"Look! There they are!"

It was Connors’s voice, high with excitement. Jamie and the American astronaut were unloading the last of the supplies from the lander. Vosnesensky and Reed were carrying them from the airlock to their proper storage places inside the dome. The two women had been assigned to checking off the stores on the computer’s inventory lists. So much for equal rights, thought Jamie.

He straightened up and tried to follow Connors’s pointing outstretched arm. The top of his helmet blocked his view for a moment, but by tilting his head inside the helmet slightly, Jamie managed to see the thin streak of a contrail blazing across the pink sky.

"Right on time," Connors said, holding his left wrist up in front of his visor. "They’ll be landing on schedule."

As if to confirm the observation, Vosnesensky’s heavy voice came through Jamie’s earphones. "Team two is in reentry trajectory. We must be finished off-loading by the time they land, in… fifty-eight minutes."

Fifty-eight minutes later all six members of the first team stood between their own lander and the inflated dome, watching the fiery descent of the second lander.

Everything about the Mars expedition was done in pairs. There were two landing parties, two backup teams who remained in orbit around the planet, duplicates of every piece of equipment and milligram of supplies.

The expedition had been planned around the "split-sprint" mode of operation, which meant (stripped of the technical jargon) that the expedition took the quickest possible route to Mars and planned to stay at the planet for a minimal length of time — two months. That was the "sprint" mode. The scientists had fought against it with logic and economics; they had failed in the face of the politicians’ desire for quick and spectacular results.

For while it was true that the sprint mode was more costly overall than a more gradual approach that would permit a longer stay time at Mars, the politicians knew that a quick mission would require fewer years of wrangling and painful budgetary crises than a longer one. Moreover, practically every politician involved in the Mars mission wanted to see humans on the red planet while he or she might still be in office to take the credit.

So the expedition sprinted to Mars.

The "split" mode simply meant that the expedition rode across the interplanetary gulf in two sets of spacecraft. The rationale was that if disaster hit one set, the other was self-sufficient and could complete the mission.

Now Jamie and the others stood waiting for the second half of their expedition to touch down on the dusty surface.

"There!" Vosnesensky blurted, and they all turned to see a dot in the sky hurtling toward them. Shapeless, formless, it was still too high to be anything more than a dark blur falling across the pink sky like a rock, dragging a bright flaming contrail behind it like a falling star.

My god, Jamie thought, that’s what we looked like yesterday.

Then a streak of color streamed from the top of the speck and billowed into a trio of broad white parachutes. The lander slowed, coasted, swaying slightly, gliding toward the ground with the three huge chutes spread above it like angels’ wings or the shade awnings of a desert tribe. But it was still falling fast, too fast. Jamie watched for several minutes, his heart in his throat, as the lander floated rapidly downward.

It grew and grew into an ungainly looking combination of saucer and teacup: the circular aeroshell drag brake topped by the cylindrical body of the landing vehicle. Jamie saw that the ceramic underside of the aeroshell was blackened and streaked from its burning flight through the upper Martian atmosphere.

Abruptly the parachutes separated from the lander and flapped away, lost angels wandering across the Martian landscape. The craft seemed to stagger in midair. Puffs of gray-white steam spurted from its control jets as the lander teetered and righted itself, hovering for an instant.

The retro-rockets fired fitful short bursts, blasting grit and swirling dust devils up from the ground as slowly, slowly the oversized saucer and teacup settled downward, cushioned by the hot rocket exhaust. Through his helmet Jamie could hear the intermittent screeching of the retros, like the staccato shrill of a frightened bird.

The lander was coming down more than a hundred meters away, yet a miniature sandstorm was pelting against his hard suit. He resisted the Earth-trained impulse to lean into the wind; there was no real pressure pushing against him in this thin atmosphere.

Finally the noise ceased, the sand stopped blowing, and the segments of the aeroshell drooped to the ground like wilted petals of a huge metal flower.

Jamie heard in his earphones, "That’s it! We’re down!"

There had been surprisingly little argument over the language to be used on Mars. For more than half a century scientists had used English as their common worldwide tongue. As had aircraft pilots and their ground controllers. A few of the politicians had put up something of a struggle, more for their own national egos than for any serious reason. The French had been especially difficult. Yet in the end they had to face the fact that the one language all of their prospective explorers understood was English.

Still, Vosnesensky spoke in Russian through his suit radio to the pilot of the second lander, Aleksander Mironov, while Ilona Malater and Tony Reed set up the hand-sized video cameras on their tripods.

Joanna Brumado, in her dayglo-orange hard suit, turned toward Jamie. "I suppose we are just the spear carriers."

"Waterman!" Vosnesensky’s voice rang in Jamie’s earphones. "Take the still camera and photograph the aerobrake structure."

Jamie said to Joanna, "One spear carrier."

"Brumado!" the Russian called. "Monitor the gas emissions from the landing craft."

He heard the Brazilian woman’s laughter. "No spear carriers."

After slightly more than a quarter hour, the hatch of the landing vehicle popped open and the slim metal ladder slid down to the red dust. A figure encased in a brilliant red pressure suit appeared at the hatch. Must be the other Russian, Jamie thought as he snapped photos for the expedition’s official history.

Six hard-suited figures trooped slowly down the ladder, one after the other, and gathered in front of the video cameras with their lander behind them. They too spoke solemn words about the triumph of the human quest and the glories of human intelligence and drive.

Jamie knew the six to be a Russian, an American, a Japanese meteorologist, a fellow geologist from India, an Egyptian geophysicist, and a French geochemist who was the only woman among the second landing team.

The politicians had worked frantically to please as many nations as possible — and to get as many as possible to help fund the quarter-trillion-dollar Mars Project. To their credit, where it was necessary for them to balance national pride against scientific needs, national pride did not win every round. But if an Israeli biochemist was selected to go to Mars, then it became absolutely necessary to send a follower of Islam along. It was imperative that both Japan and France be represented. And of course, there must be the same number of Russians and Americans.

Jamie’s last-minute substitution for Father DiNardo had upset the Soviet-American balance, and while that could not be helped, it was not accepted gladly either in Moscow or, strangely, in Washington.

The first team started to help the second team unload their landing/ascent vehicle. More equipment would be sent later in the day by automated, unmanned one-way landers from the spacecraft in orbit. Vosnesensky was in charge of all the ground team, with Pete Connors his ostensible second-in-command. But Jamie heard a lot of Russian chatter in his earphones; the two cosmonauts were already talking to each other to the exclusion of the others.