He was sitting on the bench, hands clenched on its back edge, with one leg raised up so that his foot rested approximately in Connors’s groin. The women find that funny, Jamie thought, his face reddening.

"That’s it, friend," said Connors.

Jamie put his leg down and got to his feet. The suit felt cumbersome, stiff. He clomped past the rack where it had hung, now looking like a pathetic dead plastic tree, and took his helmet from the shelf atop it. He started to put it on, more to hide his blushing than anything else.

"Gloves," Connors said. "You don’t want to go outside without your gloves, man."

Flustered, Jamie yanked his gloves from the clip on the rack and tucked them into the pouch on his right thigh. He had carefully placed the fetish his grandfather had given him in the left thigh pouch. It was small enough so that no one noticed him doing it. Following Connors and the others, he walked toward the airlock and the next set of racks, where the backpacks waited.

"Got to remember to do everything by the numbers," Connors told him as he helped Jamie into the backpack.

"Right."

"It’s not so bad now, everything’s new, we’re all real aware of what we’re doing. But later on, a few days from now or a few weeks, when it’s all so routine we don’t even think about it — that’s when you can make a mistake that’ll kill you. Or kill somebody else."

Jamie nodded. He knew that Connors was right. Mission regulations insisted that one astronaut be part of the team whenever anyone went outside the dome. The astronaut served as safety officer; his responsibility was to make certain that all safety rules were strictly followed. His authority was absolute.

"What’s your assignment for today?" Jamie asked as he turned to help Connors. "Or are you just going outside to watch us like a safety patrolman?"

Glancing back over his shoulder at Jamie, Connors said, "Sure I got a job. Decontamination and cleanup. I got to make sure all of us clean off whatever dust we pick up on our suits before we come back inside again."

Before Jamie could say anything, Connors added, "You know they’d make the black man into the janitor, don’tcha?"

For a moment Jamie felt startled, upset. Then Connors broke into a toothy grin. "My main task this morning is taping a TV show for the kids back home."

Jamie felt relieved. Connors had never shown the slightest trace of ill humor; he seemed always cheerful, not an angry bone in his body.

"I’m going to be Dr. Science on Mars. Show the local scenery, do a few simple demonstrations of the low air pressure and gravity. For educational TV. I’ll be a media star all around the world!"

Laughing, Jamie said, "Good for you."

At last they were all ready. Jamie remembered to pull on his gloves and seal them to the metal cuffs of his suit. The backs of the gloves were ridged like an external skeleton of slim plastic "bones"; the palms and fingertips were clear plastic, hardly thicker than kitchen cling wrap.

Like the others, Jamie took the tools he needed for the morning’s work and clipped them to the web belt at his waist. Rock pick. Scoop. Corer. Sample bags. He held in one hand the long telescoping titanium pole that could serve as a lever or extended handle.

"A true spear carrier."

Jamie turned to see Joanna standing beside him, a lovely butterfly trapped inside a glaring orange cocoon. Both her hands were filled with bulky silvered cases.

"You look like an encyclopedia salesman," he said.

She blinked, puzzled.

"Okay, listen up," Connors called to them. "We go through the airlock in Noah’s ark fashion: two by two. Visors down, everybody."

Joanna had to put her instrument cases on the floor before she could deal with her helmet visor.

"Check seals and air flow." Connors’s melodious voice now came humming through the helmet earphones.

The astronaut personally checked each of the scientists before starting them through the airlock. He and Monique Bonnet went through together, clean white and tricolor blue. Then Patel in his butter-yellow suit with Naguib, kelly green. Ilona and Toshima were next, the green of her suit a shade or two darker than the Egyptian’s, while the Japanese meteorologist’s softly peach-colored suit bristled with instruments and equipment that dangled from every conceivable type of belt and harness. Jamie thought that Toshima barely was able to raise his booted feet over the lip of the airlock hatch. If he ever trips and falls it’ll take two of us to haul him back up to his feet.

Finally it was Jamie’s turn, with Joanna. The two Russians, Abell, and Tony Reed remained inside. Mironov and Reed were assigned to monitor the scientists on the surface; the hard suits had instrumentation built into them that automatically reported on body temperature, heart and breathing rate, and oxygen/carbon dioxide ratio inside the suit. Astronaut Abell ran the comm console, maintaining contact with the expedition command in orbit while Vosnesensky watched everybody and everything with the eye of a Russian eagle.

With its visor down Jamie’s hard suit served as a shell that protected him from the gaze of others. He was glad of it. He had been embarrassed minutes earlier, and now he felt his stomach fluttering and his palms getting damp. It was not fear so much as anticipation. He was about to step out onto the surface of Mars and begin the work that he had dreamed about for so many years.

Let me go in beauty, he found himself thinking. Let me find harmony and beauty out there.

The noise of the airlock pumps dwindled down until Jamie could only feel their vibration through his boots. The telltale light on the tiny control panel turned red, indicating that the chamber had been pumped down to the ambient pressure outside. He leaned on the control button and the outer hatch sighed open a crack.

Pushing it all the way open, Jamie waited until Joanna went through before he stepped out onto the sandy red, rock-strewn desert to begin his morning’s work.

Like almost everything else about the mission, the selection of their landing site had been a political compromise.

The biologists had wanted to land near the polar cap, where beneath the layers of ice and frozen carbon dioxide there might be hidden pools of liquid water — and some form of life. Experiments conducted by unmanned landing probes, starting with the original Viking I and II back in 1976, had shown that there was unusual chemical activity in the Martian soil. Could life exist in that soil, if there was liquid water available?

The geologists could not make up their minds where they wanted to land, with an entire strange new world to sink their picks into. There were massive volcanoes to study, a rift valley longer than the distance from New York to San Francisco, regions where meteoric craters studded the landscape and made it appear as battered as the moon. There were areas that looked as if the ground were underlaid by layers of permafrost, oceans of water frozen underground. There were cliffs and highlands that undoubtedly bore the testimony of billions of years of weathering, and the huge Hellas Basin, a hole nearly a thousand miles wide and three miles deep.

The physicists wanted to study how energetic radiation and subatomic particles streaming in from the sun and stars interacted with the thin Martian atmosphere. They also wanted to probe the planet’s interior, to determine why Mars had no planetwide magnetic field, as Earth does.

The Russians especially wanted to examine the two tiny moons of Mars and test techniques for extracting rocket propellants from their rocky bodies. The Americans wanted to visit the old Viking I lander and place a plaque on it honoring a dead scientist.

The resolution of these conflicting desires was a compromise that pleased no one. The landing site picked was just north of the equator at one hundred degrees west latitude, on the edge of the massive upland rise called the Tharsis Bulge. To the south was the badlands of Noctis Labyrinthus; to the west the mammoth Tharsis shield volcanoes. But their actual landing site was an undistinguished, gently sloping flatland that was considered relatively safe for the landings, about equally distant from the western end of the monumental rift valley known as Valles Marineris and the chain of volcanoes that crowned the Tharsis highlands.