Free Mars Life by Ben Bova

as much as he loved her.
    “Okay,” he said. “On to Mars.”
    “Fine,” said Vijay. “But right now let’s get to the restaurant. I’m starved.”

TITHONIUM BASE: CELEBRATION

    They held an impromptu celebration—of sorts—the night that the personnel from Hellas Base returned to Tithonium. No one planned it, no one was really in a celebratory mood. It took three trips in one of the broad-winged rocketplanes to bring all twenty-three of the men and women with their personal effects back to Tithonium. They were downcast, subdued, dejected at the realization that they had to abruptly leave their work, cut short the studies they’d been undertaking at the vast impact crater of Hellas.
    As soon as their leader, Yvonne Lorenz, set foot inside the base’s main dome, Chang bustled her into his office and closed the door firmly.
    Seeing the dispirited expressions on the new arrivals, Kalman Torok said loudly, “What’s the matter? You don’t want to go back home?”
    A few of them shot annoyed glances at the biologist. “Like packing up and leaving in the middle of a program is a good career move?” one of the women snapped.
    Torok shrugged good-naturedly. “Come on and have a drink,” he said. “I’m buying.”
    Officially there was nothing stronger on the base than fruit juice, but most of the men and women kept private stashes of some sort. One thing led to another, and soon most of the people in the base had gathered in the cafeteria section of the dome. Several had brought bottles or flasks from their private quarters and splashed the various liquors into the plastic cups of juice—with one eye on Chang’s closed door. The mission director enforced the rules with iron rigidity. Or tried to.
    Carleton, in his makeshift workshop, heard the growing chatter and laughter across the dome. He looked up from the plaster cast he had lovingly made of the fossil vertebra.
    “Sounds like a party,” he said to Doreen McManus, who was watching him work.
    She got up from the spindly stool she’d been sitting on and slid the door open a crack.
    “It is a party,” she said. “Looks like everybody who isn’t on duty is in the cafeteria.”
    “Want to join them?” Carleton asked.
    “Are you finished?”
    He lifted the white plaster cast from the work table. “Isn’t she a beauty? A lot better than those stereo images the computer generates.”
    He held it out to her and Doreen took it in her hands. “It is a beauty,” she agreed, with an approving smile.
    “The first of many,” said Carleton as he took the actual ash-gray fossil and tucked it into a plastic specimen case he’d appropriated from the biology storeroom shelves. He closed its lid with a firm snap.
    “Let’s show it off,” Doreen suggested.
    Carleton grinned at her. “Why not?”
    Soon the gathering that was spilling beyond the cafeteria’s neatly arranged rows of tables was toasting Carleton and his discovery. The crowd’s mood had lifted considerably since the drinking had started.
    One of the astronauts who had ferried the team in from Hellas loudly insisted on calling the fossil “Carleton’s clavicle,” even when several of the others pointed out that it was actually a vertebra.
    “Clavicle,” the buzz-cut astronaut shouted, in a voice that drowned out everyone else. “It rhymes better.”
    Basking in the warmth of their approval, Carleton shook his head and laughed. He saw tall, gangling Saleem Hasdrubal stumbling through a tango with one of the women technicians. How can someone get drunk on fruit juice? he wondered. Sal’s a Muslim, he doesn’t drink liquor. Maybe Black Muslims don’t abstain from alcohol. Or maybe fruit juice is enough to set him off.
    Downing the last of the drink in his hand, he realized that Doreen was no longer at his side. Looking around, Carleton saw that she was chatting with a tall, lean young man who was wearing a denim shirt and chinos. The Navaho kid, Carleton remembered, brows knitting: Billy