“Don’t patronize me, asshole.”

He laughed again.

“Yes, I’ll find another job. Maybe I’ll even get an assistant professorship somewhere. But…”

“But you don’t think life as a rock hound is going to work out for you.”

“I don’t know, Ben. Maybe not.” Not even working on Mars data was satisfying her.

“So what’s your alternative?”

“Well, there are plenty of jobs for geologists with the oil companies. Good pay; lots of travel.”

Ben said nothing. When she glanced sideways, he was pulling a face.

She felt infuriated. “So what else do I do, smarty-pants?”

He grinned, and patted the folder on his lap. “It’s obvious. Your trouble is, thousands of geologists have been to Alaska before.”

“So?”

“So, I know a place where there are no geologists at all. Your problem is you’re working on the wrong planet.”

The bar at the Holiday Inn was pretty full. It was July 5, the day after the Bicentennial. Bunting drooped around the walls, and there was other Bicentennial debris: a couple of newspaper pictures of Operation Sail, the big regatta in New York Harbor, and yellowing, handwritten, out-of-date signs for local pie-eating, baton-twirling, and greased-pole-climbing contests.

York found them a table in the corner. When Ben went to get drinks, she grabbed the folder out of his hands and spread the Soviet material over the veneer tabletop.

The first couple of images were Soviet publicity shots of a Mars 9 lander mock-up on a simulated Martian surface. The craft landed hard, closed up into a ball, and then four petals unfolded to reveal instrumentation and antennae; in place, the lander was a splayed-open sphere, four feet across.

Ben returned with drinks: Buds, in bottles that glistened with dew.

She pushed the publicity shots across the table. “Look at these damn things. Red sand and blue sky.”

He laughed. “Well, you can’t blame the Soviets. That’s what we expected to find down there, too. The trouble is, we want Mars to be just like Earth.” He took one of the pictures. “Still, isn’t their Mars lander pretty?”

“Oh, sure,” York growled. “But Viking would have been a hell of a lot prettier. Viking would have had stereoscopic cameras and a full meteorology station and four biology experiments. And Voyager would have had a surface rover.” Voyager, a heavy Mars probe to be launched by Saturn V, had been killed by budget cuts in 1967, and the Viking landers in 1972. “Think of it. After traveling hundreds of millions of miles, if we want this Soviet probe to see behind some rock twelve feet away, we can’t do it. Pathetic.”

He held his hands up. “Don’t ask me to argue. Anyhow, the Soviets haven’t done so badly.”

“We’d have done better, Ben. You know it.”

All NASA had to show for this Mars opportunity was another Mariner orbiter, taking high-resolution photos of equatorial landing sites, plus one hard-impact probe which had sampled the atmosphere before crashing into the surface. It was just like the lunar program of the 1960s; the unmanned science program had been completely subordinated to the operational needs of the manned mission to come. The new Mariner, laden with imaging equipment, wasn’t a scientific probe but an advance scout for the manned missions. And we could at least have sent a couple of Vikings.

Meanwhile the Soviets were sending up their own clumsy probes, evidently intent on genuine science. In fact the Soviets had sent probes to Mars in every launch opportunity since 1960. And of the current year’s pair of probes, Mars 8 had failed, but Mars 9 had started transmitting surface images the day before — on America’s Independence Day. Humanity’s first Martian lander had probably provided all the propaganda benefit the Soviets could have wished for.

Priest dug more pictures out of the folder. “Here. This is what you want to see…”

She grabbed the photographs and started leafing through them eagerly. The pictures were grainy, and the resolution wasn’t great. But they were in color. Soon the bar table was covered with images of crusty, rust brown Martian regolith, a rocky horizon, a pink sky.

Ben said, “These are strictly for JPL consumption only. The Soviets passed them over because we gave them Mariner images of their landing site, in Hellas. So you’re not seeing them now. Okay?”

“Sure.” Her heart pumped harder. “Oh, God, Ben, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this. It would have taken me months to get my hands on this stuff otherwise.”

He touched her hand, briefly; his palm was cool and dry, the feel of his skin somehow startling. “You know, it means a lot to me to see you like this.”

She looked at her hand inside his. She felt confused, conflicting emotions surging. So her dubious relationship with Ben Priest was still dubious.

She pulled back her hand, unwilling to think about this. Not when she had Mars on the tabletop.

The Soviet lander was sitting in the middle of a flat, undulating landscape of ocher-colored material, with boulders scattered between small dunes. It was, she thought, like the stony deserts of North Africa, North America, or Asia. Some shots showed pieces of the lander itself: an unfolded petal, resting on the regolith, there a jumble of clunky Soviet equipment on the upper surface, a series of white-painted boxes contrasted with the pink sky. Another photo showed a sampling arm upraised, as if in triumph, over the surface; she could clearly see trenches, scooped out of the sandy regolith by the arm.

It looked very real, the rocks so sharply pictured it was almost as if she could reach into the frames and pick them up…

“Natalie? Are you okay?”

She looked up at him. He looked blurred; she found some kind of hot liquid rolling down her left cheek.

“Natalie?”

“Yeah.” She wiped her eyes, quickly, with a napkin. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize.”

“It’s just that it’s as if I’m there. Sitting on top of the lander, on Mars itself…”

I know where I am, precisely.

I am in Hellas. One of the deepest impact basins on the planet.

It is a little before the solstice: deep midwinter, here in the southern hemisphere of Mars.

The surface is reddish, boulder-strewn. Over there I can see what look like impact craters, between the dunes. Those dunes are obviously of windborne material. And I see other wind effects, such as those trails of fine grains lying between the boulders. That tells me that the prevailing winds here are in quite consistent directions.

But it’s obvious that the landscape doesn’t owe its morphology just to erosion and deposition by winds. Over there, I see stretches of a hardened vitrified surface. Vitrified: a crust of mineral salts, left behind by evaporation.

There has been water here, shaping the surface…

He ordered them both more beers; she drank, and felt the cool glow of the alcohol suffusing her.

“Now. Look at this stuff.” Ben dug out a photostatted report. “This is the real pay dirt.”

She scanned it quickly. It was a statement of preliminary conclusions by Academician Boris N. Petrov, of the Soviets’ life sciences team. The report seemed very guarded. It was couched in the language of a discipline with which she had only a nodding acquaintance, and further masked by cautious Soviet official-speak.

She dropped the paper back on the table. “It’s so damn circumspect. It’s hard to make out anything at all.”

“Yeah.” He cradled his glass. “Well, the results are ambiguous. The life experiment is a gas chromatography mass spectrometer!”

“We’d have done better. Viking would have carried—”

“Yeah, I know. Anyway, the GCMS looked for organic molecules in the regolith.”

“And?”

“The GCMS found nothing, Natalie.”

“Nothing? But that’s impossible…”

Organic molecules didn’t necessarily imply the existence of life. “Organic” just meant “carbon-based.” But organic molecules were a necessary precursor to Earth-type life, and they had been expected on the Martian surface; organic materials had even been found in meteorites from outer space.