Copyright © 1999 by Abbenford Associates

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ISBN: 978-0-446-55101-4

Other Books by

Gregory Benford

THE STARS IN SHROUD

JUPITER PROJECT

IF THE STARS ARE GODS

(with Gordon Eklund)

FIND THE CHANGELING

(with Gordon Eklund)

SHIVA DESCENDING

(with William Rostler)

TIMESCAPE

AGAINST INFINITY

ARTIFACT

HEART OF THE COMET

(with David Brin)

A DARKER GEOMETRY

(with Mark O. Martin)

IN ALIEN FLESH

MATTER'S END

FOUNDATION'S FEAR

COSM

THE GALACTIC CENTER SERIES

IN THE OCEAN OF NIGHT

ACROSS THE SEA OF SUNS

GREAT SKY RIVER

TIDES OF LIGHT

FURIOUS GULF

SAILING BRIGHT ETERNITY

To an idea and those who pursue it:

Mars in our time.

PART I

IN THE HALL OF THE MARTIAN ENTREPRENEURS

It seemed … that if he or some other lord did not endeavor to gain that knowledge, no mariners or merchants would ever dare to attempt it, for it is clear that none of them ever trouble themselves to sail to a place where there is not a sure and certain hope of profit.

Prince Henry the Navigator, assessing the motivations for sea exploration, circa 1480

1

JANUARY 11,2018

“WELCOME BACK TO MARS!”

She always opened these public broadcasts in the same way. Firm, friendly, positive.

“Viktor and I are here near the northern rim of Gusev Crater, doing some final surveying work.”

Actually, we had to get out of the hab one last time. Take a last look around, have some time together before we're all crammed into that tiny Earth Return Vehicle, the size of a New York apartment.

“I expect most of you know the view pretty well by now.”

I hope you're not already bored and out getting a sandwich.

“Still, those high ramparts to the east catching the afternoon sun, they're beautiful. A kilometer high, too.”

Hope they don't recall that I covered nearly this same territory over a year ago. Completing a search grid isn't exciting, but maybe we shouldn't coddle the audience so much. And then, Axelrod's media types would just cut this part out anyway.

“The theme here is looking for unusual volcanic activity, whether fossil evidence or even current emissions. And biological clues, too—after all, I'm still hopeful. We have to keep a sharp eye out. Mars covers a lot of its secrets in dust! Nothing so far, but some of you may remember that over there—Viktor, pan across to the east, will you?—we located some lava tubes so big that we could walk into them. That was exciting! Marc later worked out from his radioactive dating equipment that the lava had flowed in them nearly a billion years ago.”

Yeah, and not a sign of any activity since. I'll bet Axelrod's media managers cut this whole segment.

Not that I give a damn. I must've made over three hundred of these bright-eyed little talks by now. At least on this one there's something to look at. Going home, it'll be worse than those loooong six months getting here. Nothing to report but scientific details. No big cliff-hanger suspense about the landing, or about what we'd find, like on the way out. Maybe some about the dangers of aerobraking, but that's minor. I'll bet Las Vegas doesn't even give odds on us making it.

“So we'll just keep pushing. One more night out here, then back to base for the prelaunch trials. Should be exciting!”

This smile must be frozen on by now …

“So good-bye for now. Julia, from Mars to you.”

She stuck out her tongue. “Auggghh! Doing this for two years and still I can never think of anything to say.”

Viktor lowered the camera. “Spontaneous. Is better that way.”

“God, if this wasn't in the contract—”

“Would not have made even a dozen, I know. You said maybe one thousand times now.”

“Marc is so much better at this.”

“Marc is not here. Want to make quick squirt for your parents?”

This brightened her. “Sure, roll ‘em.”

Julia struck a pose a little less heroic and shifted her feet. She was in her pressure suit, which bulked impressively but also, when Viktor went to a wide shot, showed its scrapes and blotchy color. It had started out a pretty royal blue, the best color choice of the four, but the UV and peroxides here had hammered it pretty hard. Now Viktor's yellow stood out better.

Viktor waved, and she said, “Hi, Mums and Dad. Here I am, back on survey. Had a good time on Kangaroo Island? Hard to keep the old eagle eyes peeled when I know we're headed back in just a few weeks. Man, am I getting worn down! Viktor's taking a break with me, the getaway special for the newlyweds.”

Ooops, I'm blundering into that again … let's just change the subject.

“It's been kinda dicey with Marc and Raoul. Nothing basic, just prickly, irritable. They are, I mean. I'm the soul of warm sympathy, just like always.”

She grinned, paused and looked around, wondering what they would appreciate about the landscape. Viktor panned with her gaze; he was really good at that by now.

“See that outcrop over there? I figure it was thrown out by the meteor that made Thyra Crater. Signature splash effect, radially outward. So I was looking around, sniffing for signs of how much water there was here, maybe break open a few rocks and look at the mineralization. The usual, in other words. Nobody'll be able to say that at the tail end, I slowed up on the job!”

She sighed, feeling the old sensation of an emotional logjam: she could not switch from bright-eyed to real, not right away. She should have put some of the Thyra stuff in the public footage. Try again, then.

“I really miss you guys, as usual. Hope your viro treatments went easy, Dads. You looked great, last squirt I got. We had some trouble with the high-bandwidth signal, maybe lost your latest two days ago. Hope there's one waiting when I get back to base. I had a dream about taking a bath last night. Just that, nothing but the bath. Shows you what sensory delights I miss, huh? A long scrub in a big tub, the one we had in the old place, remember? Well, love to the rest of the family!”

Short, but she couldn't do any more without starting to go stilted on them. Maybe she had already. The first few months, she had replayed her squirts, both public and private, and edited them before the high-gain antenna sent them Earthside. Now she just let it go. History was history—over. If she scratched on camera, so be it.

“Was good,” Viktor said, smartly shutting off the camera.

“Let's move.”

She started toward the rover, its sulfurous yellow standing out violently against the pink sands and rocks. At midday Mars was a bit less red, because the light coming nearly straight down wasn't scattered as much by the perpetual fine dust that hung in the air.

In the distance a dust devil snaked lazily across the barren plain. They'd seen hundreds, nearly one a day. Kilometers high, they unceasingly threw the rusty fines of the surface into the thin atmosphere.

She had long ago given up yearning for green hills or ocean swells. Now Mars held for her a subtle but varied palette, its tans and rosy shades fraught with meaning. The mind adapted. Even so, iron oxides were a limited medium for nature's work. She kept the flatscreen in her personal room set permanently on a green Irish hill sloping down to a pounding sea. When she got back, she was going to find that exact spot and live there a while. Maybe forever. And hang on the wall a realtime flatscreen of Gusev Crater.

“What's that?”

Viktor peered out the big viewport and let the rover slow. “Cloud. Nearby.”

The filmy white mist faded. “How far?” Her heart was pounding, her biologist senses instantly alert. A water cloud at this time of day meant an underground vent.

“Hard to tell. Could be on horizon, long way off.”

“Or close. Damn, it's gone.” She had caught it out of the corner of her eye and the haze had lasted only seconds.

“Was rising.”

“Yeah, I thought so too.”

They had skirted around some hummocky hills. To save time Viktor was taking a fast route back to base, angling over a long sandy slope. The cloud had hung over the hills to the east, in an area they had not crisscrossed in detail because it was tricky terrain.

“Go in there, slow work.”

One last try? “Let's go look anyway.” Better late than never to find an outgassing vent.

An hour later she was ready to give up. Viktor was being good about it, carefully driving them across dry washes that had perhaps run with water or mud back before amphibians had first crawled up onto the beaches of Earth. They navigated around slumped pits that might have evaporated away ice deposits. Marc's seismology had probed this region, mapping ice layers several tens of meters below, plus some enticing tendrils that might be lava tubes. But eons of erosion and shifting dust had obscured most telltales.

“There!” he whispered.

A plume of yellow-white furled up from behind a low crest. “It's close!”

He floored the rover and its rumble echoed her quickening pulse. They had seen nothing like this through 500 days of patient crawling over the floor of Gusev Crater, a hundred fifty kilometers across. All along she'd harbored the hope that life would be hanging on underground, away from the cold and dry. With Marc she'd inspected the smaller Thyra Crater with microscopic attention, to no avail.

Over the rise, down a rocky slope toward a pit that didn't look any different from thousands she had seen before. Yet above this one a teardrop plume faded into the pink air, towering a hundred meters like a dirty exhalation of—what?

“Thermal vent, uh?” Viktor flashed her a quick grin.

“Hush. The gods of Mars will hear you and take it away.”

He parked at the edge of the pit as she unclipped her gear from the wall mounts. The pit slope was fairly steep, and she got out all the climbing equipment. She had learned to keep it inside, where the fine dust could not get into the moving parts. Even the tough rope got worn away by the stuff where it rubbed.

Viktor sent Marc a quick radio message that they were going outside, and where they were. No need to get their hopes up with a description.

Out through the lock, consciously being systematic in moving the gear despite her excitement. Haste made accidents, and the lock was getting pesky, sticking around the seals.

Outside, she studied the whole area carefully, frowning. Steep, sandy descents were not her favorite. The fifteen-degree slope ran down about ten meters to a hole at the bottom about three meters across. It looked something like a giant ant lion pit. She guessed it was a volcanic blowout crater, rock walls obscured by the perpetually moving sands. “Looks like an old crater.”

“See those rocks at rim?” Viktor pointed.

“Right, the yellow and white patches? Unusual discoloration.”

“Condensate, could be.”

“Hope so.”

She had the irrational urge to sniff the air, guess what the gas plume had been. They looped the cable and pulley rig onto the rover's back harness and winch. Going down the slope was a little tricky because the sandy dust had a funny layered feel, slipping away suddenly beneath her boots. A gritty skid. Viktor followed in her boot steps. They had secured the rope through their suit loops. She felt quite secure walking to the edge of the hole, but placed each step slowly to see if the rock rim would bear her weight. Months ago Marc had suffered a sudden fall when a shelf had given way, and he had limped for weeks. Looking down, she saw plenty of discoloration on the rocky throat that extended into blackness.

Viktor had knelt beside an outcrop. “Ice.”

“What? Where?”

Pure water ice was improbable on the Martian surface. It would sublime away quickly. But the light orange film on the edges of the rocks near the hole glistened. “Vent,” Viktor pronounced.

“Remember the gods,” she said, absently.

“I go,” he said, and without ceremony pulled his line tight.

“Hey, I'm the biologist. I want to take a sample of this film—”

“So take. I am captain, I go.”

He started backing over the rim. There was enough room to let him descend by walking backward down the inside. She knelt and used a sterile wiper to collect the film, then secured it in a biosample baggy. She was nearly out of the baggies and here at last there was—

“Ow!”

She turned to see him wheeling sideways with a silky slowness she would never forget.

“Viktor!” With her cry she tried to stop his fall.

Barely below the lip, Viktor had caught his left boot during a power descent. When he tried to free the tip he managed to turn it, leveraging it with his whole weight. “Ah!”—his second yelp rang in Julia's suit comm when he hit the side of the hole on the rebound. His right arm smacked the wall vainly and a plume of red dust arced up and out of the hole.

“What happened?”

He tried to make the left foot bear weight. “Damn, hurts.”

The dust began its lazy descent as she bent over Viktor's line. The top of his helmet was still in the light. “How bad?”

“Did not feel break.”

“Hope it's just a sprain.”

“I lost my hold with boot. Rock was slippery.”

“It looks like ice on the rocks. Condensed out from the plume, I guess.” She'd have to think about it later.

He hit the winch control and ascended to her level. She wrestled him clumsily over to the narrow edge of the hole and made him lay down. She unfastened the bottom of his insulated legging and ran her hands lightly over the ankle cuff of the pressure suit underneath. “Suit looks okay, no breaches. How's your self-med?”

The damned dust had settled on his faceplate and she couldn't see him, but knew he would be checking the readouts on the inside of the helmet. “Normal.” His voice was thin and strained.

“Good. How do you feel?”

He shifted slightly, groaned. “Like yesterday's blini. Light-headed. Foot hurts like hell.”

Keep him talking. Can't risk shock. She was no doctor, but her year of physician's assistant training snapped into high gear. She kept her tone light. “That's what you get for doing cartwheels.”

“Unnnh. I can't move it.”

She frowned, wondering how difficult it was going to be to get him back into the rover. Help was more than forty klicks away, and she was driving the only pressurized vehicle on the planet. Mission protocol limited the open rover to twenty-five klick trips, so the two of them had to manage it on their own. She thought of calling Marc on the emergency band, for moral support if nothing else. No, concentrate on Viktor. Plenty of time to analyze things in the rover. If she could get him there.

“Okay, enough laziness. Let's get you up.”

“Aw … right.” His slightly slurred voice worried her. They were all worn down, and shock could be setting in.

She slipped her left arm clumsily around his waist, feeling like a kid in a snowsuit. Suit-to-suit contact had a curiously remote feel about it, with no feedback from the skin. Still, she liked hugging him, even this way. They had slept together in a close embrace ever since the launch from Earth orbit.

“I've got some great stuff in the rover that'll make you feel like a new man.”

“Want to feel like man I was.”

“C'mon, get up.”

“Why not pull me up on the line? I lie down—”

“Don't think I could.”

“Pull with rover.”

“Hey, I'm in charge.”

“Aieee!”

With her help he heaved himself up onto his right leg, leaning heavily on her. Together they struggled for balance, threatened to go over the edge, then steadied. She had long ago stopped counting how many times the 0.38 g of Mars had helped them through crucial moments. It had proved the only useful aspect of the planet.

“Whew. Made it, lover.” Keep the patter going, don't alarm him. “Ready? I'll walk, you hop as best you can.”

Like a drunken three-legged race team, they managed to stagger slowly up the crater slope with the judicious assist of the winch. You will work as a team, the instructor at mission training had said constantly, but she hadn't anticipated this. Over her comm came deep, ragged gasps. Hopping through drifts of gritty dust, even in the low gravity, was exhausting Victor. Luckily the rover was just a dozen meters away.

Slow and steady got them there. He leaned against the rover as she struggled off first her harness, then his. She rolled him into the lock and set the cycle sequence. No time to brush off the dust, but she got off the coverall they used over suits to keep the dust at a minimum. She hooked it with her own to the clamps beside the lock. Skip the usual shower on entry, too. She climbed into the lock with him, sealed it. She hit the pump switch and oxygen whistled into the lock from half a dozen recessed ports.

With a wheeze, the cycler finished. She was jammed in and couldn't turn around to see him. She felt the rover's carriage shift. Good; he had rolled out of the lock and was lying on the floor.

The chime sounded; full pressure, 90 percent Earth normal. She turned off her suit oxygen, released the clamps on her helmet and as quickly as possible shucked her parka, leggings, and finally, her suit. She shivered as she stepped out into the chilly cabin: she had actually been sweating on Mars—a novel experience.

A prickly itch washed over her face and neck and already she regretted their dusty entry. The usual routine was to brush the suits down outside with a soft brush. Some genius from mission prep with a lot of camping experience had thoughtfully stowed it aboard, and it quickly became one of their prized possessions. The Martian surface was thick with fine, rusty dust heavily laden with irritating peroxides. Her skin had felt like it was being gently sandpapered all during the long months here—especially when she was tired, as now.

Fluffing her short black hair, she donned a red Boeing cap and went over to help Viktor. She upped the rover pressure to get him more oxygen, and together they gingerly peeled off his insulating layers and his suit. A look at his leg confirmed her guess: sprained ankle, swelling fast.

From there it was straight safety manual stuff: bind, medicate, worry.

“I love you, even zonked on painkillers,” she murmured to his sleeping face when she had checked everything five times.

He had dropped off disturbingly fast. He kept up a front of invincibility, they all did somewhat or they wouldn't be here; it went with astronaut psychology. But he had the bone-deep fatigue that came from a hard mission relentlessly pursued. He didn't talk about it much, but the launch coming up was troubling him.

She was suddenly very tired. Emotional reaction, she diagnosed wryly. Still, better tend to it.

On Mars, you learn to pace yourself. Time for a cup of tea.

She looked around first for her tea cosy, carefully brought from Earth as part of her personal mass allowance. Nothing could've induced her to leave it behind—home was where the cosy was. She retrieved it from a corner of the cooking area. Originally light blue and cream colored, it was now permanently stained with maroon dust. When things got tough she sought the comfort of a proper cup of tea made in a teapot. There were precious few emergencies that couldn't wait until after a cuppa.

As the water heated she got on the emergency band and tried to reach the other two back at the hab. No answer. They were probably deep in the guts of the Return Vehicle, starting the final checks for the approaching test fire. She left a heads-up on the ship's message system, saying that they were coming back pronto, hurt. No way could she get any more done out here on her own. Anyway, Viktor came first, and any solo work was forbidden by their safety protocols.

With the robot arm on the front she unhooked the last solar-powered electromagnetic hailer from the outside rack and placed it in what she hoped was a good spot. It was always a judgment call. The winds were fickle, and the constantly shifting dunes had buried more than one.

She stared out of the forward viewport at the pale pink hills, trying to assess what this accident meant to the mission. Maybe just a mishap, no more. But Viktor still had plenty to do preparing for their return launch. No, this would screw up the schedule for sure. Her own work would get shoved aside.

And the vent—when would she get back? For about a microsecond she considered going down the hole herself. No, contrary to all mission procedures. Worse, stupid.

Face it, she thought—biology was not the imperative here anymore. She had made her big discovery. To the world, their expedition was already a big success—they'd found fossil life. But she wanted more than long-dead microbes.

And now they had one more accident to complicate things. Plan all you want, Mars will hand you surprises.

Like the accident that had gotten them all here.

2

MARCH 2015

“DAMN, STUCK AGAIN!”

She had been driving the Rover Boy, as they called it.

Rover was the telepresence explorer on Mars which had scouted the landing site. It was still operating after five years, thanks to the Mars Outpost program. There was a chem factory to feed Rover and backup electronics packages sitting in the Outpost base. Plus a microwave dish to keep in constant Earth contact through the three communication satellites above. She had trained with Rover from Johnson Space Center for years. Right now Julia was coaxing it across the tricky landscape, like a mother tending a toddling, balky child.

She was taking it around the edge of Thyra Crater, letting the autopilot on board negotiate the slope and rocks. There was no choice, given the time delay of over half an hour. Rover Boy was the most advanced model ever developed, but it had problems. Big, insurmountable ones.

“Where is it?” Viktor asked beside her.

“Stalled on a sand dune, looks like.”

She thumbed through close-up processing commands, fingers drumming on the driver's console. Nearby hummed the station-keeping labors of the Jet Propulsion Lab.

At thirty-two, she had lost none of her impatience with life. What was more, she did not intend to. Piloting Rover Boy with infuriating delays was more trying than she could ever let on, or else risk being scrubbed from the Mars mission. So her fingers danced uselessly, rather than slamming on the gas in Red Rover and trying to back out of the clogging sand fifty-three million miles away.

“Yah, the dune to the left, last time.”

“Its onboards must've chosen to go that way.”

“Looks maybe to turn wheels left, reverse out,” Viktor said in what he probably thought was a helpful tone.

“It's a day's work getting out of a chuckhole,” she said uselessly, sending the Reverse order and cutting the wheels to the right. Before they got free her watch would be over.

She glanced at her framed picture of the little Sojourner rover, one she had saved from her first brush with space excitement at age fourteen, way back in 1997. Sojourner had suffered from the same time delay problem—no way around the speed of light!—but its plucky nosing around had got Julia started on her Mars fixation. She brought it on her watches here, for luck. Today it didn't seem to be working.

Rover Boy was hugely bigger, better, but—“We're never going to get far from Thyra in slow-mo.”

Viktor pointed to a smudge on the horizon. “Cloud?”

“Ummm.” She thumbed up the last view in that direction, north-west. “Wasn't there last time.”

“Unusual to have cloud at midday. Evaporate at dawn.”

“Could be transmission error.” It would take over an hour to get another look that way. She sent the order to swivel the TV cameras.

Julia sighed. She had still not come to terms with the simple fact that she and Viktor and the rest, fine folk all, were not in the six-person crew going to Mars in one year. Sure, they had known that half of the astronauts in training would form a backup crew. Sure, they might be in the second expedition. If there was a second. Unless the first crew found something damned interesting, that seemed improbable. NASA was already far over budget on this one.

Nothing to do but wait for the return signal, probably Rover barking back that it was still stuck. Viktor flicked the console view controls. “Let's catch news.”

With a touch of pensive sadness she watched the TV feed from Cape Canaveral. There it stood, only moments from launch: the Big Boy Booster, as the media gang called it. She thought fleetingly of how everything on this mission was Rover Boy or Big Boy or some other closed-club name. How had that happened?

Atop its cigar-shaped bulk was the seemingly tiny Mars Transit Vehicle, ready to be flung into orbit for its first space trials. She thought of her friends in there, waiting to ride into the black sky and deploy the silvery cylinder, spin it up with the last stage booster as a counter-weight, try out the 0.38 g for a month in gravity physiological trials— and felt another sour jolt of pure envy.

Into the last twenty seconds now. She reached out and clasped Viktor's hand. She could get away with that, tense moment and all—if anybody noticed. (Or had they noticed long ago, even before she and Viktor got together, and cut them both to the second team?)

“We have a burn,” came the flat, factual incantation, used now for over half a century at the Cape.

The huge white booster, bigger than the Saturn V, lifted gracefully upward—and a spurt of virulent yellow leaped sideways from it. The explosion ripped apart the feeds just above the nozzles. Angry yellow climbed up the sides and, before she could gasp, engulfed the payload. Already the booster had begun to topple to the side.

It was the worst sort of accident.

Always feared, impossible to completely eliminate. A failed wall buffer at the high-pressure point. Fuel blockage. A pressure-driven chemical excursion.

The enormous, ripping convulsion destroyed the gantry, support structures—the whole launch area. The six crew tried to eject but the whole event was far too fast for even astronaut reflexes. They all died, mercifully fast. So did an electrician, standing half a mile away, struck by flying steel.

Julia went through the days of uproar in a glassy daze. Mourning for friends. Avoiding TV crews. Watching as the disaster undermined NASA's support in Congress. Letting the days creep by as the gray pall over her life slowly lifted.

Soon enough the strident voices from the House floor claimed an even larger victim than the booster. The entire Mars campaign was “halted for the duration,” as one craggy-faced pol put it. The duration of what? Apparently, of the minimum-energy launch window that beckoned in 2016. After that, it would be 2018 before the next launch window. But once stopped, would the Mars program ever restart?

Slowly Julia sank into depression. She had been buoyed up for so long by the taste of opportunity. To have it snatched away so abruptly left a big hole in her life.

She had been riding on hope ever since, six years before, the United States had negotiated the Mars Accords. At the time it had seemed brilliant. The true trick of getting to Mars was how to do it without squandering anybody's entire Gross National Product. When President George Bush called in 1989 for a manned mission to Mars on the fiftieth anniversary of the 1969 Apollo landing, he got the estimated bill from NASA: $450 billion. The sticker shock killed Bush's initiatives in Congress. The price was high because everyone in NASA and their parasite companies tacked every conceivable extra onto the mission. An expanded space station. A moon base. Redundancy.

Multiple backup systems are the key to safety—but the more backups, the higher the cost. NASA's $450 billion program was an enormous government pork farm.

So a radical idea arose: the advanced nations could get this adventure on the cheap by simply offering a prize of $30 billion to the first manned expedition to return successfully from Mars.

European governments had long used this mechanism for risky explorations, going back to the Portuguese in the 1400s. In 1911, William Randolph Hearst offered a $50,000 prize to the first person to fly across America in less than thirty days. Human-powered flight got a boost from a $200,000 award claimed in 1978 by the Gossamer Albatross. The method worked.

The advantages were many, and political: governments would put out not a dime until the job was done, and only reward success; only private investors would lose if their schemes failed. Politicians could be proud, prophetic patrons of exploration and, simultaneously, enemies of make-work bureaucratic programs. And if astronauts died, it was on somebody else's head, not an embarrassment to a whole government.

To win the Mars Prize, it would not be enough to fly a flags-and-footprints expedition. More like a treasure hunt, the Accords specified a series of scientific explorations—geologic mapping, seismic testing, studying atmospheric phenomena, taking core samples, looking for water and, of course, fossils or life. Samples returned from Mars would be immensely valuable: a full range of specimens weighing three hundred kilograms would be turned over to the Accords Board in exchange for the $30 billion. Anything over and above that was for the investors.

On the surface, the Mars Accords were international treaty obligations to open Mars for a global effort. Actually it was grudging support for NASA, whom everyone expected to eventually claim the prize. Julia and the other astronauts had been in training under this initiative.

But not now. Nobody else had taken up the challenge, and NASA had been slowly assembling an effort to fly at the minimum-energy planetary orbital window in 2016.

A week after the blowup, a day after the big state funeral, President Feinstein announced that the U.S. would “redirect its energies to near-Earth projects.” Like building another wing on the space station, a notorious pork barrel beloved of Congress.

Mars seemed dead. All the astronauts were dejected, their years of training wasted. A few took sudden leaves. One went skydiving. Some started hanging out in bars, not part of the approved health regimen.

Julia tried to wear her Doris Day mask through the whole thing, but it kept slipping. She consoled Marc and Raoul, men who ditched good careers to train for Mars. Even then, she kept quiet about being romantically involved with Viktor. In the tight little world of astronaut politics, nobody knew what would happen next. Conceivably, just having kept it secret might knock them out of space station missions—the only game left.

Then a slim, beautifully dressed man walked in on the Mars astronaut team at Johnson Space Center.

He came with a trailing wedge of suited, alert men and women who formed a bow shock wave for him, enabling a dramatic entrance. He shook a few hands, traded short sallies, and worked the room almost like a politician. Julia knew she had seen him somewhere before. His gaze swept the NASA staff like a searching though affable spotlight. The whole room seemed to focus around him as people talking to the side stopped to watch.

His swift gaze found the dozen astronauts. He paused for effect, then asked, “Who still wants to go to Mars—on the cheap?”

John Axelrod. Ready smile, tanned good looks, darting blue eyes that gleamed with wary assessment. She had felt an uneasy fascination with him from the first moment.

His money originally came from Genesmart, a biotech firm he helped start, that brought to market Tourex, an antibacterial to combat Montezuma's revenge. It had become the indispensable traveling companion for tourists and business travelers worldwide. When he took Genesmart public, he was an overnight multibillionaire. But from his early years he had been the kind of man who would bet on whose bag came off the baggage claim carousel first. His interest in Mars ran back to childhood. He had been a washout in early astronaut training, but had kept a keen interest and had some insider, good ol’ boy contacts at NASA.

He knew NASA's unmanned return ship, the ERV, had launched for Mars over a year ago. It had landed in Gusev Crater and refueled, using the Martian atmosphere, and was ready even now to fly a crew back to Earth. And he didn't want to see the Mars mission die.

“Plus,” he had said to the astronauts, “there's money to be made.”

In just a few wheeler-dealer days, Axelrod had put together a consortium of big corporations to win the $30 billion Mars Prize.

“But we estimated sixty billion dollars to go,” one astronaut interrupted.

“That's with bureaucrats and paperwork.” Axelrod grinned, white teeth against tanned skin. He looked to be in his forties, fit and bristling with peppery energy. “That, I'll cut.”

He had a risky but inexpensive method for a red planet mission first suggested in the early 1990s. Instead of using NASA's costly orbiting return module, the Consortium crew would return to Earth directly in the NASA return ship.

“But the ERV is government property!” an astronaut called.

“It's an abandoned ship. My lawyers will argue that the Law of the Sea applies here. With no crew, it belongs to whoever gets to it.”

“That's not fair!”

“Life ain't.”

“NASA will need it when they go.”

“It'll be a junker by then.”

Cutting the crew to four also allowed the Consortium to launch a smaller manned habitat vehicle. The crew of four would land near the ERV.

“That's dangerous, outside our design protocols.”

“Mars is already dangerous, and outside your control. I'm gonna minimize costs.”

“But with four people, there's not enough backup.”

“I don't wanna back up. I want to go forward.”

“If anybody gets sick—”

“There'll be a qualified doctor. But he—or she—will pull other duties, too. Everybody works, all the time.” “Four is still too few!”

“Hey, the fewer you send, the fewer we can lose.”

This met only silence.

But … orbital mechanics were clear and cruel. The whole round trip would take two and a half years. Due to the shifting alignment of the planets, launch windows for trajectories needing minimum fuel are spaced about twenty-six months apart. The trip each way takes about six months, leaving about one and a half years on the surface.

When he finished, Axelrod stood back and hooked his thumbs in his belt and waited for more howls of protest. There was silence. His direct, no-BS manner had sobered the astronauts. NASA's big-bucks plan would have taken less than a year, round trip—expensive in fuel, but easy on the crew. The Consortium four would have to hold out on Mars, exploring and staying alive, for a grueling endurance test.

But it would be cheap. And they'd all get rich … if they got back. The salaries would range well into millions. Axelrod tossed off, “For the survivors, that is. And the widows.”

“You can do all that for thirty billion bucks?” someone asked.

“Nope, twenty. Got to be a profit here, folks.”

A long silence.

“Any volunteers?” Axelrod asked. The dozen astronauts all looked at one another. One stormed out, calling Axelrod a maniac. Three others expressed reservations and drifted out the door.

But eight were willing. Eager. Including Julia and Viktor, Raoul and Marc.

Over the next few weeks the eight candidates threw themselves into planning for Axelrod's risky Mars Direct concept, much as the original Mercury astronauts took a hands-on role in developing the first spacecraft. The ideas had been around for a while, pushed by the Mars Society. Axelrod just knew what to purloin. They had a joyous visit from Bob Zubrin, the Tom Paine of Mars who had pushed the earliest ideas about going on the cheap. Graying but as hot-eyed as ever, Zubrin gave the staff meeting he attended an evangelical fervor.

Axelrod believed in the vigor of private capital, sure, but with the inexorable workings of planetary orbits bringing the launch window ever closer, he knew how to save time. He leased the Johnson Space Center facility for training astronauts—the cheapest, easiest, and quickest way to continue their conditioning.

Getting the private camel's nose under the NASA tent was not easy. But the Congressional timidity about going had a flip side: joy at a windfall of private money. The long-awaited crisis in Social Security, Medicare, and other overloaded social systems demanded fresh infusions of raw cash. Axelrod came to Congress with a delightful transfusion. Next year Congress would have to face painful cuts, but hell, that was next year.

Soon enough Axelrod was selling camera crews the right to film at JSC the intensive crew training. Grav-stress tests for aerobraking. The glitches in integrating and servicing the food, water, and waste systems. Not least, the medical nightmares coming up due to the six-month-long free-fall flight to Mars. The doctors were sure the crew would be too weak to function once they arrived, one major reason NASA had opted for a more expensive but shorter route. Never before had network anchors worried on the nightly news about zero-g effects, radiation levels, and the subtleties of orbital mechanics.

Even better, they debated a growing mystery. Axelrod's whole plan was based on buying, cheaply, the prototypes of hardware for NASA's doomed mission, then converting them into the actual flight modules. But certain key components were missing. No explanation, sorry.

The gone gear was particularly centered around the life-support systems. Julia suspected some of the more remote provinces of NASA were hoarding these for some other venture, in the wake of the agency's retreat from Mars. Who else would want to hold on to it?

This forced Axelrod to dig deeper into his own pockets to replace them. Grumbling, he did so. Julia got to see him grandly write a check for $2.3 billion. The cameras ate up the whole thing, of course.

Costs mounted. Estimates of future expenses soared even faster.

The whole world watched, and most betting was that Axelrod would fall flat on his underfinanced face well before liftoff.

One day Julia and Viktor were at a swimming pool with the married astronauts, Raoul and Katherine Molina. Twenty feet down, in full pressure suits, they were simulating zero gravity conditions that would occur in the six-month flight. Axelrod came charging in with his usual corps of assistants straggling after. He shouted out orders—after all, he paid the rent—and had them hauled out of the pool.

Dripping, irritated, weighed down by their heavy suits, the astronauts stood watching him. “Big announcement, guys. Had to tell you myself.”

“Suit radios we have,” Viktor said.

“This you don't wanna hear on those comms. Forget the pool work. You aren't going in zero at all.”

Another money saver. He and his team had decided on a Russian space habitat prototype that was designed to create artificial gravity in flight. The crew compartment module was connected by a cable to the last stage of the big booster rocket they launched with. By making these two modules revolve about each other, the habitat would feel an artificial, centrifugal “gravity.”

“See,” Axelrod said, “that cuts down on training and gear. Solves other problems, too—those medical worries, to start. Makes the plumbing work a whole lot easier, too.”

So the Consortium mission was a go. But which four of the eight got to fly?

Julia had not been able to sleep the night before Axelrod's selection announcement. Neither had Viktor. She knew—she was next to him, tossing and fretting.

“You are more the favorite,” Viktor said suddenly. “You must face going without me.”

“Me, the favorite?”

“Better looking. Talk better, too.”

She had never really considered the possibility that he wouldn't be with her on Mars. That only one of them would be chosen. She had never thought about their future, not in the terms he dryly outlined.

“Each have maybe fifty-fifty shot. Probability we both go, twenty-five percent.”

“You're the best pilot.”

“You are best biologist and general backup. But without knowing more, those are the odds.”

She held him close. “I don't like to think of our lives together in terms of probabilities.”

“Agree. Is too much like our daily work.”

People weren't best considered, she felt, as racehorses. They just were.

Axelrod made his picks at a big press conference. Plenty of camera snouts, tons of tension. Feeding the eye-appetite of humanity. None of the astronauts wanted it that way, but Axelrod had licensed coverage of the event to a cable network on an exclusive.

“Got to raise capital, y'know. Send you folks to Mars with steaks and champagne.”

And the team of four were, the married couple, Raoul and Katherine. The very telegenic pilot, Marc Bryant. And Julia.

But not Viktor.

The four chosen astronauts sat at a long table on the dais behind Axelrod. She looked at the others. Raoul and Marc beamed, Katherine was smiling her careful astronaut's smile that could mean anything. And Julia?

It was like a sudden lurch into zero g. Falling. No Viktor.

They were not just probabilities. She remembered thinking, We're ourselves, not race horses.

She sat beneath the glaring, searching lights and thought, No Viktor. For two and a half years. By the time I get back, it will be over between us.