“Okay, Natalie, the SEP’s installed,” he said. “What next?”

“Rog. According to our checklist, here, one of you should be setting up the CELSS, and the other taking samples.”

“It ain’t time for lunch yet?” Bleeker asked plaintively.

Stone laughed. “I’ll do you a favor, Adam. You set up the CELSS, and I’ll hike around for the goddamn samples.”

They trudged back to the MET, and Stone sucked a little more of the flat, tasteless Tang from the tube at his neck.

I’d sure rather be watching the Olympics with a couple of cold ones at my side, he thought. But there just wasn’t the time. He’d had no time of his own, it felt like, since he’d joined the Agency.

Stone helped Bleeker haul the mock-up CELSS kit out of the MET. The CELSS, the Controlled Environment Life Support System, was a small inflatable greenhouse. It came packaged as a disk of plastic. Stone and Bleeker laid the disk out on the ground and Bleeker went to work on a small foot pump, pushing air into the ribbing of the greenhouse; soon a dome maybe four feet high had taken shape.

By the time he was done Bleeker was sweating even harder. “My God, Phil, it’s real work operating that damned pump in these boots.”

“You want to go rockhounding instead?”

“No, no,” Bleeker said. “Leave me to my darn vegetable patch.”

He pulled a simple aluminum spade out of the MET and began to scrape without enthusiasm at the soil. Later he’d set up a little water sprinkler inside the dome, and he’d be planting crops — soybeans and potatoes. The idea was that the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian air would be able to reach the plants through the permeable walls of the greenhouse, and the plastic dome would trap a lot of the heat of the sun. Martian soil, it seemed from the limited Soviet lander results, contained most everything needed to grow crops save for phosphorus and free water, so Bleeker would be doping the soil with a nutrient additive.

This CELSS kit was just an experiment; there was no intention of growing foodstuffs to supply the first expedition. The point was to prove that crops could be grown on Mars; it would point the way to techniques for future, longer-term missions — and even the first permanent colony, off in an unknowable future.

Likewise, Ares would be carrying another long-term experiment called ISPP, for In Situ Propellant Production. The crew would set up kits designed to extract oxygen from compressed Martian air, and maybe hydrogen and oxygen from any accessible under-surface water. If it could be shown that propellants and oxidizers for the return journey could be manufactured on Mars, the weight and costs of future trips there could be cut by more than half.

Dragging the MET, Stone began to walk, more or less north of Bleeker.

“Okay, Natalie. I’m coming off this layer of loess, now. I’m arriving on what looks like a gravel bed, loosely compacted. I can see striations. Kind of streamlined, like scour marks. It looks as if water has flowed here…”

York called, “Why don’t you make a sample stop?”

“Rog.”

He picked a spot, reasonably level, and set up the calibrating gnomon. He walked around the gnomon, carefully photographing it from every side. Next he worked the mechanical tests. He pressed a spring-loaded metal plate against the soil, and thrust a cylindrical probe into the ground. Then he put a lump of aggregate into a crusher, a handheld nutcracker affair. He called out readings to Natalie York as he worked.

When he’d fully documented his site he took samples from the surface. He picked up loose material with tongs, rakes, and scoops, and tried breaking a piece off a larger rock with a hammer.

Actually, the landscape baffled Stone. He’d been taking a geology field trip each month for the last year, and he’d gotten familiar with the subject to some extent. But he’d never seen an area like this.

Most EVA training was taking place out in the high deserts in the western USA. At one site, in Nevada, half a square mile of desert had been faked up to simulate the Martian surface as observed by the Soviets, with fine sand raked in, large boulders set deliberately on the surface. There was even a fake MEM descent stage set up there, a mock-up of wood and paint. The MEM had a compartment for a full-scale Mars Rover, which you could pull down and unfold, just like the real thing. That was a sim exercise Stone could appreciate: bouncing across a fake, but recognizably Martian desert, in a four-wheel-drive Rover…

But he really did not know what the hell was going on today. How was this piece of shit in Washington State, across which they were dragging this fucking Apollo-class golf cart, supposed to relate to whatever the hell was waiting for them on Mars?

After maybe half an hour, he’d piled the MET with carefully selected — and uniformly worthless — samples of Washington State. “Okay, Natalie, I figure I’m done here.”

“Well done, Phil. We’ll make a rock hound out of you yet. But I still haven’t heard much about the morphology of your site.”

He growled, and wiped sweat from his brow with a dusty hand. “Give me a break.”

“Come on now, Phil. Taking samples isn’t enough — you ought to know that by now — what’s crucial for the geologists is the context. Tell me what you see.”

Stone began to walk forward again. His pack chafed at his shoulders, but looking around more systematically, he began to see some pattern, some logic underlying the landscape formations; and as he did so, he began to forget his discomfort.

“I see a mix of landscape here. I see what looks like bare bedrock, and sedimentary stuff that’s been scoured out, and depositional material. As if left behind by running water.”

“Good.”

“The land here can’t be of much value. Light pasture, maybe; there isn’t much growing, certainly not in the bare rock faces. I think the rock is basalt. Volcanic, anyhow. The macroforms in the bedrock are mostly channels. The channels are pretty straight: not much sinuosity. They look as if they are basically river valleys, but widened and deepened. Maybe by glaciation?” Great tongues of ice, flattening and deepening valleys, scouring down to the bedrock -

“Don’t speculate, Phil. The goddamn Apollo astronauts speculated all the time, and they confused the hell out of everybody. Just observe.”

“Sure.” Speculating test pilots on Mars. Natalie’s number one nightmare. “I see evidence of channel anastomosis. And uplands left isolated between the channels.”

Back at the CELSS, Bleeker looked up skeptically. He called, “Anasto-who?”

Stone imagined York’s chagrin at that remark. Bleeker’s comparative backwardness at the geology wasn’t surprising. The guy was under real pressure; as well as field trips like this in support of the eventual landing mission, Bleeker was also working toward the D-prime Earth-orbit mission next month.

But then, Stone reflected, Bleeker was supposed to be the landing mission surface specialist.

“Anastomosis, asshole. It’s all in your Boy’s Coloring Book of Geology. Where a channel has been breached, and cut a branch through into another channel. Look. See the way the channels over there seem to diverge, then join up again. And you can see over there, where that bit of plateau has been left isolated. Cut off by the new channels.”

The isolated upland was like a tabletop of rock, stuck in the middle of the plain.

“Yeah. Okay, I see it. So what caused the breach?”

“Phil—”

“Okay, okay, Natalie. Don’t ask me questions like that, Adam. I won’t speculate.” It could be glaciation, though. Must be. What the hell else could have caused so much damage to the landscape? A lava flow, maybe?

“What other macroforms?” York asked.

Stone climbed on top of a rock, the heavy pack banging against his back, and peered around. “More uplands, carved out of the sedimentary stuff. They look—”