Wherever they lived, Joanna did so well at the convent schools that her parents decided to send her to a prestigious preparatory school in the United States. She had pleased her father by showing an aptitude for science. She had pleased her mother by obeying her one unbendable rule: "Do not do anything that you can’t tell me about afterward."

Joanna had intended to tell her mother about the tall fair-haired instructor who had taken her to bed. She was madly in love and bursting to tell her mother all about it. She waited a week and then could wait no more. She telephoned her mother.

To learn that her mother had been stricken with a serious heart seizure that very morning and taken to the hospital. Joanna forgot school and her lover; she hastily packed a bag and flew to Brasilia.

She could tell from her father’s face that there was no hope for her mother. The doctors at first did not even want to allow her to see the stricken woman, fearing an emotional outburst that would hasten the end. With the same iron self-control that she now realized had been her mother’s main strength, Joanna assured them that she would not upset her dying mother. They looked from her utterly determined face to her father, who nodded. "Let her see her mama," said Alberto Brumado in a broken, tear-strangled voice. "She may not have another chance."

Her mother looked very pale, very tired. Tubes ran from her slim arms to strange machines that chugged and beeped behind the bed. Another tube ran up her right nostril. Joanna thought they were sucking the life out of her mother.

She did not cry. She stood by the edge of the high bed and stroked her mother’s hair, realizing for the first time how thin and gray it had become. Her mother opened her eyes and smiled up at her.

"Mama…"

"My lovely daughter," the woman whispered. "How beautiful you have become."

"Mama, I love you so much!"

"Don’t worry about me, dear." Her voice was so weak that Joanna had to bend down to hear the words.

"I don’t want you to die."

Blinking her dry eyes slowly, Joanna’s mother whispered, "It is your father you must care for now. I can’t protect him any longer. You must do it for me."

"Protect him?"

"His work. It is very important. To him and the whole world. Don’t let him be distracted. Don’t let anything stand between him and his work. Protect him. Help him."

"I will, Mama. I will."

"You’ve always been a good girl, Joanna. I love you very much."

"I love you, Mama."

"Protect your father. Remember."

"I promise, Mama."

Those were her mother’s last words. Joanna kept her promise. She became her father’s shield against any distraction that might interfere with his great, consuming goal. Especially any female distraction. Joanna attended college where her father taught. She traveled with him around the world. She kept house for him. She never took another lover.

They trooped back into the dome, suits and equipment smudged with red dust.

Despite their excitement over the green-streaked rock, Vosnesensky insisted that they follow mission protocol and carefully clean their suits and all their gear before stepping into the main section of the dome. The area just inside the airlock, where the hard suits and outside equipment were stored, served as the cleanup and maintenance section. Its partitions reached up to the curving dome itself.

"We will have to use the biological decontamination procedures if we have found native life forms," Vosnesensky grumbled as he pulled off his suit.

Jamie was vacuuming the dust from his boots with the angrily buzzing little hand machine thinking, You would take the greatest discovery in history and make a chore out of it, wouldn’t you?

Tony Reed, standing just inside the door of the partition, his nose wrinkling at the acrid smell that filled the area, cast curious eyes at Joanna’s sample boxes.

"In that case," he said, "we’d have to make this section airtight, with the sort of envelope they have in biology labs."

"That can be done," Vosnesensky said as he lifted the torso of his hard suit over his head.

Let’s see what we’ve got first, thought Jamie.

As soon as she was finished dusting her suit Joanna lugged the cases to her small biology bench, where she had an isolation box and remote manipulators to work with. The Martian rock would be kept in a Martian environment while she examined it. Ilona and Monique went with her.

"Mother and daughters," muttered Naguib, watching them through the window in the partition as they marched off to the bio lab.

"Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite," said Reed, his eyes also fixed on them.

Jamie, finally free of his hard suit, felt too tired to go to his cubicle to remove the undergarments. He sat on the bench in front of his locker, hands on knees, head bent, silent. His left armpit felt raw, chafed. Suit’s rubbing there, he realized. I’ll have to pad it before I use it again. The pungent smell he had noticed on first taking off his helmet had dissipated now. Or we’ve all become accustomed to it, he thought. Maybe it’s the dust.

"Dr. Malater must be Athena," Naguib said. "She’s quite tall and athletic."

"Yes, and little Joanna is Aphrodite, wouldn’t you say?" Tony murmured. "She’s got the right figure for a sex goddess, hasn’t she?"

"And Dr. Bonnet is older, so she must be Hera, queen of the gods."

Tony smiled at the brown-skinned Egyptian. "Rather a good fit, don’t you think?"

Naguib nodded agreement, then added, "But wasn’t it those three goddesses who started the Trojan War? We must be careful with them." He laughed.

Tony granted him a sly smile. "Careful, yes, by all means. But remember that goddesses can become angry if you don’t worship them properly."

It was too much for Jamie. Reed and his slightly sneering way of looking at the world was more than he wanted to deal with at the end of this long, exciting, exhausting day. He hauled himself to his feet and headed for his privacy cubicle where he could strip off the rest of his clothes and then maybe go take a shower.

Before he got halfway there, though, Paul Abell intercepted him.

"Your turn before the cameras, friend." The American astronaut’s frog eyes were wide and bulging, his smile curved almost from ear to ear.

"What do you mean?" Jamie asked.

"The media back on Earth. Looks like you’re a very popular guy. They want to interview you, and mission control has set it up." Abell pointed. "The comm console awaits your pleasure."

Each of the explorers was expected to respond to the news media’s demands for interviews "live, from the planet Mars."

With the distance from Earth growing larger every hour, it took nearly ten minutes for a radio or TV transmission to travel from one world to the other, so truly "live" interviews were out of the question.

How could you conduct an interview with a twenty-minute wait between each question and its answer?

The media producers had their solution: each explorer would receive a list of questions. The explorer would then answer those questions before the camera, one after the other. On Earth, the answers would be snipped apart so that a questioning reporter could be inserted into the appropriate spots. The result looked as if the reporter and the explorer on Mars were indeed talking to one another "live." Almost. There was little of the spontaneity of a truly face-to-face interview. But the world’s audiences were accustomed to wooden performances from scientists and astronauts, or so the TV producers assured their executives.

Besides, these people were speaking from Mars!

Wearily, Jamie slid into the creaking plastic chair in front of the main communications screen, still in his thermal undergarment, like white longjohns covered with tubing. Abell sat off to one side, monitoring the equipment and grinning as if he enjoyed watching a scientist trying to field questions from the media.