Mars

'I see.'

'Do you? You are a scientist. You are happy to be here, to explore. You have a new world to play with. I am the man of authority. I am the one who must say no to you when you want to go too far, when you might endanger yourself or the others.'

'We all understand that,' Jamie said. 'We accept it.'

'Yes? Does Dr. Malater accept it? She hates me. She goes out of her way to annoy me every chance she gets.'

'Ilona isn’t…' Jamie’s voice trailed off. He realized he had no defense for her.

'She is a Jewish bitch who hates all Russians. I know that. She has made it very clear to me.'

'Her grandparents fled Hungary.'

'So? Was that my fault? Am I to be blamed for things that happened in our grandparents’ day? She risks the success of this mission because of a grudge that is two generations old?'

Jamie laughed softly. 'Mikhail, I know people who have kept grudges going for two centuries, not just two generations.'

The Russian said nothing.

'There are American Indians who’re still fighting battles from colonial times.'

'The Yankee imperialists took your land from you,' Vosnesensky said. 'They engaged in genocide against your people. We learned this in school.'

'That happened a long time ago, Mikhail,' said Jamie. 'Should I spend my life hating all the whites? Should I hate my mother because she’s descended from people who killed my ancestors? Should Pete Connors hate Paul Abell because his ancestors were slaves and Paul’s were slave owners?'

'You feel no bitterness at all?'

The question stopped Jamie. He did not truly know what he felt. He had hardly ever considered the matter in such a light. Was Grandfather Al bitter? No, he seemed to accept the world as he found it.

'Use what’s at hand, Jamie,' Al would say. 'When they hand you a lemon, make lemonade. Use what’s at hand and make the best of what you find.'

At length Jamie answered, 'Mikhail, my parents are both university professors. I was born in New Mexico and went back there to spend summer vacations when I was a kid, but I grew up in Berkeley, California.'

'A hotbed of radicalism.' Vosnesensky said it flatly, as if reciting a memorized line. Jamie could not tell if the Russian were joking or serious.

'My father has spent most of his life trying not to be an Indian, although he’d never admit it. Probably doesn’t even realize it. He earned a scholarship to Harvard University. He married a woman who’s descended from the original Mayflower colonists. Neither one of them wanted me to be an Indian. They always told me to be a success, instead.'

'They deny your father’s heritage.'

'They try to. Dad’s scholarship came through a program designed especially to help minority groups — such as Native Americans. And the history texts he’s written have sold to universities all around the U.S. mainly because they present American history from the minority viewpoint.'

'Hmp.'

'They were never active in Indian affairs and neither was I. If it weren’t for my grandfather I’d be more white than you are. He taught me to understand my heritage, to accept it without hating anybody.'

'But Malater, she hates me.'

'Not you, Mikhail. She hates the idea of Russians. She doesn’t see you as an individual. In her eyes you’re part of an inhuman system that hanged her grandfather and forced her grandmother to run away from her native land.'

Vosnesensky muttered, 'That is not much help.'

'Just like people who don’t see individuals among the Indians, or even tribes,' Jamie went on. 'There’s a lot of whites who still see ‘the Indian’ instead of individual men and women. They don’t understand that some people want to live in their own way and don’t want to become white.'

'And you? How do you want to live?'

Jamie no longer had to think it over. 'I’m the descendant of Indians. My skin is darker than yours. But if you take our brains out of our skulls, Mikhail, you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between them. That’s where we really live. In our minds. We were born on opposite sides of the world and yet here we are together on a totally other planet. That’s what’s important. Not what our ancestors did to one another. What we’re doing now. That’s the important thing.'

Vosnesensky nodded somberly. 'Now you must give that little speech to Malater.'

Jamie nodded soberly. 'Okay. Maybe I will.'

'It won’t do any good.'

'Probably not,' Jamie agreed. 'But there’s no harm trying.'

'Perhaps.'

A new thought struck Jamie. 'Mikhail — is that why you decided to come out on this traverse with me, instead of letting Pete do it? Just to get away from Ilona?'

'Nonsense!' spat the Russian with a vehemence that convinced Jamie he had hit on the truth. Ilona’s hurting him, Jamie realized. She’s really hurting the poor guy.

DOSSIER: M. A. VOSNESENSKY

'Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?'

Mikhail Andreivitch had heard that cry from his father all his life, it seemed. Nikolai was the older of the two boys, the paragon of the family. He studied hard at school and won excellent marks. He was quiet; his favorite pastime was reading books. His friends were few, but they were as studious and well mannered as Nikolai himself.

Mikhail, the second son (there was a younger daughter), sailed through school hardly even glancing at his textbooks. Somehow he got good grades; not quite as good as his older brother’s, of course, but good enough to send him to the engineering college. Instead of studying, Mikhail listened to music, imported American rock mostly. The noise drove his father wild. Mikhail had lots of friends, girls as well as boys, and they all liked to listen to loud rock music and dress in blue jeans and leather jackets like bikers.

And he gambled. 'The curse of the Russians,' his father called it. His mother wept. Mikhail played cards with his friends and, sometimes, with older men who dressed well and had faces of stone. His parents feared the worst for him.

'You’re turning your mother gray!' his father shouted when Mikhail announced he was going to buy a motorbike. He had worked for two years in secret, spending his afternoons in a garage helping the mechanic instead of attending classes. Somehow he had still managed to pass his examinations at school. Even so, two years’ wages were not enough to buy the handsome machine he coveted. Mikhail had risked every ruble on a card game, vowing that if he won he would never gamble again. He won, mainly because he had been willing to take greater risks and had more money to put up than the other gamblers that night.

True to his self-imposed discipline, he never gambled again. He bought the bike over his father’s objections and his mother’s flowing tears. It did not matter to them that Mikhail could now drive from their apartment to his college classes without spending two hours a day on city buses. They only saw him zooming along the streets of Volgograd with pretty young girls shamelessly showing their legs as they rode behind Mikhail, clutching him tightly.

His mother was already gray, and his father almost totally bald. The old man had been a civil servant, one of the numberless apparatchiks who had been pushed out of the government bureaucracy in the name of perestroika and forced to find another job. Briefly he had worked as an administrator in one of the largest factories in Volgograd, but only briefly. He entered politics and soon was elected to a seat on the city council, where he settled down in comfortable anonymity for the remainder of his working life.

'Why can’t you be reasonable, like your brother?' his father cried when Mikhail announced that he was going