Shit.

Under the guidance of PGNS Challenger was heading for a point a couple of miles beyond the big escarpment, north of the mouth of the major outflow valley, just as planned. But when he saw it close up he could see the land was uneven, scoured out, ribbed with what looked like gravel bars. And there was an impact crater, low, eroded, right in the middle of it all, with a teardrop-shaped island of debris behind that.

“Scablands,” he said. “Natalie, you’re going to love it. Because it looks like you were right. It looks like a fucking river bottom out there…”

But he couldn’t put the MEM down in that shit.

Solenoids rattled, and Challenger shuddered. The computer was revising its trajectory all the time, as information came in from the radar. Gershon was surprised how often the attitude jets were firing, though; it was much more frequent than in the sims.

Stone was still calling out height and velocity readings. “Seven hundred feet, down at thirty-one feet per second. Six hundred. Down at twenty-nine. Five hundred forty feet. Down at twenty-five.”

Decision time, Ralph.

He flicked a switch to override PGNS.

He pressed the translation controller, and toggled the little thruster switch to slow the MEM’s fall. Challenger responded smartly to his touch, with a rattle of solenoids.

Suddenly, he was piloting the ship. The response was crisp and sharp. The thrusters banged, and the MEM pitched forward. He found himself leaning into his restraints.

Challenger drifted over the surface of Mars, under his command.

He was aware of Stone’s eyes on him.

“Low gate,” Stone said. “Five hundred feet. Thirty-five degrees pitch. Coming down at twenty-one feet per second.”

The MEM was still falling, but it was skimming forward, sliding over the broken, flooded-out terrain. I’ve got to get north. Away from this shit from out of the old terrain. North; that’s the place to be. On the smooth lava plains beyond the flooding.

Test pilots had an adage. When in doubt, land long. Ralph Gershon kept on going, looking for a place where he could land long.

“Four hundred feet, down at nine feet per second. Three hundred fifty feet, down at four. Three hundred thirty… Watch your fuel, Ralph.”

Watch your fuel. Sure. The mission planners had sent him all this way, looping around the sun, to make landfall on an alien planet for the first time, and they’d given him about two minutes’ worth of hovering fuel to do it.

But this is what you wanted, Ralph. Isn’t it? This is what it’s all been about, all these years. To be able to fly to a planetfall, just like Armstrong.

He felt his heartbeat pumping up.

There was a place that looked reasonable, but when he got close up, he saw it was peppered with big boulders. Another gift for Natalie York, maybe, but a disaster waiting to happen for the MEM. And over there was a smoother area, but it looked crusty to Gershon, with lots of little rivulets and runs. He could imagine a footpad plunging through the surface, the whole damn MEM tipping over.

He pitched Challenger back again to keep it from picking up too much forward speed. Then he flew over another field of boulders; he banked to the left to avoid them.

There wasn’t a runway, he thought, on the whole fucking planet.

Sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes; he had to blink to clear them.

New terrain advanced over the close horizon at him, rushing up toward him, exploding in sharp, unwelcome detail. Still, he couldn’t see anywhere to set down.

“Three hundred feet, down three and a half, fifty-four forward.”

“How’s the fuel?”

“Seven percent.”

Shit. He was doing worse than in any of the sims. Except the ones he’d crashed.

There. A flat area, like a little plateau, off to his right: just a field of dust. On one side there was a field of big old boulders, on the other an eroded area. The flat place was no bigger than a parking lot, a couple of hundred square feet, but it ought to be enough.

He had his landing site.

He pushed his joystick. The MEM turned to the right. He lined up his marked window, and locked in the computer. He imagined those invisible curves, York’s magical polynomials, snaking out to join him up to his landing site.

“Two hundred twenty feet. Thirteen forward, down four. Eleven forward. Coming down nicely. Altitude velocity lights.”

The shadow of Challenger came swooping across the uneven surface of Mars toward him. The shadow was a fat irregular cone; he could see antennae bristling, and at the base the shapes of the landing pads, with their long contact probes sticking out from beneath.

There really wasn’t much of a gap left between him and that shadow.

And then dust, red and brown and yellow, came billowing up in big clouds from the surface, suspending itself in the thin air. Dust and shadows. They didn’t have those in the sims.

Guess this is for real, Ralph.

A light marked “DESCENT QTY” came on in front of him. Low fuel. If he was too low when the descent fuel ran out, he would be in a dead man’s zone: too low to abort, too high to land safely. The MEM would just fall to the surface, smashing open like a big aluminum egg.

He tried to ignore the warning light. Overdesigned crap. Let a man fly his aircraft.

PGNS released the craft from the landing program, and Challenger began its final descent.

He picked a little gully, just beyond the landing point, to use as a reference for the craft’s height and motion, and he stared at the gully as he worked toward killing his horizontal velocity. The MEM had to land straight down, with no sideways motion. Otherwise, the touchdown might break off a landing leg.

There was a haze of dust all around the craft, billowing up, obscuring his view, adhering to the window in great ocher streaks.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Any forward drift?”

“You’re okay. Hundred up. Down at three and a half.”

The haze was all around him. And now he could see dust flying away from him in all directions, scouring over the surface. The streaks confused his perception of his motion, the way fog blowing across a runway could sometimes. But he could see a big rock, sticking up through the haze, and he focused on that.

“Sixty feet. Down two. Two forward. Two forward. Good.”

He clicked the descent toggle, killing the speed, until Challenger was floating toward Mars as slow as a feather.

“Fifty feet. Thirty. Down two and a half. We’re kicking up a lot of dust.”

I can see that, damn it. The MEM was drifting backwards, and Gershon couldn’t tell why. And going backwards was bad, because he couldn’t see where he was going. He pulsed the hand controls.

“Twenty.”

Well, he’d killed the backward motion, but a sideways drift had crept in. Fuck. He was pissed with himself. He wasn’t flying his bird smoothly at all.

“Four degrees forward. Three forward. Drifting left a little. Faint shadow.”

The shadow closed up, and dust billowed, so he couldn’t see the ground anymore. He struggled to get the MEM vertical.

He kept falling, blind.

“Four forward. Three forward. Down a half. Drifting left.”

Gershon felt a soft bump.

“Contact light,” Stone said. “Contact light, by God!”

For one second, Gershon stared at Stone.

Then he killed the descent engine, fast.

The vibration that had accompanied the engine firing, all the way down through the powered descent, faded at last. He should have cut it as soon as the contact light came up; if the engine kept firing too close to the surface the back pressure from its own exhaust could blow it up…

Challenger fell the last five feet, and impacted on Mars with a firm thud. Gershon felt the landing in his knees, and every piece of gear in the cabin rattled.

“Shit,” he said.

Stone started to rattle through the post-touchdown checklist. “Engine stop. ACA out of detent.”