Edith’s grin turned rueful. "Well, we knew it wouldn’t last forever. It was fun, though."
"I think the world of you, Edith."
"Only this world, though. Now you got another one to think about."
"Yes." He laughed, feeling shaky, unsure.
She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly. "Good luck, Jamie. Best luck in two worlds to you."
All he could think to say was, "I’ll be back."
She answered, "Sure you will."
SOL 3: MORNING
"Today’s the big day, huh?"
Despite the fact that he had been a jet fighter pilot and an astronaut with more than twenty shuttle missions on his record, Pete Connors reminded Jamie of a high school football player moments before the opening kickoff. His dark brown eyes, usually sorrowful, now showed an excitement that most men lose after their teen years, a barely suppressed sense of adventure.
Connors, Jamie, and most of the others were suiting up for their first day of actual scientific work on Mars. Bright sunshine streamed through the clear double-walled plastic of the inflated dome’s lower section; the weather forecast was for a typical late-summer day: clear skies, light wind, high temperature climbing up into the sixties after an overnight low of minus one hundred twelve.
"The big day," Jamie agreed, tugging on the sky-blue outer pants of his hard suit.
They dressed in layers. First the form-fitting underwear that was honeycombed with thin, flexible water tubes. The water carried away body heat and kept the wearer at a reasonable temperature inside the heavily insulated hard suit. Next came the fabric coveralls and then the hard suit itself, built to contain a normal terrestrial air pressure of roughly fourteen pounds per square inch inside even if there were nothing but pure vacuum on the other side of its metal and plastic shell.
You leaned against a locker and laboriously tugged the hard-suit pants over your hips. The torso shell stood on a rack so you could duck under it and slide your arms through the sleeves while pushing your head through the bright metal ring of the neck seal. Once inside the suit it was virtually impossible to bend over to pull on the boots. The explorers always dressed in pairs and helped each other with the boots and the backpacks that bold the air regenerator, batteries, heater, pumps, and fans of the life-support system.
The first time Jamie had tried to don a hard suit, back on Earth, it had taken more than an hour and seemed like a particularly sophisticated combination of torture and humiliation. The first time he had tried it in Martian gravity, as their spacecraft approached the red planet, things had gone much more easily. Now, however, he was getting accustomed to the light gravity of Mars, and putting on the suit was becoming a chore again.
Eight of the team were preparing to go outside the dome, struggling into their suits like a short-handed football team getting into its padding and uniforms. Or like knights putting on their armor. Jamie wondered if King Arthur’s men grumbled and swore while they suited up for battle.
Their dressing area was a line of racks and lockers where the suits were stored, with a pair of long plastic benches laid out in front of them. Built for Martian gravity, the benches looked to Jamie to be too thin to sit on safely, their slim legs too far apart.
But Connors thumped down on one, suit and all, to let Jamie help him into his heavy cleated boots. The others were doing the same, Jamie saw. The benches sagged slightly under the weight, but only slightly.
Boots zippered, Connors got up and stamped his feet on the plastic flooring.
"Good," he said, nodding from inside the suit. "Now let’s get yours on."
Jamie sat warily. He noticed Ilona Malater standing beside Joanna, both of them fully suited except for their helmets, talking together softly and earnestly, like school chums or sisters. Biochemist and microbiologist. Jamie thought that of all the scientists brought to Mars the two of them had the most to gain. Or lose. If they found any evidence for life at all they would become international celebrities. But if they failed to find any evidence of life the whole world, perhaps even the scientific community, would always wonder if they had overlooked something.
Was that why the board picked all women for the life sciences? The third member of the bio team was Monique Bonnet, the French geochemist who had taken a cram course in paleontology, just in case they should discover fossils in the red sands or rocks.
The tall Israeli leaned closer to Joanna and said something that made her smile, then cover her mouth with a hand to keep from laughing out loud. They’re looking at me, Jamie realized. All the others are already in their suits, waiting to go. I’m the laggard.
He was sitting on the bench, hands clenched on its back edge, with one leg raised up so that his foot rested approximately in Connors’s groin. The women find that funny, Jamie thought, his face reddening.
"That’s it, friend," said Connors.
Jamie put his leg down and got to his feet. The suit felt cumbersome, stiff. He clomped past the rack where it had hung, now looking like a pathetic dead plastic tree, and took his helmet from the shelf atop it. He started to put it on, more to hide his blushing than anything else.
"Gloves," Connors said. "You don’t want to go outside without your gloves, man."
Flustered, Jamie yanked his gloves from the clip on the rack and tucked them into the pouch on his right thigh. He had carefully placed the fetish his grandfather had given him in the left thigh pouch. It was small enough so that no one noticed him doing it. Following Connors and the others, he walked toward the airlock and the next set of racks, where the backpacks waited.
"Got to remember to do everything by the numbers," Connors told him as he helped Jamie into the backpack.
"Right."
"It’s not so bad now, everything’s new, we’re all real aware of what we’re doing. But later on, a few days from now or a few weeks, when it’s all so routine we don’t even think about it — that’s when you can make a mistake that’ll kill you. Or kill somebody else."
Jamie nodded. He knew that Connors was right. Mission regulations insisted that one astronaut be part of the team whenever anyone went outside the dome. The astronaut served as safety officer; his responsibility was to make certain that all safety rules were strictly followed. His authority was absolute.
"What’s your assignment for today?" Jamie asked as he turned to help Connors. "Or are you just going outside to watch us like a safety patrolman?"
Glancing back over his shoulder at Jamie, Connors said, "Sure I got a job. Decontamination and cleanup. I got to make sure all of us clean off whatever dust we pick up on our suits before we come back inside again."
Before Jamie could say anything, Connors added, "You know they’d make the black man into the janitor, don’tcha?"
For a moment Jamie felt startled, upset. Then Connors broke into a toothy grin. "My main task this morning is taping a TV show for the kids back home."
Jamie felt relieved. Connors had never shown the slightest trace of ill humor; he seemed always cheerful, not an angry bone in his body.
"I’m going to be Dr. Science on Mars. Show the local scenery, do a few simple demonstrations of the low air pressure and gravity. For educational TV. I’ll be a media star all around the world!"
Laughing, Jamie said, "Good for you."
At last they were all ready. Jamie remembered to pull on his gloves and seal them to the metal cuffs of his suit. The backs of the gloves were ridged like an external skeleton of slim plastic "bones"; the palms and fingertips were clear plastic, hardly thicker than kitchen cling wrap.
Like the others, Jamie took the tools he needed for the morning’s work and clipped them to the web belt at his waist. Rock pick. Scoop. Corer. Sample bags. He held in one hand the long telescoping titanium pole that could serve as a lever or extended handle.