Free Mars by Ben Bova

glanced at Joanna, then quickly returned his focus to Jamie. “I see.”
    The word for Antony Reed was “suave.” He looked like the average American’s idea of an upper-class Englishman, which in fact he almost was. A trim, slight frame, the kind of spare figure that comes from tennis and handball and perhaps polo. Handsome face, with elegant cheekbones and a chiseled profile. Neat little moustache, sandy hair that flopped roguishly over his forehead. He wore precisely creased royal-blue coveralls over a white turtleneck and managed to look almost as if it were a jaunty yachting costume. Yet his eyes were too old for his face, Jamie thought. Ice-blue, coldly calculating eyes.
    Reed was a physician who had refused to take over his father’s posh practice in London, preferring to join the British astronaut corps as a flight surgeon. When the European Community joined the international Mars Project, Reed immediately applied. He exuded the calm self-confidence of a man possessed of the certain knowledge that he would be picked as the team physician for the Mars explorers.
    Jamie sat between the Englishman and Joanna Brumado, who smiled her welcome to him.
    “I did not know that you were going to stay on here,” Shesaid. Her voice was a whisper, like a little girl who had been trained to stay as quiet as possible.
    “It was Dr. Li’s idea,” Jamie replied tightly. “The base commander will explain everything at the briefing, right after lunch.”
    “I wonder if our crafty Chinese has some sort of
mono a mono
up his sleeve,” Reed mused.
    Jamie kept himself from glaring at him.
    “Mano a mano?”
asked Dorothy Loring. “Like in a bullfight?” She was a big-boned blonde, completely at home in her thick sweater and heavy-duty jeans, a latter-day Valkyrie, a descendant of Vikings who had gone from her family’s farm in Manitoba to a doctorate at McGill and postdoc work at the Salk Institute in La Jolla.
    Reed pointed with his eyes. At the other end of the table sat Franz Hoffman, alone, intently frowning into the display screen of a computer he had set up on the tabletop.
    Jamie said nothing.
    Neither did Joanna, but her eyes showed that she understood Reed’s implication. They were beautifully soft brown eyes, large and liquid, wide-spaced like a child’s. Joanna was small and round, almost hidden inside a bulky brown sweater. Her face was heart shaped, framed by a dark mass of hair that curled thickly even though it had been cropped short. To Jamie she looked like a waif, a lost child, with her small stature and those big brown eyes that seemed troubled, almost frightened.
    “Our Viennese friend,” Reed said in a lower voice, “is not very well liked, I fear.”
    “You should not say that,” Joanna whispered.
    “Why not?” Reed asked. “Good lord, the man has all the charm of a Prussian drillmaster. And the eating habits to match.”
    Loring broke into a giggle, then quickly put her hand to her mouth to stifle it. Jamie, sitting where he looked directly down the table at Hoffman, saw that the Austrian never glanced up from his computer, never acknowledged by so much as a flicker that anyone else was in the room.
3
    “I do not understand,” said Franz Hoffman. “Does Dr. Li think that I need an assistant? A Sherpa guide to carry my baggage up the mountain?”
    Jamie held onto his swooping temper, just barely. He had decided that there would be no way to avoid Hoffman in the crowded, snow-buried base so he would make a virtue of necessity by offering to help the Austrian to continue the meteorite search out on the glacier.
    Hoffman had been unpacking his clothes when Jamie knocked on the half-ajar door to his quarters. It happened to be the same room that Dr. Li had just left. But already Hoffman had turned it into his personal domain. A five-foot-long photomosaic map of Mars was pinned up on the flat wall above the bunk bed. On the curving wall beside the desk the geologist had taped a smaller satellite