Ben Bova - Mars_玖贝云文库

Ben Bova - Mars

Listen to the wisdom of the Old Ones:

The red world and the blue are brothers. They were born together in the seething maelstrom of dust and

gas spinning out from the heart of the vast cloud that was to become Father Sun.

For uncountable time each world was engulfed in endless violence. Monsters roared down out of the

sky, pounding the worlds mercilessly in a holocaust of terrible explosions. Under such awesome

bombardment there could be no solid ground; the rocks themselves were liquid bubbling magma as the

fiery rain from the sky went on and on, blotting out the radiance of the newly bright Father Sun with

steaming clouds that covered each world from pole to pole.

Slowly, with the godlike patience of the stars themselves, slowly their surfaces cooled. Solid land took

form, bare rock, hard and harsh and lifeless. Worse than the desert where The People live; much worse.

There was no tree, no blade of grass, not even a drop of water.

Deep below their crusts both worlds were still liquid-hot with the energy of their violent creation. Water

trapped beneath the ground boiled up, sweated from the depths like droplets beading a gourd in the heat

of summer. The water evaporated into the thin film of atmosphere swaddling each newborn world.

Cooling rain began to spatter onto the naked rocks, running into rivulets, streams, raging torrents that

gouged the rocks out of their paths and tore huge gashes in the land.

On the bigger of the two worlds mighty oceans grew, filling deep rocky basins with water. The smaller

world formed broad shallow lakes, but gradually they faded away into the thin, cold atmosphere or sank

out of sight below the surface of the land.

Because of its glistening wide oceans the larger of the two worlds took on a deep blue tint. The smaller

world slowly turned into a dusty, windblown desert as its waters sank into its ground. It turned rust-red.

Life arose on the blue world, first in the seas and later on dry land. Gigantic beasts roamed forests and

marshes, only to disappear forever. At last The People came to the blue world-First Man and First

Woman emerged, standing tall and proud in the bright sunlight. Their children multiplied. Some of them

wondered about the world in which they lived and about the stars that dotted the night.

They turned their intelligent eyes to the red gleam in the sky that marked their brother world and

wondered what it was. They watched it carefully, and the other stars too, and tried to understand the

workings of the heavens.

To The People, the stars spoke of the endless cycles of the seasons, the time to plant, the time of the

rains. The red world held no special fascination for them. They called it merely "Big Star."

But to the Anglos, steeped in conquest and killing, whenever their pale eyes turned to the red gleam in the

sky that marked their brother world they trembled with thoughts of blood and death. They named the red

world after their god of war.

Mars.

SOL 1: MORNING

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"Touchdown."

It was said in Russian first and then immediately repeated in English.

Jamie Waterman never felt the actual moment when they touched the surface II Mars. The descent

vehicle was lowering so gently that when it finally set down on the ground Jamie and the others realized it

only because the vibration of the rocket thrusters ceased. Beyond everything else, Vosnesensky was a

superb pilot.

All sense of motion stopped. There was no sound. Through the thick insulation of his pressure suit helmet

Jamie could hear nothing except his own excited breathing.

Then Joanna Brumado's voice came through his earphones, hushed, awed: "We're here."

Eleven months ago they had been on Earth. Half an hour ago they had been in orbit around the planet

Mars. Then came the terrifying ride down, shaking and bumping and burning their way through the thin

atmosphere, an artificial meteor blazing across the empty Martian sky. A journey of more than a hundred

million kilometers, a quest that had already taken four years of their lives, had at last reached its

destination.

Now they sat in numb silence on the surface of a new world, four scientists encased in bulky, brightly

colored pressure suits that made them look as if they had been swallowed alive by oversized robots.

Abruptly, without a word of command from the cockpit above them, the four scientists began to unstrap

their safety harnesses and got up stiffly, awkwardly from their chairs. Jamie slid his helmet visor up as he

squeezed between Ilona Malater and Tony Reed to get to the small round observation port, the only

window in their cramped compartment.

He reached the window and looked out. The other three pressed around him, their hard-shell pressure

suits butting and sliding against one another like a quartet of awkward tortoises trying to dip their beaks

into the same tiny life-giving puddle.

A red dusty desert stretched out as far as the eye could see, rust-colored boulders scattered across the

barren gently rolling land like toys left behind by a careless child. The uneven horizon seemed closer than

it should be. The sky was a delicate salmon pink. Small wind-shaped dunes heaped in precise rows, and

the reddish sand piled against some of the bigger rocks.

Jamie catalogued the scene professionally: ejecta from impacts, maybe volcanic eruptions but more likely

meteor hits. No bedrock visible. The dunes look stable, probably been there since the last dust storm,

maybe longer.

"Mars," breathed Joanna Brumado, her helmet practically touching his as they peered through the

window.

"Mars," Jamie agreed.

"It looks so desolate," said Ilona Malater, sounding disappointed, as if she had expected a welcoming

committee or at least a blade of grass.

"Exactly like the photos," said Antony Reed.

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To Jamie, the red desert world beyond the window looked just as he had expected it to look. Like

home.

The first member of the team to leave the landing ship was the sturdy construction robot. Crowding

against the small observation window with the three other scientists, Jamie Waterman watched the

bulbous, blue-gray metal vehicle roll across the rusty red sand on its six springy wheels, stopping abruptly

about fifty meters from where their lander stood.

Watching the square-sided machine with the bulky liquefied air tanks atop it, Jamie thought to himself,

Russian design, Japanese electronics, and American software. Just like everything else on this expedition.

A pair of gleaming metal arms unfolded from the truck's front like a giraffe climbing to its feet and began

to pull a shapeless heap of plastic from the big storage bin on its side. The robot spread the plastic out on

the sand as precisely as a grandmother spreading a picnic tablecloth. Then it seemed to stop, as if to

inspect the shiny, rubbery-looking material. Slowly, the lifeless plastic began to stir, filling with air from

the big tanks on the robot's top. The plastic heap grew and took form: a bubble, a balloon, finally a rigid

hemispherical dome that completely hid the robot from view.

Ilona Malater, pressing close, murmured, "Our home on Mars."

Tony Reed replied, "If it doesn't leak."

For more than an hour they watched the industrious little robot building their inflated dome, fixing its rim

firmly to the dusty Martian soil, trundling back and forth through a man-tall flap to get reinforcing metal

ribs and a complete airlock assembly from the landing vehicle's cargo bay and then weld them into place.

They were all anxious to go outside and plant their booted feet on the rust-red soil of Mars, but

Vosnesensky insisted that they follow the mission plan to the letter. "The braking structure must cool," he

railed down to them from the cockpit, by way of legitimizing his decision. "The dome structure must be

finished and fully pressurized."

Vosnesensky, of course, was too busy to stand by the observation port and watch with the rest of them.

As commander of the ground team he was up in the cockpit, checking out all the lander's systems while

he reported to the mission leader in the spacecraft orbiting overhead and, through him, to the mission

controllers back on Earth, more than a hundred million kilometers away.

Pete Connors, the American astronaut who copiloted the lander, sat at Vosnesensky's side and

monitored the construction robot and the sensors that were sampling the thin air outside. Only the four

scientists were free to watch the machine erect the first human habitation on the surface of Mars.

"We should be getting into our backpacks," said Joanna Brumado.

"Plenty of time for that," Tony Reed said.

Ilona Malater gave a wicked little laugh. "You wouldn't want him to become angry with us, would you,

Tony?" She pointed upward, toward the cockpit level.

Reed cocked an eyebrow and smiled back at her. "I don't suppose it would do to upset him on the very

first day, would it?"

Jamie took his eyes from the hard-working robot, now fitting a second heavy metal airlock into the

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dome's curving structure. Without a word he squeezed past the three others and reached for the

backpack to his pressure suit, hanging on its rack against the far bulkhead. Like their suits, the

backpacks were color coded: Jamie's was sky-blue. He backed against it and felt the latches click into

place against the back of his hard suit. The suit itself still felt stiff, like a new pair of Levis, only worse. It

took real effort to move its shoulder joints.

In the jargon of the Mars Project their vehicle was called an L/AV: landing/ascent vehicle. It had been

designed for efficiency, not comfort. It was large, but most of its space was given to capacious cargo

bays housing equipment and supplies for the six explorers. Atop the cargo bays, on the airlock level, the

hard suits and backpacks for outside work were stored. There were four fold-down seats in the airlock

level, but the compartment felt terribly crowded to Jamie when he and the three other scientists were

jammed into it, especially when they were bundled inside their cumbersome hard-shell suits. Above the

airlock level sat the cockpit with the cosmonaut commander and astronaut second-in-command.

If they had to, the six men and women could live for days inside this landing vehicle. The mission plan

called for them to set up their base in the inflated dome that the robot was building. But they could

survive in the lander, if it came to that.

Maybe. Jamie thought that if they had to spend just a few more hours cooped up in this cramped

claustrophobic compartment, somebody would commit murder. It had been bad enough during the

nine-month flight from Earth in the much roomier modules of the parent spacecraft. This little descent

vehicle would quickly turn into a lunatic asylum if they had to live in it for days on end.

They donned the backpacks using the buddy system, as they had been trained to do, one scientist helping

the other to check out all the connections to the suit batteries, heater, and air regenerator. Then check it

all again. The backpacks were designed to connect automatically to ports in the pressure suit, but one

tiny misalignment could kill you out on the surface of Mars.

Then they began to check the suits themselves, from the heavy boots to the marvelously thin and flexible

gloves. What passed for air outside was rarer than the highest stratosphere of Earth, an unbreathable mix

of mainly carbon dioxide. An unprotected human would die in an explosive agony of ruptured lungs and

blood that would literally boil at such low pressure.

"What! Not ready yet!"

Vosnesensky's deep voice grated. The Russian tried to make it sound mildly humorous, but it was clear

that he had no patience with his scientific underlings. He was fully encased in his blazing red suit,

backpack riding like a hump behind his shoulders, ready to go, as he clumped down the ladder from the

cockpit. Connors, right behind him, was also in his clean white hard suit and backpack. Jamie wondered

which genius among the administrators and psychologists back home had assigned the black astronaut to

a gleaming white suit.

Jamie had helped Tony Reed and now the Englishman turned away from him to face their flight

commander.

"We'll be ready in a few moments, Mikhail Andreivitch. Please be patient with us. We're all a bit nervous,

you know."

It was not until that exact moment that the enormity of it hit Jamie. They were about to step outside this

metal canister and plant their booted feet on the red soil of Mars. They were about to fulfill a dream that

had haunted humankind for all the ages of existence.

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And I'm a part of it, Jamie said to himself. Maybe by accident, but still I'm here. On Mars!

"You want my honest opinion? It's crazy."

Jamie and his grandfather Al were hiking along the crest of the wooded ridge that overlooked the freshly

whitewashed mission church and the clustered adobe houses of the pueblo. The first snow had dusted the

mountains and the Anglo tourists would soon be arriving for the ski season. Al wore his bulky old

sheepskin coat and droop-brimmed hat with the silver coin band. Jamie felt so warm in the morning sun

that he had already unzipped his dark-blue NASA-issue windbreaker.

Al Waterman looked like an ancient totem pole, tall and bone-limn, his craggy face the faded tan color of

weathered wood. Jamie was shorter, more solidly built, his face broader, his skin tanned an almost

coppery brown. The two men shared only one feature in common: eyes as black and deep as liquid jet.

"Why is it crazy?" Jamie asked.

Al puffed out a breath of steam and turned to squint at his grand-son, standing with his back to the sun.

"The Russians are runnin' the show, right?"

"It's an international mission, Al. The U.S., the Russians, Japanese, lots of other countries."

"Yeah, but the Russians are callin' most of the shots. They been shootin' at Mars for twenty years now.

More."

"But they need our help."

"And the Japs."

Jamie nodded. "But I don't see what that's got to do with it."

"Well, it's like this, son. Here in the good old U.S. of A. you can get on the first team because you're an

Indian now don't got mad at mo, sonny. I know you're a smart geologist and all that. But being a red man

hasn't hurt you with NASA and those other government whites, has it? Equal opportunity and all that."

Jamie found himself grinning at his grandfather. Al ran a trinket shop on the plaza in Santa Fe and milked

the tourists shamelessly. He harbored no ill will for the Anglos, no hostility or even bitterness. He simply

used his wits and his charm to get along in the world, the same as any Yankee trader or Florida real

estate agent.

"Okay," Jamie admitted, "being a Native American hasn't hurt. But I am the best damned geologist

they've got." That wasn't entirely true, he knew. But close enough. Especially for family.

"Sure you are," his grandfather agreed, straight-faced. "But those Russians aren't going to take you all the

way to Mars on their ship just because you're a red man. They'll pick one of their own people and you'll

have spent two-three years training for nothing."

Jamie unconsciously rubbed at his nose. "Well, maybe. That's a possibility. There are plenty of good

geologists from other countries applying for the mission."

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"So why break your heart? Why give them years of your life when the chances are a hundred to one

against you?"

Jamie looked out past the darkly green ponderosa pines toward the rugged, weather-seamed cliffs where

his ancestors had built their dwellings a thousand years ago. Turning back to his grandfather he realized

that Al's face was weathered and lined just as those cliffs were. His skin was almost the same bleached

tan color.

"Because it draws me," he said. His voice was low but as firm as the mountains themselves. "Mars is

drawing me to it."

Al gave him a puzzled, almost troubled look.

"I mean," Jamie tried to explain, "who am I, Al? What am I? A scientist, a white man, a Navaho-I don't

really know who I am yet. I'm nearly thirty years old and I'm a nobody. Just another assistant professor

digging up rocks. There's a million guys just like me."

"Helluva long way to go, all the way to Mars."

Jamie nodded. "I have to go there, though. I have to find out if I can make something of my life.

Something real. Something important."

A slow smile crept across his grandfather's leathery face, a smile that wrinkled the corners of his eyes and

creased his cheeks.

"Well, every man's got to find his own path in life. You've got to live in balance with the world around

you. Maybe your path goes all the way out to Mars."

"I think it does, Grandfather."

Al clasped his grandson's shoulder. "Then go in beauty, son." Jamie smiled back at him. He knew his

grandfather would understand. Now he had to break the news to his parents, back in Berkeley.

Vosnesensky personally checked each scientist's hard suit and backpack. Only when he was satisfied did

he slide the transparent visor of his own helmet down and lock it in place.

"At last the time has come," he said in almost accentless English, like a computer's voice synthesis.

All the others locked their visors down. Connors, standing by the heavy metal hatch, leaned a gloved

finger against the stud that activated the air pumps. Through the thick soles of his boots Jamie felt them

start chugging, saw the light on the airlock control panel turn from green to amber.

Time seemed to stand still. For eternity the pumps labored while the six explorers stood motionless and

silent inside their brightly colored hard suits. With their visors down Jamie could not see their faces, but

he knew each of his fellow explorers by the color of their suits: Joanna was dayglo orange; Ilona vivid

green; Tony Reed canary yellow.

The clattering of the pumps dwindled as the air was sucked out of the compartment until Jamie could

hear nothing, not even his own breathing, because he was holding his breath in anticipation.

The pumps stopped. The indicator light on the panel next to the hatch went to red. Connors pulled the

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lever and the hatch popped open a crack. Vosnesensky pushed it all the way open.

Jamie felt light-headed. As if he had climbed to the top of a mesa too fast, or jogged a couple of miles in

the thin air of the mountains. He let out his breath and took a deep gulp of his suit's air. It tasted old and

metal dry. Mars lay framed in the oval hatchway, glowing pink and red and auburn like the arid highlands

where he had spent his childhood summers.

Vosnesensky was starting down the ladder, Jamie realized. Connors went down next, followed by

Joanna, then Tony, Ilona, and finally himself. As if in a dream Jamie went slowly down the ladder, one

booted foot at a time, gloved hands sliding along the gleaming metal rails that ran between two of the

unfolded petals of the aero-brake. Its ceramic-coated alloy had absorbed the blazing heat of their fiery

entry into the Martian atmosphere. The metal mesh seemed dead cold now.

Jamie stepped off the last rung of the flimsy ladder. He stood on the sandy surface of Mars.

He felt totally alone. The five human figures beside him could not truly be people; they looked like strange

alien totems. Then he realized that they were aliens, and he was too. Here on Mars we are the alien

invaders, Jamie told himself.

He wondered if there were Martians hidden among the rocks, invisible to their eyes, watching them the

way red men had watched the first whites step ashore onto their land centuries ago. He wondered what

they would do about this alien invasion, and what the invaders would do if they found native life forms.

In his helmet earphones Jamie could hear the Russian team leader conversing with the expedition

commander up in the orbiting spacecraft, his deep voice more excited than Jamie had ever heard before.

Connors was checking the TV camera perched up at the front of the stilled robot construction vehicle.

Finally Vosnesensky spoke to his five charges as they arranged themselves in a semicircle around him.

"All is ready. The words we speak next will be heard by everyone on Earth."

As planned, they stood with their backs to the landing vehicle while the robot's camera focused on them.

Later they would pan the vidcam around to show the newly erected dome and the desolate Martian plain

on which they had set foot.

Holding up one gloved hand almost like a symphony conductor, Vosnesensky took a self-conscious half

step forward and pronounced: "In the name of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, of Sergei Pavlovich

Korolev, of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, and of all the other pioneers and heroes of space, we come to

Mars in peace for the advancement of all human peoples."

He said it in Russian first and then in English. Only afterward were the others invited to recite their little

prewritten speeches.

Pete Connors, with the hint of Texan drawl he had picked up during his years at Houston, recited, "This

is the greatest day in the history of human exploration, a proud day for all the people of the United States,

the Soviet Union, and the whole world."

Joanna Brumado spoke in Brazilian Portuguese and then in English. "May all the peoples of the Earth gain

in wisdom from what we learn here on Mars."

Ilona Malater, in Hebrew and then English, "We come to Mars to expand and exalt the human spirit."

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Antony Reed, in his calm, almost bored Oxfordian best, "To His Majesty the King, to the people of the

United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth, to the people of the European Community and the

entire world-today is your triumph. We deeply feel that we are merely your representatives on this distant

world."

Finally it was Jamie's turn. He felt suddenly weary, tired of the posturings and pomposities, exhausted by

the years of stress and sacrifice. The excitement he had felt only minutes ago had drained away,

evaporated. A hundred million kilometers from Earth and they were still playing their games of nations

and allegiances. He felt as if someone had draped an enormous weight around his shoulders.

The others all turned toward him, five faceless figures in hard suits and gold-tinted visors. Jamie saw his

own faceless helmet reflected five times. He had already forgotten the lines that had been written for him

a hundred million kilometers ago.

He said simply, "Ya'aa'tey."

EARTH

RIO DE JANEIRO: It was bigger even than Carnival. Despite the scorching midafternoon sun the

crowds thronged downtown, from the Municipal Theater all the way up the mosaic sidewalks of the

Avenida Rio Branco, past Praca Pio X and the magnificent old Candelaria Church, out along Avenida

Presidente Vargas. Not a car or even a bicycle could get through. The streets were literally wall-to-wall

with cariocas, dancing the samba, sweating, laughing, staggering in the heat, celebrating in the biggest

spontaneous outpouring of joy that the city had ever seen.

They jammed into the tree-shaded residential square where gigantic television screens had been set up in

front of high-rise glass-walled apartment buildings. They stood on the benches in the square and

clambered up the trees for a better view of the screens. They cheered and cried and shouted as they

watched the space-suited explorers, one by one, climb down the ladder and stand on that barren rocky

desert beneath the strange pink sky.

When Joanna Brumado spoke her brief words they cheered all the louder, drowning out the little

speeches of those who followed her.

Then they took up the chant: "Brumado-Brumado-Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do!"

Inside the apartment that had been lent to him for the occasion, Alberto Brumado smiled ruefully at his

friends and associates. He had watched his daughter step onto the surface of Mars with a mixture of

fatherly pride and anxiety that had brought tears to the corners of his eyes.

"You must go out, Alberto," said the mayor of Rio. "They will not stop until you do."

Large TV consoles had been wheeled into the four corners of the spacious, high-ceilinged parlor. Only a

dozen people had been invited to share this moment of triumph with their famous countryman, but more

than forty others had squeezed into the room. Many of the men were in evening clothes; the women wore

their finest frocks and jewels. Later Brumado and the select dozen would be whisked by helicopter to the

airport and then on to Brasilia, to be received by the president of the republic.

Outside, the people of Rio thundered, "Bru-ma-do! Bru-ma-do!"

Alberto Brumado was a small, slight man. Well into his sixties, his dark round face was framed by a

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neatly clipped grizzled beard and short gray hair that seemed always tousled, as if he had just been

engaged in some strenuous action. It was a kindly face, smiling, looking slightly nonplussed at the sudden

insistence of the crowd outside. He was more accustomed to the quiet calm of the university classroom

or the hushed intensity of the offices of the great and powerful.

If the governments of the world's industrial nations were the brain directing the Mars Project, and the

multinational corporations were the muscle, then Alberto Brumado was the heart of the mission to

explore Mars. No, more still: Brumado was its soul.

For more than thirty years he had traveled the world, pleading with those in power to send human

explorers to Mars. For most of those years he had faced cold indifference or outright hostility. He had

been told that an expedition to Mars would cost too much, that there was nothing humans could do on

Mars that could not be done by automated robotic machinery, that Mars could wait for another decade

or another generation or another century. There were problems to be solved on Earth, they said. People

were starving. Disease and ignorance and poverty held more than half the world in their mercilessly

tenacious grip.

Alberto Brumado persevered. A child of poverty and hunger himself, born in a cardboard shack on a

muddy, rainswept hill overlooking the posh residencias of Rio de Janeiro, Alberto Brumado had fought

his way through public school, through college, and into a brilliant career as an astronomer and teacher.

He was no stranger to struggle.

Mars became his obsession. "My one vice," he would modestly say of himself.

When the first unmanned landers set down on Mars and found no evidence of life, Brumado insisted that

their automated equipment was too simple to make meaningful tests. When a series of probes from the

Soviet Union and, later, the United States returned rocks and soil samples that bore nothing more

complex than simple organic chemicals, Brumado pointed out that they had barely scratched a billionth of

that planet's surface.

He hounded the world's scientific congresses and industrial conferences, pointing out the photos of Mars

that showed huge volcanoes, enormous rift valleys, and canyons that looked as if they had been gouged

out by massive flood waters.

"There must be water on Mars," he said again and again. "Where there is water there must be life."

It took him nearly twenty years to realize that he was speaking to the wrong people. It mattered not what

scientists thought or what they wanted. It was the politicians who counted, the men and women who

controlled national treasuries. And the people, the voters who filled those treasuries with their tax money.

He began to haunt their halls of power-and the corporate boardrooms where the politicians bowed to the

money that elected them. He made himself into a media celebrity, using talented, bright-eyed students to

help create television shows that filled the world's people with the wonder and awe of the majestic

universe waiting to be explored by men and women of faith and vision.

And he listened. Instead of telling the world's leaders and decision makers what they should do, he

listened to what they wanted, what they hoped for, what they feared. He listened and planned and

gradually, shrewdly, he shaped a scheme that would please them all.

He found that each pressure group, each organization of government or industry or ordinary citizens, had

its own aims and ambitions and anxieties.

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The scientists wanted to go to Mars for curiosity's sake. To them, exploration of the universe was a goal

in itself.

The visionaries wanted to go to Mars because it is there. They viewed the human race's expansion into

space with religious fervor.

The military said there was no point in going to Mars; the planet was so far away that it served no

conceivable military function.

The industrialists realized that sending humans to Mars would serve as a stimulus to develop new

technology-on risk-free money provided by government.

The representatives of the poor complained that the billions spent on going to Mars should be spent

instead on food production and housing and education.

Brumado listened to them all and then softly, quietly, he began speaking to them in terms they could

understand and appreciate. He played their dreams and dreads back to them in an exquisitely

manipulative feedback that focused their attention on his goal. He orchestrated their desires until they

themselves began to believe that Mars was the logical objective of their own plans and ambitions.

In time, the world's power brokers began to predict that Mars would be the new century's first test of a

nation's vigor, determination, and strength. Media pundits began to warn gravely that it might be more

costly to a nation's competitive position in the global marketplace not to go to Mars than to go there.

Statesmen began to realize that Mars could serve as the symbol of a new era of global cooperation in

peaceful endeavors that could capture the hearts and minds of all the world.

The politicians in Moscow and Washington, Tokyo and Paris, Rio and Beijing, listened carefully to their

advisors and then made up their minds. Their advisors had fallen under Brumado's spell.

"We go to Mars," said the American President to the Congress, "not for pride or prestige or power. We

go to Mars in the spirit of the new pragmatic cooperation among the nations of the world. We go to

Mars not as Americans or Russians or Japanese. We go to Mars us human beings, representatives of the

planet Earth."

The president of the Soviet Federation told his people, "Mars is not only the symbol of our unquenchable

will to expand and explore the universe, it is the symbol of the cooperation that is possible between East

and West. Mars is the emblem of the inexorable progress of the human mind."

Mars would be the crowning achievement of a new era of international cooperation. After a century of

war and terrorism and mass murder, a cosmic irony turned the blood-red planet named after the god of

war into the new century's blessed symbol of peaceful cooperation.

For the people of the rich nations, Mars was a source of awe, a goal grander than anything on Earth, the

challenge of a new frontier that could inspire the young and stimulate their passions in a healthy,

productive way.

For the people of the poor nations-well, Alberto Brumado told them that he himself was a child of

poverty, and if the thought of Mars filled him with exhilaration why shouldn't they be able to raise their

eyes beyond the squalor of their day-to-day existence and dream great dreams?

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Ben Bova - Mars

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