decent, considering its quite natural preponderance of scholarly journals and texts (it was, after all, a museum boat). I got the impression that the craft was named after either the museum’s founder or one of its more generous patrons, but no one ever enlightened me on the subject, so I never learned which.
I found enough to read to occupy most of my time, although outside of the voluminous scientific literature the general run of reading material was limited to turn-of-the-century European novelists and playwrights, with an unexpected sprinkling of midcentury writers from the South American states, mostly new to me. I had read no Borges at all since school and happening upon his inimitable genius was most enthralling. But the poets were almost entirely new discoveries. I had read, or looked into, a few of the Argentines—Ascasubi, Lugones, Almafuerte—but the others—such as a now-forgotten poet, once enormously popular, named Carriego—were all unknowns. Among them was Vazquez, the Nobel-prize winner, who became the most exciting of my new finds.
With nothing else to do in the endless monotony, I read virtually all day long. From time to time I would have to switch the machine off for no other reason than that it was overheating. Luckily, no one else aboard had my leisure, so I had the book tapes all to myself. The girl, I think, had a portable reader in her cabin; the Doctor was busy with a detailed redaction of the thought record; I don’t know what Bolgov did—perhaps just sprawled on his bunk all day, glaring at the ceiling and sweating greasily—and the ship, of course, navigated itself.
In this strange way we traversed the distance between Luna and Mars, hardly seeing or speaking to each other except at meals. And I passed the monotony of transit gaining a modest education in obsolete European novelists and obscure South American poets. And without the least trouble or contact with a Mandate scout.
* * * *
Mars became a big, mottled orange with spots of permafrost marking its poles. The Doctor expanded on his plans. It would have been begging for trouble, had he done the usual thing and moored the d’Eauville in a parking orbit and taken either the gig or the Lanzetti down. For surely the Earthside cops would have reconstructed what had happened and beamed an alert to their CA colleagues at Deimos Terminal. A quick scout would have spotted the d’Eauville without trouble and cut off the Doctor’s escape route by simply sitting him out.
So he planned on something a trifle more risky, and that was to set the spacecraft down on the surface. Now an Icarus is about as small and light a craft as can safely be used for a crossover, but it’s still cumbersome and tricky and fragile enough to make planetfall dangerous. The safety margin, however, got a boost from the fact that the gravity field of Mars is skimpy at best and the museum had already modified the d’Eauville’s design to take an outsized and high-powered drive engine for just such a purpose. Anyway, the Doctor was certain the computer could set her down on her tail in the flats west of the Drylands without blowing a venturi or springing a seam. I hoped he was right.
Once a safe planetfall was accomplished, the CA cops simply had no way of finding us, unless they had thirty times the manpower and flying strength they had had when I was last here. Because they could only locate the d’Eauville if they made an aerial search of the entire planetary surface, acre by acre. Which was a logistic impossibility.
The trouble with making planetfall in the westernmost Drylands was that we would have to do an awful lot of surface travel after landing. But that could not be helped: it would be like waving red flags and yelling “Look at me!” to go any closer to a major colony like Laestrygonum. And we needed a flat space with solid bedrock to set down on.
We didn’t dare risk running so much as a single orbit, since we wanted to come down with the least possible chance of being sighted en route. In mid-crossover Bolgov had carefully programed the d’Eauville’s piloting and navigational computer to match intrinsics with the planet upon approach, so that the craft could segue smoothly from its original flightpath directly into a landing pattern without a break. It was a masterly job, and it went off without a hitch.
We came down in a slow glide, at an elongated angle to make maximum use of the thin atmosphere as a cushion to slow us down, since we didn’t wish to run the risk of using the ordinary spiral braking orbit. A fast planetfall was of the essence, since every single second of time between the moment we broke out of deep space and the moment we hit topsoil we were in constant danger of being noticed on somebody’s radar.
So we came in high up in the northern hemisphere over Arcadia and rode her down across Orcus at a shallow angle that tightened into a fish-hook arc. The glide path took us curving across the midregions of the Mare Sirenum in the direction of Aonius Sinus, with our terminus calculated just west of central Phaethontis.
The fabric began heating up till the hull would soon be a dull cherry-red. The Sirenum went hissing by beneath us in a rusty-purplish blur, much too hazy for us to make out anything but the largest craters. It was a shame we were going too fast to see the landscape, because this was very historic country. The area we were passing over had been the first chunk of local real estate that we Earthmen had ever gotten a close-up look at, even if it had only been a passing glance. I refer to the history-making Mariner IV fly-by, way back in 1965. The tiny, unmanned craft had skimmed across this same part of the Sirenum with all cameras whirring.
The only major canal that traverses the western half of Phaethontis is called the Thermodon. The Doc had hoped to be able to set the d’Eauville down near the west bank of the Thermodon, because the craft had been spray-enameled a dark mottled pattern and would blend with the colors of the canal, reducing the risk of a visual sighting. Coming out of our glide path for a taildown was a tricky bit of maneuvering, but the gyros were up to it, and we sat down, shaken by racking shudders that made the fabric screech and the structure groan. But we made it. The jets died with a cough, the craft trembled, then sat still. And then we all began to breathe again…
We had made it and in one piece.
“My compliments to the museum staff, Doc,” I said in the unexpected silence. “Not many ships could live through a planetfall that tough.”
“Thank you, my boy, but I believe the credit belongs to the Rolls-Royce people. They built good craft in those days…”
We unstrapped, levered ourselves out of the pressure chairs, which deflated with a piercing whistle, and began taking off our emergency suits and putting on the lightweight thermal suits we would need for Mars itself.
It seemed that only the Doctor and I had ever been on Mars before. So we helped the other two accustom themselves to the use of their respirators. Of the four of us, only I had ever undergone the Mishubi-Yakamoto treatments and could do without the artificial breathing boosters.
We had come down just where the Doc had planned. All about us, but tapering off due west, the canal extended like a four-foot-high miniature jungle. Seen from above—it was to be hoped!—the Antoine d’Eauville ought to blend unobtrusively with the shrubbery. Of course, to anyone crossing Phaethontis either afoot, on slidar, or by sand-tractor, it would stand out somewhat more prominently than a dozen sore thumbs, and that we could not help. However, this was the edge of the Drylands, and nobody ever comes this far south, not even the People, for the very good reason that there is nothing here to attract them.
* * * *
Actors on the cube, stuck in a space-adventure epic, always make planetfall, crack the seal, and hit dirtside in no time flat. The conventions of stereovision drama aside, in real life it takes from two to three hours before you are ready to leave the spacecraft. You have to deprogram your computer, dampen the power pile, let the fabric cool, run triple checks for a burst seam, check out suits and respirators, and do a hundred other things. In our case, as we would not be coming back to the craft until this whole expedition was over, it took closer to five hours before we were ready
