Suddenly there was a figure before him.

Frank staggered, shocked. A human, a spacesuited figure, with an outer garment coated in frost, had just appeared out of nowhere. And a stentorian voice sounded in Frank’s headset, bawling out a song. Frank didn’t recognize the lyrics, but he knew the tune. ‘That’s the Russian national anthem. What the—’

‘Too late to make claim, Yankee! Need bigger flag than that!’

Frank stood straight. ‘Who the hell are you?’

‘You’re late, Viktor,’ Willis Linsay called.

The Russian saluted the MEM. ‘Nice to see you too, Willis. You going to introduce this fellow here? Hey – what your name, Frank? You want I teach you chorus? Try in English. Be glorious, our free Fatherland, age-old union of fraternal peoples . . . Hey, Willis!’ He patted a plastic box at his waist. ‘Stepper box works on Mars, by the way.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Ancestor-given wisdom of the people! Be glorious, our country! We are proud of you! . . .’

17

THE CREW OF THE Galileo, with a little help from Viktor Ivanov, their unexpected welcome party – unexpected to Sally and Frank Wood anyhow – spent twenty-four hours closing down the MEM lander, and unpacking its cargo, which included the prefabricated components of two aircraft. Gliders they would be, and light, spindly affairs, as Sally could tell as soon as the parts were unpacked and laid out on fine sheets over the dusty ground. It was in these fragile craft that they would be exploring the Long Mars, she learned from her father. One was to be called Woden, the other Thor.

It took Sally a few hours to get used to the Martian conditions. In the thin air her pressure suit was doing its best to inflate like a balloon, but there were joints at the elbows and knees and ankles that made moving around relatively easy. It was going to get tougher yet on the stepwise Marses, where the air would be vastly thinner than this. In the lower gravity, one-third of Earth, she could lift massive objects, but once such loads were in motion they tended to keep moving, so she needed to take care. Walking was tricky, and running more so, with a tendency to lift off the ground with every step. Experimenting, she found in fact that running in a gentle jog was easier than walking. But to run properly she needed to keep her body low down so that her feet could push back at the Martian ground, maximizing traction.

Frank gently mocked her efforts. ‘We’ll have you in astronaut training yet.’

Sally just ignored him, head down, experimenting, concentrating. Being able to run away was a basic survival skill; therefore she intended to master running on Mars.

While Willis and Frank got busy assembling the gliders, Sally got to know their unexpected visitor. ‘You liked surprise? You land on empty Mars. God bless America. Whoosh! Big fat Russian here first. Haw! Haw!’

Viktor invited Sally to come and visit his own base, meet his companions there. ‘Marsograd. Willis calls it Marsograd. Not its name, you not pronounce real name. Not far from here, couple hundred miles. On flank of Arsia Mons, one of the big Tharsis volcanoes. We monitor volcanoes, big job, try to understand . . . Come visit.’

Why the hell not? Let Willis and Frank play with their toy aeroplanes.

Viktor’s vehicle, which he’d parked in a deep young crater out of sight of the MEM, was a big, tough-looking truck on fat tyres, with a cabin that was a bubble of scarred Perspex. To Sally, it was like some glorified tractor. Inside, the cabin smelled strongly of oil and greasy Russian males, and the air cycling system rattled alarmingly. But it was roomy and warm, and the bucket seats were comfortable enough as the truck rolled away.

Heading roughly north-east they bounced over a rock-strewn landscape, following tracks that the truck had presumably laid down itself. The sky, cloudless today, her second day on Mars, was blue except at the horizon, where it faded to a more Martian dusty red-brown. And there was life here, clearly visible: those things like cacti, round and hard, what looked like trees, gnarled and folded over with small, spiky leaves – even what looked like reeds, or maybe big grass blades, each with one indented side facing the sun. She imagined the blades tracking the sun as it wheeled across the sky during the Martian day.

‘Like a story book,’ she said.

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s like the way they imagined Mars to be, oh, more than a century ago. Austere but Earth-like, with tough life forms. Like in old science fiction stories. Not the sun-blasted airless desert that we actually found, when the space probes got there.’

Viktor grunted. ‘Most Marses like our Mars. You see. This the exception. Special circumstance.’ He seemed proud of his vehicle. He patted the heavy steering wheel. ‘Willis calls this Marsokhod. Not its name, you not pronounce. Runs on methane fuel from our wet-chemistry factories. You see.’

‘I never even knew the Russians were exploring the Gap.’

He grinned. He was about forty; his face was leathery, crumpled, sweat-crusted after hours behind a facemask, and his black greasy hair was a tangle. ‘GapSpace, cowboy outfit in England. Don’t know about Russians. Not interested to look. Of course Russians are here. We have base on world on other side of Gap, on Baltic coast, high latitude. Called Star City. Like university campus and manufacturing plant and military base, all in one. Also Chinese here, though not so much. Mostly don’t know about each other. How would we know? Big empty Earths. No spy satellites. What difference, if one here or all? Gap is door to big universe. Willis know.’

‘He would.’ Which was presumably how he had known about the true colour of the Martian sky, for instance. ‘So the Russians were first here, on this Gap Mars?’

‘Of course! Our flags, our anthems. But we help Willis. Why not? Humans together, few of us on big cold world. Now he will explore Long Mars. What he finds, he share.’

Maybe, she thought. ‘Listen, Viktor. When we first arrived, you said something about a Stepper working. What Stepper?’

He grinned again. ‘Daddy didn’t tell you? In back.’ He nodded his head at a pile of junk behind the seats.

She twisted and rummaged, bouncing uncomfortably as the truck rode low-gravity high over big boulders, until she found the plastic box that had been strapped to Viktor’s side when he’d first shown up. It opened easily after she popped a couple of catches. Inside was a tangle of wiring and electronic components that she recognized as the circuitry of a Stepper, the artificial aid that enabled people to step – most people anyhow, even if they didn’t have the natural ability shared by such as herself and Joshua. This was basically her father’s invention. The only difference from a thousand such boxes she’d seen before, from tangles lashed up by teenagers to sleek bulletproof models issued to cops and military, was that there was no potato in here, the earthy, almost comical ingredient that powered the box. Instead there was a grey-green puffball. ‘What’s this?’

‘Martian cactus. Native. My colleague Alexei Krilov gives fancy Latin names. Use here instead of potato. Of course we grow potatoes too. Can’t make vodka with a cactus. You see.’

It took only a few hours to reach Marsograd.

For the last hour or so the land rose steadily; they were entering Tharsis, province of giant volcanoes, including Olympus Mons. But when Viktor pointed north-west all Sally could see of Arsia Mons, actually one of the lesser volcanoes, was rising land, a kind of bulging horizon. The Tharsis volcanoes, on this Mars as on the Mars of the Datum, were so big that you couldn’t even see them from the ground.

The Russian base was centred on a cluster of yellowing plastic domes, evidently prefabricated. But huddled around these were structures that looked oddly like tepees, struts of what appeared to be the native ‘wood’ draped with leather of some kind. Animal skins? All these buildings were sealed up with ageing polythene sheets, and connected by piping to creaky-looking air circulation and scrubbing plants. Away from the central habitation, big solar cell arrays sprawled across the rocky ground.