Of course I did, reader. Homer’s hero has leapt across millennia, farther, returning from the shores of gloomy Acheron. It is little to him to step down on something so domestic as the icy crusting of the far side of the world, but at the History Gate, here we have a wonder to thrill the hero’s breast if any can, carried here at the greatest expense humanity has ever committed to a single object. The great red stone is smooth now, worn to a mirror by the pilgrim multitudes who come to set foot on our collective triumph: a patch of Mars. And at this gate too I hoped that the familiar sight of a camp pitched stubbornly against the hostile elements might make this living ancient smile. To the right of the great stone, in the shadow of the slopes and city, stand the preserved (and restored) cramped huts of the old Esperanza Base, where humankind first learned to huddle through the dread Antarctic Summer. To the left, a wall of Griffincloth shows not-quite-live (data, like light, lags on the orbit-to-orbit jog) the huts and hydroponics where our Martian terraformers huddle through a more alien cold. Burnished letters frame the Mars rock with the ancient motto of the Esperanza Base: Permanencia, un acto de sacrificio (Permanence, an act of sacrifice). Yes, even Achilles pauses.

“Thank you so much for making time to come in person. I know half the Earth must want to talk to you right now.” Strangest Senator, Olympic Champion Aesop Quarriman, offered her strong handshake as we climbed down from the car. “The committee’s received thousands of letters. Every athlete and every coach from every team is with us, all the way.” Her stance had an energy here that never showed in the Senate, as if Romanova’s benches were mere stables, and this the open track where racehorses are most themselves. Quarriman wore a different bull’s-eye patch now, stitched over the breast of her Gray Team track suit, and so new that the snipped threads of its predecessor still showed around its edges. Her old one had been gray and white, but the new one was formed of concentric circles in the colors of the Olympic rings. Her companions, committee members and aides alike, wore the bull’s-eye in Olympic colors too, improvised in cloth and marker within hours of Sniper’s call-to-non-arms appearing in The Olympian.

That bull’s-eye’s Target took Quarriman’s hand as He stepped down onto the red Mars stone. “The athletes’ approval gladdens Me.”

Wait, Jehovah is with thee? Mycroft, thou shouldst tell me when Jehovah Mason is present in a scene.