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boarding.
    By now the hab was familiar to billions of Earthbound TV viewers and Net surfers. Everyone on Earth had the opportunity to follow their adventures, which were beamed daily from Ground Control and carried on the evening news. Their webpage registered over a hundred million hits in the week following the landing. Mars had ceased to be space and had become a place.
    Raoul and Marc climbed down out of the hab as she approached in the last slanting rays of a ruddy sunset, two chubby figures in dark parka suits. Only Raoul's slight limp from frostbitten toes distinguished them. The tracker system had alerted them. Thanks to the mission planners, they would not have to carry Viktor in. The rover mated directly to hab airlock.
    But first, a little ceremony they had devised: salvaging water from the rover. Even with Viktor hurt, they followed procedure.
    The methane-oxygen burn made carbon dioxide, which the engine vented, and pure water. She backed the rover to the conical return ship. The gaudy NASA emblem they had completely covered with a plated-on, red-on-white MARS CONSORTIUM in wrap-around letters a meter high. Axelrod had made a point of including that thumb-in-your-eye gesture in the payload.
    Outside, Raoul and Marc hooked the water condensers to the input lines, so the chem factory inside could store it. They had full tanks of methane and oxygen for the liftoff, but water was always welcome, after the parching they had taken on the long flight here.
    They waved to her. Their little rituals; the guys made the gesture as a way of saying “welcome home.” In the bleak, rusty dusk, the cold of night biting already through to her, the symbolism was important. Mars was sharp, cold, and unrelenting, and they all felt it to the bone.

4

    APRIL 2015

    “V IKTOR, YOU SHOULD GET OUT, GO FOR A WALK .”
    “Thank you, no.”
    Julia walked around to where he sat on the couch, watching a news channel in Russian. The story seemed to be about the latest shuffling of governments. From her very limited Russian, Julia gathered that somebody had been president for the total span of three hours.
    “You can't just veg out like this.”
    “Vegetables have right to be left alone. Plant liberation.”
    “I thought if we both go to Axelrod, explain how well we work together—”
    “Work? Is what you call single entendre meaning?”
    She got up and paced, not liking this edgy humor of his, but in an odd way respecting it. No astronaut was built to take failure. They all knew they could be cut from a list, and many had been.
    But this list was the culmination of a lifetime, the A-grade ticket. Not just because everyone who returned would be wealthy—a rather new element in space careers, since NASA kept salaries at civil service levels for everybody. Because Mars was the sole destination that lifted the heart, that gave the inevitable risk a gravitas of immense historical and scientific heft.
    And Viktor wasn't going.
    He sat on the couch and watched the trivid and drank dark beer. He had quite a capacity, she had to give him that. He had arranged the five bottles before him in an exact pentagonal pattern.
    “Look, I'll go to Axelrod.”
    “I do not wish you to go begging for me.” He gave her a grave, owlish look.
    “I don't think four people is enough for this, anyway. I could start there—”
    “Four is the design spec.”
    “Look, all the thorough design studies at JSC showed—”
    “That six was better. Of course is. But is not cheaper.”
    “We aren't even taking a doctor, for Chrissake, just me.”
    “You have year of emergency medical training.”
    “But it's not enough! What if I had to do heart surgery, or—”
    “You are all excellent”—he paused to pronounce each part, excellent —“condition. No heart attacks likely.”
    “Okay, okay, but we should have a backup pilot, right?”
    “You say that because I am pilot-engineer.”
    “And if the pilot gets hurt? Not like a biologist breaking a leg, who