Richard Orme was confused. As the captive leader of an expedition to Mars, he is eager to learn just what game his Martian 'hosts' are playing at. The man in the golden orb that floats above their subterranean cities - is he really Jesus? And when this 'Jesus' returns to Earth - would history repeat itself, once more? Orme does not know who to turn to in this strange, hollowed-out planet - not the Krsh teachers, nor the man they call Jesus, nor even the comely Martian whose dangerous love so kindles his desires...

To my mother

The great canyon complex of the Vallis Marineris was a black wound on a red body. It ran for 3,000 miles from east to west near the equator of Mars. At its widest it was fifty miles and at its deepest several miles. If it resembled a terrible gash in a corpse, it also looked like a colossal centipede, the legs being the channels winding through the highlands towards the vast rift, and the bristles on the legs, the subtributaries.

From the Aries, in a stationary orbit, Richard Orme looked down as if from an incredibly high mountain. A rapidly dying wind was blowing high clouds of ice crystals and low clouds of red dust across part of the complex, obscuring the section that was their goal after four months of voyage. He turned from the port and floated towards Madeleine Danton. She was seated before a viewscreen, her waist belted to a chair, which was bolted to the deck. Behind her floated Nadir Shirazi and Avram Bronski. Their hands gripped the back of the chair while they stared over her shoulders at the screen.

Orme seized Shirazi's shoulder, swivelled around, and steadied himself. On the screen was the exposed tunnel that the satellite had photographed five years ago. Its roof, once a thin shell of rock, had fallen in. A passage ten feet wide, twenty feet tall, and eighty feet long was revealed.

Though the dust storm looked solid from the ports of the ship, the pictures transmitted by the robot rover, which had landed two years ago, were fairly clear within fifty feet. Beyond was a reddish haze.

The tunnel's floor was slowly being covered by dust. At one end it disappeared into the darkness of the part of the roof that had not collapsed. At the other end, vaguely discernible through the dust, was a door. It was of some dark material that could be metal or stone. Its smoothness showed that it had been machine-made.

On the black surface of the door were two large orange characters: Greek letters, capital tau and capital omega. Danton's oval face was expressionless. Shirazi's hawkish features showed an intensity reminding Orme of a bird of prey that has just spotted a rabbit. Bronski's dark handsome face held a smirk.

His own black features, he supposed, looked slightly ecstatic.

Orme's heart was thudding, and its sudden increase in rate would have been monitored about 11.5 minutes from now by Houston if the sensors had been attached to him. But he was dressed in a jump suit. Launch time was two hours away. By then the lower wind should have subsided to a gentle breeze.

'Let's see the ship,' Orme said.

Danton punched in the orders on the tiny console before her. The view lifted up, showing a vague dark mass through the dust, the walls of the mile-deep rift, and then a huge mass; no, only its intimations, a ghost.

The rover was crawling towards it now. Minutes passed while the curving outlines of the mass became clearer. Danton gave a verbal order to the robot to stop. Now they could see the great curving thing that had first attracted the survey satellite six years ago, shocking and exciting all of Earth and resulting in the first manned expedition to the red planet.

'I've seen it a hundred times on Earth,' Orme said. 'And I still don't believe it. A spaceship!'

Nobody answered. They understood that he was just talking to relieve tension.

How long ago was it that the vessel had landed or crashed? A hundred years ago? A thousand? How long had it been before a landslide of rotten stone had covered it? And how many years had passed before some of the rock covering had slid off to expose a small part of the colossus? Or had it been deliberately concealed, the stones piled on it by its crew?

If it hadn't been for the curiosity of an Australian scientist, his 'hunch' that the shadowy thing in the photographs looked unnatural and his persistence, the vessel still might not be noticed. It might have been undiscovered forever. Then the open tunnel had been found, and after three years, a robot had been landed to make a closer inspection. And the whole world was agog.

Richard Orme, born in Toronto, Canada in 1979, had been thirty years old when the IASA had reluctantly announced that the curving mass was indeed artificial. He had anticipated the events that would follow, and he had worked and schemed and fought to be a member of this expedition. A toss of a coin had decided whether he or an Australian astronaut would be the captain and the fourth crewperson of the Aries. The loser had smiled and congratulated him, but that night he'd got drunk and been badly crippled in an automobile accident. Though he knew that it was irrational, Orme had felt guilty about it. Part of the guilt came from his elation at having won.

Orme glanced at the chronometer and said, 'Time to start the next phase.'

Danton stayed at the console; Bronski and Shirazi got busy helping Orme to suit up. Then Orme helped the Iranian to get Bronski into his armour.

Meanwhile, Danton, in her slightly French-accented English, kept up a steady flow of reports on environmental data and the progress of the preparations. It was not an easy job since the long time-lag transmissions meant that she had to receive and often answer to comments relayed from Earth through the satellite above Houston. She had to keep in mind what she had said earlier.

The whole world was listening at this moment; it would be doing so at every opportunity. The operation should go smoothly because of their many hours of practice landing on the Moon. But there was always the possibility of electromechanical malfunction.

Finally, Orme and Bronski slid through the hatch into the lander, the Barsoom. The head of IASA had been a reader of Edgar Rice Burroughs in his childhood. His name was John Carter, the same as the hero of Burroughs's earlier books about Mars, known as Barsoom by its fictional natives. Carter had first proposed the name and had made the necessary political manipulations to get it accepted. Those who had wanted to name the lander Tau Omega, after the two characters on the tunnel door, had lost in the voting by a narrow margin.

After half an hour of rechecking, Orme gave the order for launching. The Barsoom departed slowly from the mother ship under a weak jet pulse. Orme felt a warm spot over his navel, as if that psychic umbilical cord attaching him to the mother planet had been severed. But there was no time for any introspection. His mind had to be focused on the objective, the position of the lander in relation to the landing surface, and the constant inflow of flight data. He had to be a machine without flaw; the awe and wonder during descent and the ecstasy of accomplishment could come after the touchdown on Mars. If, that is, there were no immediate problems.

The crew had practised landings on Earth in a much more powerful machine which could handle the heavy gravity and thick atmosphere. It had also practised on the Moon, where the gravitational pull was much weaker than that of Earth's and the atmosphere was practically nil. But the atmosphere here, though relatively tenuous, was still a considerable factor. However, the theory of a Martian landing had been worked out and the crew had drilled so many times under simulated conditions that the reality should be no problem.