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pressure means that free-standing water simply could not exist. High summer at the Martian equator is when the ground temperature has risen to a sweltering 62 degrees Fahrenheit; during winter, the temperature can plunge to 172° below zero at the north pole.
    A long time ago, an all-but-forgotten American vice-president named Daniel Quayle made the following observation about Mars during a TV interview: ‘Mars is in essentially the same orbit. Mars is somewhat the same distance from the Sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.’
    Dan Quayle was stupid. Mars is not Earth’s twin brother with a bad skin problem. This is a cold world. This is a harsh world.
    But by no means is it a lifeless world.
    Forty million miles from Earth, the NASDA/Uchu-Hiko cycleship SS Shinseiki coasted on the last leg of its outbound flight to Mars, gracefully spinning on its central axis like a three-vaned weathercock.
    Nine months earlier, three interplanetary vessels had fired their nuclear-thermal engines and launched themselves from Earth orbit, following identical trajectories toward the red planet. Once having escaped Earth’s gravity well, beyond the orbit of the Moon, the vessels had rendezvoused in deep space. The three ships linked together at the multiple-target docking adapter at each forward bow, so that each vessel lay 120 degrees apart from the other, forming a pinwheel 240 feet in diameter. Long heat radiators accordioned outward from the ends of each of the three arms, and reaction-control jets fired to spin the pinwheel clockwise to produce one-third Earth gravity within the two cylindrical habitation modules that lay behind the solar-thermal dishes on each arm.
    In this way, once again, the Shinseiki was created, just as it had been twice already. Elsewhere in the vast distance separating Earth and Mars, its two sister cycleships were on other stages of the Mars Run; the USS Percival Lowell, the American ship operated by Skycorp, was on the long, lonely return flight from the red planet, and the SS Sergei Korolev, the CIS ship jointly operated by Glavkosmos and Arianespace, was being refitted for launch from the Mir space station in Earth orbit. Every five to ten months, depending on orbital conjunctions between the two planets, a different cycleship returns to Mars, with the three of them forming a long, cycling bridge between the worlds. This time, it was the Shinseiki’s turn to visit the planet of the war god.
    On this visit, though, the Shinseiki carried more than relief crews, consumables, replacement parts and mail. In hibernation deck-B of Module Two, five men were being administered drugs to wake them from their long sleep. Above them, on the other side of Arm Two’s long truss and sheathed in layers of protective gold film, were the two aeroshells which August Nash had photographed in the payload bay of the Constellation many months earlier.
    And on the opposite end of Arm Two, in a storage compartment in Module One, was a guitar.
    Ten months after he had first spoken with Richard Jessup, Ben Cassidy found himself watching a cup of coffee spill in a way that he had never seen coffee spill before in his life. He had just settled into a chair in the cycleship’s wardroom—a chair which pulled out along a slender, jointed rail from underneath the hexagonal table and unfolded like a box-top—and the Japanese commander, Minora Omori, had placed the paper cup of coffee on the table near his elbow. Dick Jessup, who had taken a seat across the table from him, had held out a briefing folder to him; when Cassidy had reached to take the folder, his elbow knocked over the cup.
    The coffee spilled in slow motion, as if caught by time-lapse photography. It tipped over at a weird angle and the coffee sloshed out at a slightly curving trajectory; like a blob of brown mercury the liquid