Priest shrugged, looking a little sheepish. “It’s always pretty much like this, Natalie. Kind of slow chaos. This is the heart of the SFOF, what they call the Space Flight Operations Facility. The results from Mariner are coming in all the time; the guys work in shifts here. And it’s adaptive; the results from one orbit may be used to influence what they do on the next. There isn’t a lot of time for housekeeping.”

“You don’t need to apologize. You ought to see the average geology field site after a couple of days.”

There was a model of the Mariner 9 spacecraft itself, a couple of feet across, hanging in one corner of the room. She slowed, looking up at it. Four silvery solar panels unfolded like sails from a central octagonal box. A rocket engine with propellant tanks was mounted on top of the box, and underneath sprouted a cluster of instruments. York could recognize the tiny lenses of TV cameras, glinting in the fluorescent light. The craft was comparatively crude, compared to the heavy Viking landers which were already under development for the 1975 launch opportunity. But still, Mariner 9 was quite beautiful, like a fine watch.

York retained lingering suspicions about the value of spaceflight in terms of its science. As a kid she’d been intrigued, even startled, by the Mariner 4 pictures. But that had worn off, and she hadn’t followed the progress of later probes closely. But still, this beautiful, delicate thing had been assembled by humans — made by hands like hers — and then thrown across interplanetary distances, to orbit Mars itself: it had become the first man-made object to orbit another planet.

It was quite a thought.

Priest was talking about the dust storm. “It covered the whole damn planet, Natalie. When we arrived we couldn’t see a thing. They did some measurements at the limb of the planet, and found the dust reaching an altitude of fifty miles. It seems impossible, but it’s true. Anyhow, the storm did us one favor.”

“How’s that?”

“All of a sudden, funnily enough, everybody got very excited about looking at the moons. Listen, you want me to get you a coffee? A doughnut, maybe?”

“No thanks, Ben.”

He led her through more corridors, to a smaller laboratory. More shirtsleeves, working at terminals and screens.

“Image Processing,” Priest said. He took her to an unoccupied monitor, and they sat on rickety fold-up chairs. He began tapping at the keypad. “They got the first reasonably clear image of Phobos on revolution thirty-one — just last night. I stayed up until the small hours watching them process the data…” An image began to build up on the video monitor, line by line, working from top to bottom. “Mariner records its pictures on magnetic tape, and sends them back to Earth in pretty much the way a newsprint wire photo is transmitted. This is exactly how the first image emerged, for the team last night.”