There was no thought of turning back. What the hell? We'd come this far, hadn't we?
We got a good look at Phobos, a jagged, uneven rock. It wasn't even round. It looked like a chunk of basalt, but Dr. Joel, the geologist, pointed out black streaks which, he said, were outcroppings of meteoric iron. It hadn't originally been a part of Mars, as our moon was once a part of the earth. Phobos was a captured asteroid, and so probably was Deimos.
The unmanned rockets were in a group, all within ten miles of each other. They were circling Mars in two hours, inside the orbit of Phobos. We approached them without radar because they were easily seen as bright moving specks in the sky.
There was nothing to pack, not even instruments, because these unmanned rockets were supposed to contain every item we would need. We just put on our spacesuits, strung a line between the Jehad and the largest of the three rockets—after stopping the Jehad's rotation—and crossed over.
Although I'd been treated to some very pretty sights of the earth and the moon, Mars was on a par with any of them. It's a small planet, only 4,200 miles in diameter, but it didn't look so small now. It filled half the sky, big, red and angry. In the northern hemisphere, where it was late spring, the polar ice cap had all but disappeared. Brownish green vegetation swept southward. Here and there over the surface was a fleecy cloud and the mysterious canals were as straight as if they'd been drawn by ruler. All those in the north had doubled and looked like parallel lines. There was a suggestion of mountains in the area known as Mare Erithraeum, which was not a sea as the early astronomers thought, but an oasis.
Once aboard the rocket, I took a seat next to Gail. Unlike the Saturn capsule, this one had portholes, to be used for observing Mars once we landed. And through them we could see Mars as we orbited toward our landing site.
We had entered through locks just above the rocket chambers. A large storeroom was packed with equipment, and a ladder ran through it to the nose cone. I noted with a great deal of relief that there was a huge tank marked WATER. It contained enough for all uses on Mars. Three weeks of "luxury" as far as water was concerned and if we found drinkable water on Mars, we could replenish our supply on the Jehad.
This, of course, did not take into consideration Dr. Spartan's plans.
Dr. Spartan came aboard last. He sat down.
"Don't remove your helmets," he warned. "I haven't released the oxygen supply yet and it's best that we land in spacesuits. We don't know what kind of terrain we'll strike and it's possible we may wind up with a punctured ship which could cost us our air supply." He paused, then added: "And, of course, we don't know what weapons the Martians have."