Late that afternoon, after they have stopped and set up the tent and tied it down to several rocks, Hans leaps through the lock waving his atmosphere kit and hopping up and down. “Listen,” he says, “I just radioed the summit station for confirmation of this. There's a high-pressure system over us right now. We're at fourteen thousand meters above the datum, but the barometric pressure is up to three hundred fifty millibars because there's a big cell of air moving over the flank of the volcano this week.” The others stare. Hans says, “Do you see what I mean?”
“No,” exclaim three voices at once.
“High-pressure zone,” Roger says unhelpfully.
“Well,” Hans says, standing at attention, “it's enough to breathe! Just enough, but enough, I say. And of course no one's ever done it before—done it this high before, I mean. Breathed free Martian air.”
“You're kidding!”
“So we can establish the height record right here and now! I propose to do it, and I invite whoever wants to to join me.”
“Now wait a minute,” Eileen says.
But everyone wants to do it.
“Wait a minute,” Eileen says. “I don't want everyone taking off their helmets and keeling over dead up here, for God's sake. They'll revoke my license. We have to do this in an orderly fashion. And you—” She points at Stephan. “You can't do this. I forbid it.”
Stephan protests loudly and for a long time, but Eileen is adamant, and Hans agrees. “The shock could start your edema again, for sure. None of us should do it for long. But for a few minutes, it will go. Just breathe through the mesh face masks, to warm the air.”
“You can watch and save us if we keel over,” Roger tells Stephan.
“Shit,” Stephan says. “All right. Do it.”
They gather just out from under the cap of the tent, where Stephan can, theoretically, drag them back through the lock if he has to. Hans checks his barometer one last time, nods at them. They stand in a rough circle, facing in. Everyone begins to unclip helmet latches.
Roger gets his unclipped first—the years as canyon guide have left their mark on him, in little ways like this—and he lifts the helmet up. As he places it on the ground the cold strikes his head and makes it throb. He sucks down a breath: dry ice. He refuses the urge to hyperventilate, fearful he will chill his lungs too fast and damage them. Regular breathing, he thinks, in and out. In and out. Though Dougal's mouth is covered by a mesh mask, Roger can tell he is grinning widely. Funny how the upper face reveals that. Roger's eyes sting, his chest is frozen inside, he sucks down the frigid air and every sense quickens, breath by breath. The edges of pebbles a kilometer away are sharp and clear. Thousands of edges. “Like breathing nitrous oxide!” Arthur cries in a lilting high voice. He whoops like a little kid and the sound is odd, distant. Roger walks in a circle, on a quilt of rust lava and gaily colored patches of lichen. Intense awareness of the process of breathing seems to connect his consciousness to everything he can see; he feels like a strangely shaped lichen, struggling for air like all the rest. Jumble of rock, gleaming in the sunlight. “Let's build a cairn,” he says to Dougal, and can hear his voice is wrong somehow. Slowly they step from rock to rock, picking them up and putting them in a pile. The interior of his chest is perfectly defined by each intoxicating breath. Others watch bright-eyed, sniffing, involved in their own perceptions. Roger sees his hands blur through space, sees the flesh of Dougal's face pulsing pinkly, like the flowers of moss campion. Each rock is a piece of Mars, he seems to float as he walks, the size of the volcano gets bigger, bigger, bigger; finally he is seeing it at true size. Stephan strides among them grinning through his helmet, holding up both hands. It's been ten minutes. The cairn is not yet done, but they can finish it tomorrow. “I'll make a messenger canister for it tonight!” Dougal wheezes happily. “We can all sign it.” Stephan begins to round them all up. “Incredibly cold!” Roger says, still looking around as if he has never seen any of it before—any of anything.
Dougal and he are the last two into the lock; they shake hands. “Invigorating, eh?” Roger nods. “Very fine air.”
But the air is just part of all the rest of it—part of the world, not of the planet. Right? “That's right,” Roger says, staring through the tent wall down the endless slope of the mountain.
That night they celebrate with champagne again, and the party gets wild as they become sillier and sillier. Marie tries to climb the inner wall of the tent by grabbing the soft material in her hands, and falls to the floor repeatedly; Dougal juggles boots; Arthur challenges all comers to arm wrestle, and wins so quickly they decide he is using “a trick,” and disallow his victories; Roger tells government jokes ("How many ministers does it take to pour a cup of coffee?"), and institutes a long and lively game of spoons. He and Eileen play next to each other and in the dive for spoons they land on each other. Afterward, sitting around the heater singing songs, she sits at his side and their legs and shoulders press together. Kid stuff, familiar and comfortable, even to those who can't remember their own childhoods.