There was a place that looked reasonable, but when he got close up, he saw it was peppered with big boulders. Another gift for Natalie York, maybe, but a disaster waiting to happen for the MEM. And over there was a smoother area, but it looked crusty to Gershon, with lots of little rivulets and runs. He could imagine a footpad plunging through the surface, the whole damn MEM tipping over.

He pitched Challenger back again to keep it from picking up too much forward speed. Then he flew over another field of boulders; he banked to the left to avoid them.

There wasn’t a runway, he thought, on the whole fucking planet.

Sweat trickled down from his brow and into his eyes; he had to blink to clear them.

New terrain advanced over the close horizon at him, rushing up toward him, exploding in sharp, unwelcome detail. Still, he couldn’t see anywhere to set down.

“Three hundred feet, down three and a half, fifty-four forward.”

“How’s the fuel?”

“Seven percent.”

Shit. He was doing worse than in any of the sims. Except the ones he’d crashed.

There. A flat area, like a little plateau, off to his right: just a field of dust. On one side there was a field of big old boulders, on the other an eroded area. The flat place was no bigger than a parking lot, a couple of hundred square feet, but it ought to be enough.

He had his landing site.

He pushed his joystick. The MEM turned to the right. He lined up his marked window, and locked in the computer. He imagined those invisible curves, York’s magical polynomials, snaking out to join him up to his landing site.

“Two hundred twenty feet. Thirteen forward, down four. Eleven forward. Coming down nicely. Altitude velocity lights.”

The shadow of Challenger came swooping across the uneven surface of Mars toward him. The shadow was a fat irregular cone; he could see antennae bristling, and at the base the shapes of the landing pads, with their long contact probes sticking out from beneath.

There really wasn’t much of a gap left between him and that shadow.

And then dust, red and brown and yellow, came billowing up in big clouds from the surface, suspending itself in the thin air. Dust and shadows. They didn’t have those in the sims.

Guess this is for real, Ralph.

A light marked “DESCENT QTY” came on in front of him. Low fuel. If he was too low when the descent fuel ran out, he would be in a dead man’s zone: too low to abort, too high to land safely. The MEM would just fall to the surface, smashing open like a big aluminum egg.

He tried to ignore the warning light. Overdesigned crap. Let a man fly his aircraft.

PGNS released the craft from the landing program, and Challenger began its final descent.