Mars Read Online Free PDF

the explorers were left behind, the precious samples would make it to the expedition spacecraft riding in orbit and then back to the scientists waiting on Earth.
    That first chore completed to Vosnesensky’s satisfaction, he ordered the team to move supplies into the dome. They hurried to beat the oddly tiny sun as it got close to the western horizon. The construction vehicle towed the heavy pallets of equipment, while the explorers performed feats of seemingly superhuman strength, lifting man-tall green cylinders of oxygen tanks and bulky crates that would have weighed hundreds of pounds on Earth.
    Sweating like a laborer inside his pressurized hard suit, Jamie smiled bitterly at the thought that the first task of the first explorers on Mars was to toil like coolies, grunting and lifting for hours in mindless drudgery. The public-relations statements and TV pictures make it all look so damned easy, he thought. Nobody ever watches a scientist at work—especially when he’s doing dog labor.
    Neither he nor the others paid any special attention to their low-gravity strength. Over the nine-plus months of their flight from Earth their spacecraft had spun on a five-kilometer-long tether to simulate a feeling of weight, since prolonged periods in zero gravity weakened muscles dangerously and demineralized bones. Their artificial gravity began at a normal Earthly one g, then was slowly reduced during the months of their flight to the Martian value of roughly one-third g. Now, on the surface of Mars, they could walk normally yet still lift enormous weights with their Earth-evolved muscles.
    At the end of their long, exhausting day they moved at last inside the inflated dome. The tiny sun was turning the sky flame-red and the temperature outside was already fifty below zero.
    The dome was filled with breathable air at normal Earth pressure and temperature, according to the gauges. The thermometer read precisely twenty-one degrees Celsius: sixty-nine point eight degrees Fahrenheit.
    The six of them were still inside their pressurized hard suits, however, and would stay in them until Vosnesensky decided it was safe to breathe the dome’s air. Jamie’s suit felt heavy against his shoulders. It no longer had that “new car” odor of clean plastic and untouched fabric; it smelled of sweat and machine oil. The backpack regenerator replaced carbon dioxide with breathable oxygen, but the filters and miniature fans inside the suit could not remove all of the odors that accumulated from strenuous work.
    “Now comes the moment of truth,” he heard Ilona Malater’s husky voice, sounding sexy—or maybe just tired.
    Vosnesensky had spent the past few hours checking the dome for leaks, monitoring the air pressure and composition, fussing over the life-support pumps and heaters grouped together in the center of the hardened plastic flooring. One by one, the others slowly drifted to him, clumping in their thickboots, waiting for him to give the order they ail awaited with a strange mixture of eagerness and dread.
    Like it or not, Vosnesensky was their team leader, and years of training had drilled them to obey their leader’s orders without a thought for his nationality. Everything they did on this dangerously different world would be carried out according to rules and regulations painstakingly developed on Earth. Vosnesensky’s first and most important task was to see that those rules and regulations were carried out here on Mars.
    Now the Russian turned from the gently humming air-circulation fans and the row of backup oxygen tanks to see that his five team members had gathered around him. It was difficult to make out his face through the helmet visor, impossible to read his expression. In his barely accented American English he said, “All the gauges are in the normal range. It appears safe to get out of our suits.”
    Jamie recalled a physicist at Albuquerque, frustrated over an experiment that refused to work right, telling him,