The unspoken rationale of the first expedition was: politics first, science second — a distant second. This was to be a "flags and footprints" mission, no matter how much the scientists wanted to explore.

Efficiency was an even more distant third, as it usually is when political considerations are uppermost. The politicians found it easier to rationalize the necessary expenditures if the project were completed quickly, before an opposition party got the chance to gain power and take credit for its ultimate success. Haste did not automatically make waste, but it forced the administrators to plan a mission that was far from efficient.

Hundreds of scientists were recruited for the Mars Project. Scores of cosmonauts and astronauts. Thousands of engineers, technicians, flight controllers, and administrators. They spent ten years in planning and three more in training for the two-year-long mission. All so that twenty-five men and women could spend sixty days on Mars. Eight paltry weeks on Mars, and then back home again. That was the mission plan. That was the goal for which thousands devoted thirteen years of their lives.

To the world at large, however, the excitement of the Mars Project grew with each passing month as the chosen personnel went through their training and the spacecraft took shape at launching centers in the Soviet Union, the United States, South America, and Japan. The world made itself ready to reach out to the red planet. Alberto Brumado was the acknowledged spiritual leader of the Mars mission, although he was not entrusted with anything more concrete than moral support. But moral support was desperately needed more than once during these years, as one government or another would want to opt out of the decade-long financial burden. But none did.

Too old to fly into space himself, Brumado instead watched his daughter board the spacecraft that would take her to Mars.

Now he had watched her step out onto the surface of that distant world, while the crowd outside chanted their name.

Wondering if he had done the right thing, Alberto Brumado went to the long, sunlit windows. The crowd cheered wildly at the sight of him.

KALININGRAD: Mission control for the Mars expedition had more redundancy than the spacecraft the explorers flew in. While redundancy in the spacecraft was required for safety, at mission control it was required by politics. Each position in mission control was shared by two people at identical side-by-side consoles. Usually one was a Russian and the other an American, although at a few of the desks sat Japanese, British, French, and even an Argentine — with a Russian by the side of each one of them.

The men and women of the mission control center were just starting to celebrate. Up to the moment of touchdown they had been rigidly intent on their display screens, but now at last they could lean back, slip off their headsets, laugh together, sip champagne, and light up victory cigars. Even some of the women took cigars. Behind the rows of consoles, in the glassed-in media section, reporters and photographers toasted one another and the mission controllers with vodka in paper cups.

Only the chief of the American team, a burly balding man in his shirtsleeves, sweat stains at his armpits, unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, looked unhappy. He leaned over the chair of the American woman who bore the archaic title of CapCom.

"What did he say?"

She glanced up from her display screens. "I don’t know what it was."

"It sure as hell wasn’t what he was supposed to say!"

"Would you like to replay the tape?" asked the Russian working beside the young woman. His voice was soft, but it cut through the buzz of conversation.

The woman deftly tapped a few buttons on her keyboard and the screen once again showed the figure of James Waterman standing in his sky-blue pressure suit on the sands of Mars.

"Ya’aa’tey," said Jamie Waterman’s image.

"Garbled transmission?" the chief asked.

"No way," said the woman.

The Russian turned from the screen to give the chief a piercing look. "What does it mean?"

"Damned if I know," grumbled the chief. "But we’re sure as hell going to find out!"

Up in the media section, one young TV reporter noticed the two men hunched over the CapCom’s seat. He wondered why they looked so puzzled.

BERKELEY: Professor Jerome Waterman and Professor Lucille Monroe Waterman had canceled their classes for the day and remained at homo to watch their son step out onto the surface of Mars. No friends. No students or faculty colleagues. A battalion of reporters hovered outside the house, but the Watermans would not face them until after they had seen the landing.

They sat in their comfortably rumpled, book-lined study watching the television pictures, window blinds closed tightly against the bright morning sun and the besieging media reporters encamped outside.

"It takes almost ten minutes for the signals to reach the Earth," mused Jerry Waterman.

His wife nodded absently, her eyes focused on the sky-blue figure among the six faceless creatures on the screen. She held her breath when it was Jamie’s turn at last to speak.

"Ya’aa’tey," said her son.

Lucille gasped: "Oh no!"

Jamie’s father grunted with surprise.

Lucille turned accusingly to her husband. "He’s starting that Indian business all over again!"

SANTA FE: Old Al always knew how to pack the store with customers even on a day like this. He had simply put a TV set prominently up on a shelf next to the Kachina dolls. People thronged in from all over the plaza to see Al’s grandson on Mars.

"Ya’aa’tey," said Jamie Waterman, from a hundred million kilometers away.

"Hee-ah!" exclaimed old Al Waterman. "The boy did it!"

Mars.

Picture Death Valley at its worst. Barren desert. Nothing but rock and sand. Remove every trace of life: get rid of each and every cactus, every bit of scrub, all the lizards and insects and sun-bleached bones and anything else that even looks as if it might have once been alive.

Now freeze-dry the whole landscape. Plunge it down to a temperature of a hundred below zero. And suck away the air until there’s not even as much as you would find on Earth a hundred thousand feet above the ground.

That is roughly what Mars is like.

Fourth planet out from the sun, Mars never gets closer to the Earth than thirty-five million miles. It is a small world, roughly half the diameter of ours, with a surface gravity just a bit more than a third of Earth’s. A hundred pounds on Earth weighs only thirty-eight pounds on Mars.

Mars is known as the red planet because its surface is mainly a bone-dry desert of sandy iron oxides: rusty iron dust.

Yet there is water on Mars. The planet has bright polar caps, composed at least partially of frozen water-covered over most of the year by frozen carbon dioxide, dry ice.

For Mars is a cold world. It orbits roughly one and a half times farther from the sun than the Earth does. Its atmosphere is far too thin to retain solar heat. On a clear midsummer day along the Martian equator the afternoon high temperature might climb to seventy degrees Fahrenheit; that same night, however, it will plunge to a hundred below zero or lower.

The atmosphere of Mars is too thin to breathe, even if it were pure oxygen. Which it is not. More than ninety-five percent of the Martian "air" is carbon dioxide; nearly three percent nitrogen. There is a tiny amount of oxygen and even less water vapor. The rest of the atmosphere consists of inert gases such as argon, neon and such, a whiff of carbon monoxide, and a trace of ozone.

Still, Mars is the most Earthlike of any other world in the solar system. There are seasons on Mars — spring, summer, autumn, and winter. Because its orbit is farther from the sun, the Martian year is nearly twice as long as Earth’s (a few minutes short of 689 Earth days) and its seasons are correspondingly much longer than Earth’s.