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“We could offer the refugees land on Mars. Like the old Homestead Act, let ‘em settle—”
    “No!” Jamie shouted.
    Laughing, Dex replied, “I was wondering how long it’d take you to yell.”
    “You’re not serious,” the Navaho president said.
    “Not really,” Dex admitted. Then his expression turned crafty. “Although I bet we could build big domes, pump air into them, bake the oxides out of the soil and start growing crops.”
    Scowling, Jamie said, “Don’t even joke about that, Dex.”
    But Dex went on, “With the new fusion torch ships the transportation costs wouldn’t be so bad, I bet.”
    “Dex—“
    “I know, it’s just crazy enough for some politicians in Washington to go for it. Send the refugees to Mars! A trillion-dollar boondoggle.”
    “It’s not funny,” Jamie insisted.
    “Yeah,” Dex admitted. “I guess not. Wouldn’t work anyway. Even with the fusion rockets it’s too damned expensive to ship millions of people off-planet.”
    “So can we get a better break on the revenue income?” the president asked, returning to her point.
    “I don’t see how,” Dex replied immediately. “Besides, we’ve got a bigger problem now.”
    “Bigger?” asked Jamie.
    “With Washington backing out of the program, the Foundation’s going to have to carry the funding load pretty much alone.”
    “But there’s the Europeans, the Chinese—”
    “And the Russians, I know. They’ll all back away, you wait and see. Besides, what they’re putting into the pot now isn’t enough to lake up the slack.”
    “So it’s up to the Foundation,” Jamie said.
    “Yeah, but the donations are getting harder to come by. The big money’s going into reconstruction, restoring the electric power grid, new housing for the refugees. Everybody and his brother has their hands out. It’s endless.”
    “And Mars is a luxury,” the Navaho president murmured.
    “Worse than that,” said Dex. “The religious nuts want to close us down. They don’t want us finding anything else about the Martians. They don’t even want to think that there was another intelligent race on Mars.”
    “The New Morality?”
    “And the Holy Disciples in Europe and all the rest of them. They don’t like us finding anything that conflicts with their twelfth-century view of the world. They want to forget about Mars. They want everybody else to forget about Mars, as well.”
    Jamie sank back in his desk chair. “So they’re putting pressure on you.”
    “Not just me. On our donors, our backers. Spend your money here on Earth, they say. Help your fellow human beings instead of poking around on Mars.”
    “That’s a strong argument,” said the Navaho president.
    Searching for a ray of hope, Jamie said, “But the universities want to continue the exploration.”
    “The universities are under pressure, too,” said Dex, with a shake of his head. “And now that the White House has skunked us, it’s going to be tougher than ever to raise new funds.”

INTERVIEW

    So how can you possibly keep your team on Mars now that the government has canceled its funding for the program?”
    Jamie stared at the interviewer. He had spent most of the day answering questions from reporters. He had appeared on four different network news shows, skipping lunch to sit before their cameras and answer the same questions over and over again.
    Normally Jamie enjoyed interviews. He got a kick out of the cut-and-thrust, where the interviewer was trying to dig out something sensational and he was doing his best to get across the points he wanted to make despite the interviewer’s loaded questions. But now, after this long day of interrogation, Jamie felt tired and irritable.
    They’re ready to bury us, he realized. Half of them don’t even know that most of our funding comes from private sources, and has for nearly twenty years. Washington pulls out and they think we’re dead.
    This interview in the studio of a local Albuquerque affiliate of a