Return to Mars Read Free

white eagle’s feather tucked atop it. He held the Navaho fetish in the palm of his gloved hand.
    “What is that?” asked Stacy Dezhurova.
    Jamie heard her strong bright voice in his helmet earphones. None of the eight members of the Second Mars Expedition had removed their spacesuits yet, nor even lifted the visors of their helmets. They stood in a rough semicircle just inside the airlock hatch, eight faceless men and women encased in their bulky white hard suits.
    “A Navaho fetish,” Jamie replied. “Powerful magic.”
    Dex Trumball shuffled awkwardly toward Jamie, his thick boots clomping heavily on the habitat’s plastic flooring.
    “You brought this all the way with you?” Trumball asked, almost accusingly.
    “On the first expedition,” Jamie said. “I left it here to guard the place while we were gone.”
    Trumball’s face was hidden behind the tinted visor of his helmet, but the tone of his voice left no doubt about his opinion. “Heap big medicine, huh?”
    Jamie suppressed a flash of anger. “That’s right,” he said, forcing his voice to stay calm, even. “The dome’s still here, isn’t it? Six years, and it’s still standing and ready for occupancy.”
    Possum Craig said in his flat Texas twang, “Let’s pump us some breathable oxy in here before we start clappin’ ourselves on the back.”
    “Six years,” Trumball muttered. “Left it waiting here all that time.”
    Six years.
    Even the discovery of life clinging precariously to the rocks at the bottom of Mars’ Grand Canyon had not made this return to the red planet easy or simple. It had taken six years to put together the people,
    the equipment—and most important of all, the money—to make this Second Mars Expedition a reality.
    To his surprise and anger, Jamie Waterman had been forced to fight for a berth on the second expedition, fight with every molecule of strength and skill he possessed. But his grandfather’s fetish must have truly been powerful: he had returned to Mars at last.
    After five months in space between the two worlds, after a week in orbit around Mars, after the blazing fury of their descent through the thin Martian atmosphere heated to incandescence by their fiery passage, Jamie Waterman and the other seven members of the expedition had at last stepped out onto the rust-red sandy surface of Mars.
    Five men and three women, each encased in bulbous hard-shelled spacesuits that made them look like lumbering tortoises rearing on their hind legs. All the suits were white, with color-coded stripes on their sleeves for easy identification. Jamie’s three stripes were fire-engine red.
    The habitat that the first expedition had left looked unchanged. The dome was still inflated and appeared unscarred from its six-year wait.
    The first thing the explorers did was to troop to the dome’s airlock and go inside. After a few moments of just gazing around its empty domed interior, they fell to their assigned tasks and checked out the life-support equipment. If the dome was unusable they would have to live for the entire year and a half of their stay on Mars in the spacecraft module that had carried them to the red planet and landed them on its surface. None of them wanted that. Five months cooped up in that tin can had been more than enough.
    The dome was intact, its life-support equipment functioning adequately, its nuclear power generator still providing enough electricity to run the habitat.
    I knew it would be, Jamie said to himself. Mars is a gentle world. It doesn’t want to harm us.
    Possum Craig and Tomas Rodriguez, the NASA-provided astronaut, started the oxygen generator. It was cranky after six years of being idle, but they got it running at last and it began extracting breathable oxygen from the Martian atmosphere to mix with the nitrogen that had kept the dome inflated for the past six years.
    The rest of the explorers went outside and fell to their assigned tasks of setting up the video cameras and virtual