Mars

'Yesterday we had a bit of a scare. Things still aren’t quite back to normal yet. A stray meteorite punctured our dome. Just a little puncture. We never even found the meteorite; it must’ve been so small it evaporated from the energy of the impact. But it leaked out some of our air and for a couple of minutes everything was pretty tense.'

He looked upward. The dome was bathed in sunlight. The pumps and fans were throbbing their usual low notes. Jamie could hear voices and the cowboy twang of a country-and-western song from somebody’s tape player.

'We’re still breathing pure oxygen in here. We’ve got to tiptoe around and be extremely careful. In a pure oxygen atmosphere, the slightest spark could set the whole dome on fire. The separators are accumulating nitrogen from the air outside, but we won’t be back on normal air for another day or two.

'There wasn’t any damage, except for the puncture itself, which Vosnesensky and Paul Abell fixed inside of a couple of minutes. I was outside when it happened and another micrometeorite scratched my helmet. Oh yes, Tony Reed knocked over a whole bottle full of vitamin pills. He’s getting kidded about being so clumsy.'

Jamie turned off the camera with the remote control box in his hand and made a wide, long, exaggerated yawn. The pure oxygen atmosphere seemed to be affecting his ears. They felt clogged, as if they needed to pop. The yawn helped, but not much.

Turning the camera on again, he continued, 'The meteors were probably the last remains of an old, ancient comet. Just a bunch of stray pebbles floating around the solar system that happened to drift right into our spot on Mars. Couldn’t happen again in a million years.'

Jamie hesitated for an instant. There was hardly any more news to tell her.

'I sure appreciated the tape you sent. And I’m glad you’re moving up in the world. Going to New York must have taken a lot of guts. If there’s anything I can do, like an interview or some background information about our work here on the surface, just send a request through the mission directors and I’ll be happy to tell you whatever you need to know.'

Jamie stopped the vidcam again, thinking, How much can I really tell her? How much would the mission directors let me tell her? He decided for now to stick to science and stay away from politics and personalities.

'It turns out that there’s a lot more water beneath the ground than the earlier unmanned landers led us to believe. It’s frozen, of course. We’re sitting on top of an ocean of permafrost that probably extends all the way down to the Valles Marineris — the Grand Canyon of Mars, that is. Maybe farther, but we haven’t crossed the canyon and investigated the other side.'

Jamie described the brief traverse to the canyon and his hopes that he would be able to return there, skipping over the arguments and debates he had triggered. He carefully avoided mentioning the 'village'; time enough for that when we’ve got definite evidence, one way or the other, he thought. Instead, he told Edith about the copper-green rock they had found. Then he ran out of things to say.

Fingering the remote control nervously, he finally flicked the camera on again. 'I’m glad all that nonsense about my speaking Navaho has settled down. At least, I presume it has. We haven’t seen much in the way of news here — mostly BBC stuff.'

He clicked it off again, licked his lips while he thought of what else he could tell Edith.

'Well, I guess that’s about it for now. We haven’t found any signs of life yet, living or fossils, but maybe conditions down in the Grand Canyon will be more conducive. Monique Bonnet has a nice little garden growing out of Martian soil, using Martian water for it. I don’t know what a few days of pure oxygen is going to do for her plants, though. We all go over and breathe on them now and then, to give them some carbon dioxide. It was nice of you to call me, Edith. I’ll be talking with you some more, later on.'

He turned the vidcam off for good, thinking, I can edit this tape for Al and for my parents and have mission control send it to them. That’ll surprise them. Maybe my parents will even send me a message in return.

Seiji Toshima had listened to all the arguments raging between Waterman and the rest of the team without once opening his mouth. Their fight had nothing to do with him, and he had been trained from earliest childhood to refrain from interjecting his own opinions where they had not been specifically requested.

But now Waterman was asking, not for his opinion, but for knowledge. That was different. Toshima was happy to exchange knowledge with the American Indian. After all, that was the purpose of this expedition to Mars, was it not? To gain knowledge. And what good is knowledge if it is not exchanged with others?

Jamie Waterman sat on a spindly-legged plastic stool in the center of the Japanese meteorologist’s laboratory. Toshima’s area had been dubbed 'weather central' by the team. It was the smallest of all the labs, as neat and gleamingly clean as if a squad of maintenance robots scrubbed and dusted the place every half hour.

The area looked like a showcase for an electronics shop. Where the other scientists’ workbenches were cluttered with glassware and instruments, Toshima had a row of computers humming quietly, their display screens showing graphs and curves. At the far end of the row, where it bent in an ell shape at the corner of the partitions, was a scanner that could take videotape and digitize the images for computer storage.

Toshima sat in the other corner on a rickety-looking stool. He had given Jamie his best stool, the only one with a back.

Since the death of Isoruku Konoye, Toshima felt an unexpected weight of responsibility on his shoulders; the responsibility of honor, of upholding the proud name of Japan even here, on this strange world. He knew that most of the others belittled everything Japanese; he could see it in their eyes when they spoke to him, in the barely tolerant smugness of men like Antony Reed and the overly solicitous politeness of the Americans and the Russians.

Back on Earth, Japan was a power to he reckoned with. Without Japan’s contributions of funding and technology the Mars Project would have died in bickering and cost-accounting among the Europeans, the Russians, and the Americans. Yet no Japanese was among the first group to land on Mars. And the only man to have been killed on this expedition had been the brilliant Japanese geochemist Konoye.

Seiji Toshima was the son of a factory worker, but within him beat the heart of a samurai. I will uphold the honor of the Japanese people. I will make these aliens respect Japan. I will make the entire world recognize the contributions of Japan to the exploration of Mars.

Suddenly he realized where his thoughts were leading. This is unworthy, he told himself. We are scientists. Knowledge knows no nationality. I am part of a team, not a medieval egomaniac.

'We can use the central processor,' he was saying to Jamie Waterman, unconsciously bending over to pat the minicomputer that stood slightly more than knee-high in that corner of the lab. Waterman was a curious one; as withdrawn and inward as a Japanese, almost. A man who understands correct behavior, Toshima thought, yet is willing to do battle for his beliefs.

'Can you access the geological file from here or should I go to the geology computer and copy it onto a floppy?' Jamie asked.

'I should be able to access it,' Toshima replied, his round flat face intently serious. Then he smiled slightly. 'Unless you have put a special restrictive code on the file to keep it secret.'

Jamie shook his head. 'No. Not at all.'

The meteorologist pulled a keyboard to his lap and flicked his stubby fingers over it. Jamie saw the display screen of the computer in front of him go blank for a moment, then show a full-color map of Mars made from a montage of photos taken from orbit.

Toshima muttered something in Japanese and the screen suddenly sprouted a weather map superimposed on the photo montage. Jamie recognized the symbols for a cold front, high and low pressure systems, and the irregular lopsided loops of isobars.

'That is the situation at this moment,' Toshima said. 'And here is the computer’s forecast for tonight' — the symbols shifted slightly; the numbers representing temperatures plummeted by a hundred or more — 'and tomorrow at noon, our time.' Again the front advanced slightly. The temperatures shot upward. At their latitude they even rose above freezing.

A hint of pride crept into Toshima’s voice as he added, 'I can even show the wind speeds and directions for much of the planet.'

'How?' Jamie asked, as vector arrows speckled the map. They showed the direction of the winds; the number of flags on their tails denoted the wind speed.

'The network of remote observation stations that has been placed around the planet,' Toshima replied. 'And,