Reed’s smile turned bitter. “What of it? The mission needs a sacrificial lamb, doesn’t it? One man killed in orbit. The entire ground team nearly killed by a stupid mistake. You can be the mission’s hero, James. I’ll be the goat.”
“That’s not right. It’s not fair.”
Reed’s smile turned sour. “Perhaps you’d better stay, then, my heroic friend. That’s the only way you’re going to get to explore more of this miserable ball of rust. Once we get back home and they start dissecting all the mistakes we’ve made, there will never be another expedition to Mars. Never.”
Jamie saw that the others had gathered around them, faces questioning. Even Vosnesensky looked doubtful, scowling worriedly. They had reached the row of lockers where their dust-spattered hard suits waited like the battered armor of knights who had sought the Holy Grail.
Jamie turned around to face Reed. Calmly, quietly, he said, “There will be no scapegoats among us. Not among us. We’re a team. Even when we get back to Earth we’re still a team. Without heroes and without goats.”
“I wish that could be true, Jamie,” said Reed, with real yearning in his voice.
“It will be.”
“It can’t be. The project directors will never trust me again. I’ll get a polite handshake and be mustered out into private practice. And think of what’s waiting for Mikhail. Our noble team leader fractured every rule in the regulations and thumbed his nose at Li and the mission controllers. Mikhail’s career is finished.”
Vosnesensky grunted. “So I will retire. I have achieved my dream. I was the first man on Mars. I will not return. I don’t think anyone will come back to Mars. Tony is right. There will be no more expeditions.”
“For how long?” Jamie demanded. “For my whole lifetime? For a hundred years? A thousand? I don’t think so. But even if it happens that way, what of it? We’ll come back to Mars one day, just as surely as the sun rises.”
“Really?”
“Yes! Because we have to. The human race has to. We’re explorers, Tony. All of us. Even you; it’s what brought you here. It’s built into our blood, into our brains. That’s what science is all about. Human beings have to learn, have to search and seek and explore. We need to, just like a flower needs water and sunlight. It’s what made our ancestors move out of Africa and spread all across the Earth. Now we’re spreading all across the solar system and someday we’ll start to move out to the stars. You can’t stop that, Tony. Nobody can. It’s what makes us human.”
Reed backed off a step, then lifted his chin a notch higher. “Very pretty speech, Jamie. But most of the human race doesn’t give a damn about Mars or anything else except their own squalid little greeds. They’re going to close down the Mars Project, Jamie. They’re going to kill it.”
“They’ll try, I know. They’ll do their best to shut us down. And I’ll do mine. Because I’m not going to rest until they send another expedition back here. If I have to do it with my bare hands, I’ll bring us back to Mars.”
Jamie stuck his hand into his coverall pocket and pulled out his bear fetish. He reached up and put it on the rack beside his gray helmet.
“And to prove it, I’m going to leave this little fellow here to greet me when I return.”
They all stared at the fetish. Jamie had not allowed any of them to see it before.
“My grandfather would say it has powerful magic,” Jamie told them. “But the real magic is in us. We make things happen. We’re coming back to Mars-all of us who want to.”
Reed huffed. “A gesture.”
“A symbol,” Jamie corrected.
“Speaking of gestures,” Ilona said, stepping through the group to stand between Jamie and Vosnesensky, “I had intended to do this in private, once we were aboard the spacecraft.”
She took from her breast pocket the dog-eared photograph that had been taped up over her bunk. Staring solemnly at Vosnesensky, Ilona methodically tore the photo into small pieces.
“Mikhail, I have wronged you and all the Russians on this mission. I apologize. You saved our lives, and it was wrong of me to hold a fifty-year grudge against you personally.”