We were, of course, monitoring every moment in the spacecraft.

The communication link had stretched pretty thin even after the first month. The geometry was troublesome. While the spacecraft was climbing out toward Mars’s orbit, Mars was moving. So was the Earth, and a good deal faster. It would go around the sun almost twice before Mars completed a single one of its orbits. The telemetry from the spacecraft now took something like three minutes to reach Goldstone. We were passive listeners. It would get worse. Any command from Earth would come half an hour late by the time the spacecraft was circling Mars, round-trip time at the speed of light. We had surrendered instant control; the ship and its passengers were effectively on their own.

Later still the Earth and Mars would be on opposite sides of the sun. The weak signals from the spacecraft would be so compromised by solar interference that we would not even receive reliably. But by then the 3070 would be in orbit, and shortly thereafter the MHD generator would join it. Then there would be plenty of power for everything. It was all planned out, where each would go, how they would interlink with each other, with the orbiting ship, with the ground station and with Roger, wherever he might roam.

We launched the 3070, powered down into stand-by mode. It was a robot run. The ionization risk turned out, on analysis, to be unacceptable in a spacecraft of normal configuration, so the Cape engineers stripped away all the life support, all the telemetry, the demolition system and half of the maneuver capability. The weight went into shielding. Once it was launched it was silent and lifeless, and would stay that way for seven months. Then General Hesburgh would capture control and play both ends of the docking maneuver. It would be difficult, but that was what he was paid for.

We launched the MHD generator a month later, with a crew of two volunteers and a maximum of publicity. Everyone was interested now. And no one objected, not even the NPA. They disdained the first launch. They acknowledged tracking the launch of the 3070 and offered their data to the NASA net. When the generator went up, their ambassador sent a polite note of congratulations.

Clearly something was happening.

It was not all psychological. New York City had two straight weeks without rioting, and garbage was collected from some of the main streets. Winter rains put out the last of the great fires in the Northwest, and the governors of Washington, Oregon, Idaho and California sent out a joint call for volunteers. More than a hundred thousand young people signed up to replant the mountain slopes.

The President of the United States was the last to notice the change; he was too busy with the internal disasters of a nation that had overbred and overspent itself into tragedy. But the time came when he realized there had been a change, not only within the United States but world-wide, not only in a change in mood but in a change in tactics. The Asians withdrew their nuclear subs to the waters of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean, and when Dash got confirmation of that he picked up the phone and called Vern Scanyon.

“I think—” He paused, and reached out to touch the smooth wood of his desk top. “I think it’s working. Pat your staff on the back for me. Now, what else do you need?”

But there was nothing.

We were fully committed now. We had gone as far as we could go, and the rest was up to the expedition itself.

Fourteen

Missionary to Mars

Not more than six times a day Don Kayman allowed himself to pray. He prayed for various things — sometimes for relief from the sound of Titus Hesburgh sucking his teeth, sometimes to be spared the smell of stale farts that smogged the interior of the spacecraft — but there were always three petitions in each prayer: the success of the mission, the fulfillment of God’s plan for Man and, most particularly, the health and well-being of his friend Roger Torraway.

Roger had the distinction of a private stateroom of his own. It was not much of a room, and the privacy was only an elastic curtain, gossamer thin and not wholly opaque; but it was all his. The other three shared the crew cabin. Sometimes Roger shared it, too, or at least parts of Roger did. He was all over the place, Roger was.

Kayman looked in on him often. The trip was a long, dull time for him. His own specialty, which was of course not operative until they actually set foot on the surface of Mars, needed no touch-up or practice. Areology was a static science, and would remain so until he himself, hopefully, added something to it after landing. So he had let Titus Hesburgh teach him the instrument board, and a little later had let Brad teach him something about fieldstripping a cyborg. The grotesque form that slowly writhed and postured in its foam cocoon was no longer unfamiliar. Kayman knew every inch of it, inside and out. As the weeks wore on he lost the abhorrence that had deterred him from wrenching an eye from its socket or opening a panel into a plastic-lined gut.

It was not all he had to do. He had his music tapes to listen to, an occasional microfiche to read, games to play. At chess he and Titus Hesburgh were pretty evenly matched. They played interminable tournaments, best 38 games out of 75, and used their personal comm allotments to have chess texts radioed up to them from Earth. It would have been relaxing for Father Kayman to pray more, but after the first week it had occurred to him that even prayer could be carried to excess. He rationed it out: on awakening, before meals, in midevening and before retiring. That was all. That was not, of course, to count the quick lift from a Paternoster or from telling His Holiness’s rosary. And then he would go back to the endless refurbishing of Roger. He had always had a queasy stomach, but obviously Roger was oblivious to these invasions of his person and took no harm from them. Kayman gradually began to appreciate the inner beauty of Roger’s anatomy, both that part which was Man’s handiwork and that part which was God’s; he gave thanks for both.

He could not quite give thanks for what God and man had done to the interior of Roger’s mind. It troubled him that seven months were being stolen out of his friend’s life. It drew forth compassion that Roger’s love went to a woman who held it cheap.

But, everything considered, Kayman was happy.

He had never been on a Mars mission before, but this was where he belonged. Twice he had been in space: a shuttle run to an orbiter, when he was still a graduate student seeking his doctorate in planetology; then a ninety-day tour in Space Station Betty. Both were acknowledged to be mere practice for the mission that would complete his study of Mars.

All that he knew of Mars he had learned telescopically or deductively or from the observations of others. He knew a lot of that. He had played and replayed the synoptic tapes of all the Orbiters and Mariners and Surveyors. He had analyzed returned bits of soil and rock. He had interviewed every one of the Americans, French and British who had landed in their various Mars expeditions, and most of the Russians, Japanese and Chinese as well.

He knew all about Mars. He always had.

As a child he had grown up on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars, the colorful Barsoom of the ocher dead sea bottoms and hurtling tiny moons. As he grew older he distinguished fact from fiction. There was no reality in the four-armed green warriors and the red-skinned, egg-laying, beautiful Martian princesses, to the extent that science was in touch with “reality.” But he knew that scientists’ estimates of “reality” changed from year to year. Burroughs had not invented Barsoom out of airy imaginings. He had taken it almost verbatim from the most authoritative scientific “reality” of his day. It was Percival Lowell’s Mars, not Burroughs’s, that was finally denied by bigger telescopes and by space probes. In the “reality” of scientific opinion, life on Mars had been born and died a dozen times.