"Because it draws me," he said. His voice was low but as firm as the mountains themselves. "Mars is drawing me to it."

Al gave him a puzzled, almost troubled look.

"I mean," Jamie tried to explain, "who am I, Al? What am I? A scientist, a white man, a Navaho — I don’t really know who I am yet. I’m nearly thirty years old and I’m a nobody. Just another assistant professor digging up rocks. There’s a million guys just like me."

"Helluva long way to go, all the way to Mars."

Jamie nodded. "I have to go there, though. I have to find out if I can make something of my life. Something real. Something important."

A slow smile crept across his grandfather’s leathery face, a smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and creased his cheeks.

"Well, every man’s got to find his own path in life. You’ve got to live in balance with the world around you. Maybe your path goes all the way out to Mars."

"I think it does, Grandfather."

Al clasped his grandson’s shoulder. "Then go in beauty, son." Jamie smiled back at him. He knew his grandfather would understand. Now he had to break the news to his parents, back in Berkeley.

Vosnesensky personally checked each scientist’s hard suit and backpack. Only when he was satisfied did he slide the transparent visor of his own helmet down and lock it in place.

"At last the time has come," he said in almost accentless English, like a computer’s voice synthesis.

All the others locked their visors down. Connors, standing by the heavy metal hatch, leaned a gloved finger against the stud that activated the air pumps. Through the thick soles of his boots Jamie felt them start chugging, saw the light on the airlock control panel turn from green to amber.

Time seemed to stand still. For eternity the pumps labored while the six explorers stood motionless and silent inside their brightly colored hard suits. With their visors down Jamie could not see their faces, but he knew each of his fellow explorers by the color of their suits: Joanna was dayglo orange; Ilona vivid green; Tony Reed canary yellow.

The clattering of the pumps dwindled as the air was sucked out of the compartment until Jamie could hear nothing, not even his own breathing, because he was holding his breath in anticipation.

The pumps stopped. The indicator light on the panel next to the hatch went to red. Connors pulled the lever and the hatch popped open a crack. Vosnesensky pushed it all the way open.

Jamie felt light-headed. As if he had climbed to the top of a mesa too fast, or jogged a couple of miles in the thin air of the mountains. He let out his breath and took a deep gulp of his suit’s air. It tasted old and metal dry. Mars lay framed in the oval hatchway, glowing pink and red and auburn like the arid highlands where he had spent his childhood summers.

Vosnesensky was starting down the ladder, Jamie realized. Connors went down next, followed by Joanna, then Tony, Ilona, and finally himself. As if in a dream Jamie went slowly down the ladder, one booted foot at a time, gloved hands sliding along the gleaming metal rails that ran between two of the unfolded petals of the aero-brake. Its ceramic-coated alloy had absorbed the blazing heat of their fiery entry into the Martian atmosphere. The metal mesh seemed dead cold now.

Jamie stepped off the last rung of the flimsy ladder. He stood on the sandy surface of Mars.

He felt totally alone. The five human figures beside him could not truly be people; they looked like strange alien totems. Then he realized that they were aliens, and he was too. Here on Mars we are the alien invaders, Jamie told himself.

He wondered if there were Martians hidden among the rocks, invisible to their eyes, watching them the way red men had watched the first whites step ashore onto their land centuries ago. He wondered what they would do about this alien invasion, and what the invaders would do if they found native life forms.

In his helmet earphones Jamie could hear the Russian team leader conversing with the expedition commander up in the orbiting spacecraft, his deep voice more excited than Jamie had ever heard before. Connors was checking the TV camera perched up at the front of the stilled robot construction vehicle.

Finally Vosnesensky spoke to his five charges as they arranged themselves in a semicircle around him. "All is ready. The words we speak next will be heard by everyone on Earth."

As planned, they stood with their backs to the landing vehicle while the robot’s camera focused on them. Later they would pan the vidcam around to show the newly erected dome and the desolate Martian plain on which they had set foot.

Holding up one gloved hand almost like a symphony conductor, Vosnesensky took a self-conscious half step forward and pronounced: "In the name of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, and of all the other pioneers and heroes of space, we come to Mars in peace for the advancement of all human peoples."

He said it in Russian first and then in English. Only afterward were the others invited to recite their little prewritten speeches.

Pete Connors, with the hint of Texan drawl he had picked up during his years at Houston, recited, "This is the greatest day in the history of human exploration, a proud day for all the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the whole world."

Joanna Brumado spoke in Brazilian Portuguese and then in English. "May all the peoples of the Earth gain in wisdom from what we learn here on Mars."

Ilona Malater, in Hebrew and then English, "We come to Mars to expand and exalt the human spirit."

Antony Reed, in his calm, almost bored Oxfordian best, "To His Majesty the King, to the people of the United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, to the people of the European Community and the entire world — today is your triumph. We deeply feel that we are merely your representatives on this distant world."

Finally it was Jamie’s turn. He felt suddenly weary, tired of the posturings and pomposities, exhausted by the years of stress and sacrifice. The excitement he had felt only minutes ago had drained away, evaporated. A hundred million kilometers from Earth and they were still playing their games of nations and allegiances. He felt as if someone had draped an enormous weight around his shoulders.

The others all turned toward him, five faceless figures in hard suits and gold-tinted visors. Jamie saw his own faceless helmet reflected five times. He had already forgotten the lines that had been written for him a hundred million kilometers ago.

He said simply, "Ya’aa’tey."

RIO DE JANEIRO: It was bigger even than Carnival. Despite the scorching midafternoon sun the crowds thronged downtown, from the Municipal Theater all the way up the mosaic sidewalks of the Avenida Rio Branco, past Praca Pio X and the magnificent old Candelaria Church, out along Avenida Presidente Vargas. Not a car or even a bicycle could get through. The streets were literally wall-to-wall with cariocas, dancing the samba, sweating, laughing, staggering in the heat, celebrating in the biggest spontaneous outpouring of joy that the city had ever seen.

They jammed into the tree-shaded residential square where gigantic television screens had been set up in front of high-rise glass-walled apartment buildings. They stood on the benches in the square and clambered up the trees for a better view of the screens. They cheered and cried and shouted as they watched the space-suited explorers, one by one, climb down the ladder and stand on that barren rocky desert beneath the strange pink sky.

When Joanna Brumado spoke her brief words they cheered all the louder, drowning out the little speeches of those who followed her.