Mars

Connors had never met Thomas A. Mutch. The NASA scientist had been killed in a mountain-climbing accident only a few years after the first automated lander had set down on the surface of Mars, in 1976. That primitive lander, known originally as Viking 1, had been renamed the Thomas A. Mutch Memorial Station shortly afterward. The plaque had been made then, when Connors was still a kid just starting to buzz the farms of Cheyenne County, Nebraska.

Now he guided the remotely piloted Little Beauty to longitude 47°97’, latitude 22°49’ north, the location where the faithful old Viking still stood on its spraddling legs after more than thirty years. Connors was to land the little plane there and detach the box with the plaque inside it, then wait until morning to take off and return to home base.

There was one further line etched into the stainless steel plaque. It read: “Emplaced,” with the space following it left blank. The date was to be filled in when human explorers finally reached the Viking lander, a feat that was not in the schedule for this first exploration mission.

Connors’s face clouded slightly. He wished he were truly flying this plane, actually on board at its controls, really there so he could land her and bolt that plaque to the old spacecraft and scratch in the date.