Mars Read Free Page B

friends and associates. He had watched his daughter step onto the surface of Mars with a mixture of fatherly pride and anxiety that had brought tears to the corners of his eyes.
    “You must go out, Alberto,” said the mayor of Rio. “They will not stop until you do.”
    Large TV consoles had been wheeled into the four corners of the spacious, high-ceilinged parlor. Only a dozen people had been invited to share this moment of triumph with their famous countryman, but more than forty others had squeezed into the room. Many of the men were in evening clothes; the women wore their finest frocks and jewels. Later Brumado and the select dozen would be whisked by helicopter to the airport and then on to Brasilia, to be received by the president of the republic.
    Outside, the people of Rio thundered, “Bru-ma-
do
! Bru-ma-
do
!”
    Alberto Brumado was a small, slight man. Well into his sixties, his dark round face was framed by a neatly clipped grizzled beard and short gray hair that seemed always tousled, as if he had just been engaged in some strenuous action. It was a kindly face, smiling, looking slightly nonplussed at the sudden insistence of the crowd outside. He was more accustomed to the quiet calm of the university classroom or the hushed intensity of the offices of the great and powerful.
    If the governments of the world’s industrial nations were the brain directing the Mars Project, and the multinational corporations were the muscle, then Alberto Brumado was the heart of the mission to explore Mars. No, more still: Brumado was its soul.
    For more than thirty years he had traveled the world, pleading with those in power to send human explorers to Mars. For most of those years he had faced cold indifference or outright hostility. He had been told that an expedition to Mars would cost too much, that there was nothing humans could do on Mars that could not be done by automated robotic machinery, that Mars could wait for another decade or another generation or another century. There were problems to be solved on Earth, they said. People were starving. Disease and ignorance and poverty held more than half the world in their mercilessly tenacious grip.
    Alberto Brumado persevered. A child of poverty and hunger himself, born in a cardboard shack on a muddy, rain-swept hill overlooking the posh
residências
of Rio de Janeiro, Alberto Brumado had fought his way through public school, through college, and into a brilliant career as an astronomer and teacher. He was no stranger to struggle.
    Mars became his obsession. “My one vice,” he would modestly say of himself.
    When the first unmanned landers set down on Mars and found no evidence of life, Brumado insisted that their automated equipment was too simple to make meaningful tests. When a series of probes from the Russian Federation and, later, the United States returned rocks and soil samples that bore nothing more complex than simple organic chemicals, Brumado pointed out that they had barely scratched a billionth of that planet’s surface.
    He hounded the world’s scientific congresses and industrial conferences, pointing out the photos of Mars that showed huge volcanoes, enormous rift valleys, and canyons that looked as if they had been gouged out by massive flood waters.
    “There must be water on Mars,” he said again and again. “Where there is water there must be life.”
    It took him nearly twenty years to realize that he was speaking to the wrong people. It mattered not what scientists thought or what they wanted. It was the politicians who counted, the men and women who controlled national treasuries. And the people, the voters who filled those treasuries with their tax money.
    He began to haunt their halls of power—and the corporate boardrooms where the politicians bowed to the money that elected them. He made himself into a media celebrity, using talented, bright-eyed students to help create television shows that filled the world’s people with the wonder