"And when did you stop beating your wife?" Abell asked gleefully. "He forgot to ask you that one."

Jamie leaned back in the flimsy plastic chair and stared at the empty screen, his mind churning. For many minutes he said nothing, remained absolutely still.

Finally Abell asked, "Are you ready?"

Behind him Jamie could hear the voices of the others and Rachmaninoff’s dark melodies. Above him he saw the curve of the dome, darkened now against the encroaching cold of the Martian night.

Beyond that thin barrier was another world waiting to be explored.

He nodded to Abell. "I’m ready."

The anchorman’s face came back on the screen, repeating his first question with that earnest little smile that was meant to convey sincerity. The face froze on the screen as Jamie answered.

"I’ve never been active in politics of any kind, on campus or afterward. I vote every election day, but that’s about it. I consider myself to be an American citizen, just like you do. My ancestry is part Native American, part New England Yankee — a mixture of Navaho and Mayflower. To me, it’s just the same as if all my ancestors came from some country in Europe, like yours did. I’m proud of my Navaho ancestry, but no more so than you’re proud of your own heritage, whatever it may be."

Jamie took a breath, then went on, "I’m speaking to you from the planet Mars. This afternoon my fellow scientists and I discovered water here. That is far more important than the color of my skin or the nature of my political activities. For the first time in our exploration of the solar system we have found water in a liquid state on another world. You should be interviewing us about that, not over a few words I spoke at a very emotional moment in my life. All the others of our team spoke in their native languages when they gave their first words from Mars. I spoke in mine — spoke the only words of Navaho that I really know. And that’s all there is to it. Now let’s stop this bullshit and get on with the exploration of Mars."

He turned in his chair toward Abell. "That’s it."

"You don’t really expect them to put that last line on the air, do you?"

"I don’t really give a damn."

Looking slightly worried, the astronaut punched up the anchorman’s next question.

"No," Jamie said. "That’s it. I’ve said all I have to say. Send it up to Dr. Li and on to Washington. I’ve got nothing to add to that."

Despite himself, Li Chengdu smiled as he reviewed the tape of Jamie’s abbreviated interview. They will not like this back in Washington, but the young man has courage.

Li steepled his fingers and wondered how much trouble he would cause if he refused to remove Waterman from the ground team. Of course, Washington had not made that demand yet. But he had no doubt that they would once they saw Waterman’s tape.

Yes, the young man has courage, Li said to himself. Do I have the courage to stand with him and defy the politicians?

They cannot reach out to Mars and replace me. But what might they do once we return to Earth? That is the interesting question. More than interesting. Perhaps my Nobel Prize hinges on this matter. Certainly young Waterman’s entire career does. His career and his life.

HOUSTON: It had taken Edith two days to make up her mind. Two days and all her courage.

When she had watched Jamie utter his Navaho greeting from the surface of Mars she had smiled to herself. Standing in the jam-packed KHTV newsroom that morning, she had no premonition of the uproar his few words would cause. One of her co-workers nudged her shoulder slightly as the picture on the screen focused on his sky-blue space suit.

"That’s your significant other, isn’t it?" the woman whispered to Edith.

She nodded, thinking, He used to be. Used to be.

Edith was surprised when the network news show that evening spent so much time on the fact that an American Indian was on Mars. The next morning, on her own, she called several of her contacts at the Johnson Space Center and found that there was considerable consternation among the NASA brass about Jamie’s impromptu little speech.

"The guys upstairs are goin’ apeshit," one of her informers told her. "But you didn’t hear anything from me, understand?"

By the second day there were rumbles that the Space Council in Washington was reviewing the Indian’s refusal to speak the words NASA had prepared for him. The Vice-President was up in arms, rumor had it. What she did was news. Everyone knew that she wanted to be the party’s choice for their presidential candidate next year.

Edith reviewed tapes of boringly standard interviews with Jamie’s parents in Berkeley and blandly evasive NASA officials. She went to sleep that second night thinking about what she should do.

She awoke the next morning, her mind made up. She called the station and told her flabbergasted news director that she was taking the rest of the week off.

"You can’t do that! I don’t…"

"I have two weeks’ vacation and a whole moss of sick days I never took," Edith said sweetly into the phone. "I’ll be back by Monday."

"Goddammit, Edie, they’ll fire your ass! You know what they’re like upstairs!"

She made a sigh that he could not help but hear. "Then they’ll have to fire me and give me my severance pay, I guess."

She hung up, then immediately called for a plane reservation to New York.

Now, winging thirty-five thousand feet above the Appalachians, Edith rehearsed in her mind what she would tell the network news chief. I can get to James Waterman’s parents. And his grandfather. And the people he trained with who were not selected to go to Mars. I know his story and I know the inner workings of the Mars Project. I can produce you a story of how this thing works, from the inside. The human story of the Mars Project. Not just shining science, but the infighting, the competition, the guts and blood of it all.

As she went through her mental preparation she thought of Jamie. He’ll hate me for doing this. He’ll absolutely hate me.

But it’s my ticket to a job with the network. He’s got Mars. He left me for Mars. Now I can use Mars my own way, for myself.

The personnel chosen for the Mars expedition were shuttled to the assembly station riding in low orbit a scant three hundred kilometers above the surface of the Earth. At that altitude, the ponderous bulk of the planet curved huge and incredibly beautiful, filling the sky, overwhelming the senses with broad expanses of blue oceans decked with gleaming white clouds, a world rich and vibrant with life glowing against the cold black emptiness of space.

Mars was a distant pinpoint in that blackness, a steady ruddy beacon beckoning across the gulf that separates worlds.

The assembly station itself was a composite habitat made out of a Soviet Mir space station linked to a reconditioned external propellant tank from an American space shuttle, bigger than a twenty-room house. The Mir part of the assembly station was attached to the shuttle tank about midway along the tank’s long curving flank, looking like a tiny green gondola on a huge matte tan blimp. The Soviet hardware contained three docking ports for shuttles or the smaller orbital tugs.

Here the sixteen chosen scientists would live and work for more than a month before they departed for Mars, getting accustomed to one another and to their expedition commander, Dr. Li. And to the eight astronauts and cosmonauts who would operate the Mars spacecraft and be in command of the ground teams.

Hanging in the black emptiness a few hundred meters from the assembly station were the two long, narrow Mars spacecraft, gleaming white in the harsh sunlight, attended by swarms of orbital tugs and massive shuttles while tiny figures in space suits hovered around them, dwarfed to the size of ants, buzzing back and forth constantly, transferring supplies and equipment every day, every hour. Compared to the bulbous dull brown and green shapes of the assembly station the Mars craft looked like sleek racing shells.