There was no need for acceleration couches. The rockets that would propel them to Mars produced very low levels of thrust; they would hardly feel as much acceleration as during a jet airliner’s takeoff. Lifting off from the ground and going into Earth orbit required a big jolt of thrust, several minutes of three g’s or more. That had all been done by space shuttles and unmanned rocket boosters carrying cargo. Once in orbit, though, the rest of the solar system could be reached gently.
One part of the habitat module was different. A section toward the rear was devoted to an oblong window made of thick quartz. Once they got to Mars, this observation port would be studded with cameras and other sensors. For now, though, it made a fine picture window.
The hour they were scheduled to depart, Jamie found himself at the observation port, hovering easily in zero g, his slippered feet dangling a few centimeters above the foot restraints set into the metal floor. He saw the Earth sliding past, an enormously massive curve of deep luminous blue, then the duller green-brown of land and the hard gray wrinkles of a mountain chain, dusted with clutching skeletal fingers of white snow. Another ocean slid into view, the immense swirl of a tropical storm’s seething clouds forming a gigantic gray-white comma over the water.
"Those are the Andes Mountains."
Joanna had come up beside him, floating noiselessly. He had not noticed, he had been staring at the world so intently.
"Come to say good-bye to Mother Earth?" Jamie asked her.
"Not good-bye," she whispered. "We will return."
"Adios, then."
She nodded absently as she slipped her feet into the floor loops, her eyes on the world they were about to leave.
"I still can hardly believe I’m here," Jamie said. "It’s kind of like a dream."
Joanna glanced up at him. "We have a long and difficult journey ahead of us. Hardly a dream."
"It is for me."
She almost smiled. "You are a romantic."
"Aren’t you?"
"No," Joanna said. "Women must be practical. Men can be the romantics. Women must think about the consequences."
"Departure in three minutes," came a Russian-accented voice over the speaker in the ceiling above them. "Please take your assigned seats in the forward lounge."
Jamie took Joanna by the shoulders and kissed her on the lips, lightly, swiftly.
"For luck," he said.
Joanna pushed free and floated away from him, her face frozen, unsmiling, her eyes wide and fearful. Without a word she turned and grabbed the edge of the hatch for purchase, then launched herself up the passageway toward the forward lounge.
Jamie waited a few moments, then went after her, moving more slowly. Then he saw Tony Reed hovering in the doorway to his cubicle, a sardonic smile on his lean face.
"I don’t think the direct approach will work with little Joanna," Reed said.
Jamie said nothing. He pushed past Reed, heading forward.
The Englishman followed him. "I may have told you too much about our little cabal to get rid of Hoffman. Remember, my impetuous friend, that she may have wanted to have you picked for the expedition, but she certainly did not want Hoffman to come with us."
Jamie looked over his shoulder and said, "White man speaks with forked tongue."
Reed laughed all the way to the forward lounge.
There were no windows in the compartment. If necessary, this entire forward section of the spacecraft could be detached and flown by the pilots up in the cockpit into a reentry trajectory and an ocean splashdown. The procedure was for emergency use only; the mission plan called for the spacecraft to return to Earth orbit, where the personnel would transfer to shuttles for the final ride to Earth’s surface. But a water landing was possible, if the need arose.
Jamie had barely floundered through the swimming course required by the mission planners. He wondered how the seven other scientists strapping themselves into their cushioned chairs would handle such an emergency. Or the four astronauts and cosmonauts in the cockpit, for that matter. It would be fine irony to go all the way to Mars and back and then drown.
"Departure in thirty seconds," came Vosnesensky’s voice from the cockpit. "I am putting an external camera view on the display screen."
The compartment had a small screen built into its forward bulkhead. It flickered briefly, then showed the curving bulk of the blue-and-white Earth sliding past. Jamie took the last remaining seat and clicked the safety belt across his lap to prevent himself from floating out of the chair. Reed had taken the chair beside Joanna.
"Five seconds… four, three, two, one — ignition."
The Russian’s voice was flat calm. Jamie felt a surge of pressure pushing him against the chair’s back. Nothing startling; he had driven sports cars with more acceleration. The picture of Earth on the display screen did not change discernibly.
But Vosnesensky’s voice said, "We are off, on schedule. Mars 2 thruster ignition was precisely on time, also."
A clearly American voice broke in, "We’re off for Mars!"
Not one of the scientists cheered. Jamie wanted to, but felt too embarrassed. An image of Edith formed in his mind, the strangely sad smile on her pretty face as they said good-bye for the final time. No, not the final time, Jamie told himself. I’ll be back. I’ll see her when I get back.
He did not notice Tony Reed staring at him, thinking, I got rid of that prig Hoffman and neither our Navaho geologist nor pretty Joanna has even so much as thanked me for it. Perhaps I made a mistake. She’s interested in this Red Indian. As long as he’s among us Joanna won’t even look at me.
SOL 3: NIGHT
They did not eat together that night. Joanna and the other two women huddled by the biology bench, ignoring food as they tested the green-streaked rock. Tony Reed and a couple of the other men drifted by, but the women shooed them away.
Jamie picked at his meal, worrying more about the idiotic news media back home than the Martian rock. It’s copper, he told himself. Got to be.
But suppose it isn’t? A part of his mind wanted the rock to be life bearing. In fact, as he sat alone at the wardroom table methodically working his way through the bland microwaved meal, Jamie realized that if they had indeed found life it would surely divert the media’s attention from this Native American business.
He got up and took his half-finished tray to the recycler, scraped the food into the slot in its top, and then stacked the tray and his utensils in the dishwasher’s rack. Someone had put a swing-era tape on the sound system: a clarinet sweet as licorice worked through an old ballad.
Laughter rose from the far side of the dome; men joking together. He recognized Patel’s high-pitched squeal. His fellow geologist had found something amusing. Whom was he sharing it with? Reed? Naguib? Toshima? From the sound of it they were all in one of the lab areas together.
Vosnesensky and the three other pilots were sitting around one of the communications consoles. Its screen showed a topographical map. Planning the first cross-country traverse, Jamie thought as he walked past them.
"Waterman, come and look at this," called Vosnesensky. "Latest photos of the badlands."
Jamie joined them and saw that the image on the screen was a map of contour lines superimposed on a photograph of the Noctis Labyrinthus region, slightly less than three hundred kilometers to the south. He pulled a chair from the monitoring station next to the comm console and joined the little group.
Noctis Labyrinthus. The badlands. A real labyrinth of interconnected canyons and chains of craters, fault lines that ran for hundreds of kilometers like giant cracks crisscrossing the ground, slumped canyon walls with landslides that may have been caused by flowing water.
The labyrinth was at the western end of the titanic Valles Marineris, the Grand Canyon of Mars that extended more than four thousand kilometers, at places so wide that an observer standing on the lip of the seven-kilometer-deep canyon could not see the other side of it. Named after the Mariner 9 spacecraft that discovered the giant rift, Valles Marineris was longer than North America was wide, and deeper than the Atlantic Ocean. Its western end butted into the enormous upswelling of the Tharsis Bulge, where ten-kilometer-high volcanoes sat atop a mammoth blister of rock the size of Europe.