Mars

SOL 24: NOON

Aleksander Mironov hummed softly as he checked Jamie’s backpack. The rover’s airlock was crowded with just the two of them in it: Mironov in his fire-engine red hard suit, Jamie in his sky-blue, with a gray spare helmet to replace his meteorite-gouged original.

Mironov’s visor was up, and Jamie could see that the Russian was smiling as he clomped back into his view. Mironov’s face looked chunky, almost compressed in his helmet, as if stuffed into a container a half size too small. It was a broad-cheeked, snub-nosed face, slightly ruddy, sprinkled lightly with freckles, with pale blue eyes and eyebrows so fair they were barely visible.

“Gloves?” Mironov asked.

“Right here on my belt, Alex.” Jamie tugged them on. Of all the equipment on the mission, the gloves were the most advanced piece of technology. Thin enough to be easily flexible and give the wearer a good feel for whatever he grasped, yet tough enough to protect the hands against the near vacuum of the Martian atmosphere.

“Visor down,” Mironov said. Only after they had both sealed their helmets did he turn to the pumps and start them chugging.

“You look tired,” the cosmonaut said over the suit-to-suit radio.

Surprised, Jamie said to the gold-tinted visor, “I feel okay.”

“You were outside four hours yesterday, then you stayed up very late last night. You were outside all morning, and now you go again.”

The pumps stopped. The indicator light turned red. Mironov pushed the hatch open.

“We’ve only got three days here,” Jamie replied as they stepped through the hatch and down the short ladder to the rough, blackened ground. “We’ve got to make the most of them.”

“Patel makes you feel guilty.”

Jamie forgot himself and tried to shrug inside the suit. All he got for his effort was a fresh irritation under his armpit, where the suit chafed him.

“You must not drive yourself so hard,” Mironov went on. “When you are tired you make mistakes. Mistakes can kill a man.”

“I’ll be all right. The others are pushing just as hard,” Jamie said.

“I gave them the same lecture,” said the Russian. His voice sounded more disappointed than distressed.

“And?” Jamie asked.

Mironov pointed a gloved finger toward the butter yellow and dark green figures of Patel and Naguib. “They ignored me just as you are ignoring me.”

Patel and Naguib were already chipping samples of the dark basaltic rock that spread as far as the eye could see. Old lava flow, Jamie knew. Pavonis Mons had erupted over and over again, red-hot magma flowing in all directions. How long ago? The samples they were taking would give them the answer. They had decided to spend these three precious days at the base of the volcano’s shield, collecting as many samples from as many different locations as possible. They would start to analyze them on the trek back to the base, they had agreed.

Yet none of the three scientists could resist testing the samples they had collected. Last night they had stayed up for hours, while Mironov reminded them of the mission schedule like an ineffectual camp counselor. They ran a dozen samples through the portable GC/ MS in the rover’s lab module.

The mass spectrometer told them that their samples were iron-rich basalts, no more than five hundred million years old, based on their ratio of potassium to argon.

“But the argon might have outgassed,” Jamie warned. “Some of it may have escaped into the atmosphere.”

“Much of it may be missing,” Naguib agreed.

“Which means that the samples could be much older,” said Jamie.

Patel, still refusing to meet Jamie’s eyes, said to the Egyptian, “We will run more definitive tests back at the base, where we can irradiate the samples in the power reactor.”

Naguib nodded and said, “Yes. If the remote handling system is working. It was down…”

“Pete said he’d have it running by the time we got back,” Jamie said.

“Astronaut Connors!” Patel almost snorted. “He spends all his time flying the RPV instead of attending to maintenance.”

“Pete will have the remote handlers working by the time we get back,” Jamie insisted.

Finally they folded down their bunks for sleep: Patel and Naguib on the uppers, Mironov and Jamie below. Jamie fell asleep quickly, only to be awakened by a whining, almost sobbing sound from above. One of them’s having a nightmare, he realized. He turned his face toward the curving wall of the rover and went back to sleep. His last conscious thought was that the metal skin of the vehicle felt cold; the freezing night of Mars waited outside, less than an inch away.

Over breakfast they had agreed that their best strategy was to work along the line of fissures and sinkholes that ran up one side of the volcano’s massive base. They would go as far as they could up the gentle slope of the shield, with Mironov driving the rover behind them so they would not exceed the safe walk-back distance specified in the mission regulations.

All three of these volcanoes sit astride this big fault line, Jamie said to himself as he laboriously chipped away at the tough black basalt. Looking back toward the rover, he saw Mironov planting another beacon into the ground. It was not easy work; this was real rock, not the compacted sands they had found around their domed base. The thin layer of reddish dust that covered the rock was easily scuffed away. Jamie wondered why the wind did not remove it entirely.

Inside his hard suit Jamie could not feel any wind, and there were no clouds in the salmon sky to show air movements. Yet the meteorology instruments on their beacons showed a fairly steady breeze of more than forty miles per hour running up the long gradual slope toward the volcano’s distant summit. At night the wind direction reversed to downslope and slowed to little more than twenty miles per hour.

Forty miles per hour would be a stiff gale on Earth, Jamie knew. But in the thin air of Mars there was no strength in the wind, not even enough to scour the last layer of sand off the rocks.

Jamie put his hands on his knees and let the suit’s fans cool him down for a while. His visor was starting to fog over from his exertion. He waited, scanning the barren rocky waste that stretched all around him. Dead rock, as rough and bare as the worst badlands he had ever seen in New Mexico. Blasted and pitted by meteor craters, some as big as a football field, most nothing more than the dent a hammer might make on the hood of a car. There were cracks in the solidified lava, vents and fissures that twisted from one crater pit to another. The ground rose almost imperceptibly toward the volcano’s high caldera, so far away that it was well over the horizon.

Strangely, not so many rocks were scattered around. The molten basalt must have pushed them downslope. Jamie pictured the black rocky field on which he stood as it must once have been: a broad surging stream of red-hot lava spewing from those vents to flow sluggishly down toward the plain, melting or bulldozing the rocks in its path.

Heat must be coming up from the interior along this fault line, Jamie reasoned. Molten magma flowing time and time again, building these big cones, spilling out to form the shields. Then what about Olympus Mons, some fifteen hundred kilometers to the northwest? It’s not sitting on a fault, not that we can see. But it’s probably younger than these three beauties. Could there be a hot spot down below that built Pavonis and its two companions, then migrated northwest to build Olympus?

Jamie realized his back ached from stooping awkwardly in the cumbersome suit. He straightened up, wondering, Does Mars have plate tectonics, like Earth? Wouldn’t think so, the planet’s so small that its core can’t possibly have enough heat energy to move whole continents of mantle rock. But there was enough heat energy to build these volcanoes. Where did it come from? Is it still flowing?

He looked upslope, his eye following the rugged, dark landscape as it climbed into the pink sky. When’s the last time you burped, Pavonis, my friend? Have you gone completely cold, or will you spread lava across this ground again one day?

Suddenly a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye startled him. It was gone by the time he turned his face toward it. A shadow flitting across the ground? Like a bird flying overhead…?

Jamie looked upward and saw the silvery speck of the soarplane glinting in the sunlight high above. His heart was pounding from the sudden rush of adrenaline. It made him feel foolish. No Martian hawks circling up there; just Pete Connors trying to photo-map Pavonis’s caldera. Hope it makes Patel happy.

“Voice check.” Mironov’s boyish tenor in his earphones startled Jamie. He looked around and saw that his shadow stretched long across the ground. The sun was getting close to the horizon.

“Patel here.”

The rover was parked a hundred meters or so down the slope, between a meteor crater twice its size and a zigzag fissure that might once have been a lava vent. You were right, Rava, Jamie said silently. These volcanoes have so much to tell us, and we won’t be here long enough to even begin to understand their story.

“Waterman okay,” Jamie said. The voice checks were standard safety procedure when the scientists were out of visual range of the astronaut or cosmonaut in charge of the team. In this rough ground, Mironov could not possibly keep all three of his wandering teammates in sight.

There was a long silence.

“Naguib?” Mironov’s voice sounded sharp in Jamie’s earphones. “Dr. al-Naguib, voice check please.”

No answer.

“Dr. al-Naguib?”

“He was over by the fissure there.” Patel pointed further upslope. “Perhaps the terrain is blocking his radio transmission.”

Jamie heard low guttural muttering, Mironov cursing in Russian. Following the outstretched arm of Patel’s yellow suit, Jamie called into his helmet microphone, “Let’s take a look, Rava. Maybe he’s in trouble.”

“No, I do not believe so…”

“Stay where you are. It’s my responsibility to find him,” Mironov shouted. “I don’t want two of you missing.”

But Jamie was already striding upslope as fast as he could in the hard suit. The slope was easy and his boots gave him good traction, but the rough ground was treacherous.

“Rava,” he called, “where did you see him last?”

The butter-yellow suit had not moved. “To your right,” Patel’s voice replied. “Perhaps twenty or thirty meters farther up.”

Jamie worked his way around a conical pit, a meteor strike that looked shining new compared to the more weathered craters dotting the ground. He saw a fissure snaking across the black rock, wide enough for a man to fall into. How deep?

Very, he saw, as he bent awkwardly to peer into it. Black and deep as hell. He turned on his helmet lamp, but the beam shone only feebly into the steep crevasse.

“Dr. Naguib?” he called.

Still no reply. If he’s stuck inside this fissure he ought to be able to hear my radio signal, Jamie said to himself. If he’s conscious. If he’s alive.

“Wait where you are!” Mironov called. “I am coming. I have the directional tinder.”

Jamie had to turn completely around to see the Russian bounding toward him in his fire-engine suit, a black box the size of a personal television set in one gloved hand. Patel was still frozen where he stood; his only motion had been to let his arm relax down.

A lot of good the directional finder will do, Jamie thought. If Naguib can’t hear us and we can’t hear him, there’s no radio signal for the directional finder to zero in on.

“He must be on the other side of this crevasse,” Jamie called to Mironov, unconsciously raising his voice, as if he had to shout to cover the distance between them.

Before Mironov could reply, Jamie took a few steps backward, then ran up and jumped across the fissure. In the low gravity it was easy, even with the cumbersome suit weighing him down.

“Wait!” Mironov bellowed. “I order you to wait!”

Jamie took a few more steps forward, swiveling his gaze back and forth as much as the helmet would allow. He’s up here somewhere. Got to be. Out of our line of sight. Out of radio contact. That means…

The uneven ground seemed to stop suddenly off to the left, as if it dropped away steeply. Jamie headed that way while Mironov’s puffing breath panted in his earphones.

“This way, I think,” Jamie called, heading for the break. It was a ravine, he saw. Pretty steep.

And there Naguib lay, crumpled facedown at the bottom of a ten-meter drop. The ravine was roughly twenty meters across, a ragged irregular trench carved into the solid basalt. Naguib’s deep-green hard suit sprawled at its bottom like a broken, discarded toy, legs spraddled, unmoving.

“He’s here!” Jamie shouted, turning enough to see Mironov sailing across the crevasse. “Come on. We’ll need a rope, a line.”

Gingerly, Jamie started down the steep side of the crevasse. It was all in shadow, with the sun dropping toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see rough places to clutch and precarious footholds.

“Go back to the rover and get the climbing winch,” he heard Mironov call to Patel. The radio voice was noticeably dimmed once Jamie’s helmet dropped below the rim of the ravine.

It seemed to take an hour to work his way down to the Egyptian. It was dark down at the bottom; he needed his helmet lamp to see the final few meters.

In his earphones, though, he heard Naguib breathing raggedly. He’s alive. His suit hasn’t ruptured.

Finally he reached the geophysicist’s side. The backpack was badly dented. In the light of Jamie’s helmet lamp it was difficult to see how serious the damage might be.

“Is he alive?” Mironov’s voice was so loud it made Jamie wince.

“Yes. We’ll need a line to haul him up.”

“On the way.”

Slowly, tenderly, Jamie turned Naguib onto his back. Damned helmet’s banged up too, he saw. He peered into the visor, wiped at the red sand that had smudged it. Naguib’s eyes were fluttering. His face seemed covered with blood. He coughed.

Jamie checked the backpack monitoring gauges on Naguib’s wrist. Christ, he’s out of air! He must be breathing his own fumes in there.

Quickly, with the automatic reactions bred by long hours of training, Jamie reached to the side of his own backpack and yanked out the emergency air hose. He looked at the telltales on his own wrist. Not much to spare; we’ve all been out so damned long the regenerator filters are just about tapped out.

Plugging the free end of the hose into the emergency port in Naguib’s metal ring collar, he thumbed the release and let air flow from his own tank into Naguib’s battered helmet.

The Egyptian took in a deep, sighing breath, his whole body arching slightly. Then he coughed.

“Easy,” Jamie said. “Easy. Take it easy and everything will be all right.”

Coughing like a man who had been underwater too long, Naguib managed to ask weakly, “Waterman? You?”

“Yes. Alex and Rava are rigging the winch. We’ll have you out of here in a few minutes.”

“I… slipped. Going down… the rock gave way and I started to fall.”

“Can you sit up?”

“I think so.”

Gently Jamie helped him up to a sitting position. With the hard suit it was like bending a length of stiff plastic pipe.

“How do you feel?” Jamie could not hear Mironov or Patel; he guessed that they had switched to another radio frequency.

“I think my nose is broken. I can’t breathe through it.”

“Ribs? Arms, legs?”

Naguib was silent a moment, then, “Everything else seems to be in order. I think I can stand now.”

“Not yet. Just relax.” Looking up, Jamie saw that the sliver of sky above the ravine was still bright. There was still some daylight up there, although night could enfold them in a matter of minutes, he knew.

Don’t want to be out here with an injured man in the dark, he told himself, tapping on the control keys of his radio unit. His earphones erupted with Mironov’s snarling, growling Russian as he struggled to get the winch in place.

“Alex,” he called. The cosmonaut’s voice cut off immediately, although Jamie heard him panting in his earphones. “Dr. Naguib seems to be okay, except that he might have broken his nose in the fall he took. His regenerator is ruptured, though. I’m sharing air with him.”

Silence. Then Patel’s voice, high-pitched, frightened. “We do not have very much air left in any of our regenerators. We have been out all afternoon.”

“We can make do,” Mironov said. “We will all share, once we get the two of you back up here.”

The winch cable came snaking down with the climbing harness hanging like an empty vest. Jamie slung it around Naguib’s shoulders and began cinching up the straps.

The Egyptian said, “My scintillation meter… it began flashing… there may be a vein of uranium exposed by this ravine.”

“Is that why you climbed down here?” Jamie asked as he tightened the harness straps.

“I started down… then I fell. I must have blacked out.”

“You’ll be okay. Just save your breath. Don’t need to talk now. Wait till we’re back in the rover.”

Slowly the two men at the top of the ravine winched the green-suited geophysicist up to them. Jamie heard Mironov order Patel to share his air with Naguib while the Russian worked the winch back down to the bottom. Jamie quickly slipped the harness on, shouted that he was ready, and let the winch motor pull him up.

Then they started trekking back to the rover, Jamie carrying the winch, Mironov and Patel supporting Naguib. The Russian was sharing air with him now, Jamie saw.

The sun was touching the horizon when they reached the crevasse that they had all jumped across earlier. The sky was already so dark in the east that stars were twinkling.

“We could go around it,” Patel suggested, sounding as if he wanted to be contradicted.

“It would take too long,” said Mironov. “The fissure is many kilometers in length. We must jump across.”

“I’m not sure that I can,” said Naguib.

“We will hold your arms,” Mironov answered, “and all three of us will jump together. In this gravity it will not be difficult.”

“I don’t know if I can,” Naguib repeated. “My legs…”

Jamie saw that Patel had released Naguib’s arm and was stepping slowly, almost furtively, toward the edge of the crevasse. Mironov was sharing his air with the injured man. Jamie dropped the winch and came up on the Egyptian’s other side. He took Naguib’s free arm and lifted it across his own shoulders.

Softly he said, “You got us into this situation; you’ll have to help us get out of it.”

Patel began to object, but he heard Naguib chuckle deep in his throat. “True. Too true, James. I will do my best.”

Jamie smiled inside his helmet. “Good. It shouldn’t be any trouble. Come on, Alex, let’s back up a bit and get a running start.”

Patel leaped across first, without a word. Then Jamie and Mironov tried to carry Naguib across the fissure. Their first attempt was nearly a disaster. Naguib’s strides did not match theirs, and the three of them nearly fell down trying to put on the brakes before they reached the edge. Jamie heard Mironov whispering curses to himself and the frightened panting of Naguib. The Russian’s air hose popped out of Naguib’s collar, so Jamie plugged his own in.

Vaguely Jamie recalled a myth about birds helping a Navaho hero to cross some impassable gulf. Or did he walk along a rainbow? We could use some help now, he said to himself.

Precious little daylight remained. The cold of night was seeping into Jamie, and he knew that Naguib must be even stiffer, colder.

They backed off again, with Mironov telling them to start on the left foot and keep pace. “I will count cadence,” he said.

“Ahdyeen… dvah… tree… chyeetireh,” Mironov counted off. “Ahdyeen… dvah…”

The three of them soared over the crevasse like a trio of armor-plated hippos and landed in a scuffing, skidding cloud of red dust on the other side. They managed to stay on their feet, just barely.

“Better than the Bolshoi Ballet!” Mironov beamed as they headed toward the rover, still propping up Naguib on either side.

“Too bad we didn’t get it on tape,” Jamie joked.

Naguib said nothing. Patel was up ahead, his helmet lamp on, a pool of light thrown against the dark ground as he headed for the safety of the rover.

Once through the airlock they sat Naguib down on one of the benches and helped him out of his hard suit, then Jamie cleaned up the Egyptian’s bloodied face while Patel vacuumed the suits and Mironov went up to the cockpit to report to base.

“I don’t think your nose is broken,” Jamie said. “It’s not even bleeding anymore.”

“I banged it on my visor when I fell,” Naguib said.

“You could have been killed,” said Patel, his big eyes somber.

Naguib smiled weakly. “I was never much good at field work.”

Mironov came back, unsmiling, grim faced. “Reed wants to speak with you,” he said to the Egyptian. “He will prescribe medication.”

Jamie offered to help him to the cockpit, but Naguib got shakily to his own feet. “I can make it,” he said. “I think you are right—nothing broken.”

Wordlessly Patel went to the galley and pulled out a dinner tray for himself. Mironov scowled after him.

“Nothing to be sore about, Alex,” Jamie said to the cosmonaut. “Abdul’s okay. Just a bloody nose, that’s all.”

Mironov snorted and glared at Patel.

Reed confirmed that Naguib’s nose was probably not broken, and the four men pulled out the folding table and sat down for dinner.

“We have only two replacement backpacks in the stores,” Mironov growled as they ate. “Please be more careful tomorrow.”

“I thought there might be a vein of uranium exposed down at the bottom of that fissure,” said Naguib, explaining and apologizing at once. “My scintillation meter registered high levels of radiation.”

“Uranium?” Patel snatched at the idea. “If we could get a uranium-lead ratio we could date the lava field with great firmness.”

Jamie said, “We haven’t found any usable levels of radioactives anywhere else.”

“Something is there, at the bottom of that ravine,” said Naguib.

“Then we’ll have to go back there tomorrow and get some samples,” Jamie said.

Mironov hiked his almost invisible brows. “Go back?”

“With the winch, Alex,” said Jamie. “And we can even lay the extensible ladder over the fissure that we had to jump across.”

The Russian said nothing, but he looked across the table at Patel.

“Then it’s agreed,” Jamie concluded. “Rava and I will go back and get samples from the bottom of the ravine.”

Abruptly, Mironov slid out from behind the table and strode up to the cockpit. They stared at his retreating back.

Patel blinked several times, then resumed their conversation as if nothing had happened. “A uranium-lead ratio could give us absolute dating for this particular segment of the lava flow…”

“Excuse me.” Jamie pushed himself across the bench and got to his feet. Patel kept talking to Naguib.

Mironov was sitting in the driver’s seat, his fingers flicking across the control board, checking all the rover’s systems. Jamie slipped into the seat beside him.

“What’s wrong, Alex?”

The Russian took a deep breath. From behind them, they could hear Patel’s voice chattering away.

“Your fellow geologist would have let Naguib die out there, if he had his own way.”

“What? Rava?”

“I told him to bring the winch. He carried it as far as the fissure, but he refused to jump over. He threw the rig across the crevasse and then started back for the rover.”

Jamie fell silent, digesting the information. Rava must have panicked, he said to himself. And Alex is pissed as hell at him.

“But he did jump across afterward,” Jamie said at last. “He came over and helped us out.”

“After I threatened to break every bone in his scrawny body,” Mironov grumbled. “His yellow suit is an appropriate color. I even had to force him to share his air with Naguib.”

“He must have been pretty damned scared,” Jamie said.

“He is not dependable. Not in an emergency. I will not allow you to go out alone with him.”

Jamie shrugged. “Then you’ll have to come with us, Alex. If there’s really a vein of uranium down in that ravine—any radioactives at all—it’s crucially important to us.”

The Russian made a curt nod. “I will come. Naguib can stay inside and man the radio.”

“Okay. Now try to calm down. Patel may have panicked, but being sore isn’t going to help.”

“Yes. I know. But I would still like to wring his neck.”

Jamie tried to laugh. He patted Mironov on the shoulder and said, “Carrying a grudge can be just as damaging as giving in to panic. Try to see things in perspective, Alex.”

The Russian grunted.

Jamie got out of the chair and headed back to the table where Naguib and Patel were still chatting.

“Okay,” Jamie said. “Tomorrow morning we go back to the ravine—Rava, Alex, and me.”

“What about me?” Naguib asked as Jamie slid behind the opposite side of the narrow table.

“You stay inside and recuperate. You can analyze the samples we took today.”

“And who put you in charge?” Patel snapped. “Who elected you the captain of this team?”

Jamie blinked with surprise. “It just seems like the logical way to proceed. Abdul’s going to feel pretty stiff and sore tomorrow, I’m sure. That leaves you and me, Rava. And Alex.”

Patel’s nostrils flared. “Yes. Of course. You and me and our cosmonaut supervisor. And then the next day we return to the dome,” he said angrily. “And that will be the end of our three days here.”

Jamie leaned back on the bench, staring at Patel across the littered dining table, surprised at himself for expecting appreciation from his fellow geologist. Or even courtesy.