Six months up we lost Rene, and the first of the two crawlers we had.

Two months later in quick succession we lost Gerard, Clemmens the German and Armstrong the first American.

London Control of course got us within two hours of shutting down and evacuating, before we had a reconfirm from the Americans that they were still go.

London quietly relayed the confirm and washed their hands of us after that, calling us the 'American' project. It made Andreeson laugh since he didn't give a damn for the Brits who were overseeing the project to begin with.

Maggie didn't say anything. Just popped her head in the door, when the news came back up that we were still go and asked with a flat lipped look on her face, "Anyone going out, then? I've got rock samples and Ferrough? You going to look for water or let us all run out and die?"

She looked at me then and it took me a bit by surprise.

Six months up and she doesn't say jack, then in the space of two months she talks to me like I was her long lost cousin or what.

She was hard as nails and the last thing I wanted was a super riding my case while I tried to do my job and her thinking it was hers.

I grunted and got up from the chair where I'd parked myself every waking hour I wasn't in sleep or the mess or rerunning numbers on scans or lab tests I had done eight weeks ago, since the last accident when they put us all on hold.

She turned then without a grin or a word and zipped up her parka and fitted her faceplate as she stepped through the airlock and toward the outside door.

I zipped up and followed, picking my equipment belt off the wall peg next to the lock as I spun the door lock and it hissed back, the seal quick snapped and the door cushioned open.

Through the transparent tube wall of the outer lock it was bright, my goggles snapped down the spectrum to accommodate the light, but that lasted all of two seconds as the dust storm outside whipped sand up into the lower atmosphere and the sunlight darkened by several magnitudes. The goggles shifted back up and I continued down the twenty foot lock toward the door that Maggie stepped through and closed behind her. The shifting gears of the mechanism click-clanking and then fading in my earphones. Ten feet more, and I spun the outside lock back and stepped outside. Moving quickly aside as the door pulled back and resealed itself.

The bright and dark moved around me like shadows on the moon.

I lost twenty, probably thirty pounds as a refracting magnetic field swept over where I stood and then moved on. For an instant I was lighter, halfway through a step that suddenly became too easy to overstep and lose my balance, I pulled back, but then suddenly as the field shifted away I was heavier, and in mid step as my leg came down I shifted my weight forward so I wouldn't suddenly land on my face. I smiled, not the first time and peered through the shifting sand to see if I could see Maggie.

In broken segments of distance, five and then twenty and then ten feet as the sand shifted and the light and dark shifted I saw her red scuffed white parka as she stopped and turned and signed.

Be There was a long pause as the wind shifted, and the sand haze obscured her, then finally, careful! I raised a hand and gave the 'Ok' sign, then turned away from her white-red silhouette and moved what should have been south. I checked by running my left hand across the surface of the barracks as I counted steps. twice losing weight and then gaining it once at almost three times normal. On my way to the water trough, a place you could find with your nose, but never any instruments. Out here in the moment to moment shifting sands and light and magnetic fields instruments were next to useless.

Five trillion American dollars on the first Mars expedition, and we're making it all work with a little spit and ingenuity.

I laughed, but couldn't hear myself as the wind snatched my voice away.

The water trough was a mile out. A gouge in the sand/stone surface that stretched eighty yards by fifteen. Far enough out, in this place, to get lost, get killed, die five feet from the edge of the trough rim and never be found. It was as much an art as it was science, that, what it was and why it was here. With us earthers crawling all over it, as if we were ants and understanding it about as much as they would. It was as much gut instinct as it was seasoned rationalizations of why things worked or they didn't.

I counted off 5,000 steps with no wall to guide me for more than 4900 of them, and stepped off the last sand step to the edge of the trough's stone edge. It extended in front of me another twenty feet before the shelf fell off and into a straight crevasse that extended down. Out of sight and sound.

But you could still smell the water.

How it was here, and why? What principles or rules, or happenstance; as I have come to regard most of what happens here, made it this way? We haven't found answers for those questions yet. But we still work at them.

Mars had ice caps, once, perhaps that had extended as far as only a thousand kilometers from the equator. It made no sense in terran formation comparisons that it could happen. But it did here. Given Mars' own particular set of rules, its own set of circumstances. We were just scratching the surface of those now.

Trying to stay alive on an alien planet and figure out why things worked the way they did.

I stopped wool gathering abruptly, before I got myself killed by not paying attention to something new and changing that might be suddenly violent and deadly. It was almost always something new. Something we had never expected or guessed at. Something that existed here in the framework of a few small variables and nowhere else.

I walked the remaining twenty feet across the stone, feeling the roughness, and perhaps some of its age, and stepped off the ledge and fell twenty feet, turning in mid air around to face the falling wall, I extended a hand with a piton and silver leaded coil of rope.

And struck the piton into the cliff face.

The rope spun out, inches from my hand, and I thought idly for a moment; that if my hand ever got caught in the wire, for even an instant... I would lose it.

The light faded, turned black in front of my eyes as the rope went taut and my body slammed in the harness to a stop.

Inside my parka I sweated and breathed too quick, trying to calm my heart rate from the fall. I reached out a gloved hand and touched the stone and felt through the rubberized cloth water rushing down the face of the cliff wall.

I smiled and uncapped a plastic sample bottle on the side of my belt and filled it, then brought the capped clear tube to my goggles and peered at it.

It was sandy and tinted, but with what? I smiled, that was another question for another day. I spent the next thirty minutes filling bottles and strapping them to the inside of my jacket where in case I fell or died or never came back, they would at least find the samples preserved.

Maggie had laughed when I had told her that after Rene had found the trough, and after we had lost him and I replaced him in collecting the samples.

I'm not kidding I had signed standing on the edge of the trough and watching the sunlight fade and brighten.

You're too cynical to die! she had signed back and that had made me laugh.

Sure, sure. We had walked back to the barracks then, and I noticed that she didn't once get lost. Which reminded my of poor Rene and how dedicated and smart he was.

But he got lost easy.

After taking the samples I spent the next six hours climbing out.

clambering up the face of the cliff with my arms and legs cramping up, back up to the edge, finally, where I crawled over the lip and fell onto my back while the sand swirled overhead.

The world was pressure.

Moments of air and sand pushing against your chest and then gone. Weight that suddenly appeared and then just as quickly disappeared. I turned on my microphones briefly, but there was only static. So I clicked the switch back off and felt the silent Martian world of pressure and weight return. Where sound and light became as arbitrary and as stable as wishes in storybooks, which is to say, not at all.

After I caught my breath I stood and turned in the swirling sand storm and looked west. Turned, then turned back... it felt west. Then struck out moving through the sand and the rocks and the weight and the light and the darkness, counting each step as I moved forward.

One of these days I would get turned around and step back over the edge of that damned cliff. I smiled. Well, that would be the end of that wouldn't it.

I spun the handle of the door to the airlock and the mechanism clicked in reverberations against my hand as I rested it against the surface of the door and waited while the lock cycled back and the door hushed open. I stepped through into the tubeway and felt my weight shift six or seven times before I made the inner door and got it open. Then stepped through again, but this time into a static universe the size of a small trailer park of collected narrow barracks.

The temperature was constant. The background sounds droned below the level of clarity, while I left my ear plugs in to dampen the clatter. I pulled my goggles off and stuffed them into a pocket as my eyes readjusted to the constant light. Burtrum waved and said something, his lips moving, but I signed.

Tired, catch some eats and sleep. I grinned weakly and pushed through the common room into the smaller hallways and inter-connected walkways to the other trailers and their labs and the mess hall and the infirmary and out to the most central set of barracks where everyones sleeping quarters were.

Burtrum waved me off and his grin slid to a puzzled look, but I just smiled and turned away.

Maggie had made it back from the cliff face that was a half mile west of the barracks. It would have proved a wind-break in the same climate on earth, but here, it didn't matter where the cliff wall was, or how small or how large.

The storms moved, not with the wind and around dynamically shaped objects, but from the magnetic fluctuations between the sand storms in the atmosphere and the polarized magnetic fields that those storms generated on the surface as they moved across the planet.

Mountains didn't stop sand storms. The sand storms just moved over them.

I smiled.

Like everything else on Mars, the storms had their own minds.

And maybe the mountain as well.

I met Maggie in the mess and sat down with my coffee and hydroponic vegetables, as she sat her tray of eggs and sausage down on the table and glanced at my lunch tray , but didn't say anything.

I started to tell her, that it was time to get used to what we could supply first hand.

But I waved the thought off I held a thumbs up and grinned.

Went good today, twenty samples. I'll have them in the lab in another thirty minutes, take a shower and climb back into some dungarees and hit the microscopes. She shook her head at the word.

We didn't really use microscopes anymore, but it was still a phrase.

like Geronimo! and Save the Alamo! and Custer Sucks! that passed along a feeling of what we did. At least in the most generic and basic way.

Like saying we studied rocks and biology for a living.

It was true, but only at the most base level.

You? I signed She moved her lips as if she were going to speak for a moment and then looked at me, and the plugs still in my ears. For some reason I had started keeping them in the last several weeks. She sighed and then started to sign.

Her fingers forming abbreviated pictures in the still air between us.

Maggie had spent the better part of the day digging samples at St. Helens.

It was the local name we gave to the god-forsaken and half blasted mountain that was supposed to shield the camp, but never did, and which lay in varying degrees of obliteration across the landscape. Maggie said she thought originally that it had been volcanic activity that had subsided some millennia ago. Except that the trace radiation of the surface debris was not any older than samples she had used the crawler to dig out several hundred feet down.

How could this be? I smiled but didn't say anything at all.

I was getting used to it.

I patted her hand and ate quickly and then got up and headed for the doorway and the kitchen slot where I pushed my empty lunch tray until it disappeared and then headed for my room.

Behind me Maggie sat and ate slowly.

She was smart, she would figure it out.

I smiled and let the thought go and wished suddenly for a long hot bath.

Maybe all of a hundred and twenty seconds if we had enough water for a full shower. I could live with that.

I was halfway through the lab tests, staring into pixelized scans of salt, traces of mineral ores, as well as water and... I smiled, and something else in the scan I couldn't recognize.

Par for the course.

I shut down the display and powered up the retest algorithms of the test program itself on the other monitor. Rene had laid down the main program parameters when he had started the water tests. It was natural to assume that there would be trace elements of things we would recognize. But what about the things we would not?

I had tweaked the program, but was no hardware programmer, I could widen the spectrum of half a dozen test areas that were known and never even get close to whatever it was that the program kept returning unknown values for.

Atomic weights?

Variations on elemental properties?

Didn't matter what I tried, it was like shooting geese in the dark, where most of the time, I was bound to get nothing at all.

I pushed the program display away and dimmed the projection screen, leaned back tired in the chair and sipped at my cold coffee.

The door of the lab cycled open then, with an under layer of sound reverberating through my ear plugs. I turned and saw Maggie step through the door. She was wearing a one-piece white utility that contrasted nicely against her reddish short hair.

Find anything? She signed.

I smiled at the sudden novelty of unbroken sentences that didn't have shifts of light or sand obscuring them.

I shook my head and then looking at the screen with the program algorithm on it, I patted the seat next to me.

Wanna look at a program for me? I'm trying to isolate something.. She grinned and signed back, Sure, why not? Who needs sleep, right? She laughed.

I relinquished the chair next to me, and glanced at my watch. It was 1:30 am local on a eighteen hour workday. That meant I had already crossed over into tomorrow and would have to wait to get some sleep sometime after getting back in from another sample run. Sometime late tonight.

I almost laughed, but didn't. Instead I just brought the sample screen back up and stared at the foreign trace element in the legend, which represented a black undefined area on the scan, that simply said: Unknown.

I was tired but I loved it.

This is what love was.

Finding answers under rocks on another planet while standing on your head and reciting the biologists code backwards. I felt like a twelfth century monk discovering science.

I did laugh then, and Maggie stared at me a moment, but said nothing, then returned to the program display and I refocused the sample screen resolution up and started to rerun the scans.

I had already run them over a hundred times already.

One more time wouldn't hurt.

I punched the numbers on the control panel and watched as Maggie pulled up a screen of assigned arrays and started tracing down through nested sub-routines in the program.

I kissed her cheek and startled her, not on purpose, but because I was damn glad to have the help.

After a bit, she quieted down.