Return to Mars Read Free Page A

reality rigs to record their arrival on Mars and transmit the news back to Earth. With his stone fetish tucked into the thigh pocket of his spacesuit, Jamie remembered the political flap he had caused when the first expedition had set foot on Mars and he had spoken a few words of Navaho instead of the stiffly formal speech the NASA public relations people had written for him.
    And he remembered one thing more: the ancient cliff dwelling he had seen, built into a high niche in the soaring cliff wall of the Grand Canyon. But he dared not mention that to the others.
    Not yet.

 
HOUSTON: THE FIRST MEETING
     
    JAMIE HAD MET THE EXPEDITION’S SCIENCE TEAM FOR THE FIRST TIME IN A tight little windowless conference room in NASA’s Johnson Space Center, near Houston. The two women and three men had been chosen out of thousands of candidates, their names announced weeks earlier. Jamie himself had been selected to be their leader only two days ago.
    “I know what you’re going through,” Jamie said to the five of them.
    This was the first time he had met the four scientists and the expedition’s physician face-to-face. Over the months of their training and Jamie’s own struggle to be included in the Second Mars Expedition, he had communicated with each of them by electronic mail and talked with them by Picturephone, but he had never been in the same room with them before.
    Now he stood, a little uneasily, at the head of the narrow conference table, feeling like an instructor facing a very talented quintet of students: younger, more certain of themselves, even more highly qualified than he himself. The four scientists were seated along the rickety oblong table, their eyes on him. The physician/psychologist sat at the table’s end, an exotic-looking Hindu woman with dark chocolate skin and midnight-black hair pulled straight back from her face.
    They were all in mission coveralls, coral pink, with name tags pinned above the breast pocket. The physician, V. J. Shektar, had tied a colorful scarf around her throat. She was watching Jamie with big, coal-black, almond-shaped eyes.
    None of the others had added to their standard uniform, except C. Dexter Trumball, who had sewn patches on both his shoulders: one bore the microscope-and-telescope logo of the International Consortium of Universities, the other the flying T symbol of Trumball Industries.
    “We’re going to be living together for more than three years,” Jamie continued, “counting the rest of your training and the mission itself. I thought it’s high time we got to know each other.”
    Jamie had fought hard to be accepted for the second expedition. He would have been happy to be included as a mission scientist. Instead, the only way he could get aboard was to accept the responsibilities of mission director.
    “You said our training,” the geophysicist, Dexter Trumball, interrupted. “Aren’t you training for the mission, too?”
    Trumball was handsome, with dashing film-star looks, dark curly hair and lively bright eyes the blue-green color of the ocean. As he sat back comfortably in his padded chair, he wore a crooked little grin that hovered between self-confidence and cockiness. He was no taller than Jamie, but quite a bit slimmer: a nimble, graceful dancer’s body compared to Jamie’s thicker, more solid build. He was also ten years younger than Jamie, and the son of the man who had spearheaded the funding for the expedition.
    “Of course I’m training, too,” Jamie answered quickly. “But a good deal of what you’re going through—the Antarctic duty, for example—I did for the first expedition.”
    “Oh,” said Trumball. “Been there, done that, eh?”
    Jamie nodded tightly. “Something like that.”
    “But that was more than six years ago,” said Mitsuo Fuchida. The biologist was as slim as a sword blade, his face a sculpture of angles and planes.
    “If you were a computer,” he added, with the slightest of smiles cracking his hatchet-sharp