“They got a lot of rems!”

“But he could have gotten behind their water supply. A little one-man shelter wouldn’t be to hard to set up.”

John still hadn’t gotten over the idea of it. “A whole year in hiding!”

“It’s a big ship. It could be done, right?”

“Well, I suppose so. Yeah, it could, I guess. But why?”

Maya shrugged. “I have no idea. Someone who wanted on, who didn’t make the selection. Someone who had a friend, or friends…”

“Still! I mean, a lot of us had friends who wanted to come. That doesn’t mean that…”

“I know, I know.”

They talked about it for most of an hour, discussing the possible reasons, the methods that could have been used to slip a passenger on board, to hide him, and so on. And then Maya suddenly noticed that she felt much better; that she was, in fact, in a wonderful mood. John believed her! He didn’t think she had gone crazy! She felt a wash of relief and happiness, and threw her arms around him. “It’s so good to be able to talk to you about this!”

He smiled. “We’re friends, Maya. You should have brought it up before.”

“Yes.”

The bubble dome would have been a wonderful place to view their final approach to Mars, but they were going to be aerobraking to reduce speed, and the dome would be behind the heat shield that they now deployed. There would be no view.

Aerobraking saved them from the necessity of carrying the enormous amount of fuel it would have taken to slow down, but it was an extremely precise operation, and therefore dangerous. They had a leeway of less than a millisecond of arc, and so several days before MOI the navigation team began to tweak their course with small burns on an almost hourly basis, fine tuning the approach. Then as they got closer they stopped the ship’s rotation. The return to weightlessness, even in the toruses, was a shock; suddenly it came home to Maya that it wasn’t just another simulation. She lofted through the windy air of the hallways, seeing everything from a strange new high perspective; and all of a sudden it felt real.

She slept in snatches, an hour here, three hours there. Every time she stirred, floating in her sleeping bag, she had a moment of disorientation, thinking she was in Novy Mir again. Then she would remember, and adrenalin would knock her awake: almost there. She would pull through the halls of the torus, pushing off the wall panels of brown and gold and bronze. On the bridge she would check with Mary or Raul or Marina, or someone else in navigation; everything still on course. They were approaching Mars so quickly it seemed they could see it expanding on the screens.

They had to miss the planet by thirty kilometers, or about one ten-millionth of the distance they had traveled. No problem, Mary said, with a quick glance at Arkady. So far they were on the Mantra Path, and hopefully none of his mad problems would crop up.

The crew members not involved with navigation worked to batten down, changing the layout of the farm especially, preparing everything for the torque and bumps that two and half gee were sure to bring. Some of them got to go out on EVAs, to deploy subsidiary heat shields and the like. There was a lot to do; and yet the days seemed long anyway.

It was going to happen in the middle of the night, and so that evening all the lights stayed on, and no one went to bed. Everyone had a station — some on duty, most of them only waiting it out. Maya sat in her chair on the bridge, watching the screens and the monitors, thinking that they looked just like they would if it were all a simulation in Baikonur. Could they really be going into orbit around Mars?

They could. The Ares hit Mars’s thin high atmosphere at forty thousand kilometers per hour, and instantly the ship was vibrating heavily, Maya’s chair shaking her fast and hard, and there was a faint low roar, as if they flew through a blast furnace — and it looked like that too, because the screens were bursting with an intense pink-orange glow. Compressed air was bouncing off the heat shields and blazing past all the exterior cameras, so that the whole bridge was tinged the color of Mars. Then gravity returned with a veangance; Maya’s ribs were squeezed so hard that she had trouble breathing, and her vision was blurred. It hurt!

They were plowing through the thin air at a speed and height calculated to put them into what aerodynamicists call transitional flow, a state halfway between free molecular flow and continuum flow. Free molecular flow would have been the preferred mode of travel, with the air that struck the heat shield shoved to the sides, and the resulting vacuum refilled mostly by molecular diffusion; but they were moving too fast for that, and they could only just barely avoid the tremendous heat of continuum flow, in which air would have moved over shield and ship as part of a wave action. The best they could do was to take the higest possible course that would slow them enough; and this put them into transitional flow, which vacillated between free molecular and continuum flow, making for a bumpy ride. And there lay the danger. If they were to hit a high pressure cell in the martian atmosphere, where heat or vibration or gee forces caused some senstive mechanism to break, then they could be cast into one of Arkady’s nightmares at the very time they were crushed in their chairs, “weighing” four hundred pounds apiece, which was something Arkady had never been able to simulate very well. In the real world, Maya thought grimly, at the moment when they were most vulnerable to danger, they were also most helpless to deal with it.

But as fate would have it, Martian stratospheric weather was stable, and they remained on the Mantra Path. Which in actuality turned out to be a roaring, shuddering, breath-robbing eight minutes. No hour Maya could remember had lasted as long. Sensors showed that the main heat shield had risen to six hundred degrees Kelvin—

And then the vibration stopped. The roar ended. They had skipped out of the atmosphere, after skidding around a quarter of the planet. They had decelerated by some twenty thousand kilometers an hour, and the heat shield’s temperature had risen to seven hundred and ten degrees Kelvin, very near its limit. But the method had worked. All was still. They floated, weightless again, held down by their chair straps. It felt as if they had stopped moving entirely, as if they were floating in pure silence.

Unsteadily they unstrapped themselves, floated like ghosts around the cool air of the rooms, an airy faint roaring sounding in their ears, emphasizing the silence. They were talking too loudly, shaking each others’ hands. Maya felt dazed, and she couldn’t understand what people were saying to her; not because she couldn’t hear them, but because she wasn’t paying attention.

Twelve weightless hours later their new course led them to a periapsis thirty-five thousand kilometers from Mars. There they fired the main rockets for a brief thrust, increasing their speed by about a hundred kilometers an hour; after that they were pulled toward Mars again, carving an ellipse that would bring them back to within five hundred kilometers of the surface. They were in martian orbit.

Each elliptical orbit of the planet took around a day. Over the next two months, the computers would control burns that would gradually circularize their course just inside the orbit of Phobos. But the landing parties were going to descend to the surface well before that, while apogee was so close.

They moved the heat shields back to their storage positions, and went inside the bubble dome to have a look.

During apogee Mars filled most of the sky, as if they flew over it in a high jet. The depth of Valles Marineris was perceptible, the height of the four big volcanoes obvious: their broad peaks appeared over the horizon well before the surrounding countryside came into view. There were craters everywhere on the surface: their round interiors were a vivid sandy orange, a slightly lighter color than the surrounding countryside. Dust, presumably. The short rugged curved mountain ranges were darker than the surrounding countryside, a rust color broken by black shadows. But both the light and dark colors were just a shade away from the omnipresent rusty-orangish-red, which was the color of every peak, crater, canyon, dune, and even the curved slice of the dust-filled atmosphere, visible high above the bright curve of the planet. Red Mars! It was transfixing, mesmerizing. Everyone felt it.