Then he remembered his grandfather years ago, when Jamie had been an eager young high schooler bursting to show off how much he had learned in his science classes. He had tried to explain to Al the laws of thermodynamics, throwing in terms such as "entropy" and "heat flow" and "thermal equilibrium."

"Aw, I know all about that stuff," Al had said.

"You do?" Jamie had been extremely skeptical of his grandfather’s claim.

"Sure. Comes up every day in the store. Or when I play poker. What it boils down to is, you can’t win, you can’t even break even, and you can’t get out of the game."

Jamie had gaped at his grandfather. Al had explained the concepts of thermodynamics as succinctly as he would ever hear.

"Main thing," Al said, grinning at his surprised grandson, "is to stay in balance with life. That way no matter what happens it won’t throw you. Stay in balance. Never lean so far in one direction that a puff of wind can knock you over."

What it boils down to is that you have to pay for everything you get, and the price is always more than the value of the thing you’re after. And you can’t get out of the game. Even millions of miles from Earth, you can’t get out of the game.

The hatch to the observation area was open. No one was there. Good.

The astronomers hated the spin that produced a feeling of gravity within the Mars-bound ships. It meant that their telescopes, even though placed outside the ships along the tethers connecting them, had to be mounted on complex motorized bearings that moved exactly opposite to the spin so that they could remain focused on the same distant speck of light for weeks or months at a time.

The spin had bothered Jamie, too, at first. The stars rotated past the oblong window in a slow steady procession instead of remaining fixed against the dark backdrop the way they did on Earth. But they don’t really stay still on Earth, Jamie told himself. They rotate around the sky too slow for you to notice. Out here we’ve just speeded things up. We’ve made our own little world and it spins around every two and a half minutes instead of every twenty-four hours.

It felt cold in the observation section. He knew it was only his imagination, but the cold of that deep empty darkness out there seemed to seep through the window and chill him to the bone.

Someone was already there. As Jamie stepped through the open hatch he saw the tall, lithe form of Ilona Malater standing by the long window. She was staring out at the stars, her face solemn, immobile. In the faint light her honey-colored hair looked gray, her tan coveralls nearly colorless.

As Jamie approached the window he almost felt glad that someone else was there. His desire to be alone faded beneath his need for human warmth. He realized that Ilona was tall and slim enough to be a high-fashion model. Her aristocratic face had that magazine-cover haughtiness to it, as well.

"Hello," he said.

She whirled, startled, then relaxed and smiled. "Jamie. What are you doing up here?"

"Same as you, I guess."

"I thought this was my private hideaway." Ilona’s voice was a rich, throaty contralto.

With a rueful grin Jamie said, "Me too." He hesitated, then offered, "I can go back…"

"No, that’s all right." She smiled back at Jamie. "Perhaps I need someone to talk to more than I need solitude."

The only light in the area came from the faintly glowing guide strips on the floor. And the starlight. Barely enough to see her face, to catch the expression in her eyes. The electrical hum that pervaded the spacecraft seemed fainter here, muted.

"You heard about Hoffman?" Jamie asked.

"What has he done now?"

"He’s had a nervous breakdown."

Ilona arched an eyebrow. "Serves him right, the pig."

"That’s a hell of an attitude!"

"He was a womanizer. I imagine he’s the terror of the female undergraduates wherever he teaches."

Jamie blinked at her. He had never thought of Hoffman as anything but a geologist who stood between himself and Mars.

"He tried to seduce every woman he met during training."

"He hit on you?"

Ilona laughed. "He tried to. I hit him back. I told him that if he could not satisfy his wife why did he think he could satisfy me? He never spoke another word to me."

Jamie thought it less than funny. There was a fierceness in this woman that he had never suspected, an anger seething within her.

Then it occurred to him. "He must have hit on Joanna too."

"Yes. Certainly."

That’s why Joanna wanted him off the mission, Jamie said to himself. Not to get me aboard. Just to get rid of a man who bothered her.

He felt suddenly awkward. There was no place to sit except the chill metal floor, no one to turn to for support. He looked out the non-reflective window and saw nothing but the starry emptiness; the Mars 2 craft was out of sight, literally over their heads.

"Is Hoffman’s breakdown what brought you up here?" Ilona asked.

Jamie nodded. "And you?"

"I had to get away," she said, her voice lowering. "I am becoming depressed."

"Why? What’s wrong?"

"Mars is wrong. I am wrong. It was wrong to include a biochemist on this expedition. There is no life on Mars for me to study."

"We don’t know that for certain," Jamie said. "Not yet."

"Don’t we?" Ilona spoke the words with a weary sigh. Then she turned and stretched her arm toward a glowing ruddy point of light swinging past in the starry blackness.

"Look at the planet, Jamie. Think of all the rocks and soil samples and photographs we have studied. We get new photos and data every day from the orbiters they’ve put around the planet. Not a trace of life. Nothing. Mars is absolutely barren. Lifeless."

He turned from the red glow of Mars to focus on her sorrowing face once more. "But we’ve only had a few dozen samples. You’re talking about a whole world. There must be…"

She laid a long manicured finger on Jamie’s lips, silencing him. "You have heard of Gaia?" Ilona asked.

Jamie said, "The idea that the Earth is a living entity?"

Ilona gave him a scant smile. "That’s close. Not bad for a geologist."

He found himself grinning back at her. "All right, what about Gaia? And what’s it got to do with Mars?"

"The Gaia hypothesis states that all life on Earth works together as a self-regulating feedback system that maintains itself. No single species of life — not even the human race — lives in isolation. All species are part of the whole, part of the totally integrated living Gaia."

"I don’t see what that’s got to do with Mars," Jamie said.

"Life has spread itself all across the Earth," Ilona replied. "Down in the deepest ocean trenches there is life. The air teems with microorganisms, even up in the stratosphere there are yeast molds floating about. Even in the most barren Antarctic deserts there are rocks that hold colonies of lichens just below their surfaces."

"And Mars looks barren."

"Mars is barren. The probes have found nothing in the air. There is no liquid water. The soil is so loaded with superoxides it’s like an intense bleach; no living organism could survive in it."

"Some of the rocks bear organic chemicals," Jamie reminded her. — "But if life existed on Mars it would not be confined to one place!" Ilona’s husky voice was almost pleading now. "If there were a Martian equivalent of Gaia we would see life everywhere we looked, just as we do on Earth."

Stubbornly Jamie shook his head. "But Earth is warmer, Earth has liquid water everywhere you look, it’s easy for life to grow and spread on Earth. Mars isn’t that rich. Life would have a tougher time there."

Ilona shook her head too. "No, I don’t believe that’s the reason why Mars looks so bleak. The planet is truly barren. There is no life there and there probably never was. I have wasted the past three years of my life. Sending anyone involved in biology was a mistake."