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to enable them to jump the line. He said apologetically, ‘We built this for Walter Cronkite-type news conferences. Our corporate masters insisted. Normally it’s deserted. But you’re in luck, Ms Linsay; the scuttlebutt is that the Martian rainstorms have cleared enough for the Envoy mission controllers to attempt a landing this very day. So it’s a good chance to show off to you what we’re doing here.’
    Sally glanced at her father. ‘Rainstorms? On Mars?’
    ‘It isn’t our Mars,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’
    Raup led them into a central auditorium, with rows of benches before a lectern, the walls coated with big display screens. The place was full of chattering technicians and scientist types. For now the wall screens were blank, but smaller screens and tablets around the room showed grainy colour images being put through various enhancement processes. Sally glimpsed fragments of landscapes, grey-blue sky, rust-red ground.
    ‘Wow,’ Raup said, seeing the screen images, for once not sounding like he was simulating the emotions he expressed. ‘Looks like they did it, they landed the Envoy. The first time we made it, to this copy of Mars.’
    ‘Envoy?’
    ‘A series of unmanned space probes.’ Raup drew her attention to hard-copy images on the wall: trophy pictures of chunks of a planet, taken from space. ‘The first couple of Envoys to Mars were flybys, and these are the pictures we got. Today’s was the first actual landing, a necessary precursor to the manned missions that will follow. The very latest pictures, live from the Mars of the Gap!’
    Willis snorted. ‘Yeah, but they’re getting the mix wrong. The sky is nowhere near that colour.’
    Sally stared at her father. If these were the first landings on this Mars, how could he know that? But she’d long ago learned not to try to interrogate him.
    Raup said, ‘You understand that the probe itself is really only a test article. For now we’re just proving the propulsion technology. With the Gap, you can do a lot . We’re hauling over nuclear rocket stages – inertial confinement fusion, if you’re familiar with the technology – and with those babies we’re getting to Mars in weeks , where it used to take you seven, eight, nine months depending on the opposition. . .’
    Sally knew or cared nothing about nuclear rocketry, but the pictures caught her attention. One showed a disc, presumably the full globe of Mars imaged from space – but it wasn’t the Mars she remembered from decades of NASA pictures back on the Datum. This Mars was washed-out pink, with streaks of lacy cloud, and patches of steel grey that glinted in the sun: lakes, oceans, rivers. Liquid water, on Mars, visible from space. And there was green, the green of life.
    ‘I told you,’ Willis said. ‘This Mars is different.’
    ‘You understand you’re seeing the Mars of the Gap universe, the universe one step over from here,’ Raup said, back to his over-rehearsed way. ‘The images are radioed back to the Brick Moon, our station in the Gap. We have a clever system of packet-feeding the data stepwise to our facilities here . . . Our Mars is a frozen desert. This Mars, the Gap Mars, is something like Arizona, though at a higher altitude. The Envoys confirmed the higher atmospheric pressure. On this Mars you could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a facemask and sun cream.
    ‘In this particular launch window, it was unlucky for us that our twin Envoy landers arrived in the middle of the worst storm season we’ve seen since we started watching Gap Mars, oh, a decade or more back. Not dust storms – here you get rain, snow, hail, lightning. The controllers didn’t want to risk that maelstrom, and for weeks the orbiters’ cameras have sent back nothing but images of lightning flashes. But now the storms have settled out, and evidently the mission planners agreed to go for a descent attempt. We’re just waiting for the images to stabilize