Somebody had put a cassette in the tape player up by the snow-covered window: a softly whining old country lament: "Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…"
Or scientists, Jamie said to himself as he took a tray and walked down the self-service counter. He found that he had no appetite, settled for a slice of soggy defrosted pie and a mug of coffee. Then he went to the farthest corner of the dining room and sat alone at the end of an empty table.
No one paid him any attention. Which suited Jamie fine. He was an outsider now, a pariah, and they all knew it.
Then Joanna came in, wearing a dark green chamois man’s shirt that fit her like a tent: shoulders drooped down almost to her elbows, shirttails around her knees. She had rolled up the sleeves, and beneath it she wore a white tee shirt and nubby running pants. Dressed for comfort, Jamie saw. Yet she did not look sloppy: casual, not unkempt.
She went straight to the coffee urn and poured herself a steaming mug. Then, looking around the nearly empty dining room, she saw Jamie and came to his table.
"I could not sleep," she said, sitting at the corner of the table just to his right.
Jamie nodded toward the coffee mug. "That’s not going to help you."
She laughed lightly. "Oh, caffeine never keeps me awake. I was raised on coffee."
"In Brazil."
"Yes."
As if to prove her point Joanna took a long swallow, then put the mug down on the Formica tabletop. Jamie felt as if he wanted to get away, but he did not know how.
Joanna said, "I understand that you are an Indian."
"Half Navaho."
"In Brazil you would be called a mestizo. I am a mestizo myself. My father and mother, both mestizos. There are millions of us in Brazil. Tens of millions in Latin America, from Mexico southward."
"And two here in Antarctica," Jamie said.
She laughed again, a pleasant happy sound. She seemed less tense than she had been earlier, her voice stronger. "Yes. Two of us here."
Jamie smiled back at her. They began to talk, easily, quietly. He could feel himself relaxing with her.
She told him about Sao Paulo and Rio, how the poor farmers and villagers had streamed into the cities in such a torrent that they had swollen into a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all.
Jamie found himself telling her about Berkeley and the Bay, beautiful, earthquake-vulnerable San Francisco and the golden fertile valleys of California. And then about New Mexico and his grandfather.
"Al thinks of himself as a Navaho, but he acts like an Anglo businessman. He can go around saying that a man can’t get rich if he takes proper care of his family, yet he owns half the housing developments on the north side of Santa Fe."
Jamie lost track of the time, talking with Joanna. She asked if he had a girlfriend and he told her that he had been dating a TV anchorwoman back in Houston.
"But it’s nothing serious," he quickly added. "What about you? Are you married? Engaged?"
Joanna shook her head. "No. No one. There is only my father and me. My mother died several years ago."
Then she asked, "When did you first become interested in going to Mars?"
"Oh, god, it happened so long ago I don’t even remember… wait, yes I do." The memory came into clear clean focus. "In elementary school. They took the class on a field trip to the planetarium. The show was all about Mars."
"Ah," said Joanna. "With me, of course, it was my father. We talked about Mars every evening at dinner, every morning at breakfast."
"I started reading everything I could about Mars. Fiction, nonfiction. Pretty soon I found the scientific books much more interesting than the fiction."
"That is why you became a scientist?"
Jamie thought a moment. "Yep, I guess maybe it is."
"But why a geologist?" she asked.
With a grin, Jamie replied, "You can’t spend much time in the southwest without becoming a geologist. Have you ever seen the Grand Canyon? Or the Barringer Meteor Crater?"
Joanna shook her head.
"The mountains, the rocks — they’re like picture books that have the history of the planet written on them."
"And Mars?"
He shrugged. "A new world. Nobody’s touched it yet."
Jamie had done a double major in schooclass="underline" geology and planetary sciences. He did not want to be just another rock hound or end up working for an oil company. He wanted to find out what makes the world the way it is; not just the Earth, the other planets too.
But there were no jobs in planetary sciences when he left school with his brand-new Ph.D. He accepted a postdoc at CalTech and spent a year hunting for meteorites. When the year was finished he wound up taking an assistant professorship at Albuquerque, thinking that he would have to spend the rest of his life teaching would-be oil hunters and doing field work in the summers. He was in Canada studying astroblemes, the scars from ancient meteor strikes, when the Mars Project sent out its first call for scientists.
"A new world," Joanna echoed. "Is that why you enrolled for training?"
"My parents were against it. Even my grandfather had his doubts. But I had to give it a shot, had to try. I didn’t want to be just another assistant professor working toward tenure. I didn’t want them going to Mars without…" Jamie suddenly realized where he was and what he had agreed to. "…without me," he finished lamely.
Joanna placed her hand atop his. A small soft feminine hand, pale against his own, roughened and darkened by years of field work.
"I will write to my father," she said softly. "Perhaps there is something he can do."
Jamie said nothing, but he thought to himself bleakly, They’ve already got one part-Indian set for the mission. They won’t need another.
7
It was cold in the helicopter. Cold and noisy. The big chopper clattered and lurched in the gusty wind blowing down from the summit of Mount Markham. Glancing out the window of the rattling, vibrating cargo door Jamie saw the broad white expanse of the glacier stretching below them, glaring reflected sunlight into his eyes, glittering where snow had drifted into mountainous dunes.
"Several of the meteorites found in this area have been proven to be from the moon," Hoffman was telling Joanna, bellowing to be heard over the roar of the turbine engines.
She was sitting in the middle seat, safety harness buckled tightly across her shoulders and lap, her gloved hands clenched into rigid little fists, her head turned toward Hoffman so that she would not have to look out at the desolate world of ice below them.
Hoffman was lecturing at the top of his voice. To anyone else it would have sounded like the ultimate in arrogance, but Jamie knew that the Austrian was just as frightened as Joanna was. He was talking to stay in control of himself, telling Joanna every last detail about the meteorites that had been found on the glacier.
By me, Jamie reflected sourly. I found the damned meteorites. That part he doesn’t mention.
"Have any of them been definitely identified as Martian?" Joanna yelled back at him.
"Only two have matched comparisons with stones brought back from Mars by the automated probes," Hoffman hollered. "And those were found more than twenty years ago. None of the meteorites located recently have proved to be of Martian origin."
"Some of the stones found elsewhere in Antarctica have microflora living in cracks in their surfaces," Joanna shouted, shifting the subject to her field of expertise to keep the throat-straining conversation going and avoid thinking about being alone out there on the ice.