I’d sure rather be watching the Olympics with a couple of cold ones at my side, he thought. But there just wasn’t the time. He’d had no time of his own, it felt like, since he’d joined the Agency.

Stone helped Bleeker haul the mock-up CELSS kit out of the MET. The CELSS, the Controlled Environment Life Support System, was a small inflatable greenhouse. It came packaged as a disk of plastic. Stone and Bleeker laid the disk out on the ground and Bleeker went to work on a small foot pump, pushing air into the ribbing of the greenhouse; soon a dome maybe four feet high had taken shape.

By the time he was done Bleeker was sweating even harder. “My God, Phil, it’s real work operating that damned pump in these boots.”

“You want to go rockhounding instead?”

“No, no,” Bleeker said. “Leave me to my darn vegetable patch.”

He pulled a simple aluminum spade out of the MET and began to scrape without enthusiasm at the soil. Later he’d set up a little water sprinkler inside the dome, and he’d be planting crops — soybeans and potatoes. The idea was that the carbon-dioxide-rich Martian air would be able to reach the plants through the permeable walls of the greenhouse, and the plastic dome would trap a lot of the heat of the sun. Martian soil, it seemed from the limited Soviet lander results, contained most everything needed to grow crops save for phosphorus and free water, so Bleeker would be doping the soil with a nutrient additive.

This CELSS kit was just an experiment; there was no intention of growing foodstuffs to supply the first expedition. The point was to prove that crops could be grown on Mars; it would point the way to techniques for future, longer-term missions — and even the first permanent colony, off in an unknowable future.

Likewise, Ares would be carrying another long-term experiment called ISPP, for In Situ Propellant Production. The crew would set up kits designed to extract oxygen from compressed Martian air, and maybe hydrogen and oxygen from any accessible under-surface water. If it could be shown that propellants and oxidizers for the return journey could be manufactured on Mars, the weight and costs of future trips there could be cut by more than half.

Dragging the MET, Stone began to walk, more or less north of Bleeker.

“Okay, Natalie. I’m coming off this layer of loess, now. I’m arriving on what looks like a gravel bed, loosely compacted. I can see striations. Kind of streamlined, like scour marks. It looks as if water has flowed here…”

York called, “Why don’t you make a sample stop?”

“Rog.”