Vosnesensky turned to Connors, the second-in-command. "Pete, the mission plan calls for you to test the air first."

The American chuckled nervously from inside his helmet. "Yeah, I’m the guinea pig, I know."

He took an exaggeratedly sighing breath that they could all hear in their earphones. Then, "Here goes."

Connors opened his helmet visor a crack, took a sniff, then slid the visor all the way up and pulled in a deeper breath. He broke into a toothy grin. "Helluva lot better than what’s outside."

They all laughed and the tension cracked. Each of them pushed up their visors, then unlocked the neck seals of their suits and lifted their helmets off altogether. Jamie’s ears popped, but nothing worse happened.

Ilona shook her short-clipped blonde curls and inhaled slowly, her slim nostrils flaring slightly. "Huh! It smells just like the training module. Too dry. Bad for the skin."

Jamie took a long look around their new home, now that his vision was no longer restricted by the helmet.

He saw the dome rising into shadowed gloom over his head, ribbed with curving metal struts. It reminded him of the first time he had gone into a planetarium, back when he’d been a kid in Santa Fe. The same hushed, awed feeling. The same soft coolness to the air. To Ilona the air felt too dry; to him it felt delicious.

The dome’s smooth plastic skin had been darkened by a polarizing electric current to keep the heat inside. In daylight the dome’s lower section would be made transparent to take advantage of solar heating, but at night it was like an oversized igloo sitting on the frozen Martian plain, darkened to retain heat and not allow it to radiate away into the thin, frigid Martian air. Strips of sunlight-equivalent fluorescent lamps lit the floor area softly, but the upper reaches of the dome were barely visible in the darkness gathering there.

The plastic skin of the dome was double walled, like insulating windows, to keep out the cold. The topmost section was opaque, filled in with a special dense plastic that would absorb harmful radiation and even stop small meteorites, according to the engineers.

The thought of the dome getting punctured was scary. Patches and sealing compounds were placed along its perimeter, but would they have time to repair a puncture before all the air gushed out? Jamie remembered the hoary old joke of the parachute packers: "Don’t worry about it. If this chute doesn’t work, bring it back and we’ll give you a new one."

The electric power that heated the dome came from the compact nuclear generator inside one of the cargo vehicles. Tomorrow, after the second team’s landing, the construction robot was scheduled to extract the generator and bury it in the Martian soil half a kilometer from the dome.

Mustn’t call it soil, Jamie reminded himself. Soil is alive with microorganisms and earthworms and other living creatures. Here on Mars it’s called regolith, just like the totally dead surface of the totally dead moon.

Is Mars really dead? Jamie asked himself. He remembered the stories he had read as a youngster, wild tales of Martians battling along their planet-girdling canals, beautiful fantasies of cities built like chess pieces and houses that turned to follow the sun like flowers. There were no canals on Mars, Jamie knew. No cities. But is the planet entirely lifeless? Are there fossils to be dug out of that red sand?

IN TRAINING: KAZAKHSTAN

As they drove along the river, Yuri Zavgorodny gestured with his free hand.

"Like your New Mexico, no?" he asked in his hesitant English.

Jamie Waterman unconsciously rubbed his side. They had taken the stitches out only yesterday and the incision still felt sore.

"New Mexico," Zavgorodny repeated. "Like this? Yes?"

Jamie almost answered, "No." But the mission administrators had warned them all to be as diplomatic as possible with the Russians — and everyone else.

"Sort of," Jamie murmured.

"Yes?" asked Zavgorodny over the rush of the searing wind blowing through the car windows.

"Yes," said Jamie.

The flat brown country stretching out beyond the river looked nothing like New Mexico. The sky was a washed-out pale blue, the desert bleak and empty in every direction. This is an old, tired land, Jamie said to himself as he squinted against the baking hot wind. Used up. Dried out. Nothing like the vivid mountains and bold skies of his home. New Mexico was a new land, raw and magic and mystical. This dull dusty desert out here is ancient; it’s been worn flat by too many armies riding across it.

"Like Mars," said one of the other Russians. His voice was a deep rumble, where Zavgorodny’s was reedy, like a snake-charmer’s flute. Jamie had been quickly introduced to all four of them but the only name that stuck was Zavgorodny’s.

Christ, I hope Mars isn’t this dull, Jamie said to himself.

Yesterday Jamie had been at Bethesda Naval Hospital, having the stitches from his appendectomy removed. All the Mars mission trainees had their appendixes taken out. Mission regulations. No sense risking an attack of appendicitis twenty million miles from the nearest hospital. Even though the decisions about who would actually go to Mars had not been made yet, everyone lost his or her appendix.

"Where are we going?" Jamie asked. "Where are you taking me?"

It was Sunday, supposedly a day of rest even for the men and women who were training to fly to Mars. Especially for a new arrival, jet-lagged and bearing a fresh scar on his belly. But the four cosmonauts had roused Jamie from his bed at the hotel and insisted that he come with them.

"Airport," said the deep-voiced cosmonaut on Jamie’s left. He was jammed into the back seat with two of the Russians, sweaty, body odor pungent despite the sharp scent of strong soap. Two more rode up front, Zavgorodny at the wheel.

Like a gang of Mafia hit men taking me for a ride, Jamie thought. The Russians smiled at one another a lot, grinning as they talked among themselves and hiking their eyebrows significantly. Something was up. And they were not going to tell the American geologist about it until they were damned good and ready.

They were solidly built men, all four of them. Short and thickset. Like Jamie himself, although the Russians were much lighter in complexion than Jamie’s half-Navaho skin.

"Is this official business?" he had asked them when they pounded on his hotel door at the crack of dawn.

"No business," Zavgorodny had replied while the other three grinned broadly. "Pleasure. Fun."

Fun for them, maybe, Jamie grumbled to himself as the car hummed along the concrete of the empty highway. The river curved off to their left. The wind carried the smell of sun-baked dust. The old town of Tyuratam and Leninsk, the new city built for the space engineers and cosmonauts, was miles behind them now.

"Why are we going to the airport?" Jamie asked.

The one on his right side laughed aloud. "For fun. You will see."

"Yes," said the one on his left. "For much fun."

Jamie had been a Mars trainee for little more than six months. This was his first trip to Russia, although his schedule had already whisked him to Australia, Alaska, French Guiana, and Spain. There had been endless physical examinations, tests of his reflexes, his strength, his eyesight, his judgment. They had probed his teeth and pronounced them in excellent shape, then sliced his appendix out of him.

And now a quartet of cosmonauts he’d never met before was taking him in the early morning hours of a quiet Sunday for a drive to Outer Nowhere, Kazakhstan.

For much fun.

There had been precious little fun in the training for Mars. A lot of competition among the scientists, since only sixteen would eventually make the flight: sixteen out of more than two hundred trainees. Jamie realized that the competition must be equally fierce among the cosmonauts and astronauts.