The pink sky deepened into red, then violet, uniformly, evenly, the way the dome of a planetarium softly dims when its lights are turned down toward darkness.
“Look!” Jamie pointed as the sun dipped out of sight. A single lonely wisp of a cloud hung above the horizon, glowing like a silver ghost briefly. Then the sun disappeared and the cloud faded into the all-encompassing darkness.
“This is more beautiful than I could have imagined.” Vosnesensky’s voice was softer, gentler than Jamie had heard before.
“It sure is. I wonder…”
Jamie’s words died in his throat. His heart began to pound. The sky was shimmering, glowing faintly as a spirit hovering above them, flickering colors so pale and delicate that for a breathless moment Jamie could not believe his eyes.
“Mikhail…”
“I see it. Aurora.”
“Like the northern lights.” Jamie’s voice was hollow with awe, trembling. The lights pulsed and billowed across the sky, exquisitely ethereal pastels of pink, green, blue, and white. He could see stars through them, faintly.
“But Mars has no magnetic field,” Vosnesensky said, sounding more puzzled than impressed.
“That’s just it,” Jamie heard himself reply. “Particles from the solar wind must hit the upper atmosphere all across the planet. The gases up there glow when the particles excite them. This must be going on everywhere, every night. We’ve just never stayed out long enough to see it.”
“Wouldn’t it be observable from orbit?” Mikhail was being more of a hardheaded scientist than Jamie.
“Must be pretty faint, looking down against the background of the planet itself. But if they know what to look for I’m sure Katrin Diels and Ulanov will be able to observe it.”
The colors faded away. The lights died slowly, leaving the sky calm and dark. Jamie felt a shudder race through him, though whether it was fear or ecstasy he could not tell. Probably some of both. His pulse was still thundering in his ears. As far as the eye could see in any direction, there was nothing but utter darkness now. As if the world had vanished, as if he were standing alone in a universe all his own, unpopulated, unoccupied except for himself.
And the stars. Even through the tinted visor of his helmet Jamie saw the bright eternal stars looking down at him like faithful old friends, telling him that even on this strange empty world they were up there in their places, the guardians of universal order.
One of the stars was visibly moving across the sky. “Is that our ships in orbit?” Jamie wondered aloud.
Vosnesensky chuckled. “It is Phobos, so close it looks like a space station, going from west to east. Deimos is too faint to see unless you know exactly where to look for it.”
Jamie recognized Orion and Taurus, with the cluster of the Pleiades in the bull’s neck. Turning, he saw both the Dippers. The North Star isn’t over the north pole of Mars, he remembered.
“Look there.” Vosnesensky must have been pointing, but with nothing except starlight Jamie could not make out his form.
The Russian took him by the shoulder and turned him slightly. “Just above the horizon. The bright blue one.”
Jamie saw it. An incredibly beautiful blue star shimmering low on the horizon.
“Is it Earth?” he asked, in a reverent whisper.
“Earth,” replied Vosnesensky. “And the moon.”
Jamie could not make out the fainter whitish star nearly touching the blue one. Vosnesensky insisted he could, but Jamie thought it might have been more the Russian’s imagination than superior eyesight.
“We must get back inside the rover,” Vosnesensky said at last. “No sense freezing to death while admiring the sky.”
He turned on his helmet lamp, immediately destroying their night-adapted vision, and then touched the controls on his wrist to remotely turn on the lights in the rover. Reluctantly, almost angry at the cosmonaut, Jamie followed Vosnesensky back to the vehicle.
It took a surprisingly long time to get out of their hard suits in the confined space inside the rover’s airlock. The excitement of discovering the aurora gradually dimmed away. By the time they were down to their tubed skivvies, sitting on folded-up bunks facing each other with a pair of microwaved meals on the narrow table between them, Jamie’s pulse had returned almost too normal.