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to put itself into orbit around Mars; it made one sweep past the planet, firing off pictures as it went. Mariner sent back twenty-one pictures, in all. They covered maybe one per cent of Mars’s surface.
    Natalie York had never even thought about Mars, other worlds, before Mariner. She wasn’t even
interested
in astronomy, or space travel, or other worlds, or any of that. Astronomy was a subject for the handful of old men who controlled access to the bigtelescopes, and used them to pursue their obscure, decade-spanning projects. Even back in 1964, geology – the study of the Earth – was what captured
her
imagination. Stuff you could walk around in, and pick up, and examine with your eyes and hands.
    Mariner made everything different. For a while, anyhow.
    She remembered a teacher at school, trying to put over the basics of astronomy.
    In July 1964, when Mariner reached Mars, the planet had been in opposition. Mars was a planet that circled the sun, like Earth; but its orbit was outside the Earth’s, and its year was twice as long. That meant its distance from Earth was constantly changing, as Earth scooted by on the inside track. But when sun, Earth and Mars were lined up, in that order, Mars would come closest to Earth.
Opposition. That’s what it means. So at opposition, Mars is almost opposite the sun, seen from Earth. At its closest point
.
    She remembered, as she’d learned of this, a sudden sense of herself as a passenger on the Earth – as if it was a giant spinning spaceship, steaming past this great red liner called Mars.
    To do their jobs, astronomers have to be able to figure out where they are, in relation to the rest of the universe. They have to be able to imagine, really and truly, that they aren’t living on a flat Earth
.
    She’d gotten copies of the pictures radioed back by Mariner 4, and had indeed taped them to her bedroom wall.
    The first photo showed the limb of the planet, seen from close to; the horizon curved, and surface markings were vaguely, frustratingly visible. Still, the image was a hell of a contrast to the misty, unreal disk you could see through a telescope.
    Mariner’s photos showed how Mars would look to an orbiting astronaut.
    The next few pictures showed views of the surface, as if looking down from directly overhead. The monochrome images looked like aerial pictures of a desert, Arizona maybe …
    Ben Priest said now, ‘You know, Mariner was a big shock to us all. Before Mariner, we thought we understood Mars pretty well. You could walk around on the surface with nothing more than a facemask. We thought we saw seasonal changes in dark patches on the surface, that were maybe down to some kind of spreading vegetation.
    ‘But now, everything looks different. We had it wrong –
all
of it. Earth-like Mars certainly isn’t.’
    It was Mariner’s seventh picture that was the real surprise.
    The seventh picture showed craters. Nobody was expecting to find
those
.
    Not Arizona, then. Mars looked more like the Moon.
    Priest said, ‘We know now the atmosphere is impossibly thin. It’s mostly carbon dioxide, and there’s no oxygen, and hardly any water vapor. Not even nitrogen … Mariner didn’t find any canals, incidentally. Even though it flew over an area where a lot of the most prominent canals were expected.
    ‘All our ideas were turned upside down by this. With such a thin atmosphere, any life must be very hardy. Nothing like terrestrial life at all. But, of course, the question of life won’t be settled until humans land there. It was one hell of a disappointment, the NASA guys tell me. Suddenly, Mars became a place it wasn’t worth traveling to. If we don’t make it to Mars, if the funding and resources aren’t assembled, then for me, that shock of Mariner 4 will have been the turning point.’
    York shrugged. ‘But NASA oversold Mars for years. It was a kind of holiday resort in the sky, teeming with life, justifying all the billions they wanted to pour into