of course, it was another giant step for mankind,

but fifteen astronauts had come to mars...and only ten would return

TESTING, one, two, three, four, five.... Evans speaking. I will continue to record as long as possible. This is a two-hour capsule, but I doubt if I'll fill it.

That photograph has haunted me all my life; now, too late, I know why. (But would it have made any difference if I had known? That's one of those meaningless and unanswerable questions the mind keeps returning to endlessly, like the tongue exploring a broken tooth.)

I've not seen it for years, but I've only to close my eyes and I"m back in a landscape almost as hostile -- and as beautiful -- as this one. Fifty million miles sunward, and 72 years in the past, five men face the camera amid the antarctic snows. Not even the bulky furs can hide the exhaustion and defeat that mark every line of their bodies; and their faces already touched by death. There were five of them.

There were five of us, and of course, we also took a group photograph. But everything else was different. We were smiling -- cheerful, confident. And our picture was on all the screens of Earth within ten minutes. It was months before their camera was found and brought back to civilization.

And we die in comfort, with all modern conveniences -- including many that Robert Falcon Scott could never have imagined when he stood at the South Pole in 1912.

Two hours later, I'll start giving exact times when it becomes important.

All the facts are on the log, and by now the whole world knows them. So I guess I'm doing this largely to settle my mind -- to talk myself into facing the inevitable. The trouble is, I'm not sure what subjects to avoid, an which to tackle head on. Well, there's only one way to find out.

The first item. In 24 hours, at the very most, all the oxygen will be gone. That leaves me with the three classical choices. I can let the C02 build up until I become unconscious. I can step outside and crack the suit, leaving Mars to do the job in about two minutes. Or I can use one of the tablets in the med kit.

C02 build-up. Everyone says that's quite easy -- just like going to sleep. I've no doubt that's true; unfortunately, in my case it's associated with nightmare number one...

I wish I'd never come across that damn book..."True Stories of World War Two," or whatever it was called.

There was one chapter about a German submarine, found and salvaged after the War. The crew was still inside it -- two men per bunk. And between each pair of skeletons, the single respirator set they'd been sharing.

Well, at least that won't happen here. But I know, with a deadly certainty, that as soon as I find it hard to breathe, I'll be back in that doomed U-boat.

So what about the quicker way? When you're exposed to a vacuum, you're unconscious in ten or fifteen seconds, and people who've been through it say it's not painful -- just peculiar. But trying to breathe something that isn't there brings me altogether too nearly to nightmare number two.

This time, it's a personal experience. As a kid, I used to do a lot of skindiving when my family went to the Caribbean for vacations. There was an old freighter that had sunk 20 years before, out on a reef with its deck only a couple of yards below the surface. Most of the hatches were open, so it was easy to get inside to look for souvenirs and hunt the big fish that like to shelter in such places.

Of course, it was dangerous -- if you did it without scuba gear. So what boy could resist the challenge?

My favorite rout involved diving into a hatch on the foredeck, swimming about 50 feet along a passageway dimly lit by portholes a few yards apart, then angling up a short flight of stairs and emerging through a door in the battered superstructure. The whole trip took less than a minute -- an easy dive for anyone in good condition. There was even time to do some sight-seeing or to play with a few fish along the route. And sometimes, for a change, I'd switch directions, going in the door and coming out again through the hatch.

That was the way I did it the last time. I hadn't dived for a week -- there had been a big storm and the sea was too rough -- so I was impatient to get going. I deep-breathed on the surface for about two minutes, until I felt the tingling in my finger tips that told me it was time to stop.

Then I jacknifed and slid gently down toward the black rectangle of the open doorway.

It always looked ominous and menacing -- that was part of the thrill. And for the first few yards, I was almost completely blind; the contrast between the tropical glare above water and the gloom between decks was so great that it took quite a while for my eyes to adjust. Usually, I was halfway along the corridor before I could see anything clearly; then the illumination would steadily increase as I approached the open hatch, where a shaft of sunlight would paint a dazzling rectangle on the rusty, barnacled metal floor.

I'd almost made it when I realized that this time, the light wasn't getting better. There was no slanting column of sunlight ahead of me, leading up to the world of air and life. I had a second of baffled confusion, wondering if I'd lost my way. Then I realized what had happened -- and confusion turned to sheer panic. Sometime during the storm, the hatch must have slammed shut. It weighed at least a quarter of a ton.

I don't remember making a U-turn; the next thing I recall is swimming quite slowly back along the passage and telling myself: "Don't hurry -- your air will last longer if you take it easy." I could see very well now, because my eyes had had plenty of time to become dark-adapted. There were lots of details I'd never noticed before -- such as the red squirrelfish lurking in the shadows, the green fronds and algae growing in the little patches of light around the portholes and even a single rubber boot, apparently in excellent condition, lying where someone must have kicked it off.

And once, out of a side corridor, I noticed a big grouper staring at me with bulbous eyes, its thick lips half parted, as if it was astonished at my intrusion.

The band around my chest was getting tighter and tighter; it was impossible to hold my breath any longer -- yet the stairway still seemed an infinite distance ahead. I let some bubbles of air dribble out of my mouth; that improved matters for a moment, but, once I had exhaled, the ache in my lungs became even more unendurable.

Now there was no point in conserving strength by flippering along with that steady, unhurried stroke. I snatched the ultimate few cubic inches of air from my face mask -- feeling it flatten against my nose as I did so -- and swallowed them down into my starving lungs. At the same time, I shifted gears and drove forward with every last atom of strength.

And that's all I remember, until I found myself spluttering and coughing in the daylight, clinging to the broken stub of the mast. The water around me was stained with blood and I wondered why. Then, to my freat surprise, I noticed a deep gash in my right calf; I must have banged into some sharp obstruction, but I'd never noticed it and even now felt no pain.

That was the end of my skindiving, until I started astronaut training ten years later and went into the underwater zero-g simulator. Then it was different, because I was using scuba gear; but I had some nasty moments that I was afraid the psychologists would notice and I always made sure that I got nowhere near emptying my tank. Having nearly suffocated one, I'd no intention of risking it again.

I know exactly what it will feel like to breathe the freezing wisp of near vacuum that passes for atmosphere. No thank you.

So what's wrong with poison? Nothing, I suppose. The stuff we've got takes only 15 seconds, they told us. But all my instincts are against it, even when there's no sensible alternative.

Did Scott have poison with him? I doubt it. And if he did, I'm sure he never used it.

I'm not going to replay this I hope it's been of some use, but I can't be sure.

The radio has just printed out a message from Earth, reminding me that transit starts in two hours -- As if I'm likely to forget -- when four men have already died so that I can be the first human being to see it. And the only one for exactly 100 years. It isn't often that Sun, Earth and Mars line up neatly like this; the last time was when poor old Lowell was still writing his beautiful nonsense about the canals and the great dying civilization that built them. Too bad it was all delusion.

I'd better check the telescope and the timing equipment.

The Sun is quiet today -- as it should be, anyway, near the middle of the cycle. Just a few small spots and some minor areas of disturbance around them. The solar weather is set calm for months to come. That's one thing the others won't have to worry about on their way home.

I think that was the worst moment, watching Olympus lift off Phobos and head back to Earth. Even though we'd known for weeks that nothing could be done, that was the final closing of the door. It was night and we could see everything perfectly. Phobos had come leaping up out of the west a few hours earlier and was doing its mad backward rush across the sky, growing from a tiny crescent to a half-moon; before it reached the zenith, it would disappear as it plunged into the shadow of Mars and became eclipsed.

We'd been listening to the countdown of course, trying to go about our normal work. It wasn't easy, accepting at last the fact that fifteen of us had come to Mars and only ten would return. Even then, I suppose there were millions back on Earth who still could not understand; they must have found it impossible to believe that Olympus couldn't descend a mere 500 miles to pick us up.

The Space Administration had been bombarded with crazy rescue schemes; heaven knows we'd though of enough ourselves. But when the permafrost under landing pad three finally have way and Pegasus toppled, that was that. It still seems a miracle that the ship didn't blow up when the propellant tank ruptured.

I'm wandering again. Back to Phobos and the countdown. On the telescope monitor, we could clearly see the fissured plateau where Olympus had touched down after we'd separated and begun our own descent. Though our friends would never land on Mars, at least they'd had a little world of their own to explore; even for a satellite as small as Phobos, it worked out at 30 square miles per man. A lot of territory to search for strange minerals and debris from space -- or to carve your name so that future ages would know that you were the first of all men to come this way.

The ship was clearly visible as a stubby, bright cylinder against the dull gray rocks; from time to time, some flat surface would catch the light of the swiftly moving Sun and would flash with mirror brilliance. But about five minutes before lift-off, the picture became suddenly pink, then crimson -- then vanished completely as Phobos rushed into eclipse.

The countdown was still at ten seconds, I think we all forgot our own predicament; we were up there aboard Olympus, willing the thrust to build up smoothly and lift the ship out of the tiny gravitational field of Phobos -- and then away from Mars for the long fall Earthward. We heard Commander Richmond say "Ignition," there was a brief burst of interference and the patch of light began to move in the field of the telescope.

That was all. There was no blazing column of fire, because, of course, there's really no ignition when a nuclear rocket lights up. "Lights up," indeed! That's another hangover from the old chemical technology. But a hot hydrogen blast is completely invisible; it seems a pity that we'll never again see anything so spectacular as a Saturn or Korolev blast-off.

Just before the end of the burn, Olympus left the shadow of Mars and burst out into sunlight again, reappearing almost instantly as a brilliant, swiftly moving star. The blaze of light must have startled them aboard the ship, because we heard someone call out: "Cover that window!" Then, a few seconds later, Richmond announced: "Engine cutoff." Whatever happened, Olympus was now irrevocably headed back to Earth.

A voice I didn't recognize -- though it must have been the commander's -- said: "Goodbye, Pegasus," and the radio transmission switched off. There was, of course, no point in saying "Good lick." That had all been settled weeks ago.

I've just played this back. Talking of luck, there's been one compensation, though not for us. With a crew of only ten, Olympus has been able to dump a third of her expendables and lighten herself by several tons. So now she'll get home a month ahead of schedule.

Plenty of things could have gone wrong in that month; we may yet have saved the expedition. Of course, we'll never know -- but it's a nice thought.

I've been playing a lot of music, full blast -- now that there's no else to be disturbed. Even if there were any Martians, I dont suppose this ghost of an atmosphere could carry the sound more than a few yards.

We have a fine collection, but I have to choose carefully. Nothing downbeat and nothing that demands too much concentration. Above all, nothing with human voices. So I restrict myself to the lighter orchestral classics: the "New World Symphony" and Grieg's piano concerto fill the bill perfectly. At the moment, I'm listening to Rachmaninoff's "Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini," but now I must switch off and get down to work.

There are only five minutes to go; all the equipment is in perfect condition. The telescope is tracking the Sun, the video recorder is standing by, the precision timer is running.

These observations will be as accurate as I can make them. I owe it to my lost comrades, whom I'll soon be joining. They gave me their oxygen, so that I can still be alive at this moment. I hope you remember that, 100 or 1000 years from now, whenever you crank these figures into the computers.

Only two minutes to go; getting down to business. For the record, year 1984, month May, day 11, coming up to four hours, 30 minutes, Ephemeris time...now.

Half a minute to contact; switching recorder and timer to high speed. Just rechecked position angle, to make sure I'm looking at the right spot on the Sun's limb. Using power of 500 -- image perfectly steady even at this low elevation.

Four thirty-two. Any moment, now...

There it is ..there it is! I can hardly believe it! A tiny black dent in the edge of the Sun, growing, growing, growing...

Hello, Earth. Look up at me -- the brightest star in your sky, straight over head at midnight.

Recorder back to slow.

Four thirty-five. It's as if a thumb were pushing into the Sun's edge, deeper and deeper -- fascinating to watch.

Four forty-one. Exactly halfway. The Earth's a perfect black semicircle. -- a clean bite out of the Sun. As if some disease were eating it away.

Four forty-five plus 30 seconds. Recorder on high speed again.

The line of contact with the Sun's edge is shrinking fast. Now it's a barely visible black thread. In a few seconds, the whole Earth will be superimposed on the Sun.

Now I can see the effects of the atmosphere. There's a thin halo of light surrounding that black hole in the Sun. Strange to think that I'm seeing the glow of all the sunsets -- and all the sunrises -- that are taking place round the whole Earth at this very moment.

Ingress complete -- four hours, 50 minutes, five seconds. The whole world has moved onto the face of the Sun. A perfectly circular black disk silhouetted against that inferno, 90,000,000 miles below. It looks bigger than I expected; one could easily mistake it for a fair-sized sunspot.

Nothing more to see now for six hours, when the Moon appears, trailing Earth by half the Sun's width. I'll beam the recorded data back to Lunacom, then try to get some sleep.

My very last sleep. Wonder if I'll need drugs. It seems a pity to waste these last few hours, but I want to conserve my strength -- and my oxygen. I think it was Dr. Johnson who said that nothing settles a man's mind so wonderfully as the knowledge that he'll be hanged in the morning. How the hell did he know?

Ten hours, 30 minutes, Ephemeris time. Dr. Johnson was right. I had only one pill and don't remember any dreams.

The condemned man also ate a hearty breakfast. Cut that out.

Back at telescope. Now the Earth's halfway across the disk, passing well north of center. In ten minutes, I should see the Moon.

I've just switched to the highest power of the telescope -- 2000. The images is slightly fuzzy but still fairly good, atmospheric halo very distinct. I'm hoping to see the cities on the dark side of Earth.

No luck. Probably too many clouds. A pity; it's theoretically possible, but we never succeeded. I wish...Never mind.

Ten hours, 40 minutes. Recorder on slow speed. Hope I'm looking at the right spot.

Fifteen seconds to go. Recorder fast.

Damn -- missed it. Doesn't matter 00 the recorder will have caught the exact moment. There's a little black notch already in the side of the Sun. First contact must have been about ten hours, 41 minutes, 20 seconds, E.T.

What a long way it is between Earth and Moon -- there's half the width of the Sun between them. You wouldn't think the two bodies had anything to do with each other. Makes you realize just how big the Sun really is.

Ten hours, 44 minutes. The Moon's exactly halfway over the edge. A very small, very clear-cut semicircular bite out of the edge of the Sun.

Ten hours, 47 minutes, five seconds. Internal contact. The Moon's clear of the edge, entirely inside the Sun. Don't suppose I can see anything on the night side, but I'll increase the power.

That's funny.

Well, well. Someone must be trying to talk to me. There's a tiny light pulsing away there on the darkened face of the Moon. Probably the laser at Imbrium Base.

Sorry, everyone, I've said all my goodbyes and don't want to go though that again. Nothing can be important now.

Still, it's almost hypnotic -- that flickering point of light, coming out of the face of the Sun itself. Hard to believe that 3even after it's traveled all this distance, the beam is only 100 miles wide. Lunacom's going to all this trouble to aim it exactly at me and I suppose I should feel guilty at ignoring it. But I don't. I've nearly finished my work and the things of Earth are no longer any concern of mine.

Ten hours, 50 minutes. Recorder off. That's it -- until the end of Earth transit, two hours from now.

I've had a snack and am taking my last look at the view from the observation bubble. The Sun's still high, so there's not much contrast, but the light brings out all the colors vividly -- the countless varieties of red and pink and crimson, so startling against the deep blue of the sky. How different from the Moon -- though that, too, has its own beauty.

It's strange how surprising the obvious can be. Every knew that Mars was red. But didn't really expect the red of rust -- the red of blood. Like the Painted Desert of Arizona; after a while, the eye longs for green.

To the north, there is one welcome change of color; the cap of carbon-dioxide snow on Mt. Burroughs is 25,000 feet above Mean Datum; when I was a boy, there weren't supposed to be any mountains on Mars.

The nearest sand dune is a quarter of a mile away and it, too, has patches of frost on its shaded slope. During the last storm, we thought it moved a few feet, but we couldn't be sure. Certainly, the dunes are moving, like those on Earth. One day, I supposed, this base will be covered -- only to reappear again in 1000 years. Or 10,000.

That strange group of rocks -- the Elephant, the Capitol, the Bishop -- still holds its secrets and teases me with the memory of our first big disappointment. We could have sworn that they were sedimentary; how eagerly we rushed out to look for fossils! Even now, we don't know what formed that outcropping; the geology of Mars is still a mass of contradictions and enigmas.

We have passed on enough problems to the future and those who come after us will find many more. But there's one mystery we never reported to Earth nor even entered in the log. The first night after we landed, we took turns keeping watch. Brennan was on duty and woke me up soon after midnight. I was annoyed -- it was ahead of time -- and then he told me that he'd seen a light moving around the bas of the Capitol. We watched for at least an hour, until it was my turn to take over. But we saw nothing; whatever that light was, it never reappeared.

Now Brennan was as levelheaded and unimaginative as the come; if he said he saw a light, then he saw one. Maybe it was some kind of electric discharge or the reflection of Phobos on a piece of sand-polished rock. Anyway, we decided not to mention it to Lunacom unless we saw it again.

Since I've been alone, I've often awaked in the night and looked out toward the rocks. In the feeble illumination of Phobos and Deimos, they remind me of the skyline of a darkened city. And it has always remained darkened. No lights have ever appeared for me.

Twelve hours, 49 minutes, Ephemeris time. The last act's about to begin. Earth has nearly reached the edge of the Sun. You could easily mistake it for a small spot, going over the limb.

Thirteen hours, eight.

Goodbye, beautiful Earth.

Going, going, going, goodbye, good-

I'm OK again now. The timings have all been sent home on the beam. In five minutes, they'll join the accumulated wisdom of mankind. And Lunacom will know that I stuck to my post.

But I'm not sending this. I'm going to leave it here for the next expedition -- whenever that may be. It could be ten or twenty years before anyone comes here again; no point in going back to an old site when there's a whole world waiting to be explored.

So this capsule will stay here, as Scott's diary remained in his tent, until the next visitors find it. But they won't find me.

Strange how hard it is to get away from Scott. I think he gave me the idea. For his body will not lie frozen forever in the Antarctic, isolated from the great cycle of life and death. Long ago, that lonely tent began its march to the sea. Within a few years, it was buried by the falling snow and had become part of the glacier that crawls eternally away from the pole. In a few brief centuries, the sailor will have returned to the sea. He will merge once more into the pattern of living things -- the plankton, the seals, the penguins, the whales, all the multitudinous fauna of the Antarctic Ocean.

There are no oceans here on Mars, nor have there been for at least five billion years. But there is life of some kind, down there in the badlands of Chaos II, that we never had time to explore. Those moving patches on the orbital photographs. The evidence that whole areas of Mars have been swept clear of craters by forces other than erosion. The long-chain, optically active carbon molecules picked up by the atmospheric samplers.

And, of course, the mystery of Viking Six. Even now, no one has been able to make any sense of those last instrument readings before something large and heavy crushed the probe in the still, cold, depths of the Martian night.

And don't talk to me about primitive life forms in a place like this! Anything that's survived here will be so sophisticated that we may look as clumsy as dinosaurs.

There's still enough propellant in the ship's tanks to drive the Marscar clear around the planet. I have three hours of daylight left -- plenty of time to get down into the valleys and well out into Chaos. After sunset, I'll still be able to make good speed with the head lamps. It will be romantic, driving at night under the moons of Mars.

One thing I must fix before I leave. I don't like the way Sam's lying out there. He was always so poised, so graceful. It doesn't seem right that he should look so awkward now. I must do something about it.

I wonder if I could have covered 300 feet without a suit, walking slowly, steadily -- the way he did to the very end.

I must try not to look at his face.

That's it. Everything shipshape and ready to go.

The therapy has worked. I feel perfectly at ease -- even contented, now that I know exactly what I'm going to do. The old nightmares have lost their power.

It is true: We all die alone. It makes no difference at the end, being 50,000,000 miles from home.

I'm going to enjoy the drive through that lovely painted landscape. I'll be thinking of all those who dreamed about Mars -- Well and Lowell and Burroughs and Weinbaum and Bradbury. They all guessed wrong -- but the reality is just as strange, just as beautiful as they imagined.

I don't know what's waiting for me out there and I'll probably never see it. But on this starving world, it must be desperate for carbon, phosphorus, oxygen, calcium. It can use me.

And when my oxygen alarm gives its final ping, somewhere down there in that haunted wilderness, I'm going to finish in style. As soon as I have difficulty in breathing, I'll get off the Marscar and start walking -- with a playback unit plugged into my helmet and going full blast.

For sheer, triumphant power and glory, there's nothing in the whole of music to match the "Toccata" and "Fugue in D Minor." I won't have time to hear all of it; that doesn't matter.

Johann Sebastian, here I come.

---------------

Note: All the astronomical events described in this story will take place at the time and dates stated.

Reprinted from Playboy, January 1971. Copyright (c) 1971 Playboy Enterprises, Inc. No part of this article may be produced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means -- electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise -- without the written permission of the copyright owner.