Mars

"Oh?"

"She hasn’t said anything to me, you realize, but I can see that she’s fascinated by you. And if ever a young lady looked up to a father figure, it’s her."

"Who?"

"Why, Joa

6

Jamie delayed going to the dining room until he was certain most of the others had eaten and returned to their individual quarters. Most of the regular McMurdo staff and visiting researchers shared dormitory rooms, but the Mars Project’s one luxury was to afford each of its members a private room. Jamie had spent the day talking with the new arrivals, embarrassing them and himself. He had no desire to speak with any of them further. Not this evening.

Sure enough, the dining room was almost empty. It had been a long day for the newcomers, he realized. The flight in from Christchurch took ten hours even when the weather was good. Unpacking, getting settled in this spartan godforsaken base — the new arrivals were already in their bunks, for the most part. Only a couple of them still sat at one of the long galley tables, tiredly huddled over the remains of their di

Somebody had put a cassette in the tape player up by the snow-covered window: a softly whining old country lament: "Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys…"

Or scientists, Jamie said to himself as he took a tray and walked down the self-service counter. He found that he had no appetite, settled for a slice of soggy defrosted pie and a mug of coffee. Then he went to the farthest corner of the dining room and sat alone at the end of an empty table.

No one paid him any attention. Which suited Jamie fine. He was an outsider now, a pariah, and they all knew it.

Then Joa

She went straight to the coffee urn and poured herself a steaming mug. Then, looking around the nearly empty dining room, she saw Jamie and came to his table.

"I could not sleep," she said, sitting at the corner of the table just to his right.

Jamie nodded toward the coffee mug. "That’s not going to help you."

She laughed lightly. "Oh, caffeine never keeps me awake. I was raised on coffee."

"In Brazil."

"Yes."

As if to prove her point Joa

Joa

"Half Navaho."

"In Brazil you would be called a mestizo. I am a mestizo myself. My father and mother, both mestizos. There are millions of us in Brazil. Tens of millions in Latin America, from Mexico southward."

"And two here in Antarctica," Jamie said.

She laughed again, a pleasant happy sound. She seemed less tense than she had been earlier, her voice stronger. "Yes. Two of us here."

Jamie smiled back at her. They began to talk, easily, quietly. He could feel himself relaxing with her.

She told him about Sao Paulo and Rio, how the poor farmers and villagers had streamed into the cities in such a torrent that they had swollen into a single urban megacity more than three hundred kilometers wide that stretched from the beaches to the inland hills, sparkling high-rise towers for the rich, sprawling filthy slums for the poor, and smoggy lung-corroding pollution for all.

Jamie found himself telling her about Berkeley and the Bay, beautiful, earthquake-vulnerable San Francisco and the golden fertile valleys of California. And then about New Mexico and his grandfather.

"Al thinks of himself as a Navaho, but he acts like an Anglo businessman. He can go around saying that a man can’t get rich if he takes proper care of his family, yet he owns half the housing developments on the north side of Santa Fe."

Jamie lost track of the time, talking with Joa

"But it’s nothing serious," he quickly added. "What about you? Are you married? Engaged?"

Joa

Then she asked, "When did you first become interested in going to Mars?"

"Oh, god, it happened so long ago I don’t even remember… wait, yes I do." The memory came into clear clean focus. "In elementary school. They took the class on a field trip to the planetarium. The show was all about Mars."

"Ah," said Joa

"I started reading everything I could about Mars. Fiction, nonfiction. Pretty soon I found the scientific books much more interesting than the fiction."

"That is why you became a scientist?"

Jamie thought a moment. "Yep, I guess maybe it is."

"But why a geologist?" she asked.

With a grin, Jamie replied, "You can’t spend much time in the southwest without becoming a geologist. Have you ever seen the Grand Canyon? Or the Barringer Meteor Crater?"

Joa

"The mountains, the rocks — they’re like picture books that have the history of the planet written on them."

"And Mars?"

He shrugged. "A new world. Nobody’s touched it yet."

Jamie had done a double major in school: geology and planetary sciences. He did not want to be just another rock hound or end up working for an oil company. He wanted to find out what makes the world the way it is; not just the Earth, the other planets too.

But there were no jobs in planetary sciences when he left school with his brand-new Ph.D. He accepted a postdoc at CalTech and spent a year hunting for meteorites. When the year was finished he wound up taking an assistant professorship at Albuquerque, thinking that he would have to spend the rest of his life teaching would-be oil hunters and doing field work in the summers. He was in Canada studying astroblemes, the scars from ancient meteor strikes, when the Mars Project sent out its first call for scientists.

"A new world," Joa

"My parents were against it. Even my grandfather had his doubts. But I had to give it a shot, had to try. I didn’t want to be just another assistant professor working toward tenure. I didn’t want them going to Mars without…" Jamie suddenly realized where he was and what he had agreed to. "…without me," he finished lamely.

Joa

"I will write to my father," she said softly. "Perhaps there is something he can do."

Jamie said nothing, but he thought to himself bleakly, They’ve already got one part-Indian set for the mission. They won’t need another.