Mars Read Free

themselves. “Mars is drawing me to it.”
    Al gave him a puzzled, almost troubled look.
    “I mean,” Jamie tried to explain, “who am I, Al? What am I? A scientist, a white man, a Navaho—I don’t really know who I am yet. I’m nearly thirty years old and I’m a nobody. Just another assistant professor digging up rocks. There’s a million guys just like me.”
    “Helluva long way to go, all the way to Mars.”
    Jamie nodded. “I have to go there, though. I have to find out if I can make something of my life. Something real. Something important.”
    A slow smile crept across his grandfather’s leathery face, a smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and creased his cheeks.
    “Well, every man’s got to find his own path in life. You’ve got to live in balance with the world around you. Maybe your path goes all the way out to Mars.”
    “I think it does, Grandfather.”
    Al clasped his grandson’s shoulder. “Then go in beauty, son.”
    Jamie smiled back at him. He knew his grandfather would understand. Now he had to break the news to his parents, back in Berkeley.
    Vosnesensky personally checked each scientist’s hard suit and backpack. Only when he was satisfied did he slide the transparent visor of his own helmet down and lock it in place.
    “At last the time has come,” he said in almost accentless English, like a computer’s voice synthesis.
    All the others locked their visors down. Connors, standing by the heavy metal hatch, leaned a gloved finger against the stud that activated the air pumps. Through the thick soles of his boots Jamie felt them start chugging, saw the light on the airlock control panel turn from green to amber.
    Time seemed to stand still. For eternity the pumps labored while the six explorers stood motionless and silent inside their brightly colored hard suits. With their visors down Jamie could not see their faces, but he knew each of his fellow explorers by the color of their suits: Joanna was Day-Glo orange; Ilona vivid green; Tony Reed canary yellow.
    The clattering of the pumps dwindled as, the air was sucked out of the compartment until Jamie could hear nothing, not even his own breathing, because he was holding his breath in anticipation.
    The pumps stopped. The indicator light on the panel next to the hatch went to red. Connors pulled the lever and the hatch popped open a crack. Vosnesensky pushed it all the way open.
    Jamie felt light-headed. As if he had climbed to the top of a mesa too fast, or jogged a couple of miles in the thin air of the mountains. He let out his breath and took a deep gulp of his suit’s air. It tasted cold and metal dry. Mars lay framed in the oval hatchway, glowing pink and red and auburn like the arid highlands where he had spent his childhood summers.
    Vosnesensky was starting down the ladder, Jamie realized. Connors went down next, followed by Joanna, then Tony, Ilona, and finally himself. As if in a dream Jamie went slowly down the ladder, one booted foot at a time, gloved hands sliding along the gleaming metal rails that ran between two of the unfolded petals of the aerobrake. Its ceramic-coated alloy had absorbed the blazing heat of their fiery entry into the Martian atmosphere. The metal mesh seemed dead cold now.
    Jamie stepped off the last rung of the flimsy ladder. He stood on the sandy surface of Mars.
    He felt totally alone. The five human figures beside him could not truly be people; they looked like strange alien totems. Then he realized that they were aliens, and he was too. Here, on Mars we are the alien invaders, Jamie told himself.
    He wondered if there were Martians hidden among therocks, invisible to their eyes, watching them the way red men had watched the first whites step ashore onto their land centuries ago. He wondered what they would do about this alien invasion, and what the invaders would do if they found native life forms.
    In his helmet earphones Jamie could hear the Russian team leader conversing with the