Contact across the Solar System

To Mars

After about a week, the Aurora arrived at Mars. As it approached, it flew by the planet's moons Phobos and Deimos, giving Arlene and Brad a chance to photograph them up close. It also flew near some of the Earth spacecraft orbiting that planet, and the Aurora and the spacecraft then photographed each other.

The pictures became big news, and they inspired drollery like a cartoon of an Earth spacecraft and the Aurora, both with arms holding cameras and both saying "Say 'Cheese'". That was obviously not to scale, and someone's to-scale comparison rather glaringly showed how puny the Earth spacecraft are in comparison to the Aurora and even to its scoutcraft.

The Aurora then entered Mars's atmosphere, though on the planet's night side. After several minutes, it entered a spaceport cavern, and in a few more minutes, it docked. Arlene and Brad came out with their original suitcases, leaving the others on the ship, and they met a delegation of local politicians and people from a local university. "Welcome to Yazna Golu, capital of Mars. This is where this contact effort began," one of them said.

"It began here?" asked Brad.

"Yes, because some of us on Mars had become worried about all your spacecraft arriving here. They were concerned that we might run into each other and cause trouble."

"But the main contact team is on Venus."

"Yes, because that's where the largest Earth-observation effort is at."

Brad also noted "I just made a great discovery. Mars has women", a reference to "Mars Needs Women".

The travelers went into Yazna Golu's city caverns, going to a hotel in that city. The next day, they got a tour of the city and experienced various festivities. Brad noticed that he seemed to feel the same weight on the Earth, and he asked his hosts about that. They said that the worlds' cities have artificial gravity to produce the Earth's strength of gravity, because that's what we are adapted to.

As on Venus, they took part in a panel discussion with various politicians and the like, and they answered lots of questions. Present for the occasion was Tikanna, an expert on Earther depictions of Mars, both fictional and nonfictional. She conceded that many of them were not very flattering and that she did not want to embarrass her guests. Someone asked about the canals of Mars, and she asked the two if they felt it too embarrassing to talk about. Brad said that it was no problem, and Arlene wanted to know what it was about, and both of them enjoyed her describing the Martian-canal controversy.

"It is a credit to the scientists of the Earth that many of them recognized how borderline the canals were. Some of them couldn't see the canals at all, and some of them saw the canals only some of the time," Tikanna stated. "Most of them didn't agree with Percival Lowell and his far-out claims. Did you know that he claimed that he found our world's capital city?"

Lots of laughs.

"Seriously. He identified it as a spot where lots of canals went out of. So here he was, describing our world's society in gory detail while his colleagues were not very sure that the canals existed."

More laughs.

"Or what they were if they did exist. Some of them thought that they were geological features. Long cracks or something like that."

Arlene and Brad also got a tour of Mars's geological wonders, riding a cylindrical mini-ship like the one that they rode on Venus. The city was in the cratered southern uplands, with its location chosen because it is geologically stable and difficult to flood if Mars ever gets terraformed. So most of the very interesting stuff was elsewhere.

The two got to see several of Mars's numerous dry riverbeds, evidence of long-ago rivers of liquid water. Riverbeds that included teardrop islands, partially-eroded craters, and other such features. There were even deltas where rivers had flowed into a long-gone ocean in the northern hemisphere. Their ship also traveled inside the Valles Marineris rift valley, close to some of its walls. Walls that were huge cliffs with piles of fallen rock at their bases, cliffs much larger than their ship. Then up Olympus Mons and into that huge volcano's summit craters. Volcanic ones, ones that dwarfed their ship. Finally, some trips to Mars's poles, with their water and carbon-dioxide ice.

Both Brad's and Arlene's cameras continued to hold up, and they continued to upload their video. It continued to get a lot of interest from people back home, especially their video of Mars's surface. Arlene often seemed like "Who would ever want to colonize that big desert?" while Brad was rather interested.

They got back to Yazna Golu, and the next day, they and their Martian hosts said goodbye, and the two travelers and their two tour guides got back aboard the Aurora with what they got on Mars. The ship headed back to the Earth, which looked like a bright blue-white star from Mars.