Jamie stepped off the last rung of the flimsy ladder. He stood on the sandy surface of Mars.

He felt totally alone. The five human figures beside him could not truly be people; they looked like strange alien totems. Then he realized that they were aliens, and he was too. Here on Mars we are the alien invaders, Jamie told himself.

He wondered if there were Martians hidden among the rocks, invisible to their eyes, watching them the way red men had watched the first whites step ashore onto their land centuries ago. He wondered what they would do about this alien invasion, and what the invaders would do if they found native life forms.

In his helmet earphones Jamie could hear the Russian team leader conversing with the expedition commander up in the orbiting spacecraft, his deep voice more excited than Jamie had ever heard before. Connors was checking the TV camera perched up at the front of the stilled robot construction vehicle.

Finally Vosnesensky spoke to his five charges as they arranged themselves in a semicircle around him. "All is ready. The words we speak next will be heard by everyone on Earth."

As planned, they stood with their backs to the landing vehicle while the robot’s camera focused on them. Later they would pan the vidcam around to show the newly erected dome and the desolate Martian plain on which they had set foot.

Holding up one gloved hand almost like a symphony conductor, Vosnesensky took a self-conscious half step forward and pronounced: "In the name of Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky, of Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, of Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin, and of all the other pioneers and heroes of space, we come to Mars in peace for the advancement of all human peoples."

He said it in Russian first and then in English. Only afterward were the others invited to recite their little prewritten speeches.

Pete Connors, with the hint of Texan drawl he had picked up during his years at Houston, recited, "This is the greatest day in the history of human exploration, a proud day for all the people of the United States, the Soviet Union, and the whole world."