Muldoon wrote out three names.

CDR: Stone. MSP: Bleeker. MMP: Gershon.

It didn’t look so bad. It was still a crew of pilots. All USAF, actually. You had a streak of brilliance in Gershon, which was missing in Curval, and which might make a lot of difference if it came down to the wire, forty million miles away on Mars. And, unlike Curval, Muldoon knew he could rely on Gershon to apply himself to every aspect of the mission, including all the dull shitty stuff. Like the geology.

And he could expect Stone and Bleeker, both calm and unflappable, to compensate for Gershon’s instability.

Gershon, then.

It didn’t go any way toward satisfying the carping scientists; but, hell, he’d just have to absorb the flak about that. Bleeker was a good man, and there was no way he was going to bounce him.

And, of course, he reflected, with Gershon being a rookie that definitely ruled out any chances of selecting Natalie York, even if he could get Gershon some experience on the D-prime. One rookie, or near-rookie, on the crew was bad enough; two would be laughable, in his opinion.

He picked up the phone and asked Mabel to set up calls to Stone, Bleeker, Gershon, and Curval.

He wondered if he should call York. He decided there was no need.

Although it wasn’t yet 10 A.M., the sun was already intense on Phil Stone’s head and back. He could feel the sweat pool beneath his collar and under his light Snoopy helmet, and it soaked into the shirt on his back, under the heavy pack.

The ground was just black rock, it seemed to him, and the heat from the cloudless furnace of a sky came blasting straight back up at him. There was nothing but rock, scrubby grass, and smashed-up gravel for miles around.

Dangling in a plastic wallet at Stone’s belt there was a pack of aerial photographs of the area, together with a couple of outline U.S. Geological Survey maps. He unclipped the pack and looked around, trying to figure how the features he saw compared to the photographs and maps. The photographs had been blurred, artificially, so that he couldn’t see any detail finer than would be shown in Mariner photos of the surface of Mars.

The landscape here was extraordinary. Sculpted, full of knobby hills and canyons, some cut right into the bedrock. He’d never seen anything like it.

“I don’t know where the hell we are,” he admitted. “It’s damned difficult. Everything looks different, from the ground.”

Adam Bleeker, hiking beside Stone and similarly laden with helmet, pack, and Mars boots, came to a halt. Bleeker was towing a two-wheeled cart called a MET, a Modular Equipment Transporter. Bleeker leaned forward, propping his hands on his knees. His blond hair seemed to be on fire in the sunlight. “I can figure where we are,” Bleeker said wearily.

“Huh?”

“About a mile to the east of the Union Pacific. I just heard a whistle.”

Natalie York’s radio voice crackled in Stone’s headset. “Say again please, EV2; I do not copy.” York was playing capcom in the comparative comfort of her tent.

Bleeker straightened up. He caught Stone’s eye and mouthed an obscenity.

Stone said, “Roger, Natalie. We’re both a little weary here, on the surface of Mars. I guess we’re using up our consumables at a heavy rate.”

“Then take a drink, you babies.”

Bleeker mouthed more obscenities, but Stone waved him silent. “She’s right, goddamn it. Come on.” He reached behind his head, to where two short plastic tubes dangled from his backpack. He pulled one of them to his mouth and sucked; tepid Tang squirted over his tongue.

Bleeker took a mouthful of water from his own plastic spigot, swilled it around, and spit it onto the black rock underfoot, where it sizzled, running away and drying quickly.

“Try some Tang,” Stone said.

“Tang gives me the farts.”

“Yeah, but you need to replace the potassium you sweat out. Good for the heart…”

“You two heroes ready to carry on?”

“Oh, up yours, York,” Stone said.

They straightened up and walked on.

They came to a bed of gravel and clay, broad and sweeping; the bedrock thrust through it like blackened, exposed bone. “We’ve found what looks like loess, Natalie,” Stone said. “River valley deposit.” He found he was breathing hard, and he was aware that Bleeker, struggling with the heavy MET, was sweating so heavily he had soaked right through his thin T-shirt. “I think we should go for a SEP setup.”

“Roger, EV1.”

Damn right it’s “Roger.” Staying in one place and playing at scientists for a while was going to be a hell of a lot easier than footslogging across this goddamn volcanic battleground. After all, this was worse than the real thing; his Mars suit would be air-conditioned, for God’s sake.

“Adam, why don’t you scout on ahead. Go that way, up across the loess.”

“Okay.” Bleeker set down the MET’s handle, hitched his pack on his shoulders, and set off along the loess, his blue Mars boots stained and muddy.

Stone dug out a set of gloves from the MET. The gloves were thick and stiffened with wire, to simulate the pressurized gloves he’d have to wear on Mars. With the gloves on he picked the SEP out of the buggy. The SEP — the Surface Experimental Package, a suite of scientific instruments — was folded up into a heavy dumbbell shape, weighted to mirror how the real thing would feel under Martian gravity.

Bleeker had walked maybe a hundred feet down the loess. “Over here,” he called. “This is good and flat.”

Stone began to walk toward him. “Okay, Natalie, I’m deploying the SEP now.”

“Rog.”

It was a real effort to grip the bar of the dumbbell through his stiffened gloves and to hold the packages away from him. After maybe thirty feet, he stopped and put the SEP down.

Bleeker laughed. “It’s only plywood, Phil.”

“Goddamn it,” Stone shouted at him, “do you have to walk so far?”

“You know I do.”

Of course, Bleeker was right; on Mars they would have to carry the SEPs far enough from their MEM, or from the Mars Rover, that they could be sure to find a piece of surface undisturbed by the dust kicked up by their vehicles.

He pulled off the gloves and threw them in the general direction of the MET; he didn’t bother to look where they’d gone.

Bleeker whistled. “Are you supposed to do that, skipper?”

“Sue me.”

He brought the SEP mock-up to Bleeker and set it down; together, they began to deploy the instruments.

Assembling the SEP was like setting up a home barbecue. Undo the bolts. Take the packages out of their Styrofoam blocks. Tamp down the dirt to make the ground flat — actually that wasn’t so easy here; the loess was gravelly and unforgiving — and set the instruments level. Make sure each instrument is pointed the right way, and is the right distance from the others. And don’t let them get coated in dirt, goddamn it.

When they’d finished, the SEP looked like an odd, multipointed star, with the radioisotope power package at the center, and the instruments set up on the ground all around it, connected by fine orange cables. The seismometer was that silvery paint tin. A little meteorology boom stuck up in the air — the SEPs would act as weather stations for the astronauts during their stay on Mars — and that spidery gold-leaf sculpture was a magnetometer. At the front of the assembly was a pair of tall, thin stereoscopic color cameras. And on top of the whole thing sat a delicate S-band antenna, pointing to an imaginary Earth.

The SEPs would be placed at a variety of sites, as the astronauts completed their traverses. There was every hope that the SEPs could send back data long after Stone and his crew had returned to Earth. It would be kind of a neat memorial to the mission; looking down at the installed balsa-and-card mock-up of the SEP, Stone felt a certain pride in his accomplishment, in a task done well.