Free The Martian Race by Gregory Benford Page B

was still on track. A considerable feat of bravado would be required. Maybe they would reassure themselves at the same time.
    “Let's play up the water angle, not the ankle,” Viktor said.
    “Drama plays better than science,” Julia said.
    “So we must educate, yes?” Viktor jabbed his chin at Marc.
    But Marc wasn't listening. The brief description of Viktor's accident had been squirted to Earth earlier, and he was downloading the reply. Due to the present time delay of six minutes each way, normal back and forth conversations were not possible, and communications were more like an exchange of verbal letters. At times the round-trip delay was only a matter of four minutes, sometimes it was forty. Mars's distance from Earth varies by more than two hundred million miles from closest to farthest approach in the course of each Earth year. Still, it was a big advance over earlier missions.
    In the Sojourner era, it took twenty-four hours to execute a single command. NASA used solar panels on its robot vehicles, so when Sojourner was in Mars night, it was unresponsive. And part of the time Earth's giant antennae were on the wrong side of the planet to receive signals from Mars. The new comm satellites circling both planets ensured that they were always in contact with Earth, but there was still the delay time.
    Early on, Earth and Mars teams agreed on a download at a specified time, to preserve the semblance of a conversation. At the short delay times Marc and Janet tended to handle the bulk of the communications. And there was a little spark in the transmissions.
    They did a short, live video sequence at the same time each Mars day, after the crew's dinner. Because Earth's day is twenty minutes shorter, they drifted in and out of synchrony with various listening stations on Earth. But they didn't worry about it. That was Axelrod's end of the business. The “Nightly Report from Mars” was great theater, but the Consortium also had a team of doctors scrutinize the footage.
    The crew gathered around the screen to watch the latest video from Earth. It was Janet, all right, gesturing with a red Mars Bar. Mars, Inc., the candy manufacturer, had become a mission underwriter. Cautiously waiting until after the successful landing, they'd released a special commemorative wrapper—a red number featuring the four of them against a “Martian” backdrop. On Earth they had taken about twenty shots of the crew in their colored pressure suits—one each in blue, yellow, green, and purple—holding up a standard Mars Bar before scenic backdrops. They each got $5,000 per shot, and the Mars Bar people paid ten thousand dollars per pound to ship a box of the bars out for the follow-up ad campaign. It would have been irritating after a while, except that they came to relish the damned things, keeping one for exterior shots, where it quickly got peroxide-contaminated, and eating the rest as desserts. The cold sopped up calories and the zest of sugar was like a drug to Julia. She was quite sure she would never eat another, Earthside, even if she did get an endorsement contract out of the deal.
    Julia had dubbed the red-wrapped candy the Ego Bar, unwilling to honor it with the name of a planet and an ancient god, and the team adopted the name. There had been some talk early on about producing another wrapper with Mars life pictured, but rocks with wavy lines weren't exciting enough, so the manufacturer had decided to just stick with the Ego Bar.
    Somehow, the commercialism of it all still grated on her. But she had signed on with eyes open, all the same. She had known that market-minded execs ran the Consortium, but going in she had thought that meant something like, If we do this, people will like it. Soon enough she learned that even exploring Mars was seen by the execs as If we do this, we'll maximize our global audience share and/or optimize near-term profitability. Such were the thoughts and motivations on Earth.
    Still, Mars the raw and