It was still dark when the phone woke Jamie. He struggled up from a dream of ancient men trying to build a tower on the windswept top of a bare grassless mesa. The bricks kept melting away in the hot sunshine, the tower never rose higher than his own reach.

The phone buzzed insistently. Jamie finally opened his eyes, remembered that he was back in his own apartment again, alone, and groped for the telephone on the bedside table. The digital clock read 6:26 a.m. There was no hint of sunrise through the drawn blinds of the bedroom window.

"Dr. Waterman?" a man’s voice asked crisply.

"Right."

"This is an official message from Kaliningrad. I am Yegorov, personnel section."

"Yes?" Jamie was instantly wide-awake.

"You are to report to the Johnson Space Center at eight hundred hours local time and receive your orders for immediate transportation to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. From there you will board the space shuttle for transport to the orbital assembly facility."

"You mean I’m going to Mars?" Jamie shouted into the phone.

"Oh, yes. Did you not know? You have been selected as geologist on the first landing team. Good luck."

Jamie’s first impulse was to give an ear-splitting war whoop. But instead he merely said, "Thank you."

He hung up, suddenly feeling hollow inside, empty, as if he had finally pushed through a door that had been locked against him and found that it opened onto thin air.

He got out of bed, showered, shaved, repacked his well-used travel bag, and drove out to the center. Sure enough, there was a team of grinning men and women at the travel office waiting for him.

"A plane will be ready for you at the airstrip in about half an hour."

"What about my car?" Jamie suddenly realized he had made no plans about the car, the apartment, his furniture. Absurdly, he wondered what to do with his magazine and journal subscriptions.

"We’ll take care of all the details. Just sign these forms."

Jamie scribbled his name without reading the forms. Fuck it, he thought. They can have the car and everything else. Won’t need it on Mars!

They drove him to the airstrip, the whole roomful of clerks piled into one gray agency station wagon, pressing against Jamie, wanting to be as close as they could be to the man who was going to Mars. Jamie did not mind the closeness, he was thankful for the ride; he (lid not trust himself to drive. The excitement was getting to him. Mars. Geologist on the first landing team. Mars.

Edith was standing at the entrance to the hangar, in jeans and a light sweater. Obviously not her working clothes. He suddenly felt ashamed for not phoning her.

"How’d you know?" he asked, travel bag in one hand.

She grinned up at him. "I have my sources. I work in news, y’know."

"I…" Jamie did not know what to say. The clerks who had driven him here, the airplane mechanics, there were too many people watching them.

Edith’s grin turned rueful. "Well, we knew it wouldn’t last forever. It was fun, though."

"I think the world of you, Edith."

"Only this world, though. Now you got another one to think about."

"Yes." He laughed, feeling shaky, unsure.

She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him soundly. "Good luck, Jamie. Best luck in two worlds to you."

All he could think to say was, "I’ll be back."

She answered, "Sure you will."

"Today’s the big day, huh?"

Despite the fact that he had been a jet fighter pilot and an astronaut with more than twenty shuttle missions on his record, Pete Connors reminded Jamie of a high school football player moments before the opening kickoff. His dark brown eyes, usually sorrowful, now showed an excitement that most men lose after their teen years, a barely suppressed sense of adventure.

Connors, Jamie, and most of the others were suiting up for their first day of actual scientific work on Mars. Bright sunshine streamed through the clear double-walled plastic of the inflated dome’s lower section; the weather forecast was for a typical late-summer day: clear skies, light wind, high temperature climbing up into the sixties after an overnight low of minus one hundred twelve.

"The big day," Jamie agreed, tugging on the sky-blue outer pants of his hard suit.

They dressed in layers. First the form-fitting underwear that was honeycombed with thin, flexible water tubes. The water carried away body heat and kept the wearer at a reasonable temperature inside the heavily insulated hard suit. Next came the fabric coveralls and then the hard suit itself, built to contain a normal terrestrial air pressure of roughly fourteen pounds per square inch inside even if there were nothing but pure vacuum on the other side of its metal and plastic shell.

You leaned against a locker and laboriously tugged the hard-suit pants over your hips. The torso shell stood on a rack so you could duck under it and slide your arms through the sleeves while pushing your head through the bright metal ring of the neck seal. Once inside the suit it was virtually impossible to bend over to pull on the boots. The explorers always dressed in pairs and helped each other with the boots and the backpacks that bold the air regenerator, batteries, heater, pumps, and fans of the life-support system.

The first time Jamie had tried to don a hard suit, back on Earth, it had taken more than an hour and seemed like a particularly sophisticated combination of torture and humiliation. The first time he had tried it in Martian gravity, as their spacecraft approached the red planet, things had gone much more easily. Now, however, he was getting accustomed to the light gravity of Mars, and putting on the suit was becoming a chore again.

Eight of the team were preparing to go outside the dome, struggling into their suits like a short-handed football team getting into its padding and uniforms. Or like knights putting on their armor. Jamie wondered if King Arthur’s men grumbled and swore while they suited up for battle.

Their dressing area was a line of racks and lockers where the suits were stored, with a pair of long plastic benches laid out in front of them. Built for Martian gravity, the benches looked to Jamie to be too thin to sit on safely, their slim legs too far apart.

But Connors thumped down on one, suit and all, to let Jamie help him into his heavy cleated boots. The others were doing the same, Jamie saw. The benches sagged slightly under the weight, but only slightly.

Boots zippered, Connors got up and stamped his feet on the plastic flooring.

"Good," he said, nodding from inside the suit. "Now let’s get yours on."

Jamie sat warily. He noticed Ilona Malater standing beside Joanna, both of them fully suited except for their helmets, talking together softly and earnestly, like school chums or sisters. Biochemist and microbiologist. Jamie thought that of all the scientists brought to Mars the two of them had the most to gain. Or lose. If they found any evidence for life at all they would become international celebrities. But if they failed to find any evidence of life the whole world, perhaps even the scientific community, would always wonder if they had overlooked something.

Was that why the board picked all women for the life sciences? The third member of the bio team was Monique Bonnet, the French geochemist who had taken a cram course in paleontology, just in case they should discover fossils in the red sands or rocks.

The tall Israeli leaned closer to Joanna and said something that made her smile, then cover her mouth with a hand to keep from laughing out loud. They’re looking at me, Jamie realized. All the others are already in their suits, waiting to go. I’m the laggard.