Return to Mars Read Online Free PDF Page B

travelogue.
    “Mission control to Trumball,” at last came Connors’ rich baritone voice across a hundred million kilometers. “You are go for the VR tour. We have sixteen point nine million subscribers on-line, with more logging in as we announce your start time.”
    We’ll hit twenty million easy, Trumball thought happily. At ten bucks u head, that pays for almost half of our ground equipment. We’re going to make a profit out of this expedition!
     
    The Zieman family—father, mother, nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter—sat in the entertainment room of their suburban Kansas City house in front of the wall-to-wall video screen.
    Only one corner of the screen was activated: a serious-looking black man was explaining that the transmission from Mars took fourteen minutes to cover the distance between the two planets, even with the signal traveling at the speed of light, “which is three hundred thousand kilometers per second,” he emphasized.
    The nine-year-old shook his head emphatically. “It’s two hundred and ninety-nine point seven nine kilometers per second,” he corrected righteously.
    His sister hissed, “Ssshh!”
    “Put your helmets on,” their father said. “They’re going to start in a couple of seconds.”
    All four of them donned plastic helmets that held padded earphones and slide-down visors. They worked their fingers into the wired data gloves—mother helping her daughter, the boy proudly doing it for himself—then pulled the visors down when the man on the screen told them the tour was about to start.
    The black man’s voice counted down, “Three … two … one…”
    And they were on Mars!
    They were looking out on a red, rock-strewn plain, a ruddy, dusty desert stretching out as far as the eye could see, rust-colored boulders scattered across the barren gently rolling land like toys left behind by a careless child. The uneven horizon seemed closer than it should be. The sky was a bright butterscotch color. Small wind-shaped dunes heaped in precise rows, and the reddish sand piled against some of the bigger rocks. In the distance was something that looked like a flat-topped mesa jutting up over the horizon.
    “This is our landing site,” Dexter Trumball’s voice was telling them. “We’re on the westernmost extension of a region called Lunae Planum—the Plain of the Moon. Astronomers gave Martian geography bizarre names back in the old days.”
    The view shifted as Trumball turned slowly. They saw the habitat dome.
    “That’s where we’ll be living for the next year and a half. Tomorrow I’ll take you on a tour inside. Right now, the other members of the expedition are busy setting things in order; you know, housekeeping stuff. By tomorrow we’ll be able to walk through and see what it’s like.”
    Not a word from any of the Ziemans. Across the country, across the world, people sat staring at Mars, fascinated, engrossed.
    “Hear that faint, kind of whispering sound?” Trumball asked. ‘That’s the wind. It’s blowing at about thirty knots, practically a gale force wind on Earth, but here on Mars the air’s so thin that it’s not even stirring up the dust from the ground. See?”
    They felt their right hands groping into a pouch on the hard suit’s leg. “Now watch this,” Trumball said.
    They pulled out a toy-store horseshoe magnet, red and white.
    “The sand here on Mars is rich with iron ores,” Trumball explained, “so we can use this magnet…”
    They crouched down laboriously in the bulky hard suit and wrote out the letters M-A-R-S in the sand with the magnet as Trumball said, “See, we don’t have to touch the sand. The magnet pushes against the iron in the grains.”
    “I want to write my name!” said the Zieman daughter.
    “Shut up!” her brother snapped.
    Both parents shushed them.
    Trumball pocketed the magnet, then bent down and picked up a palm-sized rock. The viewers felt its weight and solidity in their gloved hands.
    “The rocks