"You feel danger?"

Joanna said, "You are an extremely attractive man, James Waterman. Perhaps when this mission is over and we are safely back on Earth we can begin to behave toward each other as ordinary men and women do. For now, we must put aside such feelings."

Jamie finally understood that her memory of McMurdo was his fumbling attempt to kiss her the evening after their first trek on the glacier. It meant a lot to her, he realized. And I thought it made her angry. She’s taking it for granted that I’m in love with her.

Am I? He thought of Edith, smiling blonde and Texas beautiful and millions of miles away. Christ, I’ve had her tape sitting in my cubicle for two days now and I haven’t even answered her. Joanna is completely different. Beautiful in a deeper way. Serious. Very serious.

Then he wondered, Does she know about Ilona? What would she think if she did?

Her hand was still clutching the cuff of his sweatshirt. Jamie covered it with his other hand.

"I guess you’re right, Joanna. You were right at McMurdo and you’re right now. We’re a long way from home. Maybe someday we’ll be able to face each other as normal people do and find out for ourselves what we really can mean to each other. But for now…" He ran out of words, finished with half a shrug that she probably could not see in the darkness.

"For now," Joanna finished for him, her voice so low he could barely hear her, "we can be friends. It will be good to have a friend, Jamie. Good for both of us."

"Yeah. Sure."

"It is the only way. We cannot form attachments now. Not here, not in this… fishbowl."

He nodded, not caring if she could see it or not.

Joanna asked, "Have you thought about what you will do when we return home?"

He almost blurted, This is my home. Here on Mars. Instead he replied softly, "Not really. Have you?"

She made a sighing sound. "My father has already been asked by the National Geographic Society to write an article about this expedition for their magazine. I suppose I will do most of the writing for him. I have been his ghostwriter for many years."

"That shouldn’t take long."

"Then lectures, I suppose. The two of us. All around the world. And a book, of course."

"I guess I’ll pick a university and spend the next few years analyzing the samples we bring back. And the data we’re amassing."

"That could be a lifetime career."

"Maybe."

She fell silent.

"What about the next expedition?" Jamie asked. "Isn’t your father going to push for a follow-on mission?"

"He is already. As I understand it, though, the politicians want to sec what the results of this mission are before they commit themselves to another."

Jamie leaned toward her, sudden urgency burning in his blood. "Joanna, don’t you see that it’s important to go back to the canyon and check out those ruins? If we can go back with evidence that there was once a civilization on Mars, an intelligent species who built cliff dwellings… holy Christ, nobody could stop a second expedition. And a third, a tenth, a hundredth!"

He sensed her smiling in the darkness. "Ahh, but suppose we find that your village is nothing more than a natural rock formation? What then?"

Her voice was sad. Jamie had no answer for her.

Pete Connors felt relaxed for the first time since the expedition had left Earth orbit.

He leaned back in the cockpit seat and looked out at the pink and red landscape gliding by nearly ten miles below. The little soarplane was flying like a dream, as deftly responsive to his hands as a loving woman.

She was a tiny gossamer aircraft, as light as plastic ribs and Mylar skin could make her. The heaviest part of the soarplane was the miniature electric engine that drove her lazily purring propeller. The engine was powered by solar cells of plastic and silicon that hugged the curves of the soarplane’s broad long wings, converting the plentiful Martian sunlight into electricity steadily, noiselessly, as she flew through the clean, bright, thin atmosphere of Mars.

The soarplane’s official designation was RPV-1. There was an RPV-2 stowed in the cargo bay of one of the unmanned landers, wings folded, patiently waiting its turn to fly. Connors had his own name for the plane, however. He called it Little Beauty. And that is the way he thought of her.

To him, Little Beauty was a thing of delight. Connors luxuriated in the feel of her controls in his hands, the broad beautiful expansive views of the passing Martian landscape he could see in panorama all around him.

One section of the view suddenly went blank. The video screen there hinged upward and Paul Abell’s frog-eyed face appeared, high forehead wrinkled quizzically.

"Aren’t you coming out for lunch?" Abell asked his fellow astronaut.

Connors shook his head. "Naw, I’m having too much fun with her. Could you make me a sandwich?"

Abell glanced at the control panel and the other video screens with their views of the distant Martian landscape. "Okay. But I want a turn with her, too, you know."

"Later," Connors muttered. "You can fly her on the leg back."

Abell looked doubtful, but he lowered the screen back down into its place. Connors felt alone again, as if he were actually soaring over Chryse Planitia, the Plain of Gold, instead of sitting inside the dome of the base in the teleoperator mockup of the soarplane’s cockpit.

In an electronic sense Connors truly was flying his Little Beauty. He was linked so thoroughly to the remotely piloted vehicle that he felt every tremor of her slender frame, every slight gust of air buoying up her gossamer wings. Nearly a thousand kilometers separated plane from pilot, but Connors was as much in control of RPV-1 as if the tiny plane actually were carrying him through the sky.

The engineers called it teleoperation, the technique of linking man and machine electronically even though they were not physically together. Thanks to teleoperation, an aircraft could range thousands of kilometers across Mars without the need to carry a pilot and all the life-support equipment that a human operator requires. The pilot could remain safely on the ground or in one of the orbiting spacecraft while the plane braved the unknown dangers of the unexplored planet.

Deep in his mind Connors felt almost the exact opposite of the symptoms of space adaptation syndrome. In zero gravity your ears screamed that you were falling while your eyes told you that you were safely bundled inside a spacecraft cabin. Flying Little Beauty, Connors’s eyes told him he was soaring ten miles high, but his butt and all his other body senses reminded him that he was sitting on the ground.

Never mind. He smiled boyishly to himself. This is as good as it’s going to get here on this rust ball. Good enough for now. Not bad for a minister’s son. He remembered his first flights in the backseat of an ancient crop duster’s biplane over the flat wheat fields of Nebraska. Everything square and neat, precise. The barren red ground below him now had never known the touch of human purpose.

Abell opened the hatch abruptly and stuck in a badly made sandwich as he asked again for a turn at the controls. Connors put him off and once more shut himself inside the cockpit.

Far down below he saw a shadow of darker red inching across the barren land. He banked the little plane slightly to get a better view of the ground.

A dust storm. Big one. Must be several hundred kilometers across its front. Connors knew that whatever his cameras saw was automatically relayed to the ships up in orbit and, through them, back to Earth. He made some mental calculations of his own, anyway, and spoke into the microphone of his headset. Toshima would appreciate all the information he could get; the Japanese meteorologist was trying to build a network of weather sensors all around the planet.