the gig. He sprung the cargo port and lifted the gig out of its cradle next to the Lanzetti, using the cargo crane, and set it down gently in the dark mossy foliage.
The craft’s gig, in this case, was an atmospheric skimmer instead of the usual two-man space boat. Actually, they had chosen well in picking a skimmer, since it is the fastest and most practical mode of transport that can be used on Mars, certainly dozens of times faster and more comfortable than a sand-tractor. Bolgov and Keresny then began to stow our gear aboard the skimmer. I suppose I should have gone to lend them a hand, but I could not do it, somehow. I wanted to savor to the fullest my first moment on Mars after all these lonely, empty, bitter years.
So I came out of the airlock below the control blister, climbed down the extensible ladder, jumped down to the springy moss, and then just stood there for a long moment, tasting the dry, spicy tang of the cold, thin air of Mars, feeling the crispness of the rubbery-tendriled moss underfoot, and the exhilarating lightness of Martian gravity. How long, how long since I had tested that ozonous tang at the back of my mouth, how long since I had felt the skin of my face pucker and roughen to the biting chill in the air…?
I stood there silent and motionless for a long time, brooding on old, glorious dreams and the memory of comrades I had known and loved, all dead men now, with six feet of dry Martian dust their everlasting home. My eyes filled and ran over with tears. Tears that vanished and were gone almost in the same instant they were shed. Tears that the desiccated Martian air drank thirstily, grateful for the rare gift of moisture…
I looked about me, eyes blurring, remembering…
My memory drifted back to my first landing on Mars, years and years ago. When I was young and raw and green and idealistic. I recalled how we had ridden down in a little, crowded, rattletrap satellite shuttle from Deimos Terminal, flying east across the Tharsis region to make planetfall at the debarkation camp out in Isidis Regio. I remembered how I had felt then when I first came out of the lock with the other new arrivals, breathing hoarsely through the strange, ill-fitting respirators, waiting to pile on the long tractor train for an interminable, bumpy ride across the craterlets to Syrtis. Staring about me then, I had been struck dumb with awe at the utter strangeness of the scene—the dim, flat stretch of the Isidis dustlands; the grim, dark, shaggy bulk of Syrtis Major, thrusting like a wedge-shaped peninsula deep into the sea of fantastic yellow sands; and the glistening pile that was Syrtis Colony itself, rising on the oddly near horizon, a haze of dim foggy blue from the earth-density air trapped within its hemispherical MPB field.
As we had approached the colony itself, several of my fellow travelers were loudly exclaiming that they had thought the city was supposed to be domed. Did Colonial Administration expect them to wear these uncomfortable masks all the time?
I remember the offhand manner in which the tractor jockey, an old Mars hand, lean as a rail and mahogany brown from deep space radiation, explained laconically that the original colony had been set up under a collapsible plastic dome—”too damned easily collapsible,” was his joke. But that was back before they invented the molecular-potential barrier field, an energy plane whose surface-tension charge repelled air molecules and stabilized internal air pressure, which made it possible to build up and maintain an atmospheric pressure of Earth-norm density—
“Oh!”
The mood snapped at the unexpected sound. I turned. The girl, Ilsa, had followed me out of the lock and was taking her first look at the surface of Mars. I went over and stood beside her; her eyes were wide with amazement, and she sucked in her breath in a gasp and sank her fingers in my arm. I didn’t blame her: your first actual look at the Martian landscape can be an amazing experience.
The craters are the first surprise Mars has for you. There are so many of them, and they are everywhere. Some of them are just little pockmarks in the ground that you can barely put your fist into; and they range all the way up to the super-monster, in the southeastern corner of whose ringwall the entire colony of Sun Lake City is built.
Her fingers dug in. I glanced down, seeing her wide-eyed stare beneath the goggles, and grinned faintly, remembering my own astonishment. For the second big surprise is when you discover that the Red Planet is not red at all, but a patchwork crazy-quilt of yellow dustlands and blue moss growth, broken here and there by vivid patches of raw orange and brilliant, impossible purple.
The first settlers couldn’t get over their amazement at the color scheme. Which is absurd, but human enough. In hindsight it’s hard to understand how anybody ever made the mistake of thinking Mars was going to be red. After all, one of the Russian scientists, Tikhov or somebody like that, deduced that Martian vegetation, if there turned out to actually be any Martian vegetation, would have to be blue in order for the planet to look red from the viewpoint of Earthside visual astronomers. He realized that more than a century and a half ago, back around 1909. And it wasn’t even that clever a deduction in the first place. All it took was a fair grasp of the mechanics of light, which the old-time boys had figured out even earlier, starting with Newton.
We just stood there for a while, just staring around. The sky was dead, dull black, lightening a little toward dusty violet at the edges of the horizon where the air molecules got a chance to bunch up a bit and do some diffracting. The stars were piercingly sharp and clear, and they were weirdly different from the stars you see at night, Earthside. These did not twinkle, did not waver in the slightest, and they were the damndest colors. Earthside the stars mostly seem glittering, flashing white, sometimes with a touch of blue or red, but that is simply because the faint, colors of starlight have little chance of getting through Earth’s mulligan stew of an atmosphere. Here they blaze in the rarest of colors: half a dozen shades of green and blue, all tones from pale yellow through red, and even a few you simply wouldn’t believe, like Alpha Derceto, which is pure brown, and Delta Erigius, which is puce.
She was looking up, searching about. Grinning, I asked her if she was looking for the moons, and she nodded and asked where they were. I tried to tell her that they were simply too damn small to be visible to the unaided vision, except under certain rather rare circumstances, but she found that impossible to believe.
“But that’s simply insane!” she said, the thin air making her voice tinny and flat. “Why, back home you can even see a communications satellite on clear nights, if you know where to look. And they’re only ten or fifteen feet across, where here— Well, Deimos, the nearest moon, is supposed to have a diameter of ten miles. It’s just crazy to say you simply can’t see them at all!”
“I didn’t say you couldn’t see them at all, I said they were too small to be seen except under certain rare conditions,” I reminded her. “One of those conditions is knowing just where to look. In the first place, Deimos is the outer moon, not the nearest, and it’s the only one you can see without magnification, because it moves so very slowly—it takes two days, local time, to cross the sky. The trouble is that it has a lousy albedo, and it’s too high for its size to make any difference in its degree of visibility.”
She sounded dubious. “Is that really true? What about the other one?”
“Phobos you never can see at all,” I told her, “even though it’s bigger than Deimos, has a higher albedo—that means ‘reflecting power,’ by the way. It’s also very, very, very close to the surface of the planet.”
“Then why can’t you see it?”
“Because it moves too fast. It goes all around the planet three whole times in a single day, and if you don’t think that is fast, well, stop and think about it.”
“But I still don’t see—!”
“You simply can’t know where precisely to look for it. It’s a question of albedo, for the most part. You see,
