“You’ve told us of your glorious exploits in the Falklands War many times, Father.”
“You’re a coward! A damned trembling, shaking little coward!” The old man turned on his wife. “You’ve raised a coward for a son.”
Tony felt his blood turn to flame. “Don’t bully her!”
His father stared at him for a long moment, then with an exasperated grunt he stormed out of the room. Tony turned to his mother, sitting silently, patiently. They heard the front door open and then slam shut.
“You don’t think I’m a coward, do you?” Tony asked his mama.
“Of course not, dear.”
Two days later Tony applied for a post in the British government’s space program. Within a fortnight he received notification that he had been tentatively accepted; he was to report to the training center for tests and evaluation. His father was not home when the letter came; there was no one in the house except Tony and his mother.
“They need physicians,” he told her, still aching with wounded pride. “I may very well be selected for the Mars training team if Britain joins the program.”
He had expected that she would be horrified, break into tears, beg him to reconsider. Instead his mother smiled and kissed him on the forehead and told him that whatever he wanted to do was what he should do.
In the end Tony was accepted by the Mars Project, a stranger bought the lucrative practice when his father retired, and his mother dragged the old man off to Nassau where he suffered an incapacitating stroke their first year in the sun, leaving him helpless and totally dependent on the loving care of his long-neglected wife.
Tony loved being part of the Mars Project. Most of the other trainees were either astronauts or scientists, dullard technicians or researchers so narrowly specialized that they knew practically nothing of the larger world of the arts and society. Tony enjoyed himself immensely, the sophisticated center of attraction and interest at all times. While others worried themselves into near hysteria over the selection process, Tony never doubted that he would be picked to go to Mars. If he feared the thought of riding millions of miles through space to an empty, harshly inhospitable world, he kept such apprehensions to himself. Only in his dreams did such terrors confront him, and then it was always in the shape of his father looming over him like a horrible devouring ogre, while his mother wept helplessly.
During his waking hours Tony made only one move that he would consider a mistake. He helped Joanna to get rid of Hoffman and bring the Navaho along with them to Mars. A blunder, Tony considered it in retrospect. The Navaho has become the center of everyone’s attention. Even Joanna’s. Especially Joanna’s.
SOL 24: NOON
Aleksander Mironov hummed softly as he checked Jamie’s backpack. The rover’s airlock was crowded with just the two of them in it: Mironov in his fire-engine red hard suit, Jamie in his sky-blue, with a gray spare helmet to replace his meteorite-gouged original.
Mironov’s visor was up, and Jamie could see that the Russian was smiling as he clomped back into his view. Mironov’s face looked chunky, almost compressed in his helmet, as if stuffed into a container a half size too small. It was a broad-cheeked, snub-nosed face, slightly ruddy, sprinkled lightly with freckles, with pale blue eyes and eyebrows so fair they were barely visible.
“Gloves?” Mironov asked.
“Right here on my belt, Alex.” Jamie tugged them on. Of all the equipment on the mission, the gloves were the most advanced piece of technology. Thin enough to be easily flexible and give the wearer a good feel for whatever he grasped, yet tough enough to protect the hands against the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere.
“Visor down,” Mironov said. Only after they had both sealed their helmets did he turn to the pumps and start them chugging.
“You look tired,” the cosmonaut said over the suit-to-suit radio.
Surprised, Jamie said to the gold-tinted visor, “I feel okay.”
“You were outside four hours yesterday, then you stayed up very late last night. You were outside all morning, and now you go again.”