Ben said, “The JPL guys figure there must be some process on Mars that actively destroys organics. Ultraviolet flux from the sun, maybe.”

“So the surface is actually sterilized.” She felt a crushing disappointment. She had, she realized, been hoping, unreasonably, that some kind of life might turn up after all. Maybe a hardy lichen clinging to the lee side of a rock… “Mars is dead.”

“Should you be jumping to conclusions like that, a true scientist like you?” He found another piece of paper. “Hey, listen to this. It’s from their meteorology team. Winds in the late afternoon were again out of a generally easterly direction. Once again the winds went to the southwesterly after midnight and oscillated about that direction through what appears to be two cycles. The maximum wind speed was twenty-four feet per second but gusts were detected reaching forty-five feet per second. The minimum temperature attained, just before dawn, was almost the same as on the previous day, minus ninety-six degrees centigrade. The maximum, measured at 2:16 P.M. local time, was minus forty-three degrees. This was two degrees colder than at the same time on the previous day. The mean pressure… Natalie, my God, this is a weather report from Mars.”

She looked up at him. His blue eyes were on her, his face gentle; she felt as if he were looking right into her.

For years, she thought, she had been heading toward Ben Priest, maybe toward that moment, like some dumb spacecraft on its blind trajectory to a target planet.

She pushed toward him, leaning across the photographs of Mars. Their lips touched, gently, almost timidly. His skin felt cool, a little rough. She pressed again, and this time the kiss was deep.

This has been coming for a hell of a long time. Ben Priest and Mars. It was a potent combination.

Eventually they broke.

He touched her cheek. “Now, where the hell did that come from?”

“The Soviets have sent pictures from the surface of Mars,” she said. “It’s a hell of a day for all of us, for all of humanity. Maybe a new step in our evolutionary history. What else do you want to do to celebrate?” She reached into the pocket of her shirt and dug out her room key. “Come on.”

Long after Ben had fallen asleep, York remained awake. It had turned into a hell of a night, the darkness laden with heat and humidity; the sheets lay loosely over her, faintly damp against her skin. She heard the ticking of the small clock beside the bed, the creak of the window shutters as they cooled. Mars 9 pictures and printouts were scattered over the floor at the end of the bed, with clothes piled loosely on top.

She could feel the tousled warmth of Ben beside her. Ben had flown around the Moon, and there he was, in her bed.

She remembered Ben’s question. Where the hell did that come from? Where, indeed. And where were they going?

She wondered if she should ask him about Karen, and Peter.

He hadn’t mentioned them; York didn’t even know where Karen was at this time. He had told her they were having difficulties with their boy: young, enthusiastic Petey had metamorphosed into Peter, a difficult seventeen-year-old, who had painted the walls of his room black — covering up the stars and astronaut pictures he’d pasted there — and spent more time listening to Alice Cooper than to his father.

But Ben didn’t say much about that, even though she could see it caused him distress. Ben rarely talked about his family, in fact.

And York was being a hypocritical asshole. A couple of hours ago, she couldn’t have given a damn about Karen.

Would Ben ever leave Karen? They went back a long time, obviously. And theirs was a Navy marriage. When Karen married Ben, she took on a lot of separation, of anxiety. Perhaps Ben thought he owed her.

Anyhow, if he did leave her — what then? Would York want him?

What about Mike?

It was all, she thought, just one hell of a mess. It was hard to understand how, for a person who had advanced so far on her rationality and logic, she could work out so little about a small affair of a handful of people, and their unexceptional relationships to each other.

She stopped thinking about it.

She picked the folder off the floor and, quietly dug farther through the contents of the Soviet file.

She found XRF results. The X-ray fluorescence device had sent back to Earth a preliminary assay of the composition of Martian regolith. She scanned it quickly. Silicon dioxide, 45 percent; ferrous oxide, 18 percent… There was a lot of silicon, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and sodium. But the proportions weren’t like any terrestrial rock. There was a lot of iron there. And not much potassium. That was probably significant; it meant that Martian rock hadn’t suffered as much differentiation by internal heating as had the Earth. Maybe Mars didn’t have a large core of nickel and iron, as Earth did…

She swore under her breath. She was speculating. Those data were so limited. That Soviet lander had set down in just one spot, on a planet with a land area the same as the Earth’s. And she could see the limitations of the sampling scoop just by looking at the photos of it. It was only going to be able to sample loose, friable material; what geologists called fines. It just wasn’t enough to give a complete picture.

What we need is someone out there, climbing off the lander, with a spade and a hammer.

Now that she’d gotten over her initial disappointment, she didn’t much care about the life results. It was geology that fascinated her; life was just a second-order consequence of geology, after all. A positive biology result would have been convenient, though. If only we had seen a silicon-based gorilla jumping up and down on the damn Russian camera, we’d be going to Mars tomorrow Even a fossilized trilobite would do.

She remembered those scratchy Mariner 4 pictures. And later, those astonishing images of Phobos, and Olympus Mons, from Mariner 9. Humanity had learned more about Mars from the probes in the last decade or so than in the whole of previous human history. She was lucky to live at such a time, when so many ancient mysteries were being resolved.

Lucky. Maybe.

But it was as if Mars was somehow teasing her. Enticing her.

She put down the reports. It was time she was honest with herself. This dribble of data isn’t enough I don’t want to spend the next thirty years as I have the last two or three, poring over grainy Mariner images, constructing hypotheses I can never confirm. I want to go to Mars, damn it. I want to get down on my hands and knees on that rocky ground, and dig a trench, and bury my gloved fingers in the surface. I want to see the pink sky, and the twin moons, and drive to the peak of Olympus Mons, and stand on the lip of the Valles Mariners.

Mars, with its slow, teasing unveiling, was seducing her.

She realized that Ben had seen that more clearly than she had. And certainly more clearly than Mike, who could barely see anything beyond his own concerns.

But the dream, the ambition itself, wasn’t the problem. The problem was, she had an outside chance of getting there. As Ben kept telling her, York was the right age, with the right qualifications, to compete for a place in NASA.

The problem was, she might actually try to do it.

But joining NASA, trying to get to Mars, meant throwing away her whole life. It meant she’d have to go back to school, and she’d have to go through endless, meaningless training with those assholes at NASA, and she might spend years in low Earth orbit working on crap outside her specialty.

It probably meant, too — it occurred to her suddenly — that she wouldn’t have any kids.

Did she really want to sacrifice all that, to go through so much shit, just for an outside chance of walking on the slopes of Tharsis?

But her fingers itched to get into that dirt, to dig around, to get beyond the loose surface crust of Mars.