The Martian Race Read Online Free PDF Page A

looked at the others. Raoul and Marc beamed, Katherine was smiling her careful astronaut's smile that could mean anything. And Julia?
    It was like a sudden lurch into zero g. Falling. No Viktor.
    They were not just probabilities. She remembered thinking, We're ourselves, not race horses.
    She sat beneath the glaring, searching lights and thought, No Viktor. For two and a half years. By the time I get back, it will be over between us.

3

    JANUARY 2018

    T HE CRACKLE OF THE RADIO STARTLED HER. “H OME TEAM HERE . G OT your heads-up, Julia. How is he?” Marc's crisp efficiency came over clearly, but she could hear the clipped tenor anxiety, too.
    “Stable.” She quickly elaborated on Viktor's symptoms, glancing at his sleeping face. She'd had a year of physician's assistant training and was the official medical officer, but Marc had more field experience, and a med school degree. She felt relieved when he approved of her treatment. “Got to think what this means,” he said laconically.
    “We'll be there for supper. Extra rations, I'd say.”
    A small, very small joke. They had celebrated each major finding with a slightly excessive food allotment. Extra beer, too. She was in charge of brewing and they always had plenty on tap from the keg in the bio lab.
    So far, they had not marked disasters this way. And they were having their share.
    “My night to cook, too,” Marc said, transparently trying to put a jovial lilt to it. “Take care, Jules. Watch the road.”
    Here came the heart-squeezing moment.
    She turned the start-up switch and in the sliver of time before the methane-oxygen burn started in the rover engine, all the possible terrors arose.
    If it failed, could she fix it? Raoul and Marc could come out in an unpressured rover and rescue them, sure, but that would chew up time … and be embarrassing. She wasn't much of a mechanic, but still, who likes to look helpless?
    Then the mixture caught and the rover chugged into action. Settling in, she peered out at the endless obstacles with the unresting concentration that had gotten her on this mission in the first place. To spend five hundred seventy days on Mars you wanted people who found sticking to the tracks a challenge, not boring. One of the job specs for astronauts was an obsessive-compulsive profile.
    She followed the autotracker map meticulously, down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a boulder-strewn pass and down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a pass …
    Here, a drive back to base that proved uneventful was even pleasant. Mars was always ready to thunk a wheel into an unseen hole or pitch the rover down a slope of shifting gravel, so she kept exactly to the tracks they had made on the way out, a proven safe return. She had seen enough of this red-hued terrain to last a lifetime, anyway. Nothing out there for a biologist.
    In the distance she caught sight of the formation she and Viktor had dubbed the Shiprock on the way out. It looked like a huge old sailing ship, red layers sculpted by eons of high winds. They'd talked about Ray Bradbury's sand ships, tried to imagine skimming over the undulating landscape. The motion of the rover always reminded her a little of being on the ocean. They were sailing over the Martian landscape on a voyage of discovery, a modern-day Columbus journey. But Columbus made three voyages to the New World without landing on the continent. He “discovered” America by finding islands in the Caribbean, nibbling on the edges of a continent. Still, he got a holiday named for him …
    A sudden thought struck her: was that what they were doing— finding only the fringes of the Mars biology? Many people had speculated that the subterranean vents were the most likely places for life on this planet. The frontier for her lay hundreds of meters below, out of reach. She sighed resignedly. But it had been great fun, at first.
    She slurped more tea, recalling the excitement of the first months. Some of