Vosnesensky pushed himself away from the table and stood up.
"Time for sleeping," he said gruffly, as if expecting an argument. "Tomorrow we must be ready for the arrival of the second team. And before we sleep we must clean the suits and store them properly."
No one argued, although Tony Reed muttered something that Jamie could not catch. They were all tired but they knew that the hard suits had to be properly maintained. Tomorrow’s schedule would be just as punishing as this first day’s. The tensions and hostilities that had grown during their nine-month flight had not evaporated simply because they had set foot on Mars. Maybe in the days to come, Jamie thought, when we’re busy working and we can roam around outside, maybe then things will change. Maybe then.
After vacuuming the dust off his hard suit and hanging it properly in the storage rack by the airlock, Jamie passed Ilona Malater’s quarters on his way to his own. The accordion-fold door to her cubicle was open. She was taping a tattered old photograph to the partition beside her bunk.
She noticed Jamie and said over her shoulder, "Come in for a moment."
Feeling slightly uncomfortable, Jamie hesitated at her doorway.
Ilona whispered throatily, "I’m not going to seduce you, red man. Not our first night on Mars."
Jamie hung by the doorway, not knowing what to say.
"Would you like to see my family album?" Ilona asked, with a wicked smile.
There was only the one photograph taped up. Jamie stepped in closer and saw a tall, tired man in a dirty soldier’s uniform standing in a street choked with rubble, his hands raised over his head, half a dozen soldiers in a different uniform menacing him with submachine guns.
"That is my grandfather in 1956," Ilona said, her voice suddenly louder, brittle. "In Budapest. Those are Russian soldiers. The Russians hanged my grandfather, eventually. His crime was to defend his country against them."
"We’re on Mars now," Jamie said softly.
"Yes. What of it?"
Jamie turned and left her cubicle without another word. Ilona would keep on deviling Vosnesensky, just as she had all during the long months of the flight here. She thought she had a mason to hate all Russians. All during the years of training she had cleverly hidden her hatred. And nursed it. Now it was coming out into the open. Now, when it might get us all killed.
We bring it all with us, Jamie said to himself. We come to a new world with words of peace and love, but we carry all the old fears and hatreds wherever we go.
Feeling completely spent, Jamie tumbled onto his cot without bothering to undress. Nearly an hour later he lay still awake on the spindly cot in his cubicle, worrying about Ilona. The dome was dark now, but not silent. The metal and plastic creaked and groaned as the cold of the Martian night tightened its frigid grip. Pumps were chugging softly and air fans humming. The psychologists had decided that such noises would actually be comforting to the lonely explorers. If the machinery noise suddenly stopped it would alert them to a dangerous situation, just as the sudden cutoff of a plane’s engine starts the adrenaline flowing immediately.
As he lay on his cot, though, Jamie heard another sound. A rhythmic sort of sighing that came and went, started and stopped. A low whispering, almost like a soft moaning, so faint that Jamie at first thought it was his imagination. But it persisted, a strange ghostly breathing just barely audible over the background chatter of the manmade equipment.
The wind.
There was a breeze blowing softly across their dome, stroking this new alien artifact with its gentle fingers. Mars was caressing them, the way a child might reach out to touch something new and inexplicable. Mars was welcoming them gently.
Jamie let his thoughts drift as he clasped his hands behind his head and listened to the soft wind of Mars until at last he fell asleep.
He dreamed of spaceships landing in New Mexico and whole tribes of Indians stepping out of them, naked, to claim the harsh barren land for their own.
IN TRAINING: ANTARCTICA
1
McMurdo Base reminded Jamie of a cross between a seedy mining town and a run-down community college campus, set on the edge of frigid McMurdo Sound between the snow-covered mountains and the Ross Ice Shelf, a quarter-mile-thick shield of ice that covered most of the Ross Sea. All the buildings looked government issue: curved-roof metal huts and square wooden barracks, even the newer cinderblock two-story administrative offices. There was a farm of oil tanks, endless rows of equipment sheds, a U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker anchored in the harbor, and an airfield literally carved out of the shelf of glittering ice that extended past the horizon, covering an area bigger than France.
The streets were plowed clear of snow, but hardly anybody ventured out into the piercing wind. The coldest temperature ever recorded on Earth had been measured in Antarctica, one hundred twenty-seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
A midsummer overnight low on Mars, Jamie knew.
Inside the hut provided for the Mars Project trainees it was almost comfortably warm, thanks to the new nuclear power system that had been installed the previous year. Old-style environmentalists had protested bringing nuclear power to Antarctica, while the new-style environmentalists protested against further use of fuel oil that soiled the increasingly polluted Antarctic air with its sooty emissions.
Each group of trainees for the Mars mission had to spend six weeks at the Antarctic station learning what it was like to live in a research outpost cut off from the rest of the world, crowded tensely together in barely adequate facilities with few amenities and little privacy, struggling to survive in a barren frozen world of ice and bitter cold.
As Jamie strode briskly down the narrow corridor of the half-buried hut he thought to himself, All project scientists are equal. Except that some are more equal than others. And now Dr. Li is more equal than all the rest of us.
Dressed in his usual thick red-and-black corduroy shirt and faded denim jeans, his western boots thumping against the worn wooden flooring, Jamie headed toward the office of Dr. Li Chengdu, the man who had just been designated to be the expedition commander. No other appointment had been made for the mission, not yet, not officially. But the snow-blanketed base was a buzzing beehive of rumors and speculation about who would be picked to fly to Mars and who would not. The men and women cooped up in the crowded base had set up betting pools. Some of them were even trying to hack their way into the computer’s confidential personnel files.
Tomorrow Jamie and the group he was attached to would fly out of McMurdo and back to civilization, weather permitting, ending their mandatory six weeks. Jamie had spent much of his time in searches for meteorites out on the snow-covered glacier that fed into the ice pack covering the Ross Sea. Antarctica was a good place for meteorite hunting. The perpetual ice and snow of the frozen continent preserved the rocks that had fallen from the sky, keeping them relatively free of terrestrial contaminants. Some of those meteorites were in fact suspected to have come from Mars. Jamie had hoped to find one in his searches of the wind-swept glacier. If I can’t get to Mars, he had told himself, maybe I can find a chunk of Mars that’s come to Earth.
In six weeks he had found four meteorites in the ice, none of them Martian.
For more than three years Jamie had worked and trained with scientists from a dozen different nations in laboratories and field centers from Iceland to Australia. For most of that time he — and everyone else — had known that he would not be selected as the geologist to land on Mars. Father Fulvio DiNardo was the top choice for the mission, not only a world-class geologist but a Jesuit priest as well.
"He’s what we call a ‘twofer,’ " one of the American mission administrators had explained cheerfully over breakfast, months earlier, when they had been at Star City, outside Moscow. "Fills two slots: geologist and chaplain."