said anything, she realized.

She turned to Challenger. The human artifact was a squat, white-painted toy, diminished by the distance she had come; the sun made the sky glow behind it. She could still see the pearl-gray interior of the airlock, embedded at the center of the MEM, and above that she could make out the fat cylinder of the ascent stage, with its propellant tanks clustered like berries around a stalk.

There was a single set of footsteps, crisp in the duricrust, leading from Challenger to where she stood, beyond the circular splash of dust from the MEM’s landing rocket. They looked like the first steps on a beach after a receded tide; they were the only footsteps on the planet.

By God, she thought, we’re here. We came for all the wrong reasons, and by all the wrong methods, but we’re here, and that’s all that matters. And we’ve found soil, and sunlight, and air, and water.

She said: “I’m home.”