One of the rare stones, almost the size of a pebble, had punctured the fuel cell that was the main electrical power source for the three-man hopper. Without the electrical power from that fuel cell, their rocket engine could not function. They were stranded in the middle of the frozen, arid plain.

In his gleaming silvery pressure suit, Faiyum reminded O’Connor of a knight in shining armor, except that he was bending into the bay that held the fuel cell, his helmeted head obscured by the bay’s upraised hatch. Bernstein, similarly suited, stood by nervously beside him.

The hatch had been punctured by what looked like a bullet hole. Faiyum was muttering, “Of all the meteoroids in all the solar system in all of Mars, this one’s got to smack our power cell.”

Bernstein asked, “How bad is it?”

Straightening up, Faiyum replied, “All the hydrogen drained out during the night. It’s dead as a doornail.”

“Then so are we,” Bernstein said.

“I’d better call Tithonium,” said O’Connor, and he headed for the ladder that led to the hopper’s cramped cockpit. “While the batteries are still good.”

“How long will they last?” asked Bernstein.

“Long enough to get help.”

It wasn’t that easy. The communications link back to Tithonium was relayed by a network of satellites in low orbit around Mars, and it would be another half hour before one of the commsats came over their horizon.

Faiyum and Bernstein followed O’Connor back into the cockpit, and suddenly the compact little space was uncomfortably crowded.

With nothing to do but wait, O’Connor said, “I’ll pressurize the cockpit so we can take off the helmets and have some breakfast.”

“I don’t think we should waste electrical power until we get confirmation from Tithonium that they’re sending a backup to us.”

“We’ve got to eat,” O’Connor said.

Sitting this close in the cramped cockpit, they could see each other’s faces even through the helmet visors’ tinting. Faiyum broke into a stubbly-chinned grin.

“Let’s pretend its Ramadan,” he suggested, “and we have to fast from sunup to sundown.”

“Like you fast during Ramadan,” Bernstein sniped. O’Connor remembered one of their first days on Mars, when a clean-shaven Faiyum had jokingly asked which direction Mecca was. O’Connor had pointed up.

“Let’s not waste power,” Bernstein repeated.

“We have enough power during the day,” Faiyum pointed out. “The solar panels work fine.”

Thanks to Mars’s thin, nearly cloudless atmosphere, just about the same amount of sunshine fell upon the surface of Mars as upon Earth, despite Mars’s farther distance from the sun. Thank God for that, O’Connor thought. Otherwise we’d be dead in a few hours.

Then he realized that, also thanks to Mars’s thin atmosphere, those micrometeoroids had made it all the way down to the ground to strafe them like a spray of bullets, instead of burning up from atmospheric friction, as they would have on Earth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he told himself.

“Tithonium here,” a voice crackled through the speaker on the cockpit control panel. All three of them turned to the display screen, suddenly tight with expectation.

“What’s your situation, E-3?” asked the face in the screen. Ernie Roebuck, they recognized: chief communications engineer.

The main base for the exploration team was down at Tithonium Chasma, part of the immense Grand Canyon of Mars, more than three thousand kilometers from their Excursion 3 site.

O’Connor was the team’s astronaut: a thoroughly competent Boston Irishman with a genial disposition who tolerated the bantering of Faiyum and Bernstein—both geologists—and tried to keep them from developing a real animosity. A Muslim from Peoria and a New York Jew: how in the world had the psychologists back Earthside ever put the two of them on the same team, he wondered.

In the clipped jargon of professional fliers, O’Connor reported on their dead fuel cell.

“No power output at all?” Roebuck looked incredulous.

“Zero,” said O’Connor. “Hydrogen all leaked out overnight.”

“How did you get through the night?”

“The vehicle automatically switched to battery power.”

“What’s the status of your battery system?”

O’Connor scanned the digital readouts on the control panel. “Down to one-third of nominal. The solar panels are recharging ’em.”

A pause. Roebuck looked away, and they could hear voices muttering in the background. “All right,” said the communicator at last. “We’re getting your telemetry. We’ll get back to you in an hour or so.”

“We need a lift out of here,” O’Connor said.

Another few moments of silence. “That might not be possible right away. We’ve got other problems, too. You guys weren’t the only ones hit by the meteor shower. We’ve taken some damage here. The garden’s been wiped out and E-1 has two casualties.”

Excursion 1 was at the flank of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

“Our first priority has to be to get those people from E-1 back here for medical treatment.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Give us a couple of hours to sort things out. We’ll call you back at noon, our time. Sit tight.”

O’Connor glanced at the morose faces of his two teammates, then replied, “We’ll wait for your call.”

“What the hell else can we do?” Bernstein grumbled.

Clicking off the video link, O’Connor said, “We can get back to work.”

Faiyum tried to shrug inside his suit. “I like your first suggestion better. Let’s eat.”

With their helmets off, the faint traces of body odors became noticeable. Munching on an energy bar, Faiyum said, “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew were showering together in a YMCA. . .”

“You mean a YMHA,” said Bernstein.

“How would a Muslim get into either one?” O’Connor wondered.

“It’s in the States,” Faiyum explained. “They let anybody in.”

“Not women.”

“You guys have no sense of humor.” Faiyum popped the last morsel of the energy bar into his mouth.

“This,” Bernstein countered, “coming from a man who was named after a depression.”