Return to Mars by Ben Bova

she too was encased in a bulky hard suit, although she had not put on her helmet. With her dirty-blond pageboy she looked like a chunky Dutch woman being swallowed alive by a robot.
    Jamie nodded and pushed himself awkwardly out of the seat. He had to bend slightly to get out of the bulbous glassed cockpit without scraping his helmet on the overhead.
    He clomped past Trudy Hall, sitting in her tan coveralls in the midsection of the rover’s module. She smiled up at him.
    The rover slowed to a smooth stop. Jamie hardly felt it; Dezhurova was an excellent pilot.
    Trumball was standing by the airlock hatch with one of the beacon rods already in his hand. Jamie took it from him silently. Later on, Dex would suit up and do the outside work, but Jamie wanted to be the first to go outside.
    “Checklist,” Trumball said as he handed the beacon to Jamie.
    Jamie nodded and slid down the visor of his helmet. Trumball riffled through the safety checklist quickly but thoroughly, making certain Jamie’s suit was correctly sealed and all its equipment functioning properly.
    “Okay, pal,” he said, tapping Jamie on the buck of his helmet. His voice was muffled by the helmet’s insulation.
    “I’m going into the airlock.” Jamie spoke into the microphone built into the helmet between the bottom of the visor and the neck ring.
    “Copy,” he heard Dezhurova’s voice acknowledge. “Wait one. I have an amber on the UV.”
    The airlock ceiling held a battery of ultraviolet lamps which turned on automatically as the airlock was pumped down to vacuum. The UV light was supposed to sterilize the outside of the hard suits, killing any microbes clinging to their surfaces, so the explorers could not contaminate the world outside with microscopic life from Earth. The UV was also supposed to kill any possible back-contamination on the suits when the explorers came back into the rover.
    “Backup is in the green,” Dezhurova’s voice said crisply in Jamie’s earphones. “I’ll check out the primary circuit while you are outside.”
    “Okay. Entering the airlock now.”
    The airlock was no bigger than a telephone booth, barely large enough to fit a suited man. Clutching the stubby rod of the geology/meteorology beacon in one gloved hand, Jamie pressed the control stud beside the outer hatch with his other. He heard the pump chug to life as the telltale light on the panel went from green to amber.
    The sound of the pump and the slight hissing of air dwindled to nothing, although Jamie could still feel the pump’s vibration through the thick soles of his boots. In a minute even that ceased, and the panel light went to red. The airlock was now in vacuum.
    The ultraviolet light was invisible to his eyes, of course, although he thought it made the red stripes on his sleeves fluoresce slightly.
    Jamie leaned on the control stud and the outer hatch slid open. He stepped carefully down the metal rung and out onto the red sand of Mars.
    He knew it was nonsense, but Jamie felt free and happy outside by himself. The barren red sands of Mars stretched all around him, out to a rugged, undulating horizon that seemed almost too close for comfort. The edge of the world. The beginning of infinity. The sky was a yellowish tan along that horizon, shading slowly toward blue as he looked up toward the small, strangely weak sun.
    “Good-sized crater off to the left,” he spoke into the helmet mike. “Looks recent, fresh rock along its rim.”
    They were following the route he had taken during the improvised jaunt to the Grand Canyon six years earlier. The excursion that had nearly killed them all. The excursion that had discovered living Martian lichen at the bottom of Tithonium Chasma.
    Jamie had half-expected to see traces of the wheel tracks from that trip, but the wind-driven sand had covered them over completely. They had not bothered to plant beacons along the way, six years ago; they
    had been in too much of a hurry for that. Now Jamie corrected that