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Tomorrow we’ll walk through the dome. In a few days we’ll be sending a team in one of the ground rovers out to the Grand Canyon. Later on, we’ll fly two people out to the shield volcanoes in the rocketplane. And we’ll be flying the unmanned soar-planes over longer distances, too. If all goes well, we’ll fly them out to the old Viking 1 landing site and maybe even farther north, to the edge of the ice cap.”
    Through all this, the viewers stared out at the Martian vista.
    “But that’s all for the future,” Trumball concluded. “For now, so long from Mars. Thanks for being with us.”
    For long moments the Zieman family sat unmoving, unspeaking. At last they reluctantly pulled off their helmets.
    “I wanna go to Mars,” announced the nine-year-old. “When I grow up I’m gonna be a scientist and go to Mars.”
    “Me too!” his sister added.

DINNERTIME: SOL 1

    JAMIE FOUND HIS OLD PERSONAL CUBICLE UNCHANGED FROM SIX YEARS earlier. The bunk with its thin Martian-gravity legs was waiting for him. The plastic unit that combined desk and clothes closet stood empty, just as he had left it.
    Everything’s in good working order, he marveled. They had filled the dome with inert nitrogen when they’d left, six years earlier. Now the air was an Earth-normal mix of nitrogen and oxygen, so they could live inside the dome in their shirtsleeves. Or less.
    During the first expedition they had been hit by a meteor swarm, almost microscopic little pebbles that had punctured the dome in several places and even grazed Jamie’s spacesuit helmet. One in a trillion chance, the astronomers from Earth had told them. Jamie nodded, hoping that the odds remained that way.
    Someone had gotten the loudspeakers going and was playing a soothing classical piano recording. Beethoven, Jamie thought. He remembered how the cosmonauts played Tchaikovsky and other Russian composers during the first expedition.
    Yet the dome felt subtly different. Its new-car smell was gone. The first expedition had occupied it for only forty-five days, but that had been enough to take the shine off it. The dome felt like home, true enough, but not exactly the way Jamie had remembered it.
    “Toilets ain’t workin’.”
    Jamie turned to see Possum Craig standing in his doorway, a gloomy frown on his heavy-jowled face. I he accordion-slide door had been left open, so there had been no need ID knock.
    “Both toilets?” Jainie asked.
    Craig nodded glumly. “Must be the water line clogged up. Or froze.”
    Officially, Craig was a geochemist, recruited from a Texas oil company to run the drilling rig. The biologists theorized that Martian life thrived underground, perhaps miles underground, and the lichen they had found in the surface rocks were merely an extension of this below-ground ecology. “Plutonian biosphere,” they called it.
    Unofficially, Craig was the expedition’s repairman. There wasn’t a tool he could not wield expertly. He was plumber, electrician, and general handyman, all wrapped in one package. Trumball had started calling him “Wiley J. Coyote” within a week of their launch toward Mars, when Craig had cleverly repaired a malfunctioning computer display screen with little more than a screwdriver and a pair of tweezers from the medical equipment.
    Craig preferred the new name to his usual “Possum,” an old oilfield reference to his painfully prominent nose.
    “You think it’s frozen?” Jamie asked, crossing his compartment in two strides and stepping past Craig, out into the dome’s open space.
    “Most likely. We shoulda buried it, first thing.”
    “And the recycling system’s not on-line yet.”
    “I could try overpressurin’ the line, but I don’t wanta run the risk of splittin’ the pipe. You don’t want that kinda mess, not the first night.”
    Stacy Dezhurova came up to them, a troubled pair of furrows between her heavy brows. Her hair was sandy brown; she wore it in a short pageboy that looked as if she’d put a