2007. Dangerous Games

WINNING MARS by Jason Stoddard

New writer Jason Stoddard has made sales to Interzone, Sci Fiction, Strange Horizons, Futurismic, Fortean Bureau, and Talebones, and is at work on his first novel. He works in the advertising industry, lives in Valencia, California, and maintains a website at www.jasonstoddard.net.

In the exciting but slyly satirical story that follows, he postulates that the Reality TV/Adventure Gaming craze will take us all the way to Mars-but that wherever we go, we’ll bring our human baggage with us.

Death came as nothing more than a thin white line in the light blue Martian sky. Like a single strand of spider-silk, gossamer and insubstantial. There was no sound.

Nandir’s team, Glenn Rothman thought, stopping for a moment to watch. Chatter from the Can above: Unstable. Tumbled. Nobody knew why.

Glenn shivered. He’d almost picked Nandir’s route, which seemed easier on the rolling and flying legs but more difficult on the Overland Challenge to the travel pod. Perfect for him and-

“Come on!” Alena said, over the local comm. She was standing thirty feet in front of him, looking back, her face twisted into an angry mask.

“We just lost Nandir.”

“I’m going to lose you if you don’t get moving!”

“Don’t you care?”

An inarticulate growl. Then a sigh. They were, after all, all camera, all the time. “Of course I care. But I want to win.”

Glenn shook his head. He bounced over to her and tried to take her hand, but she pulled away. “Not now!” she said. Her normally full lips were compressed into a thin line, the soft arcs of her face pulled into something harder and more brutal. The face he used to love. The face he still loved.

She bounded away and he hurried to catch up. She’d made it clear that they were only back together for this one ultimate challenge, bigger than Everest, bigger than freeclimbing Half-Dome, bigger than marathoning the Utah desert, bigger than swimming the English Channel, bigger than their four-year marriage, bigger than anything he could give.

He caught up and tried to give her a smile. She looked ahead grimly. The terrain was getting more rugged. Ahead of them rose part of Ius Chasma, a two-thousand-foot near-vertical wall they would have to freeclimb to reach their transpo pod.

The low gravity was both a blessing and a curse. Glenn was still getting used to what he could do. The squeezesuit and header made him top-heavy, throwing off his balance, but his total weight here was still less than half of what he was used to.

“More human interest, Glenn,” the Can blatted at him from his private channel.

He shook his head. They’d been ordering them around since before they left Earth.

“Glenn, we need to see Alena.”

He plodded ahead.

“Glenn, we’re close to contract breach.”

He turned to focus on Alena. The squeezesuit clung to her curves, and the transparent header was designed to show as much of her pretty face as possible. Less attractive now, perhaps, with her hair hanging damp and her mouth set in a hard line.

“More,” they said.

Glenn tried running in front of her and feeding the view from one of his rear cameras, but it was too hard to concentrate on the terrain ahead and keep her in frame. Eventually he dropped back to focus on the exaggerated hourglass shape of her suit.

“Good,” they said. “Stay there for a while.”

“Okay,” he said. Idiots.

“Of course someone is going to die. Probably lots of some-ones.”

Jere Gutierrez nodded solemnly. So maybe the old fuck wasn’t just another crank with a stupid dream trying to suck his nuts.

“Death is a legal problem,” he said.

“For Neteno?”

Jere didn’t answer. He pressed a discreet button and the datanet whispered in his ear. His guest was Evan McMaster, producer of Endurance, one of the last reality shows.

So he was real. He was part of the Golden Age.

Jere never prescreened CVs because everyone claimed some kind of connection, whether it was the last great years of Reality, or the almost-mythical Hegemony of the 70s and 80s, when the world was run by television, when audiences sat rapt on their cheap cloth sofas and scarfed microwave dinners in front of the tube, long before the coming of the internet and the rise of Interactives, long before television had been cast into the “Linear, Free-Access” ghetto. Every diapered octogenarian who tottered into his office smelling of piss and death claimed to be part of that great time. They all claimed to know that one compelling idea that would trounce all and return Neteno to some crowning glory, like television of old.

So maybe taking this meeting was not just a complete padre-suckup. Maybe Dad was right, just this once.

“Neteno doesn’t do snuff,” Jere said.

“What about the new Afghanistan thing? Or the Philippines?”

“That was news.”

“What about the Twelve Days in May?”

Jere just looked at him. He waited for the old guy to drop his eyes. And kept waiting.

“Make your pitch,” Jere said. “And make it good.”

Evan stood up and paced in front of Jere’s obsidian desk, backlit by the dim light coming in from the tinted window that overlooked Los Angeles.

“First, let’s dispense with the death thing,” he said.

“Sponsors don’t like it.”

“Don’t lie. Sponsors love it. They just look properly horrified and give some insignificant percentage of their profits to the survivors and everyone’s happy. Your big problem is legal.”

“Tell me why we should take the chance.”

Evan went back to his pocket projector and remapped the far wall with demographics, charts, multicolored peaks spiking like some impossible landscape. Stuff he had seen before, but this was far out of proportion. And yet it still bore the stamp of 411, Inc. It was good data.

“Three reasons. First, the Chinese.”

“The Chinese stopped at the moon.”

“Yeah. They said they’d go to Mars, but they’re bogged down at the Moon.”

“Cost.”

“Yeah. Another is NASA. They’re dead. Gutted. After the Twelve Days in May, all the money is going to Homeland Security. Everything’s being folded into the new Oversight thing. And the polls show people being OK with the Kevorking of the Mars flights. But underneath it all is a pent-up need to see some great endeavor. It’s the Frontier Factor.”

“Never heard of it.”

“Henry Kase. New pundit. Blames the lack of a Frontier Factor for most of the world’s problems. Complete crap, maybe, but it maps well on the audience we’re looking at.”

“Go on.”

“Third, the Rabid Fan. That’s real. You know it.”

Jere nodded. Everyone dreamed of creating a new Star Trek, still in syndication after all these years, or a new Simpsons. A show that made people dress up, go to conventions, meet in real life, found languages, change dictionaries.

“They’ll think this is too game-show,” Jere said.

“Yeah. But they’ll watch. All the trekkies and scifi nuts and people who dream about getting out, getting away, people who hate their lives for whatever reason, they’ll all watch. Look at the numbers.”

Jere looked at the projection, peaky and perfect and tantalizing. If they could create something like that… he sat silent for a long time, imagining himself at the forefront of a movement.

“There are problems,” Jere said finally.

“Of course.”

“Death is still one. I can borrow a platoon of lawyers to armor-plate our ass, but the shitstorm that follows may still take us down. Especially if they all kick it. As in Neteno is a goner. Done. Stick a fork in it.”

Evan nodded. “I know.”

“You’re asking me to risk my network? While you sit there, almighty, living off interest from a previous life?”

“I’m prepared to throw in,” Evan said.

“How much?”

“Everything.”

“It’s never everything.”

Evan sighed. “I’ll sign a personal guarantee.”

Jere had the bottom line whispered back to him and whistled. “You need funding like a first-run ‘Active for a Free-Access ’Near.’ ”

“The sponsors will line up.”

“Why?”

“Their logo. On Mars. Maybe a featurette. Come on!”

“Sponsors don’t like one-shots.”

“So tell them this is a series. Tell them we’re going to storm the Chinese on the moon!”

It was crazy. It was stupid. And it was, more than likely, impossible. But it was an idea. It was a big idea. And it just might be enough.

“Reality shows are dead,” Jere said.

“It’s coal. Time to mine it.”

Jere nodded. The way things retroed round and round so fast, it was probably comfortably new again. And there were probably millions of people like himself who had caught a glimpse of the last reality shows and remembered them in a fond way.

You’ve taken big chances, he thought. Which is why Neteno is a rising star amongst dying losers.

“We may be able to get some money from NASA,” Jere said, finally. And some money from Dad, since he recommended Evan.

“You’re in?” Evan said.

“How long’s the flight?”

“To Mars? Three months. We’re going to do it?”

“Then we can definitely get food and bev sponsors. Perfect, too, start on the holidays when everyone’s home and be ready for sweeps in Feb.”

“We’re doing it?”

Jere nodded.

Evan did a little jump and victory dance.

Jere cleared his calendar with a few quick touches and stood up. “Let’s go to lunch. I need to know how you intend to pull off this stunt.”

Evan’s eyes sparkled. “It’s Russian tech. You know, the stuff they do, the $250k packages to orbit for a week.”

Jere paused at the door. “That’s why I know people will die.”

“Pull it out! Come on! Pull!” Sam Ruiz shouted through their local comm. Mike Kinsson and Juelie Peters tugged at the shattered plastic shell. Suddenly the whole side twisted off, and all three ended up in a tangled heap on the dusty ground. Mike Kinsson noticed absently that the Disney and Red Bull and Wal-Mart logos on Juelie’s suit were covered in dust, and reached out to brush them off.

“What are you doing?” Sam said, yanking Juelie to her feet.

“Dust…” Mike said, and trailed off. It was stupid anyway. Why should he worry about their sponsors? Why should he worry about anything? They were dead.

Sam’s team had been given the easiest Overland Challenge, nothing more than a fast run over rocky ground, because they had been assigned the toughest rolling and flying part. Soaring over a tiny edge of Valles Marineris was part of their air journey, partly to make it more dramatic and partly to bring back some great images.

But after their brief Overland, they’d bounced up to the scene of a disaster. Their transpo pod had smashed on a huge boulder. Its smooth shape was now twisted into something that more resembled a crushed basketball.

It was supposed to hit and roll, Mike thought. A terrible design, something from last-century NASA that didn’t work then, even with all the redundancy the government could throw at it. Now the Wheel and Kite inside were probably…

“Junk,” he said softly, as Sam and Juelie began pulling out bundles of bent and sheared struts and shreds of fabric.

“Are you going to help?” Juelie asked.

Like a robot, Mike went and helped them pull out the contents of the pod. He noticed that the big Timberland and Kia and Cessna logos emblazoned on the outside of the pod had survived intact, and he had to suppress the urge to laugh. Some of the last pieces had been wedged into the rock and wouldn’t come out-including the engine that powered the Wheel and Kite.

“Where’s the rest of it?” Sam yelled.

“Stuck.”

Sam glared at him and crawled inside. When Sam crawled out again, sweat was running down his cheeks and there was a strange, faraway look in his eyes. Mike looked around at the twisted pieces strewn around them and shook his head. Sam saw it and grabbed him.

“What?” he said. “What are you shaking your head for?”

“We’re dead,” Mike said. “It’s over.”

“No! We can make something! We can do some hybrid thing, like a wheel.” He began rooting through the wreckage, frantic.

“Powered by what?” Mike said softly.

“We can power it! Or we can make skis! Or we can…”

Juelie went over to Sam and laid a hand on his shoulder. As soon as he felt her touch, he stopped. He stayed still on his hands and knees, looking down at the rocks and dust, panting.

“Mike’s right,” Juelie said. “I saw the engine.”

Sam stood up. The pale sun reflected off his shiny bronze face. He looked from the wreckage to the horizon and back again. “I don’t want to give up!” he said.

“Why?” Juelie said. “We can’t win.”

Sam looked at her for long moments, as if trying to decipher a strange phrase in an unknown language. Then he slumped. All the tension left him. He sat on a boulder and hugged his knees. Something like a wail escaped him. Under the cloudless alien sky, amidst a red desert unrelieved by water or leaf or lichen, it was a chilling sound.

“What do we do?” he said finally. “How do we get to the Returns?”

“We don’t,” Mike said, standing carefully away.

Sam just looked up at him.

“Walk overland,” Juelie said. “It doesn’t matter how long it takes.”

“There’s not enough food and water,” Mike said.

“We’ll eat less!”

“We can’t cross the Valles Marineris.”

“Why not?”

“Mile-high vertical walls.”

Juelie was silent for a while. “They’ll have to come rescue us,” she said finally.

“No,” Mike said.

“We’ve lost,” Sam said.

“Wait,” Julie said. “What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“They can’t just come down and get us,” Mike told her. “Other than our drops and the return modules, there’s no way to get down here and back again.”

Julie looked confused.

“They can’t rescue us,” Mike said. “They don’t have the capability.”

“Then what do we do?” Sam said. “Sit here and die?”

Mike looked away. Even he knew better than to answer that. Juelie walked over and offered Sam her hand. After a moment, he took it, head hanging low. Mike edged away from the two, not wanting to be part of any coming outburst. Sam had been driven by a single purpose since the start: to win his share of the thirty million dollars. That’s what he wanted. Nothing more, nothing less. He hadn’t disguised it, hadn’t hid it. But now that was taken away. And more.

We knew the risks when we signed, Mike thought, walking farther away. Or at least I did. I don’t know if Sam and Juelie were smart enough to really read through the eighty-page contract. It made them into a grey undefined thing that the legal system could wrangle about for years if the deaths and lawsuits came.

But I didn’t care. All I ever wanted to do was to see another planet. Earth was a dead-end. People pursuing dead-end dreams, interested in nothing more than making money and amusing themselves. Nobody explored. Nobody took chances.

Except for my dreams, I was as bad as everyone else. Too scared to give up my job, to let go of my condo, my ’Actives, my things. Endlessly yearning, but no ability to commit.

And so, this great leap. Finally.

And so, now you die.

Mike tried to make himself feel something, but he couldn’t. It was too far away, too remote. They had maybe five days worth of food and water in their packs. Five days, and then a couple of days for the recycling to stop working, or some other suit malfunction.

It’s too bad they didn’t give the science pack to me, Mike thought. I would have infinite time to do the experiments. Or at least many days. But it had gone to the other geek on the Thorens team.

He had wandered a hundred feet or so away from the couple when the voice from the Can blatted in his ear.

“We’re aware of your situation,” they said.

“So?” he heard Sam ask.

“We’re asking the Paul team to divert and rescue,” they said. “We think he can carry you in his Wheel. Is your fuel bladder undamaged?”

“Yes!” Juelie said, hope rising in her voice.

“Good. We’re transmitting the request to him now.”

“Great!” Juelie said. Sam’s head still hung, though. “Sam, did you hear that? We’re going to be rescued.”

“It’s a request,” Sam said. “Re-quest. Do you think Paul is going to give up his thirty million?”

“Thirty?” she asked

“Yeah. He’s the single guy. The nut.”

Mike could see Juelie looking up at him for a moment, then down at Sam.

“He might,” she said. “He still might.”

Sam’s laughter echoed in the dying Martian day.

“Promise them more flights,” Evan McMaster said.

“We don’t have any,” Jere Gutierrez said. The Russians had looked at their plans, conferred gravely, and named a price that was ten times what their highest projections were. Now they were back in their shabby Moscow hotel, drinking Stoli in a decaying bar that looked like it was last decorated back in the 90s.

“They’re bluffing,” Evan said.

“What do you mean?”

“They do tourist crap. You don’t think they really know how to put together a Mars mission? They never even landed a man on the moon!”

“Yes they did…”

“What do they teach you with in school these days? A VCR and a chocolate cake? No Commies on the moon. Just us. 1969.”

“The Russians did it, too!” Jere said.

“Nope. Never. Once we did it, they dropped their program and did unmanned probes. Said that sending people was a showboating capitalist move.”

“Shit, man, don’t scare me.”

“You just need to know what we’re dealing with,” Evan said. “It’s a poker game. And they’re bluffing.”

“If you don’t think they can get to Mars, why are we here?”

“I think they can make it to Mars. But it won’t be easy. It’ll be hard. And they know it.”

“So what do we do?” Jere said.

“Bluff right back. Tell them we’re going to do this every year. Every three months. Every shittin’ week if that’s what it takes.”

“You’re going to lie to the Russian mafia?”

Evan smiled. “No. You are.”

“No,” Jere said, shivering, remembering too many stories from Dad, the first days of the internet, the way some companies got financed.

“I thought Neteno was the big maverick studio, willing to take any chance.”

“We are.”

“Then act like it, or I’ll take it to Fox.”

Jere opened his mouth. Closed it. The rumor had already been spilled. Every network knew about it. And they would probably be interested, if they saw Evan’s data.

Evan had him by the nuts.

“How do I do this?” Jere asked. “And live?”

“They’re gonna have their setbacks, too, stuff we can put them over a barrel for. Once we’ve primed the audience, they have to meet our schedule. Or all the advertising for RusSpace goes out the door.”

And you think you’ll draw them into your web, too, Jere thought. “I wish I had your confidence.”

“It’s my life, too,” Evan said.

Yes, Jere thought. And you’re more visible than I am. I will make sure it is your life. First, you fuck. First.

“Okay,” he said. “We bluff. Now, what’s this the lawyers have come up with for the contract?”

“Aha,” Evan said. He pulled out a Palm and scrolled through a long document. “Eighty pages of gibberish. They want real signatures in real pen.”

“What does it say?”

“You don’t want to know,” Evan said, eyes still on the screen.

“Give me the gist.”

“Has them renounce their US citizenship, become wards of Neteno, hold us harmless, things like that. If they make it back, they may have to live at airports.”

“There are always volunteers.”

“The lawyers had one other suggestion.”

“What’s that?”

“Start in the prisons. If they die, public reaction will be less.”

“But they’ll have less buy-in,” Evan said, frowning.

“Yeah, that’s a problem. Do you think we can spin it?”

“I’d be happier if most of them were just genpop.”

“Maybe a mix,” Evan said.

Jere nodded and sipped his drink. There was silence for a time. The sound of an argument deep in the hotel, maybe from the kitchen. Jere let the silence stretch out.

“Why?” Jere said, finally.

“Why what?”

“Why are you doing this? Just the money?”

Evan sighed and looked away, to the cute blonde bar-tender. For a while, Jere thought he wouldn’t answer.

Then Evan looked down at the table and said, “After a while, you get used to it. Not the money. The other shit. Having dinner with George Bush, ’cause you have your hand on the throat of the public. Fucking Mary-Kate Olsen, since you pay more attention to her at one premiere than her husband does all month. Picking up your office phone and asking for anything and getting it, ’cause you’re on top, you’re on fire. Why else?”

Because you don’t want your dad to look at you with that look, that are-you-fucking-stupid look, ever again, Jere thought.

But he just nodded, and they went back to serious drinking. Later, there would be women. Later still would be more negotiation. Endless rounds. Bluff and dare. The real product of Hollywood.

The only thing that kept Keith Paul from swatting the tiny cam that dangled in front of him was that he knew that would lose him the thirty million dollars. Contract breach, the asswipe PA would say, in that breathy feminine voice of his. All camera, all the time. We can tap in whenever we want.

Yeah, and I hope you get a shot of me taking a great huge shit, Keith thought. Broadcast that to your eight hundred million viewers. Here is Keith Paul, taking a dump on your ratings.

He would be sure to say that when he won. When they pointed the camera at his face, he would tell them exactly what he thought of them. His crowning words, his first major televised fuck-you-all.

And he would win. No doubt about that. Teams were for pussies. He’d been able to skin the Wheel and string the Kite faster than any team back when they were training. He didn’t have arguments with himself, or forget where something went.

No, everything was great. He allowed himself to look up at the light blue sky. Really not that different from Earth. There was only one creepy thing. Nothing moved. It felt old and ancient and unnatural, and the sun looked small and dim. He kept wiping at his header’s visor to clear it, but it wasn’t cloudy or tinted. That was just the way Mars looked. Because it was farther away from the sun.

“We need to make a request,” said the voice of the Can. Not the breathy one, but the cute little girl that the breathy asshole was sleeping with.

“What?” They always had requests. Look at this, do that, scratch your ass.

“The Ruiz team’s transpo pod had a landing, um, malfunction. They have no transport.”

“So?” Tough shit.

“We’d like you to divert your Wheel and collect them.”

“I haven’t even reached my transpo yet.”

“After you get there.”

“And you’re going to give me extra time for this?”

A pause. “No.”

“Then how the hell am I supposed to win?”

Another pause. “They’ll die if you don’t pick them up.”

“So?”

Finally, a new voice, deep and resonant. Frank Sellers, that John Glenn fuck that had rode them out here.

“Keith, we’d really like you to consider this. Even if you don’t win the prize money-and you still might-the act of rescue will create its own reward.”

“Like, they’ll pay me more than thirty million bucks for it?”

“I’m sure our sponsors will be very generous.”

“More than thirty million generous?”

Another pause. For a while, Keith thought they’d given up on him. But Frank started in as he caught the first glimpse of his transpo pod, glittering in the distance.

“Keith, we’ve got buy-in from several of the sponsors. We can get you a million. Plus other things. Cars…”

“No.”

“They’ll die. That will be on your conscience.”

“They can’t prosecute me for it.” It would be just like them, to dredge up the fact that he was the only former felon, even though he was pardoned, even though it was just a simple carjacking thing, nothing much.

Long pause. “No.”

“I think I’ll ignore you now.”

“Keith…”

Keith looked up at the thin sky, as if to try and see the Can spinning overhead. “A million is not thirty. A million and promises is not thirty. Sorry, no can do.”

“You may not win.”

“I will.”

Another pause. This one longer. “We can go two million.”

“Did you fail math? Two million is not greater than thirty. Give me an offer more than thirty, and they’re saved.”

“We… probably can’t do that.”

“I… probably can’t save them,” Keith said, mocking his tone.

Silence. Blissful silence. Long yards passed and the transpo pod swelled in his view. As he reached its smooth, unmarred surface, Frank’s voice crackled to life again.

“Even if you win,” he said. “People will hate you.”

“That’s all right,” Keith said. “I love myself enough for all of them.”

“I thought they found life on Mars,” Jere said.

Evan rolled his eyes heavenward. It was 4:11 AM, and they were screaming down the 5 at triple-digit speeds in Jere’s Porsche. The scrub brush at the side of the road whipped by, ghostly grey streamers disappearing into taillight-red twilight. They were in that no-mans-land between Stockton and Santa Clarita, where the land falls away and you could believe you were the only person in California, at least for a time.

Jere frowned, seeing the look out of the corner of his eye. “What? They didn’t? Talk, you fucking know-it-all.”

“They still don’t know. They’re still arguing about it.”

“Funny thinking of Mars as a science thing.”

Evan shook his head, and then said, “It’s too bad we can’t do it this year. Do the whole fortieth-anniversary shindig.”

“Fortieth anniversary of what?”

“Viking. 1976.”

We put shit on Mars way back then? Jere thought. “We’re still on for ’18?”

“So far.”

Silence for a long time. In front of them there was nothing but darkness and stars and the dim outline of mountains. Jere pushed the car to 120, 130, 140. The blur became a haze of motion, almost surreal.

“So what do you think about Berkeley?” Jere said.

“It’s crap.”

“Why?”

“Like, duh. Berkeley probably can’t even design the right experiments package. They’re a liberal arts school.”

“So we get another school.”

“No.”

“What?”

“Industry,” Evan said. “That’s where the money really is. We go to industry.”

“Who?”

“Siemens. Or IBM. Someone big, with deep pockets.”

Jere nodded. Berkeley had offered them quite a bit of money. With IBM in on a bidding war, how high could the stakes get? This idea was looking better and better all the time.

Being paired with two beautiful women was, well, distracting, Geoff Smith thought. Their squeezesuits left almost nothing to the imagination, and every time he looked up, his thoughts were shattered by the simple beauty of the feminine form.

And what thoughts they were! Here he was, Geoff Smith, on an alien planet! And he was going to prove there was life on it! He would do what a million scientists back on earth wanted to do! Him, with nothing more than a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, would do what all the PhDs told him he couldn’t do. He would put Martian life under a microscope for the first time! He would look at it with his own eyes! He would be famous!

Because the big problem was that nobody had ever really looked. They’d tried the Carbon-14 tagging trick on Viking, they’d tried spectrographic analysis, but they’d never just taken a sample of dirt, put it on a microscope slide, and looked at it.

“Damn!” Wende Kirkshoff said. She was hanging from the top curve of their Wheel, holding a strut and looking at it disgustedly. She was a pretty blonde girl with freckles and a pleasant demeanor, but Geoff always thought she was avoiding him.

“What’s the matter?” Laci Thorens said. She was on the ground, assembling the engine into a subframe with a grim intensity.

“This strut doesn’t have the little fitting on the end,” Wende said. “It won’t stay in.”

“Aren’t there spares?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

Geoff shook his head and bent back to his work. Who cared about the prize? With his discovery, he would be so famous that he could name his price.

He’d set the IBM box in the lee of the transpo pod like the instructions said, digging down like they told him. He was supposed to let it go for a half hour, then take the whole thing with them.

Which was stupid. IBM was doing the same old thing, when all they had to do, really, was give him a bag and a microscope.

So he’d brought his own. Now it was just a matter of getting some dirt, throwing some water on it, putting it on the slide, and looking for wrigglies.

“There aren’t any spares,” Wende said.

“Shit. Let me see.” Laci hopped up to the top of the Wheel.

He fumbled the little vial of water out of the tiny pocket of his squeezesuit. The microscope was already out, sitting perched on top of a medium-sized rock, away from the dust and grit.

How had Viking done it? It had moved a rock, hadn’t it? And this new one from IBM was digging down. Probably best to just combine both techniques, Geoff thought, and shoved a medium-sized boulder out of the way.

He dug down into the dust with his fingers, feeling the chill seep through his squeezesuit. At about six inches down, he struck another rock and decided that was enough. The dust was clinging to his transparent header, and the front half of his suit was pink.

He took a pinch of dust from the shallow hole and dropped it onto a glass slide. The water had gone frosty around the top. He dropped a couple of drops on the slide and they froze almost instantly, making something that looked like red ice cream.

Damn, I didn’t think of that. There was no way he was going to see something with the microscope through all that gunk.

He sloshed some more water on it and pushed it around with the tip of his finger, trying to get the mixture thin enough to see through. After a couple of tries, he managed to get a thin pink film that looked reasonably transparent.

“Geoff!” Laci said. “We need your help!”

“Can’t,” he said. “In the middle of an experiment.”

“We need your help or we ain’t rolling anywhere!”

Geoff slid the slide into the microscope and looked at the watch embedded in his suit. “We have time.” And in fact, they did have almost twenty minutes left.

“We have to do it now!” Wende said.

“Wait a minute,” Geoff said. Slide in place. Microscope to eye. Nothing but fuzzy grey darkness. Focus. Dark, dark. Sliding into focus. Becoming great boulders.

“Geoff, now!” Laci said.

“Just a few seconds,” Geoff said. “Then you can have me.” Focus. Ah. Crystal-clear. Scan it over a bit and find a brighter area. There. Ah.

Water crystals. Boulders. Bright light. Nothing else.

Well, of course it wouldn’t move. But where was the rounded wall of a bacterium, or the jelly of an amoeba?

“Now,” Laci said, and strong hands picked him up. He felt his grip on the microscope slipping. He grabbed it tighter, and it popped from his hands. He was jerked back as he watched it fall, with agonizing slowness, into the dust and grit.

He wrenched out of Laci’s grip and scooped up the microscope. It was dusty, but looked okay. He looked through it. The slide was out of position, but he could still see. He reached for the focus knob…

The microscope was torn out of his hands. He looked up to see Laci standing in front of him, holding the microscope behind her back.

“Give it back!” he said. “This is important. I’m right…”

She punched his header. Hard. He could see the soft transparent plastic actually conform to her fist. It didn’t quite touch him, but the kinetic energy of the blow knocked him to the ground.

“Go,” she said. “Help Wende. You’ll get your toy back when you’re done.”

“Give it back!”

Laci raised the instrument and made as if to smash it on a boulder. Geoff lunged forward at her, but she danced away. “No,” she said. “Go help. I’ll give it back later.”

“Laci, this is important!”

“Yeah, and so is surviving. Go help.”

Geoff knew when he was beaten. He sighed and joined Wende atop the Wheel, where they quickly discovered another problem: the epoxy they’d provided for quick repairs wasn’t setting in the Martian cold.

“What do we do now?” Wende asked.

Geoff stopped looking longingly at the microscope-now sitting on top of their hydrazine engine-and inspected the problem. The strut was one of the main load-bearers that held them suspended under the top of the Wheel.

“What about the Kite?” Geoff said. “Doesn’t it share components with this? Maybe it has a strut with the right connector on it.”

“What about when we have to fly?”

“We make sure we don’t forget the damn thing.”

They dug into the bundle of struts and fabric. The components were the same, and many of them were the same length. When Geoff found one with the right connector on the end, he pulled it out and handed it to Wende.

“Just like Ikea,” he said.

“They aren’t the sponsor!”

“Same idea.”

Then he noticed that Laci was frantically tightening the straps that held the little engine in place. “We’re late!” she said. “Check the time! Come on come on come on! Let’s go!”

Laci started the engine. Near the Wheel, his microscope was still parked on top of a rock.

“Wait!” he said, running to get it.

The Wheel was already moving. “Hurry up!” Laci said.

He grabbed the microscope and ran back, throwing himself up the scaffold toward the perch by the cabin. The landscape sped by. The soft rim of the Wheel bounced over rocks and boulders.

But he had his microscope. Between that and the IBM package, he would surely find something. He would still be famous.

The IBM package!

Oh, shit, no! No no no!

He’d never picked it up.

“Stop! he cried. “You have to go back! I left the IBM package.”

Laci gave him a disgusted look. “How could you be that stupid?”

“Go back.”

She just looked at him. A slow smile spread on her face. “Sorry,” she said.

Geoff looked back at the remains of their transpo pod, but it had already disappeared over a hill. They were moving. And he was lost.

“It seems like a lot of work for just a show,” said the shithead from P &G. He was looking at the model of the Can, sprouting its ring and eleven pods.

God save me from executives who think they’re smart, Jere thought. Send them to the golf course and the cocktail lounge, where the conversational bar is comfortably low.

They were in the Neteno boardroom, which had been transformed into a neomodern interpretation of a 70s NASA workroom, redone on a much greater scale and budget. A movingink banner was cycling though imagined Mars-scapes and the logo for Neteno’s Winning Mars, and models of the Can, the drop and transpo pods, the Kites and the Wheels and the Returns, hung from the ceiling or were suspended with cheap magnetic trickery.

But there were a lot more people than the P &G guy in today. There was Altria, and J &J, and Foodlink, and a whole bunch of other guys who wanted to have product placed on the show.

So he was playing to an audience when he answered:

“Not really,” he said. He pointed at the ring. “Take the ring. It’s a standard component of the new RusSpace orbital hotels. And we’re saving four module drops by incorporating all the Return pods into a single big softlander. The transpo pods are as simple and reliable as they get, just a big bouncing ball. We’re actually using a lot of proven technology for this, just in new ways.”

“Probably what they said about the Titanic,” P &G shithead said, grinning at the other execs. “Once you drop them on the surface, you have a road course, or something like that?”

“Five courses,” Jere said, changing the graphics on the movingink banner. “All of them have three phases of travel: on foot, rolling on a Wheel, and flying in a Kite. We’ve picked routes that will highlight some spectacular scenery, like parts of the Valles Marineris…”

“What?”

“Think Grand Canyon. Times ten.”

“Oh.”

“And we have a vertical climb of 2000 feet set for one group. We’re hoping to get some extreme-sports aficionados in the audience.”

“Is that safe?” the P &G guy asked.

“We don’t claim infallibility.” And you’re not complaining, Jere thought. Don’t think we don’t notice that.

“Who’s signed so far?” shithead asked.

“That’s confidential. If you want to buy a prospectus package, we’ll discuss that further.” And you aren’t saying anything about that, either, are you? Because you know this is the deal of the century.

“What you don’t see is the most important part,” Jere said. “The people who will actually make this happen.”

“You already have your team picked?”

“No. I just want to show you what the teams might look like. Because I know you have this idea of a bunch of spacesuit-clad guys hopping around on a dead planet. Boring, right? Well, no.”

At that moment, Evan McMaster entered the boardroom through the double doors at the back, accompanied by a trio of young women wearing cosmetic squeezesuits and headers. The suits hugged every one of their curves, making them seem impossibly perfect, unattainable, unreal.

There was a collective gasp from the execs, and Jere smiled. It always worked that way.

“I don’t see how it will work.” Not the asswipe. Another one. This one from Altria.

“Mars does have a thin atmosphere,” Evan said. “We can provide pressurized air through a small backpack only to the face. The pressure required to maintain body integrity is provided by the squeezesuit.”

“Showboating,” muttered the original P &G geek.

“Which would you rather look at-this, or some old Russian cosmonaut in a wrinkled-up body sock?”

“Your contestants may not look that good.”

Evan smiled. “The squeezesuit is of variable thickness. We can make a wide variety of body types look good. And it provides an excellent palette for logo placement.”

He snapped his fingers, and logos appeared at strategic spots on the suits. Spots with high visual magnetism, to use the geek phrase. One of the girls spun to reveal a P &G competitor’s logo emblazoned over her buttocks.

Oh, they loved it. Jere could see it in their eyes. They were sold. They would talk tough and haggle, but they had them. Just like Panasonic and Canon and Nikon fighting over the imaging rights, Sony and Nokia and Motorola fighting over the comms deal, Red Bull and Gatorade fighting over the energy drink part of it, hell, damn near every single nut and bolt was being fought over.

Go ahead, Jere thought. Talk. Then shut up and give us your fucking money.

They were halfway up the sheer face, and the way Alena was climbing, they were going to die. Glenn watched her almost literally fly up the rock, making twenty-foot jumps from handhold to handhold, reaching out and grasping the smallest outcropping and crevice with fluid grace and deceptive ease.

Dangerous ease, he thought. Climbing in the low gravity seemed childishly simple compared to climbing on Earth. Which meant it was easy to take one too many chances.

Alena made one last lunge and scrabbled for grip in a tiny crevice. Her feet skidded and she slid down the face for one terrible instant before catching on another tiny outcropping. Tiny pebbles and sand bounced off Glenn’s visor.

“Slow down!” he said.

“We need to keep moving!”

“Alena…”

Labored breathing over the comm. “Listen to them!” Alena said. “Laci’s team is already rolling, and that psycho guy is, too!”

Glenn cursed. The voices from the Can, when they weren’t giving orders, provided a blow-by-blow of what the other teams were doing. To get you doing something stupid.

Glenn pulled himself up nearer to Alena. She resumed climbing, too.

“Let me get nearer,” he said. “So we can safety each other.”

“We have to keep going.”

“The others have more time to roll. We aren’t falling behind.”

Alena stopped for a moment. “I know, but…”

“It’s hard not to think it, yeah,” Glenn finished for her. He pulled himself even higher. She stayed in place for once.

“We’ll make the top before nightfall,” he said. “Then we shelter and wait it out. We’ve got a short roll and a reasonable flight. We still have the best chance of winning, Alena.”

Pant, pant. He was close enough to be her failsafe now.

Alena looked back, gave him a thin smile, and pulled herself up again. For a while it was all by the book, then Alena began stretching it a bit, leaping a bit too far, aiming at crevices just a bit too small. With the sun below the cliff, the shadows were deep, purple-black, and the cliff was losing definition in the dying day.

When they reached a deep crevice in the rock, Glenn thought things had begun to get better. But the rock was fragile and crumbly, and rust-red chunks came off easily in his hands. Glenn was about to tell Alena that they should get out of there when she reached up and grabbed an outcropping that broke off in her hand.

From ten feet above Glenn, she began to fall, agonizingly slow. Glenn felt his heart thundering in his chest, and had a momentary vision of the two of them tumbling out of the crevice to fall thousands of feet to the rocks below. He tested his handholds and footholds, and a small cry escaped his lips when he realized they probably wouldn’t survive the impact of Alena.

Glenn jumped downward, seeking better purchase. Slip and slide. Nothing more. Down once again. Nope.

Down again, and then Alena piled into him, an amazingly strong shock in the weak gravity. Mass still works, Glenn thought, wildly, a moment after he’d lost all contact with the cliff face.

Alena flailed, trying to catch the rock surface as it skidded by. Glenn knew that soon they would be moving too fast to stop, and reached frantically himself. He slowed their fall, but didn’t stop it.

Where was the edge of the crevice?

He looked below him. Right here. But there was one outcropping that looked reasonably solid. If he could catch it…

He hit hard with his feet and felt a shooting pain go up his right leg. His knees buckled and his feet slid to the side, away from the outcropping, towards destruction.

One last thing. He reached out and caught the outcropping, keeping one hand around Alena’s waist. For a moment he thought their momentum was still too great, but he was able to hold on. Alena skidded within feet of the opening.

Glenn didn’t dare move. He could hear the harsh rasp of Alena’s breathing. Meaning they were both alive. Alive!

Alena looked up at him with something in her eyes that might almost have been gratitude. He looked down at her and smiled. For a brief instant, she smiled back and his heart soared.

They backed out of the crevice and continued on up the cliff face. Glenn’s right leg roared with pain, and he knew Alena could see that he was slowing down. But she didn’t run away from him. She didn’t take chances. She didn’t say anything at all until they had reached the top, and the last dying rays of the sun painted them both blood-red.

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

He was about to say something, but the Can blatted in his ear. “What an image! Pan slowly across the sunset.”

“Thanks,” he said, bitterly, as Alena turned away.

“What the hell does Timberland know about making space suits?” Evan said. He threw down the thick ream of printouts and rubbed his face, pulling it into a comic mask of fatigue and frustration.

“They’ll pay to do it,” Jere said.

“Another prime sponsor.” Sarcastically.

“What, like you’re suddenly worried about our contestants?”

Evan shrugged and stood up to pace. “RusSpace finally got back to me.”

“And?”

“And we’re fucked.”

For a moment, the word didn’t even register with Jere. Then he heard the phrase like a physical blow. “Fucked! What does fucked mean, like they won’t do it?”

“No, no.”

“They want more money.”

“It’s 2019 now, not 2018.”

No. They couldn’t move it out again. GM and Boeing pulled out when the schedule last slid. So now it was Kia and Cessna for the Wheels and the Kites. Good names, yeah, but not blue-chip. Maybe it would boost the ratings, that bit of risk, that added chance…

Evan nodded. “Yeah, it’s a crap cocktail, all right.”

“We can’t do this,” Jere said. His voice sounded hollow and faraway.

Evan shrugged. “We have to.”

“What’s the problem this time? They lied again? They fucked up? What?”

“No.” A sigh. “It’s the testing that’s killing us. Five drop modules, five backout pods, five Wheels, five Kites, the big package of Returns, a ship with a fucking centrifuge, for God’s sake, goddamn, it’s a lot of shit to do!”

“So what do we do?”

“We push. Or we scale it back.”

“What? Take it to three teams?”

“No. Scale back the build and the test. Leave out the backout pods, for example.”

“What happens if the team can’t make it to the Returns?”

A slow smile. “Tough snatch, said the biatch.”

“What?”

“Before your time.” Another shrug. This one slow, lazy, nonchalant. “If they can’t make it to the Returns, they probably can’t make it back.”

“Will this get us back on track?”

“We could do more.”

“What?”

“Skip final test of the Kites and the Wheels. All they are is a bunch of fabric and struts anyway.”

“And?”

“Leave the spinner down on the ground.”

“How are the contestants supposed to stay in shape?”

“We’ll put in a whole lot of Stairmasters. They can exercise. Gets us another sponsor, too.”

“And?”

“And that might get us back on track. Or so say our formerly communist friends.”

“Will they guarantee it?”

“They aren’t guaranteeing anything anymore. But I think it’s a lot more likely that we’ll make the deadlines if you drop some of the fluff.”

Fluff. Yeah, fluff. Just a bunch of safety gear. Nobody will notice.

“We’re taking a big chance.”

“What’s a bigger chance? Going to ’19 or making a few changes?”

A few changes. Nothing big. Nothing major. Nothing we won’t be crucified for if it comes out.

“Can we do this clean? Can we make it look like we never had plans for the centrifuge, the backout stuff, all that?”

“I’m sure we can arrange something.”

Jere let the silence stretch out. Evan was watching him intently. In the dim light of the office, his weathered features could have been the craggy face of a demon.

“Do it,” Jere said finally, softly. Hating himself.

Wheeling had been easy back on Earth. The training had been out in the Mojave, nice smooth sand and little rocks that you could bounce over easy, and nice and flat as far as you could see.

But Wheeling was a bitch and a quarter here on Mars. Keith Paul gritted his teeth as he came to another long downhill run, scattered with boulders as big as houses and ravines that could catch the edge of the wheel and fuck him up good. He’d already dug the Wheel out twice, once when he swerved to avoid a slope that would pitch it over and ended up in a ditch, and once when he got to bouncing and bounced over a hill into a ravine.

And man, did it bounce! Whenever it hit a rock. Sometimes a foot, sometimes a couple, sometimes ten or twenty feet in the air.

They probably got some good vid of my terrified mug, Keith thought. That wasn’t good. Weakness was never good.

But he was being strong on other things. He was making good time across the desert. He’d been up rolling at the moment dawn’s light made the landscape even dimly guessable.

Other idiots are probably picking their way along like grandma in a traffic jam, he thought, and smiled. Because he was going to win.

And he was strong on the offers, too. Everyone had talked to him. Both the PA idjits, the associate director, Frank, everyone. They’d promised him everything but a blow-job and a hot dog, but the money hadn’t changed.

Almost on cue, the voice. This time it was Frank.

“We’re prepared to make you another offer,” Frank said.

“Shoot.”

“It’s our final offer,” Frank said. “And it’s a very generous one. By air, you have a good chance of being able to pick up the Ruiz team and take the prize as well. You are currently leading the three remaining teams by a fair margin.”

“What’s the offer?”

“Three million. Plus all the gifts and benefits we’ve discussed before.”

Keith shook his head.

“Keith?” Frank said.

“Yeah.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re very bad at math.” Though the idea was intriguing. With three million, he could live pretty well down in Mexico…

No! Stupid! You’re a winner. You’re in the lead. Three is not thirty.

Frank sighed. “It’s our final offer,” he said.

“No.”

Silence for a time. “Your decision has been noted,” Frank said. He didn’t sound surprised.

Noted?

“What does that mean?” Keith said. Like, were they going to try to disqualify him or something?

Silence.

“Ass! What the hell does ‘noted’ mean?”

Silence.

“Fuck you, then!”

Silence. On and on.

Was it possible that he could run this whole thing and not win due to some technicality? No. No. He was a winner. He was going to win.

And if they tried to take that away from him, God help them.

Evan hadn’t believed Jere about Russia. Now he did. All it took was a couple of days of traveling into the hinterlands in the awful winter chill, grabbing cold-slick vinyl seats as their drivers deftly slid around potholes on the treacherous black-ice roads, potholes that looked as if they could hide black bears, potholes that looked like they could swallow the car, potholes so big and deep and dark they might have gone straight through to some beautiful tropical beach in Brazil.

Now they were standing under the bulk of the main launcher, all four of them, Evan and John Glenn and even Ron Gutierrez, his ever-smiling dad. Not really John Glenn, of course, but that’s what everyone called him. Frank Sellers, another good generic white-boy name. He was a wannabe-astronaut, never really flew anything after his training in the 80s, something about the shuttle blowing up. Now he was training to fly the Mars Enterprise (some money from the Roddenberry estate). Frank was one of the concessions they’d won. The Russians could build it, fine, but it had to be an American pilot. The spikes on the preliminary audience surveys were real clear on that fact.

When Frank first came down, he’d referred to the Enterprise as the Trash Can, and the name had stuck. The comparison was apt. It was squatty and cylindrical, and it did have a utilitarian functionality, and it was even somewhat battered and dirty-looking.

“How goes it?” Evan said, after they’d made their intros.

“Good, good,” Frank said. “We’ve had some problems with the electrical systems, nothing major, just the usual shakedown crap, and they’re worried a bit about the air, but I think…”

“The air?” Ron said. “On a journey this long?”

Frank shrugged. “They’ll make it work,” he said.

“It doesn’t seem very confidence-inspiring.”

“If you could have seen half the stuff I saw behind the scenes at NASA, you wouldn’t worry. These are good guys. They’ll figure it out.”

“If you say so.”

The grand tour was less than impressive. Wires hung from open panels while teams of dirty Russians shot heated phrases back and forth with expressions of deep frustration and anger. There was a steady drip in the cockpit that tick-tick-ticked onto the synthetic material of the acceleration seat. When Ron ran a finger across it and looked up questioningly, Frank just shook his head. “Condensation. Can’t help it with so many people in here. They’ll flush it before we launch.”

When they were back out in the freezing cold again, and well away from Russian ears, Ron turned to Jere and said, “Would you fly in this?”

“Of course,” Jere said. Not a bit of hesitation. Not a bit. He knew how to deal with Dad.

The older man looked up and down the ship. “If you need more money…”

And be even more in your debt? “No,” Jere said.

“You sure?”

I’m sure I don’t want to hear you remind me about how you bailed me out again. Jere nodded and turned to Evan. “We’re on schedule?”

“Unless Frank tells me different.”

“We’ll make it,” Frank said. “No problemo.”

Later, when they were back in the car for another freezing, terrifying ride back to the hotel, Ron spoke again.

“Do you get the feeling that Frank wants this to work a little too much?”

“How’s that?” Evan said.

“He’s an astronaut. But he never flew.”

“So?”

A frown. “So maybe he wants to fly. Really badly.”

“Sometimes a little enthusiasm is a good thing,” Evan said.

Ron turned to Jere. “What do you think?”

Pretend to consider, then answer. “I think it’s good we have someone who loves what he does.”

Silence from Ron. Then: “I hope you’re right.”

Last. Dead last. No denying it now. No excuses. It had taken them way too long to assemble the Wheel that morning, far longer than they had taken back on Earth. Blame it on the cold, or the parts that didn’t want to fit together, but facts were facts.

And yet Glenn was strangely happy, oddly content. Just like that one freeclimb in Tibet, when it was clear they were beaten, hanging exhausted from numb fingertips beneath a thin sun rapidly disappearing behind a front of ominous purple-grey clouds. That moment when he realized they weren’t going to make it, that they would have to go back down. The stress and the worry suddenly lifted from him. And his great surprise when Alena agreed with him. They scrambled down the rock as the icy rain hit.

They made love back in what passed for a hotel with incredible intensity, golden and yellow sparks flying in a perfect night sky, impossible to describe, infinite and endless in a moment’s perfection. They finally collapsed, sated, face to face, sweat cooling to an icy chill in the cold room. He waited until her breathing had slowed, and lengthened, and deepened, then said, very softly, “Marry me.”

Alena’s eyes opened. In the dark they were like the glassy curve of two crystal spheres, unreadable.

“Yes,” she said softly, and closed her eyes again.

Had he imagined it? Had she really heard him? He fell asleep with questions resonating in his mind.

When he woke in the morning, she was already pulling on her gear. Glenn had a moment of sleepy pleasure, watching her slim form, before he remembered his question-and her answer-from the night before.

She looked down at him. The light fell pale and grey on her face. She looked like the ghost of an angel.

“Yes,” she said. “I said yes.”

“Glenn!” Alena shrieked. “Watch out!”

Glenn jerked back to the present as the Wheel caromed off a boulder and promptly went bouncing across a field. He pulled on his harness and leaned outside of its edge, shortening the bounces on his side and bringing them back on course. They’d been experimenting with a new technique. Each of them leaned out the side of the Wheel, giving a better view of the terrain ahead than through the translucent dust-coated fabric, and allowing them to shift its direction more rapidly by leaning in and out to shift the center of gravity.

“Pay attention!” Alena said.

“I know, I know,” Glenn said. “I’m sorry.”

“What were you thinking?”

“ Tibet,” he said.

Silence for a time. “Oh.”

“Remember?”

“I remember I don’t like losing.”

“We’re making up time,” Glenn said, after a while.

“I know.”

“The others may have problems with the Kite.”

Alena shot him a puzzled look. “Why are you trying to make me feel better?”

Because I love you, Glenn thought. That’s another thing I never wanted to lose.

The spooks came in the middle of February sweeps, just three months before launch. Jere and Evan were still trying to convince themselves that making the August sweeps would be better than February, but no matter how you garnished it or rationalized it, there would be less access in the summer. Now some of the sponsors wanted guaranteed access levels or kickbacks.

And now this.

“Mr. Gutierrez?” There were two of them, wearing indistinguishable blue suits. One of them wore a cheap black tie, the other a turtleneck. Their eyes were heavy and dead and immobile, and for once Jere was glad that his father was there with him.

He looked at the ID, not seeing the name. It was one of those new fancy holo things that they were trying to sell to everyone, but this one had a big NASA logo and a discreet little eye next to it. He was also wearing a small gold motion-holo pin that flashed and gleamed as the eye morphed into a world and back again. Underneath the holo were the etched letters: USG OVERSIGHT.

“Yes,” Jere said.

Agent #1 turned to his father. “And you, sir?”

“I’m Ron.”

“Ron…”

“Gutierrez.”

“Ah. The father. We didn’t know you had a stake in this.”

“I’m an investor.”

“Ah.”›

Jere held up a hand. “Would you like a seat? Coffee?”

Agent #1 sat. The other remained standing.

“What’s this all about?” Jere asked. “Do you want to buy the program or something?”

“There will be no program.”

“What!” Jere and Ron said, at once.

The agent just looked at them. “We can’t permit the launch.”

“You’re going to stop a launch on Russian soil?”

“When the launch could be part of a terrorist attack, yes, I’m sure the Russians will cooperate.”

“Terrorist! Where do you get that?”

“What if someone was to take over your launch, and turn it back at the US? How big of a crater could he make if it went down on a city?”

Ron’s face was red. “That’s… idiotic!”

“What do you want?” Jere asked.

“We want to prevent any possible attack on the United States.”

Ron nodded, sudden understanding gleaming in his eyes. “ China.”

“Excuse me?”

“ China ’s bitching about our program, aren’t they?”

The agent shrugged. “It is your option to speculate.”

“So what do you want?” Jere said. “How do we launch?”

“You don’t. However, if you turn the program over to us, and allow us to send qualified observers, we would provide proper acknowledgement of your role in this endeavor.”

“We can’t do that!” Jere said. “What about our sponsors? They’ll come for our heads. Hell, the Russian Mafia will come for our heads, too! We can’t just hand this over to you.”

“I’m sure we can placate the Russians. And your sponsors.”

Jere slumped back in his chair. They could do almost anything they wanted. He could be picked up and whisked away and never seen again. He could have everything taken from him piece by piece, a Job job.

Taking their offer might be the best bet. Of course, he’d have to get Evan in on it, but maybe there was some way to profit from it anyway. When you were talking deep pockets, the government had the deepest pockets of all. Maybe they could spin it…

“No fucking way!” Ron said. His face was almost purple. He levered himself up out of his chair and went to tower over the seated agent. The standing one tensed, but didn’t move.

Ron poked a finger in his chest. “We’re not going to Mars to plant fucking flags!”

“Dad…”

“Shut up.” Low and deadly.

“Did the fucking pilgrims come to plant fucking flags?” Ron said. “No! They came to get away from bureaucratic fucks like you! You assholes had your chance. How many billions did we give to you shitpoles? What did we get for it? Our lunar rovers in Chinese museums! A bunch of rusting hardware crash-landed on Mars. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Now it’s our chance!”

Jere watched his dad, open-mouthed. He was frozen in place.

Agent #2 put his hand on Agent #1’s shoulder and whispered something in his ear. Agent #1 nodded and stood up.

“So you refuse to turn over the program?”

“Damn fuckin’ right,” Ron said.

The two swiveled to look at Jere. “And does he speak for you?”

Jere looked at his father. He looked back steadily, intently. He nodded, just a fraction.

“Get out of here,” Jere said.

I hope you’re right, Dad, he thought. Or we’re both dead.

Leaving the IBM package was one thing, but the slide was inexcusable. Geoff Smith squeezed his eyes shut tight. If only he could turn back the clock! All it would have taken was a glance and a five-second diversion, and everything would have been alright.

Now, his best possible fate was winning a prize. And then having to endure the endless interviews that came after it.

And now, flying over the rugged Martian terrain, it looked like they might actually have a chance. Chatter from the Can: the felon’s Kite setup wasn’t going smoothly, his lead had evaporated, and every second left him farther behind. The extreme sports geeks had never really been in the running. They’d been slow at everything.

Money, he thought dreamily, opening his eyes, watching the landscape pass below. Money money money.

He’d hoped that he could make another slide as Laci and Wende built the Kite, but his water was lost and they didn’t let him have the time. And truth was, he didn’t really feel like it. He was in a haze, as if losing the slide had taken all the fight out of him.

Of course, he could scope the dust all he wanted when they were back on the Can, but that would be surface dust. What if the dust had to be from a few feet down? Or what if the dust had to be from near the water flows that they had seen from MGS, so many years ago? What if he’d never had a chance at all, and they knew that, and they didn’t care? His thoughts whirled like a cyclone, all destructive energy and dark currents.

Wende looked back at him from the pilot’s sling and smiled at him. Geoff tried to smile back, but his lips felt frozen in place. After a moment, Wende turned away and gestured at Laci. Laci looked back at him and frowned.

Yes, I know you don’t like me, he thought. You’ve made that abundantly clear. Now turn back around and be a good copilot.

Laci was probably thinking how much faster they would be running if he accidentally fell off. He looked up nervously at his tether, but it was solid and unfrayed.

His head swam for a moment, and he shook it. His vision blurred and doubled as if his head was a giant bell that had just been struck. He gripped his perch tighter and held still. After a moment, it passed. The landscape streamed by beneath him, soothing and hypnotic.

We’ve always looked down at the surface of Mars and imagined things. First, God of War. Next, an arid desert world where intelligence clung to life with massive feats of engineering. Then the dead and dry thing we knew today.

But it wasn’t dead! He knew there was life here.

The landscape had changed again from dunefield to dark rocks, rectilinear and almost artificial in appearance. It reminded him of ancient Mayan ruins. Or was it Egypt? Or Stonehenge?

Details swam and ran and resolved themselves again. The rectilinear lines became sharper and more regular. Now he could see individual stones, etched into fantastic designs by the passage of time.

Etched? By what? He shook his head again, and details leaped out: fantastic whorls and patterns, ancient art of the highest order. It wasn’t etched by weather. It was etched by intelligence!

Were those patterns he saw in the sand as well? Did they cover ancient squares where people once gathered? For a blinding instant, he could see the entire city as it had stood towering over the rough Martian surface…

“Stop!” he cried. His voice sounded strangely high and strangled.

“What?” Wendy said. “Why?”

“It’s them!” Geoff said. “Intelligence! The city below us… there’s a city below us!”

The two looked down, scanning back and forth with puzzled looks.

“Geoff?” Wende said. “What are you talking about?”

“The city! Look at the stones! They’re square! Look at the language on them!”

“Geoff, that isn’t funny.”

A crackle. The voice of Frank Sellers from the Can. “What do you see?”

“A city,” Geoff said. “The remains of a city. Stones! Writing! Decoration!”

“Land,” Frank said.

“No way!” Laci said.

“The Roddenberry clause says you have to investigate any overt evidence of life,” Frank said. “Sorry.”

“But there’s nothing below us!” Wende said. “Just a rockfield.”

“Land. You have to. Contract breach if you don’t.”

“Shit!” Laci said. Wende grumbled, but they began to fall from the sky.

“Turn around,” Geoff said. “The best part is behind us.”

Wende wheeled around and he saw it all, the geometric perfection, the ancient city and all its splendor.

“I still don’t see it,” Wende said. “Frank, can you review our last imagery?”

“Yep,” Frank said. “Continue landing. It’ll take me a few minutes.”

Wende picked a relatively clear section of sand and for a moment they were all acting as landing gear, running over the sand.

Geoff ’s legs felt heavy and weak, and he buckled under the weight of the Kite. Down this close, he could see nothing. Rocks were just rocks. Sand was just sand. There was no great city.

“Geoff? You alright?” That was Wende. Pretty Wende. Nice of her to think about him.

Frank’s voice crackled back on. “False alarm,” he said. “I don’t see anything other than some regular volcanic cracking. That’s probably what fooled you, Geoff.”

“I’m no fool!” he shouted. He had seen it! He had!

Silence for a time. Finally: “What does Geoff look like? Is he blue?”

“No,” Wende said. “But he looks funny. Patchy, splotchy. Oh, shit. Does he have a bug?”

“More likely an oxy malfunction. He may be cranked up too high. Funny, that usually doesn’t cause hallucinations, but…”

“I saw it!” Geoff cried.

Wende was shrugging out of her harness.

“No,” Laci said. “Wende, get back in your harness. We need to fly!”

“It’ll only take a minute,” Frank said.

“It won’t kill him.”

“Yes it will. Eventually.”

“Then we take the chance.”

Wende had stopped shrugging out of her harness, under Laci’s hard glare. Frank said nothing. Geoff watched them for a moment, thinking, I saw it! I did! I really did! There was a distant babble on the comm and things got very bright.

Then Wende’s face bent over him. “I’m not like the other monster,” she said. “Let’s get him fixed up.”

“Good girls,” Frank said. “Here, open his panel and look for…”

He said it would only take a minute, but it took over ten. When they were all back on board and soaring into the sky, even the Rothman team had passed them.

NASA came back. This time with two grinning executives and their own camera crew. Following them were fifty thousand people who jammed the Burbank streets in cars and on bikes and on foot, holding banners saying “Free Enterprise!” and “New frontiers, not new Oversight!” and of course, “NASA SUCKS!”

Jere and Evan couldn’t help grinning.

Within a day, the video of the NASA/Oversight shakedown had been posted on a thousand message boards and ten thousand blogs. The raw video almost brought the AV IM network to its knees in the US, Japan, France, Russia, and even parts of China. A thousand pundits spouted off about “The New Stalin,” “The New Face of Censorship,” the fact that the Constitution had long been paved over, the free-enterprise foundation of the country, and the “Taking of the New Frontier.”

The New Frontier had struck the core audience like a well-spoken diatribe supporting socialized health care at a meeting of Reformed Republicans. Survivalists polished their weapons and streamed out of the Sierras and Appalachians and half-forgotten Nebraska missile silos to demonstrate. TrekCon 18 turned into a huge caravan that converged on Sacramento, trapping senators in their buildings, demanding the governor secede so that Neteno could go about its business. Eventually, over a million people gathered there, some in overalls and prickly beards and armed with shotguns, some wearing Klingon outfits, some housewives in SUVs, some businessmen who worked in aviation and space and engineering. In three days, two slogans were posted at over ten million websites, plastered on bumper stickers, hung from suction-cups behind windows: Free Enterprise, and Give Us New Frontiers.

Three days after the video hit the net, Jere received a discreet phone call from a higher-up at NASA/Oversight. Jere made his own counteroffer.

A day after that, he received another phone call, politely accepting the prime sponsorship for the mission, for a price greater than the entire funds they had collected to date. The launch would go forward as planned. Jere and Evan were still the primes. The only difference was that there would be another discreet logo added on the ship and the suits.

Evan looked at Jere as the NASA muckty spouted off about “New Partnership with Business,” and how wonderful this opportunity was under the big Neteno sign out in front of the building. The press had built a wall around the crowd with cameras and laptops and transmission equipment. The crowd looked happy, vindicated, relieved. As if they were thinking, Good, good, we still have the power, we still live in a free country.

“We are proud to be able to support this effort,” the muckty said. “For less than the cost of a single robotic Mars lander, we are sending the first manned mission to Mars. With this mission, we have again leaped ahead of the Chinese. We see this as a model for future exploration of space: USG Oversight and private industry, working hand-in-hand to accomplish our goals.”

Some applause, some boos, some catcalls. But it was done. They were back on track. It even got them their advertising hook: Free Enterprise. That was really catching on in a big way, simmering around the net.

So now it’s more than a game, he thought. It’s a demonstration of some of the things that people will need to do to conquer the red planet. Or at least we spin it that way.

He looked at Evan and his hard, unblinking eyes.

To him, it was still just a game.

A game played hard, winner take all.

Frank was lying to them again. Mike Kinsson didn’t blame him. What was he going to tell them otherwise? Sorry, you’re out of luck, best to just ditch the headers and pop off quick.

“We’re still seeing if we can rig one of the Returns for remote operation,” Frank said.

“How much longer?” Juelie whined.

It was the morning of the third day. Later, Mike would go and wander around. Juelie and Sam looked like two teenagers who had just discovered sex, and they were probably happy to have the privacy. He’d already walked over to the nearby cliffs, turning over rocks, hoping beyond hope to see the tell-tale carpet of a lichen. He still remembered the first time his mother and father had taken him to the Griffith Observatory, and they had talked about what life might be like on other planets. Lichens and primitive plants for Mars, they’d said. It had fascinated him in a way that nothing had ever done, before or since.

“We’re hoping to have a definitive answer by the end of the day,” Frank said.

“What if it takes longer?” Sam said.

“Then we wait.”

“We’re running out of food!” Juelie said.

“We know. Please conserve your energy.”

They both looked at Mike. Mike looked right back at them, thinking, Like what you were doing wasn’t more strenuous than my walk.

He edged away from them. What would they do when they found out there really wasn’t any rescue coming? Maybe it would be best just to wander off, and stay wandered off.

“He’s walking away!” Juelie said.

“Mild physical exertion won’t hurt,” Frank said.

They didn’t come after him.

He walked past the cliffs from the day before and came to a place where sand and rocks made a steep slope down into a small valley. Rivulets had been cut in the surface of the slope, some still knife-edged.

He remembered old satellite images. Could he be near a place where water was near the surface? He paused to dig into one of the little channels, but turned up only dry sand and dust and pebbles.

He wandered on. He’d keep walking and see where his feet took him. Until it was time to lie down and turn down the heaters as far as they went. Maybe some real pioneer, fifty years from now, would find his desiccated body and say, This is the other guy, the one who wandered away from camp.

It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

But it was better than imagining Juelie and Sam, when the real news came down.

Russian summer was the same as Russian winter, except the black ice had been replaced by mud. And it was an entire caravan this time, reporters and pundits and hangers-on, all loudly complaining about the facilities. They swarmed the tiny town, like ants on a dead cockroach. Reporters slept in taverns, in houses, in barns, in the street if they had to. NO FOOD signs hung from many of the restaurants and bars.

“Shouldn’t they pay us extra for the tourism?” Evan said.

“It won’t last,” Jere said.

“Sure it will. There are enough bored reporters around here to crank out five thousand local-interest pieces. And people will travel anywhere.”

Then it was launch day, and Jere didn’t know how to feel. He should be worried. He should be thinking about what would happen if the whole shebang blew up on the ground. If that happened, everyone would howl for blood. They would be crucified. If they were lucky.

All because they didn’t get their daily dose of excitement. A-muse-ment, Ron used to call it. Non-thinking. To muse is to think, and to A-muse was not to think. Which is what most people wanted. Give them a roof and food and someone to screw, let them buy a few shiny things from time to time, and all they really cared about was filling the gaping void of their lives. They didn’t want to muse. They wanted to A-muse.

And God help the person who promised amusement, but didn’t come through.

It was a short ride to the launch site. The crowd outside the gates parted for them as they drove to the official grandstand and made their way to the little box at the top. Ron collapsed in his seat with a grunt. Jere and Evan book-ended him. They were sitting on camp chairs that looked like they could have come from a Napoleonic campaign.

“Crunch time,” Evan said softly.

“Yes,” Ron said.

“Anyone in a betting mood?” He rubbed his hands.

“Shut up,” Ron said.

Again, Jere was glad to have the old man. Without Ron, Evan would have woven a web tighter and tighter. Evan still held too many purse strings, and was hiding a lot of money, but they could deal with that later.

Ahead of them, the ship towered over the bleak landscape. Gleaming steel and clouds of vapor, a high-tech pillar aimed at the deep blue sky.

One minute. The few people on the field scampered to cover.

Ten seconds.

Jere held his breath.

The numbers flickered down on the big board.

There was an explosion of light and a mind-numbing roar. The Plexiglas windows of the little booth jittered and shook.

Jere held up a hand to shield his eyes. It’s exploded, it’s all over, it’s done, I’m done.

But then the cheering of the crowd roused him. He looked at them in disbelief. What were they cheering for? Were they crazy? Did they actually want to see blood?

Then his father pointed and shouted, “Look!”

The pillar was rising into the sky.

Slowly at first, then faster. It was a hundred feet up. Two hundred. Then as tall as a skyscraper, balancing on a long white tail of flame. The wind battered the grandstand and beat at the throngs, standing hundreds deep. The smell of burnt mud and concrete worked its way into the shelter. Sand and dust and grit pattered against the Plexiglas.

My God, Jere thought, as Mars Enterprise rose higher. Its flame no longer touched the Earth. It gathered speed like a jet, shrinking smaller and faster as it rose up and arced out.

Eventually, the roar reduced itself to a shout, then a mild grumbling. Mars Enterprise was a bright speck in the sky.

They had done it.

“Congratulations,” Ron said.

“For what?” Jere said.

His dad allowed himself a thin grin. “You’ve done something that no government has ever been able to do.”

“But… it wasn’t… it was just a…”

Ron held up a hand. “Shh,” he said.

“Come on!” Alena said. “Come on come on come on!”

The Can had been embargoing the status of the teams for an hour, but Glenn knew they were close. They’d made it from dead last to nearly tied with the Paul guy before the Can shut up.

“What can I do?” he asked.

“I don’t know! I was talking to the Kite, not you!”

“I’ll think positive thoughts.”

“Good for you!”

Glenn smiled. And what could he do, other than stay lashed up under the belly of the Kite for minimum aerodynamic drag? Nothing.

The next one they should make more manual, he thought. Human-powered Kites and Wheels. None of this motor crap.

“Look!” Alena pointed.

Glenn strained his eyes. Very far in the distance, he could just catch the glint of metal. “Is that it?”

“Yeah, that’s it! Come on come on come on come on!”

Alena looked at him, and he saw the girl who he’d fallen in love with, the woman he’d proposed to. She was smiling, her color high and eyes flashing. It was impossible not to love her when she was winning.

Where was Paul? If the race was as close as he thought, he should be able to see his Kite, bright white against the pale sky. He scanned from left to right, but saw nothing.

Whoever makes it to the Returns, wins. They were automatic. There was no way to race to orbit.

Another look. No Kite. Was it possible that Paul had run into trouble? Could they really be first?

Karma will get you all the time, he thought.

From ahead of them, a bright flare. The Kite rocked as Alena started violently.

“No!” she said. “No no no no no!”

“Paul,” Glenn said.

“How much longer?” Alena asked.

“A couple of minutes. But it’s…”

“Go faster!”

“It only takes three minutes to orbit!”

“I don’t care!” Her face was twisted into a mask of anguish.

Glenn fell silent and let the only sound be that of the rushing wind and roaring motor. The Return field grew ahead of them, big enough so they could see the remains of Paul’s Kite. He had had a hard landing.

When they landed, Alena scrambled to the nearest Return pod and began the launch prep. But when the prep was still less than halfway done, the voices from the Can came back. This time it was the female PA. She sounded tired.

“We have a winner,” she said. “Keith Paul is now back on board the Mars Enterprise. To our other teams, thank you for a great competition. Please travel safely on your way back. There’s no need to hurry now.”

“No!” Alena wailed. She beat on the low bench of the Return pod. Glenn tried to gather her in his arms, but she pushed him away violently. He tumbled out onto the cold sand and lay for a moment, stunned, staring up at the alien sky.

“Glenn?” Glenn shook his head, but said nothing.

“Glenn?” Frightened.

She came out of the pod and knelt atop him, her eyes red from crying. “Glenn!” she said, shaking him.

“What?” he said.

“Glenn, I can’t hear you! Are you okay?”

“What?” He reached behind him and felt the suit’s radio. It seemed okay. Of course, he could have hit something in his fall… He shrugged and gave her the thumb-and-forefinger “OK” sign.

“I heard you hit and a big hiss and I thought you’d broken your header.” She was crying even more now, big tears hitting the inside of her header and running down toward her chest.

He pushed his header to hers. “I’m okay,” he said.

“I can hear you now.”

“Yeah, old trick.”

She helped him up. The Return pod gaped open like a mouth.

“Let’s go,” she said.

“Wait a minute.” Glenn looked from the Return pods-all four of them-to the sky, and then toward the east, where the Ruiz team was stranded.

Could they? Would it be possible to fly over to the Ruiz team and pick them up? Would they have enough fuel? Could they refuel?

“Alena,” he said. “Do you want to be a real winner?”

She got it. Her eyes got big, and she nodded. She stayed helmet-to-helmet with him as she called the Can.

“Frank,” she said. “Let’s talk about the Ruiz team.”

Evan, again with his presentations. In the darkness of Jere’s office, animated charts showed realtime Viewing Audience, feedback Ratings, inferred Attentiveness, inferred Buyer Motivation, plotted against Neteno’s historicals and an average of other Linear, Free-Access networks.

“We broke the ’Near downtrend,” Jere said. “Broke it hard.”

“We should have charged more for the advertising,” Evan said. “VA times BM is a record for ’Near networks, maybe even interactives.”

“We’re swimming in money.”

“Or we could up the ad rates midcourse. They won’t desert now.”

“Or we could just do another show.”

“Not with the average sequel return at fifty-eight percent,” Evan said.

Jere frowned. That was a big hole. Unless they could keep costs down. And maybe they could. All the development was done, after all…

“Don’t even think it,” Evan said.

“What?”

“Doing another show.”

“I’m not.”

Evan shook his head. “I know that look. That starry-eyed shit that gave us the second Star Wars threequel. The one with that irritating droopy bastard, whatever his name was…”

Jere shuddered. “I know who you’re talking about.”

“Point is, this show ain’t golden. And we aren’t perfect. Leave it now and let them clamor for more.”

“Like Star Trek.”

“Damn right. Don’t come back till they’re jonesing for it.”

Jere nodded. We’re on top, he thought. We’re the magnet. Let the ideas come to us for a while.

And let that be enough.

“I won, right?” Keith Paul said.

“Yeah,” Frank said.

“I’ll get the money?”

“Yeah.”

“So where are the cameras?”

Frank ripped off his earplug and pushed away from the comm board. He grabbed Keith’s shirt with both hands and pulled him close. The momentum took them off the floor, spinning through Mars Enterprise’s command center.

“There are no cameras!” Frank yelled. His eyes were wide and bright, quivering with that adrenaline-fueled, amped-up look that guys got when they were ready to take you apart with their bare hands. Keith had seen that look a few times in his life, and he knew one thing: he wanted absolutely no part of it.

“Nobody fucking cares about you!” Frank screamed, shaking Keith like he was made out of tissue. “Everyone’s watching the real fucking heroes now! You’ll get your god-damned money, just like you wanted, but don’t expect anyone to care! Now fuck off! I’ve got important things to do!”

Frank gave him one last shove, pushing Keith into the bulkhead above. His head clanged on metal and he saw stars.

“Okay, man, okay,” Keith said, as Frank drifted slowly back down and took his seat.

“Get out of here,” Frank said.

“Look at these showboating dickweeds,” Evan said.

In the hushed velvet darkness of the live feed room, Evan’s words were incredibly loud. Technicians swiveled to look at him, then turned quickly away when they saw Jere and Ron.

They were all looking at the competitive feeds. The slice-and-dice screen showed the story. Fox, Helmers, and the SciFi Channel were all tuned on a crappy little town down in Mexico, where a slim needle was being assembled in a shabby old warehouse. Outside, a makeshift derrick grew from a field of concrete. And some hairy guy wearing a dirty coverall was talking about building a colony ship to send to Mars. He called it Mayflower II.

“They timed it,” Evan said. “Perfect. They wait till we have the Ruiz team back safe and sound, then they spring this shit.”

But it was nothing, Jere thought. Just an incomplete ship. A bunch of nuts talking about open-source technology and crap like that. Who cared?

“They knew the ratings would die the instant everyone was back in the Can,” Evan said. “They knew it, and they are fucking taking it!”

“What are the ratings like?” Jere said.

Evan shook his head and clicked on the realtime feed. The downward spike was still small, but he could see it accelerating. As he watched, it clicked down a few pixels more.

“Do we have anyone down in Mexico?” Evan said. “Can we get a line on this colony crap, too?”

“No,” Jere said.

“Shit. Shit-shit.”

It’s just a news story, Jere thought. One they’ll forget as soon as they log off.

But Ron was watching the competitive feeds, his jaw set hard, his eyes bright and glassy. Intent. Hungry. Excited. Jere knew that look. He shivered.

“Get on camera,” Ron said, not looking away from the feeds.

“What?” Evan said.

“Get your butts down to the newsroom and get on camera now!” Ron said, finally looking at them. “Before they all tune out.”

“Why?” Jere said.

“Tell them this is what you wanted. Winning Mars wasn’t just a show. This is what you intended all along.”

“But we didn’t…”

“Yes,” Ron said. “You did.”

In the blue light of the monitors, Evan’s expression of confusion suddenly bloomed into an excited smile.

“Will it work?” Jere said, looking at Ron.

Evan made a disgusted noise. “You probably believed the one about Washington never telling any lies, didn’t you?”

In the monitors, another talking head, saying they wanted to launch sometime in the next twenty-four months. Looking scared.

They’ll never make it, Jere thought.

They’ll fucking die up there.

But if they do…

Ron, looking at the slice-and-dice, openly smiling now.

“Come on,” Evan said. “Let’s go make our legacy.”