with a strange, quizzical smile playing on her lips. She held up the fingers of both hands to him. Nine fingers. We’ll be in transit for nine months, Jamie translated her silent message.
Joanna walked away, still smiling. And Jamie realized that she was telling him that the trip back home was going to be very different from the voyage outward.
'It is time to suit up,' Vosnesensky said.
For the last time, Jamie said to himself. One final hour or so in the hard suits and then we’ll be aboard the spacecraft and ready to start for home. Everyone headed for the airlock and the racks of hard suits waiting for them.
Zieman and Dr. Yang went with Tony Reed, the diminutive Chinese physician walking in front of the Englishman, the husky astronaut behind him. Like a prisoner under house arrest, Jamie thought. They’re already blaming him for the scurvy outbreak. They’ll want a scapegoat back on Earth and they’ve decided it’s going to be Tony.
Reed looked pale and withdrawn, but when he saw Jamie coming up beside him his old crooked little smile returned. 'My god, James, you look positively morose. Don’t you want to go home?'
'Sure I do.' But Jamie knew it was only partially true.
'You want to continue exploring Mars, don’t you?' Reed said.
'Don’t you?'
'No thanks,' Reed said fervently. 'I’ve had enough of this dust bowl. I’m looking forward to England and rain and flower gardens.'
Jamie thought of the desert where his Navaho ancestors lived. How much like Mars it is; yet how different.
'If you’re feeling so melancholy,' Reed jibed, 'then perhaps you ought to stay here.'
'I wish I could,' Jamie admitted.
Reed hiked an eyebrow.
'How are you doing, Tony?' Jamie asked.
'I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.'
Jamie said, 'I’m going to have a long talk with Dr. Li, once we get back into orbit. And with the mission controllers.'
'On my behalf?'
'Right.'
'Don’t bother.'
'I damned well will bother,' Jamie said, with quiet intensity. 'I’ll take it all the way up to the project directors, if I have to.'
'Don’t be silly,' said Reed. 'And don’t give me that ‘you saved my life’ business again.'
'But they’re going to make you the scapegoat for everything that went wrong with the mission!'
Reed’s smile turned bitter. 'What of it? The mission needs a sacrificial lamb, doesn’t it? One man killed in orbit. The entire ground team nearly killed by a stupid mistake. You can be the mission’s hero, James. I’ll be the goat.'
'That’s not right. It’s not fair.'
Reed’s smile turned sour. 'Perhaps you’d better stay, then, my heroic friend. That’s the only way you’re going to get to explore more of this miserable ball of rust. Once we get back home and they start dissecting all the mistakes we’ve made, there will never be another expedition to Mars. Never.'
Jamie saw that the others had gathered around them, faces questioning. Even Vosnesensky looked doubtful, scowling worriedly. They had reached the row of lockers where their dust-spattered hard suits waited like the battered armor of knights who had sought the Holy Grail.
Jamie turned around to face Reed. Calmly, quietly, he said, 'There will be no scapegoats among us. Not among us. We’re a team. Even when we get back to Earth we’re still a team. Without heroes and without goats.'
'I wish that could be true, Jamie,' said Reed, with real yearning in his voice.
'It will be.'
'It can’t be. The project directors will never trust me again. I’ll get a polite handshake and be mustered out into private practice. And think of what’s waiting for Mikhail. Our noble team leader fractured every rule in the regulations and thumbed his nose at Li and the mission controllers. Mikhail’s career is finished.'
Vosnesensky grunted. 'So I will retire. I have achieved my dream. I was the first man on Mars. I will not return. I don’t think anyone will come back to Mars. Tony is right. There will be no more expeditions.'
'For how long?' Jamie demanded. 'For my whole lifetime? For a hundred years? A thousand? I don’t think so. But even if it happens that way, what of it? We’ll come back to Mars one day, just as surely as the sun rises.'
'Really?'
'Yes! Because we have to. The human race has to. We’re explorers, Tony. All of us. Even you; it’s what brought you here. It’s built into our blood, into our brains. That’s what science is all about. Human beings have to learn, have to search and seek and explore. We need to, just like a flower needs water and sunlight. It’s what made our ancestors move out of Africa and spread all across the Earth. Now we’re spreading all across the solar system and someday we’ll start to move out to the stars. You can’t stop that, Tony. Nobody can. It’s what makes us human.'
Reed backed off a step, then lifted his chin a notch higher. 'Very pretty speech, Jamie. But most of the human race doesn’t give a damn about Mars or anything else except their own squalid little greeds. They’re going to close down the Mars Project, Jamie. They’re going to kill it.'
'They’ll try, I know. They’ll do their best to shut us down. And I’ll do mine. Because I’m not going to rest until they send another expedition back here. If I have to do it with my bare hands, I’ll bring us back to Mars.'
Jamie stuck his hand into his coverall pocket and pulled out his bear fetish. He reached up and put it on the rack beside his gray helmet.
'And to prove it, I’m going to leave this little fellow here to greet me when I return.'
They all stared at the fetish. Jamie had not allowed any of them to see it before.
'My grandfather would say it has powerful magic,' Jamie told them. 'But the real magic is in us. We make things happen. We’re coming back to Mars — all of us who want to.'
Reed huffed. 'A gesture.'
'A symbol,' Jamie corrected.
'Speaking of gestures,' Ilona said, stepping through the group to stand between Jamie and Vosnesensky, 'I had intended to do this in private, once we were aboard the spacecraft.'
She took from her breast pocket the dog-eared photograph that had been taped up over her bunk. Staring solemnly at Vosnesensky, Ilona methodically tore the photo into small pieces.
'Mikhail, I have wronged you and all the Russians on this mission. I apologize. You saved our lives, and it was wrong of me to hold a fifty-year grudge against you personally.'
Vosnesensky, totally surprised, shifted from one foot to another. 'Well… I suppose…,' he stammered.
Ilona threw her arms around his neck and kissed him so soundly that Vosnesensky’s face turned as red as his hard suit. Everyone laughed. Even Reed.
Jamie looked at the other members of the Mars team. One by one, from Abell’s grinning frog face to Ivshenko, leaning heavily on a pair of stainless steel crutches. Mikhail was right, he thought. Mars has tested us. Each and every one of us. None of us is the same person we were when we arrived here.
His gaze ended with Joanna, standing slightly aside from all the others, strong and proud. Her eyes gleamed back at him.
It’s going to be an interesting trip home, Jamie thought. Very interesting.
SOL 45: NOON
One after the other, the three ascent modules lifted from the surface of Mars on tongues of shimmering flame. Their rocket engines blew miniature sandstorms across the landscape as they shrieked like departing
