Jamie leaned back in his chair. Now he understood. Alberto Brumado’s daughter would get special consideration. With the rest of the scientists it was sink or swim, survive the rigors of training or get scratched from the list of possible Mars team members. But with Brumado’s daughter the situation was different. They want to make sure she gets through her six weeks here without packing it in.

Because he did not know what else to do, Jamie said, "I see. Okay, sure. I’ll stay over the next six weeks and help them all I can."

Dr. Li smiled, but to Jamie it seemed more sad than happy. "Thank you, Dr. Waterman. I am deeply grateful."

Jamie got up from the chair. Dr. Li extended his hand and wished him good fortune.

It was not until he was halfway down the corridor on the way back to his own quarters that Jamie realized the implications of Li’s request. He would miss the next six weeks of training. He was being asked to act as a special teacher-guide-escort for Alberto Brumado’s daughter.

They had already scratched him from the Mars mission roster. He had been relegated to the status of an instructor. They had no intention of letting him go to Mars.

2

All the scientists under consideration for the Mars expedition had met one another, of course, and often more than once, as their training took them hopscotching around the world. But it had been many months since Jamie had seen Joanna Brumado. He had barely said a dozen words to the woman.

Jamie went to the entrance area of the snow-covered base, more to say good-bye to the men and women he had been training with than to welcome the new arrivals. His group members were already looking at him with pity in their eyes, sympathy for a man who was obviously not going to make it. Some of them almost shied away from him at that last moment, as if afraid to be contaminated by the touch of a loser.

Dr. Li took off one glove and shook Jamie’s hand solemnly, wordlessly, before departing. His hand felt dry and limp, like a dead lizard.

Jamie stood inside the doorway, just out of the cutting wind, wrapped in his bulky parka, and watched his ex-teammates trot out to the waiting bus that would take them to the airstrip scraped out of the ice shelf. The bus was towed by a huge earth mover with a snowplow attached to its front. Overkill, thought Jamie. The base’s streets had been plowed and there had been no snowfall for days.

Ten people, bundled up in hooded parkas so that you could not tell the women from the men, sprinted from the hut’s entrance to the bus, bent against the frigid wind. All of them carried silvered metal cases and floppy garment bags — their precious personal items of clothing and scientific equipment. All except the cadaverous Dr. Li, who carried only his laptop and a small duffel bag. The scarecrow travels light, Jamie thought.

Ten similarly clothed and burdened figures made their way through the snarling wind from the bus to the doorway where Jamie was standing. Jamie recognized tiny Joanna Brumado easily among the ten who trooped into the entranceway, stamping the snow off their boots after the brief run between the bus and the hut’s doorway. He also saw that Antony Reed was among the newcomers.

So was Franz Hoffman.

Without a word Jamie turned toward the wooden stairs that led down into the hut’s main floor and headed for his quarters.

It was not until the new group met in the dining hall, just before lunch, that Jamie worked up the strength to go out and greet them.

The dining hall was the largest room in the hut that had been donated to the Mars Project: big enough to seat fully thirty persons at its long Formica-topped tables. Joanna was sitting at the end of one of them with Tony Reed and Dorothy Loring, a Canadian biologist.

"Mind if I join you?" Jamie asked.

Reed looked up. "Waterman? What are you still doing here?"

Keeping his face impassive as he pulled up a chair, Jamie said, "I’ve been asked to hang around and help get you people acclimatized."

Reed glanced at Joanna, then quickly returned his focus to Jamie. "I see."

The word for Antony Reed was "suave." He looked like the average American’s idea of an upper-class Englishman, which in fact he almost was. A trim, slight frame, the kind of spare figure that comes from tennis and handball and perhaps polo. Handsome face, with elegant cheekbones and a chiseled profile. Neat little moustache, sandy hair that flopped roguishly over his forehead. He wore precisely creased royal-blue coveralls over a white turtleneck and managed to look almost as if it were a jaunty yachting costume. Yet his eyes were too old for his face, Jamie thought. Ice-blue, coldly calculating eyes.

Reed was a physician who had refused to take over his father’s posh practice in London, preferring to join the British astronaut corps as a flight surgeon. When the European Community joined the international Mars Project, Reed immediately applied. He exuded the calm self-confidence of a man possessed of the certain knowledge that he would be picked as the team physician for the Mars explorers.

Jamie sat between the Englishman and Joanna Brumado, who smiled her welcome to him.

"I did not know that you were going to stay on here," she said. Her voice was a whisper, like a little girl who had been trained to stay as quiet as possible.

"It was Dr. Li’s idea," Jamie replied tightly. "The base commander will explain everything at the briefing, right after lunch."

"I wonder if our crafty Chinese has some sort of mano a mano up his sleeve," Reed mused.

Jamie kept himself from glaring at him.

"Mano a mano?" asked Dorothy Loring. "Like in a bullfight?" She was a big-boned blonde, completely at home in her thick sweater and heavy-duty jeans, a latter-day Valkyrie, a descendant of Vikings who had gone from her family’s farm in Manitoba to a doctorate at McGill and postdoc work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.

Reed pointed with his eyes. At the other end of the table sat Franz Hoffman, alone, intently frowning into the display screen of a computer he had set up on the tabletop.

Jamie said nothing.

Neither did Joanna, but her eyes showed that she understood Reed’s implication. They were beautifully soft brown eyes, large and liquid, wide-spaced like a child’s. Joanna was small and round, almost hidden inside a bulky brown sweater. Her face was heart shaped, framed by a dark mass of hair that curled thickly even though it had been cropped short. To Jamie she looked like a waif, a lost child, with her small stature and those big brown eyes that seemed troubled, almost frightened.

"Our Viennese friend," Reed said in a lower voice, "is not very well liked, I fear."

"You should not say that," Joanna whispered.

"Why not?" Reed asked. "Good lord, the man has all the charm of a Prussian drillmaster. And the eating habits to match."

Loring broke into a giggle, then quickly put her hand to her mouth to stifle it. Jamie, sitting where he looked directly down the table at Hoffman, saw that the Austrian never glanced up from his computer, never acknowledged by so much as a flicker that anyone else was in the room.