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.
3
'I do not understand,' said Franz Hoffman. 'Does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant? A Sherpa guide to carry my baggage up the mountain?'
Jamie held onto his swooping temper, just barely. He had decided that there would be no way to avoid Hoffman in the crowded, snow-buried base so he would make a virtue of necessity by offering to help the Austrian to continue the meteorite search out on the glacier.
Hoffman had been unpacking his clothes when Jamie knocked on the half-ajar door to his quarters. It happened to be the same room that Dr. Li had just left. But already Hoffman had turned it into his personal domain. A five-foot-long photomosaic map of Mars was pinned up on the flat wall above the bunk bed. On the curving wall beside the desk the geologist had taped a smaller satellite photo of the Markham glacier, already marked with red circles where meteorites had been located. A framed color photograph sat on the government- issue three-drawer bureau, a round-cheeked young woman with twin babies in her arms smiling dubiously into the camera.
'Look,' Jamie said, leaning against the doorjamb, 'Li asked me to help your group through your six weeks here. If you’re interested in continuing the search for meteorites I’m willing to help.'
Hoffman eyed Jamie silently, then went back to taking folded clothes out of a large suitcase on the bed and placing them in precise stacks in the bureau drawers.
'At the very least,' Jamie said, 'I can show you which areas I’ve already covered. Save you going over areas where nothing’s been found.'
'That information is in the data bank, is it not?' Hoffman asked.
He was about Jamie’s own age and height, but thin and almost weak-looking where Jamie was solid and chunky. Hoffman was round-shouldered and round faced. His hair was already turning gray, and it was cropped close to his skull. His face was a picture of darkly brooding suspicion, eyes small and squinting, narrow lips pressed firmly together. Jamie thought, Put a monocle in his eye and he’d look like an old-time Nazi general.
'Yes, the computer has a complete file of my treks on the glacier,' Jamie replied evenly. 'But once you’re out there on the ice the computer data loses a lot of its meaning. Even the satellite pictures aren’t much help when you’re actually out there.'
'I have done field work,' Hoffman said stiffly. 'I was born in the shadow of the Alps. None of this is new to me.'
'Suit yourself,' Jamie said. He turned to leave.
'Wait.'
'For what?'
Hoffman stood in the middle of the room, his fingers drumming unconsciously against the sides of his heavy wool slacks.
'Tell me,' he said, his voice a little less sharp, 'why does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant?'
'It’s not…'
Hoffman did not let Jamie finish his sentence. 'You did not have an assistant. None of the other geologists had assistants. Does Li think I’m incapable? Does he think I can’t make it on my own? Is this his subtle way of getting rid of me?'
Jamie felt his mouth drop open. Hoffman was just as worried and frightened as he was. Behind the brittle
