A special team in the orbiting spacecraft would visit Deimos and Phobos, the two moons of Mars, so that the Russians could test their ideas. One of the American astronauts could fly the soarplane to the Viking I site, if conditions permitted. The ground team commander, cosmonaut Mikhail Andreivitch Vosnesensky, would decide if the conditions were right. And the flight would take place only if the expedition commander, Dr. Li Chengdu, granted his approval.

The explorers had two sizable ground vehicles for cross-country travel and two gossamer-winged soarplanes for covering longer distances.

Mission plans were specific and detailed. There would be brief excursions to the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands and to one of the Tharsis volcanoes. There would be extensive chemical tests of the Martian soil. There would be drilling to look for underground water. And of course, there would be the ongoing search for any sign that life might have once existed on Mars.

Of all the landing sites in all the regions of all the planet Mars, they had to pick this, Jamie grumbled to himself. Probably the dullest place they could find. A moderately cratered plain on an upland bulge, too far from the interesting line of volcanoes to even glimpse their sixteen-mile-high peaks above the horizon. Some sand dunes off to the west and the same old rocks that lay all across the surface everywhere you looked. The most interesting thing in this region would be the fracture ridges in the wild badlands to the south, but that’s nearly three hundred kilometers away.

Ah well, he sighed inwardly. They picked this spot for a safe landing, not for its geological interest. Get to work.

Jamie began by collecting rock samples. The broad open plain on which they had landed was covered with rocks ranging from pebble-sized to boulders as big as a man. Probably thrown up when a good-sized meteoroid hit the ground. Or maybe an eruption of one of the Tharsis volcanoes, although they didn’t look as if they had erupted so violently. Jamie’s equipment back in the dome would tell him which it was, he felt sure.

"Please be sure to look for any odd color," Joanna’s voice came to him through his earphones.

Jamie turned his head and saw only the inside of his helmet. He turned his entire body ninety degrees and there she was in her dayglo suit, a dozen meters away, with Monique Bonnet still close beside her.

"Any color in particular?" he half joked. "We’ve got a great assortment of reds and pinks here."

"Green would be nice," chirped Monique’s lightly pleasant voice.

"Any color at all that seems out of the ordinary," Joanna said. "We are not particular. Not yet."

Just outside the dome’s airlock Connors was setting up one of the TV cameras for his educational show. He had a little box of props at his feet. The others were stooped over as far as the suits would allow, intently searching the sandy soil like a squad of groundkeepers looking for litter. Or that famous painting, Jamie said to himself. The Gleaners. That’s what we’re doing, gleaning, trying to find scraps of food for our minds in this frozen desert.

Damned tough to see the ground inside the suit, Jamie grumbled silently. Hardly any flexibility at all. Whoever designed these aluminum cans wasn’t thinking about the work we have to do while we’re inside them.

Toshima was busily setting up a weather station about twenty meters from the dome, on the side away from the two landing vehicles. His peach-colored suit blended with the rust-red background much better than Jamie would have thought. He’s camouflaged. That could be a problem. The suit colors had been picked to stand out clearly against the Martian landscape. Who the hell okayed peach?

Ilona was scooping up the loose sandy soil with a small shovel and pouring it into a box. She, Joanna, and Monique were going to try to raise an assortment of beans, squash, peas, and cucumbers inside the dome, using as much of the native Martian resources as possible — including water, if they found any. One of the goals of their research was to see how the lighter Martian gravity would affect plant growth and size. They expected to bring their small agricultural test facility back to the orbiting spacecraft with them and continue the experiment on the return flight to Earth.

They’ll have to bake the oxides out of the soil first, Jamie knew. Otherwise it’ll be like planting seeds in bleach.

He turned his attention to the rocks. There was certainly no shortage of them. Big blocks more than a meter wide, plenty of smaller stuff down to the size of pebbles. Many of the rocks looked pitted, etched by weathering. Couldn’t be rain, Jamie thought. Hasn’t rained here in a billion years, I’d bet. There was frost on winter mornings, though. The rocks expanded in the day’s heat, such as it was, and contracted during the bitterly cold nights.

But that wouldn’t pit them, Jamie thought. They ought to crack laterally and flake, not get pitted like golf balls. If they were volcanic, then the pitting could be from gases trapped inside the rocks bubbling out and escaping. Could they have been thrown all the way out here from the volcanoes six or seven hundred kilometers away? Or had they been blasted out of the ground by ancient meteor strikes and thrown clear of the atmosphere, reentering afterward like ballistic missiles?

He filled the two sacks he had brought with him with rocks of varying sizes, then realized with a start that he had been out for more than three hours. The sun was almost directly overhead, a strangely tiny and pale imitation of the sun he had known, shining weakly out of the salmon-colored sky.

Turning, he could no longer see the dome, although the blunt cylindrical tops of the two landers were still visible. In the distance he saw one of the unmanned spacecraft, its big cargo hatch gaping open, empty.

The horizon is shorter here, he reminded himself. Turn around, get yourself oriented properly.

"Waterman, you are out of range of the monitor cameras." Vosnesensky’s voice sounded more annoyed than worried. "Can you hear me?"

"Yes, loud and clear."

"You are almost at the limit of safe walk-back distance. Come back toward the dome."

Jamie felt almost glad that he was being commanded to come back. It was one thing to be alone back home, in the mountains or desert scrubland. Out here, in this strange world without air to breathe or water to drink, Jamie had been almost frightened.

And yet — it felt good to be alone, away from the others. Solitude had been rare, nonexistent, over the past several years. Jamie stood as tall as his suit would allow and gazed out toward the beckoning horizon, his back to the dome and the others. Even inside the hard shell of his suit he strove to get a feeling for this Martian landscape, a sense of harmony with this strange new world.

Then he saw a patch of green.