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of night-vision goggles a few miles after the entrance ramp, turn the car lights off, and floor the accelerator. The police had clocked his car at speeds upward of 160 miles per hour. They did not bother chasing him. It would have been futile. But after a few months, they noticed a pattern and shortly afterward enlisted the assistance of a helicopter. Carter pulled over as soon as the beams from the powerful searchlight struck his car. When the ground police finally arrived, they found him sitting on the grass, smoking a cigarette. He was still wearing the goggles. The incident had been the reason the selection board had first passed him over for the Mars mission. It was rumored the president had secretly intervened in his favor.
    “You may wish to inform the others that lunch is being served,” Endicott said.
    Still sniffing the air, Carter pushed his way through the galley and through the docking adaptor to the utilities module. Carter found Colonel Tom Nelson in the forward habitability module. He was above Carter, strapped to a multipurpose exercise bench pulling against a three-inch-wide strip of rubber. There was barely enough room for his long legs to fit between the machine and the wall. Drops of sweat were floating in the air around him. He was the oldest member of both crews, and the most fit.
    “C’mon, you ol’ warhorse, chow time,” Carter announced.
    “It’ll take a few minutes for me to clean up,” Nelson responded.
    “Where’s Jean Paul?”
    “In the GP lab.”
    Carter made his way to the general purpose laboratory, where he found Jean Paul Brunnet, a doctor of planetary science and biology, wearing a pair of virtual goggles and moving his hands in midair as if they held something. The blue veins in the back of his hands were visible.
    “Chow time,” Carter announced.
    “Shhh . . .” Brunnet waved his arm behind his back for Carter to be quiet and did not notice him leaving. He was examining particles, less than two-thousandths of an inch in diameter, from a Martian rock that contained possible evidence of fossilized cells. The rocks had been brought back by a Japanese robotic mission. They weren’t much different from the rocks returned by an earlier American mission. Like the American samples, the evidence was inconclusive. The formations resembled a variety of bacteria found on Earth, but were much smaller, so small, in fact, most scientists doubted that they could be fossilized cells. Brunnet disagreed. The sample currently under his scope was several billion years old.
    He took a slide of a more recent sample and examined it closely. Nothing. Not even evidence of organic material. It was as if life and any trace of it had completely ceased to exist, for none of the younger rocks contained the controversial fossils. But Brunnet did not accept this conclusion. He knew that life evolved to meet the changing conditions of its environment, particularly the lower life-forms such as bacteria. It seemed the surface of Mars was too much for it now. Mars’s thin atmosphere did not filter out the ultraviolet rays of the sun. The combination of the rays with a highly oxidizing soil created an environment that was destructive to organic material. But still there could be pockets of life, perhaps deep below the surface. Small oases protected from the deadly radiation. He pulled up another slide. Again nothing. He had spent the entire morning preparing the rack of slides in front of him.
    With a sigh, he carefully removed the slide and filed it with the others he had examined. He vaguely recalled that Carter had said something about lunch, then realized he was hungry.
    He was the last to enter the galley. There were five men altogether, the four astronauts chosen to go to Mars and Jack Robbins, a space-station specialist, who had been aboard the
Unity
several months prior to the astronauts’ arrival. His primary responsibility was to oversee preparations for the Mars trip.
    Having pulled up the daily