By Mike Muzzy · © 2026 Mike Muzzy. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

EARTH WATCHES

Earth, in the months before the civilian launch

The world learned Mars through pictures that arrived late.

The first landing photographs had shown four suited figures standing on a red plain. Newspapers printed them across entire pages. Television presenters spoke over them as though the men could hear.

The later transmissions were harder to explain.

There were doors with handwritten notices, corridors crowded with equipment, a machine shop and rows of green plants under artificial light. One camera passed a mechanical Arrivals board. Another showed a corner of Chinatown lit red above a makeshift kitchen. A shelf in the workshop had been fabricated from metal recovered and processed on Mars.

At a television studio in London, a producer watched the latest package and asked for the landing footage again.

“We've already shown the landing,” his editor said.

“Then give me the mining accident. Or the new reactor.”

“We have a man fixing a door.”

“I can see that.”

“He made the replacement hinge himself.”

The producer looked at the monitor. A technician was kneeling beside a pressure door with a small collection of tools arranged on a cloth. The camera operator had stayed with him long enough to show the old hinge coming off and the new one being fitted.

“Who wants to watch somebody fix a door?”

“People who want to know how they live there.”

The editor played the next sequence. A woman crossed a corridor carrying two cups. She stopped to let a loaded trolley pass, then continued through a doorway.

“That's not news,” the producer said.

“No. That's why it's interesting.”

They used the door repair.

By the following week, viewers had written to ask what the hinge was made from, whether the colony had a proper workshop and why the technician had not been wearing a spacesuit.

A producer who had expected complaints about dull footage asked for more of it.

The transmissions could not be broadcast as live conversations. The delay between Earth and Mars changed throughout the planets' orbits, and questions sent by reporters might not receive answers until much later. Interviews were recorded in pieces, edited and transmitted back through the relay network.

One network replayed an interview recorded before Tom Hale's departure from Mars.

The interviewer had asked what he missed most about Earth.

“Rain,” Hale said.

The answer surprised the interviewer.

“Why rain?”

In the recording, Hale glanced towards a window overlooking the plain.

“Because on Earth water falls out of the sky for free.”

The clip appeared on television in several countries. Newspapers quoted it. A schoolteacher in Manchester wrote the sentence on a blackboard during a lesson about the Martian water system.

One pupil asked whether it ever rained on Mars.

“Not like here,” the teacher said.

“Then how do they wash?”

The class spent the next twenty minutes discussing recycled water.

Elsewhere, a family watching the agricultural dome argued about the first children who might eventually live there.

“They'll never know a proper garden,” the grandmother said.

“They'll have gardens,” her son replied. “You can see the plants.”

“Under lamps. Behind glass.”

“That's still a garden.”

His daughter, who had been watching silently, asked whether the children would be allowed outside.

Nobody at the table had a satisfactory answer.

Alina became famous for tomatoes.

A photograph of her holding the first successful crop appeared beside articles about agriculture, closed water cycles and the cost of shipping food from Earth. Some reports described the tomatoes as a scientific breakthrough. Alina objected when she saw the clippings.

“We grew tomatoes,” she told a colleague. “The difficult part was keeping everything else alive while we did it.”

Her next message to Earth concerned fertiliser supplies and a replacement pump.

The television producers preferred the tomatoes.

In a factory canteen in Japan, workers gathered around a small television to watch footage of equipment built partly from machinery they recognised. One man pointed at a motor housing.

“That's ours.”

His colleague leaned closer.

“You can't tell from that distance.”

“I spent six years making them.”

The camera moved on before they could settle the argument.

A Soviet broadcast gave particular attention to the Warsaw Pact residential section and its communal facilities. The commentary praised collective organisation and the contribution of socialist engineers. A Western broadcaster used some of the same pictures in a report about the political compromises behind the colony's charter.

Both showed the same dining hall.

They drew different conclusions.

Not everyone welcomed the expansion.

Letters to newspapers questioned why governments were spending so much on a settlement millions of kilometres away while housing, hospitals and roads on Earth still needed money. A caller to a radio programme demanded to know how many ordinary homes could be heated for the cost of one cargo launch.

The presenter did not have the figure.

Neither did the caller.

They argued anyway.

Shaw became famous for refusing to become famous.

When a network asked her to identify the colony's greatest achievement, she answered, “Routine.”

The producer sent a follow-up question asking for something more inspiring.

Shaw declined.

At Camp One, she had watched the arrival of a shuttle, a pressure test, a harvest and a locally machined replacement part become entries in the daily work schedule. People walked from one pressurised section to another without suits, argued about maintenance requests and complained when lunch was late.

Those things mattered to her more than another photograph of a flag.

The images were changing what people imagined Mars to be.

For years, the public had seen it as a destination reached by exceptional crews after years of training. Now they could see a place where someone repaired a door, cooked a meal or went to work.

At UNEPA's civilian selection offices, that change had become a practical problem.

Applications arrived from every participating country and from many people who had no formal route into the programme. Some were sent through national agencies. Others came directly by post, addressed simply to the Mars office.

There were engineers, electricians, mechanics, teachers, doctors, cooks and agricultural workers. A few applicants had spent their careers in remote mining camps or aboard ships. Others had never lived more than a few kilometres from where they were born.

One man submitted plans for a restaurant.

Another offered to repair any machine the colony could break.

A woman wrote that she wanted her children to grow up somewhere without borders.

The selection officers could not afford to treat enthusiasm as a qualification.

The colony needed people who could work with limited supplies, share confined spaces and remain useful when a task changed without warning. Medical screening was demanding. So were the interviews. A skilled applicant who could not tolerate isolation might be less valuable than someone with a modest résumé and years of experience working far from home.

One candidate spent most of his interview describing the speeches he hoped to give after arrival.

“What would you do if the water-treatment unit failed?” an interviewer asked.

“I would organise a committee.”

“Before or after you found the leak?”

The candidate did not return for a second interview.

Another applicant arrived with worn certificates and a notebook filled with diagrams of equipment he had repaired. He answered questions about failed motors and improvised tools for nearly an hour.

When asked why he wanted to go, he shrugged.

“You've got machines. They'll need fixing.”

That answer went into his file.

The applications continued to accumulate even after the first screening lists had been drawn up. Selection boards compared qualifications, medical assessments and the needs of the settlement. National representatives argued over places. UNEPA officials argued over whether the proposed mix of skills would work once the passengers arrived.

Every accepted applicant would require transport, training, medical preparation and an assignment at the other end.

The number of places did not increase to match the number of people who wanted them.

By the time the final application period closed, the selection office had filled an entire storage room with paper.

Some applicants had included photographs. Others sent references, certificates, medical records or handwritten explanations of why they believed they belonged on Mars.

The selection officers read what they could and rejected far more than they accepted.

Thirteen places were available on the first civilian ship.

On television, Mars still looked impossibly far away.

On the desks at UNEPA, it had become a question of names.