Somebody has to maintain the system and check the same monitors. I saw everything of importance that happened. That's the only way I come into the yarn at all. I didn't start out a hero type. I didn't turn into one. I just watched what happened; and I got sick at my stomach along with everybody else. And now I slink away, sick and ashamed, and not understanding even that, along with the rest. Not heroes--no--none of us. From the first this was intended and conducted as a genuine scientific project, a group effort, with each man's ego subdued and blended in to serve the needs of the whole. No special heroes emerging to show up the rest of the dopes. None of the usual stuff of romantic fiction was supposed to happen--those unusual dangers, horrible accidents, sudden frightful emergencies so dear to the little sadistic hearts of readers and viewers. So far as I know, nobody beat up anybody with their fists, nor gunned them down; which is the usual, almost the only, fictional way yet found among the humanists for coping with life problems. We assembled the mastership on the Moon base from parts which were Roman candled up, a few pieces at a time, from too heavily gravitied Earth. The yelps of pain from taxpayers reached almost as high. It was one thing to wash the hands of the vexing problem of nuclear testing by wanting it shifted out to Mars. It was something else to pay for having it. Against the Moon's lighter gravity we eventually were space-borne with no more than the usual fight between power thrust and inertia, both physical and psychological. Without touching that precious reserve of fuel which we hoped would bring us back again, we were able to build up enough speed that it took us only a month to reach Mars. No point in showing, because nobody would care, how the two dozen of us were cramped in the tiny spaces left by the equipment and instruments we had to carry. Construction and maintenance had done their job properly, and, for once, inspection had actually done its job, too. We were able to reverse properly at the right time, and soft cushion powered our way down into a Martian plain eastward of a low range of hills. Surely everybody has watched the documentaries long enough to have some idea about the incredibly hostile surface of Mars; the too thin air, which lets some stars shine through even in daytime; the waterless desert; the extremes of temperature; the desolation.... Ah, the desolation! The terrifying desolation! * * * * * Moon surface is bad enough; but at least there is the great ball of Earth, seeming so near in that airless world that one has the illusion of being able to reach out and almost touch it, touch home, know home is still there, imagine he can almost see it. "See that little tip of land there on the east coast of the North American continent? That's where I live!"