The Martian Race Read Free Page A

after five years, thanks to the Mars Outpost program. There was a chem factory to feed Rover and backup electronics packages sitting in the Outpost base. Plus a microwave dish to keep in constant Earth contact through the three communication satellites above. She had trained with Rover from Johnson Space Center for years. Right now Julia was coaxing it across the tricky landscape, like a mother tending a toddling, balky child.
    She was taking it around the edge of Thyra Crater, letting the autopilot on board negotiate the slope and rocks. There was no choice, given the time delay of over half an hour. Rover Boy was the most advanced model ever developed, but it had problems. Big, insurmountable ones.
    “Where is it?” Viktor asked beside her.
    “Stalled on a sand dune, looks like.”
    She thumbed through close-up processing commands, fingers drumming on the driver's console. Nearby hummed the station-keeping labors of the Jet Propulsion Lab.
    At thirty-two, she had lost none of her impatience with life. What was more, she did not intend to. Piloting Rover Boy with infuriating delays was more trying than she could ever let on, or else risk being scrubbed from the Mars mission. So her fingers danced uselessly, rather than slamming on the gas in Red Rover and trying to back out of the clogging sand fifty-three million miles away.
    “Yah, the dune to the left, last time.”
    “Its onboards must've chosen to go that way.”
    “Looks maybe to turn wheels left, reverse out,” Viktor said in what he probably thought was a helpful tone.
    “It's a day's work getting out of a chuckhole,” she said uselessly, sending the Reverse order and cutting the wheels to the right. Before they got free her watch would be over.
    She glanced at her framed picture of the little Sojourner rover, one she had saved from her first brush with space excitement at age fourteen, way back in 1997. Sojourner had suffered from the same time delay problem—no way around the speed of light!—but its plucky nosing around had got Julia started on her Mars fixation. She brought it on her watches here, for luck. Today it didn't seem to be working.
    Rover Boy was hugely bigger, better, but—“We're never going to get far from Thyra in slow-mo.”
    Viktor pointed to a smudge on the horizon. “Cloud?”
    “Ummm.” She thumbed up the last view in that direction, north-west. “Wasn't there last time.”
    “Unusual to have cloud at midday. Evaporate at dawn.”
    “Could be transmission error.” It would take over an hour to get another look that way. She sent the order to swivel the TV cameras.
    Julia sighed. She had still not come to terms with the simple fact that she and Viktor and the rest, fine folk all, were not in the six-person crew going to Mars in one year. Sure, they had known that half of the astronauts in training would form a backup crew. Sure, they might be in the second expedition. If there was a second. Unless the first crew found something damned interesting, that seemed improbable. NASA was already far over budget on this one.
    Nothing to do but wait for the return signal, probably Rover barking back that it was still stuck. Viktor flicked the console view controls. “Let's catch news.”
    With a touch of pensive sadness she watched the TV feed from Cape Canaveral. There it stood, only moments from launch: the Big Boy Booster, as the media gang called it. She thought fleetingly of how everything on this mission was Rover Boy or Big Boy or some other closed-club name. How had that happened?
    Atop its cigar-shaped bulk was the seemingly tiny Mars Transit Vehicle, ready to be flung into orbit for its first space trials. She thought of her friends in there, waiting to ride into the black sky and deploy the silvery cylinder, spin it up with the last stage booster as a counter-weight, try out the 0.38 g for a month in gravity physiological trials— and felt another sour jolt of pure envy.
    Into the last twenty seconds now. She reached out