Mars

SOL 38: AFTERNOON

“What’d I tell you?” Connors puffed. “Light as feathers.”

The astronaut and Jamie were shoveling away the red dust that had piled up against the rover’s side. Jamie thought that the stuff was so light they could engage the electric motors and the wheels would churn right through it. But Connors insisted that they take no chances, or at least as few as possible. So the two of them dug, despite their weariness, despite the pain that shot through their arms and legs, despite the growing nausea that was surging through Jamie’s gut in hot sickening waves.

The morning mist was almost entirely gone, merely a few wavering tendrils clinging to spots along the cliff wall where the sun did not reach. The cliffs themselves stood towering over them, immense rugged fortifications that blotted out half the sky and marched beyond the horizon both to their right and to their left.

The orange streaks of the lichen stood out sharper than ever against the red rocks. Jamie wondered if the lichen colonies on the ground had some method of shaking off the dust that now covered the canyon floor to a depth of several inches. We won’t be here long enough to see, he knew. And we don’t have a remote TV camera to set up here and watch them for us, dammit.

The dust billowed up as their shovels bit into it, rising in strangely soft, slow clouds that drifted dreamlike on the gentle wind wafting down the canyon. Jamie saw that Connors’s suit was covered with the rust-colored dust almost up to his armpits. He looked down and saw that his own blue suit was similarly splashed with rust.

“One good thing,” Connors was panting, “about this stuff… It doesn’t… cling to your… visor.”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet.

“On the moon… damned dust sticks… it… gets charged… with static… electricity.”

“Save your breath,” Jamie said.

“Yeah…”

The two women were inside battening down the lab modulo for the trip. Their precious specimens of lichen were already safely protected in insulated containers. Ilona had worried that the lichen might die for lack of sunlight until Joanna pointed out that they obviously could lie dormant for long periods without light when sandstorms covered the rocks for days or even weeks on end.

“I think… that’s… good enough,” Connors panted as Jamie dug around the rearmost wheel on the logistics module.

“Think we’ve got… enough traction?” Jamie was gasping too.

“Yeah… Looks okay.”

“Let’s try it.”

They trudged back to the airlock, utterly weary, and clambered inside. Jamie would have left his shovel outside, but Connors insisted that they stow both shovels in their proper place in the outside equipment bay of the lab module. Pete hasn’t lost his sense of detail, at least, Jamie thought. Must be his astronaut training.

It took more than an hour for them to squirm out of their suits and vacuum them clean, even with Joanna and Ilona helping them. Ilona was not much help; she was very weak. We must look pathetic, Jamie thought. I’m glad Mikhail isn’t here to see us.

“Get some food into you,” Joanna said, looking ashen herself.

Jamie’s insides were boiling. “I don’t think I could keep anything down.”

“Energy bars, at least. The glucose will do you good.”

Ilona slumped on the bench in the midship area, her eyes barely open.

Connors pulled the refrigerator open. “Maybe some juice… I feel like I’ve got a hangover. A bad one.”

“Juice will raise your blood sugar,” Joanna said. “That will be good.”

The orange juice was entirely gone. There was no other juice in the capacious refrigerator except tomato. Connors grabbed the plastic container and pulled off its cap. Raising it to his lips he took four big gulps, then handed it to Jamie.

Thinking that if whatever was ailing them was infectious it didn’t matter now, Jamie drained the container almost to the end.

“There are juice concentrates in the freezer,” Ilona called weakly from where she sat.

“Do we have enough water?” Jamie asked.

“Yes, we should,” Joanna said. “I’ll see to it.”

Connors shambled off toward the cockpit. But he got no farther than the benches halfway there. He sagged onto the bench opposite Ilona.

“My… legs… Jesus, they… won’t carry me.”

Jamie pushed past Joanna toward the astronaut, driven on a sudden spurt of adrenaline. Connors’s eyes looked frightened. Joanna’s, terrified.

“What’s the matter, Pete?”

“Can’t… I just feel… so damned weak…”

“Okay. Okay. Just sit there. Get your strength back.”

“But we got… to get started.”

“I can drive.”

“You?”

“I can do it. I know how.”

“Yeah… but…”

Jamie made a smile big enough for them all to see. “Just like driving pickups in New Mexico. No sweat.”

Wishing he truly felt that confident, Jamie made his way to the cockpit and slid into the driver’s seat. He had been trained to operate the rover as a backup, of course, and he had watched Vosnesensky and Connors for enough hours. He had even driven the rover under their skeptical eyes.

Can you do it all alone? Jamie asked himself. Hell yes, he replied silently. I’ve got to.

Taking his time, going deliberately slowly, carefully, Jamie checked out the control panel from one end to the other. Then he touched the switch that started the drive motors. Beneath his seat the electric generator whined to a higher pitch. Funny how you never notice the damned thing humming away until it changes its tune, Jamie said to himself. Or stops altogether.

“Here we go,” he called over his shoulder. Ilona made a weak smile back at him. Joanna was sitting beside Connors, holding a plastic cup in one hand. She’s turning into Florence Nightingale, Jamie thought. Will Pete be okay? Will Ilona make it? God, they could both die. We could all die.

The rover lurched forward, slewed slightly to the left, then straightened as Jamie eased off the accelerator and held the steering wheel firmly.

“We’re moving!” he yelped. “We’re on our way.”

Not a sound came from the three behind him.

Then Jamie thought, We’re heading in the wrong direction. The cliff village is the other way; we’re leaving it behind.

Despite his own pain and the terrible weariness that was sapping the strength from his body, Mikhail Vosnesensky grimly donned his hard suit. Abell and Mironov helped him, but neither of them looked any better than Vosnesensky felt.

It is the dust, the Russian told himself. It has to be. Outwardly he had dismissed the idea of some weird Martian infection as too preposterous even to consider. Yet deep in his heart he feared the possibility that they had all been poisoned by some alien bug for which there was no cure.

Although Dr. Li said it was not necessary for him to be outside when the lander arrived, Vosnesensky quoted regulations until the expedition commander reluctantly bowed acquiescence.

I may be sick, Vosnesensky told himself, but I still know my duty. The regulations call for a cosmonaut to be suited up and ready to assist the landing party once they touch down. There is a good reason for this rule and as long as I can stand on my own two legs I will not allow any rule to be broken.

So he tottered weakly out through the airlock hatch and stood waiting, a fire-engine red figure standing stolidly on the rusty soil of Mars. Exactly on schedule the L/AV streaked across the pink sky and deployed its parachutes. They billowed into perfect white hemispheres dangling the cup-and-saucer lander beneath them. At the precise moment the chutes detached the retro-rockets fired. The lander, with cosmonaut Dmitri Iosifovitch Ivshenko at its controls and astronaut Oliver Zieman beside him, touched the sands of Mars about two hundred meters away.

The lander had one passenger only: Dr. Yang Meilin. And a cargo of pharmaceuticals packed in hard plastic boxes.

In less than half an hour the diminutive Dr. Yang was deep in conference with Tony Reed in the dome’s infirmary.

Hard to tell what’s going on behind those slanted eyes, Reed said to himself as he showed her the data from all his tests of the ground team.

“The people in the rover seem to be the worst off,” Reed was saying aloud. “Although god knows that most of the people here in the dome are in bad-enough shape.”

“How did you permit this to happen?” Dr. Yang asked. Her voice was silky, low. But still the question startled Reed.

“Permit it?” His voice sounded shrill, defensive, even to himself. “How can anyone combat a disease unless he has a clear diagnosis?”

“You have no idea of what is affecting your comrades?”

“None,” he snapped. “Do you?”

Her face was a perfectly impenetrable mask. “I cannot say until I have performed some tests.”

Reed pushed back his stubborn lock of sandy hair. “Then I suggest we get started on your tests.”

“Yes. I notice that you do not seem to be troubled by this illness. Therefore I will use you as a baseline control, if you have no objection.”

“None whatsoever.”

“Good,” said Dr. Yang. Then, matter-of-factly, “Roll up your sleeve, please.”

Reed obediently bared his left arm, thinking, You come down here all fresh and businesslike, certain that you’ll discover whatever it is that I’ve overlooked. Perhaps you will. Perhaps you’ll be luckier than I’ve been. Or smarter. It’s my own fault. I’ve missed something, I’ve done something wrong. Or failed to do something I should have. And she knows it. They all know it. They all blame me.

As Dr. Yang deftly slipped a needle into his vein, Tony insisted silently, But it isn’t me. It’s this blasted alien world we’re on. We have no business here. We’re out of our depth. I’m out of my depth. I should never have come to Mars. None of us should have. Mars has defeated me. Mars has defeated us all.

Jamie thought his vision was blurring, but then the stinging made him realize that sweat was getting into his eyes. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with one hand, keeping a firm grip on the wheel with the other. The rover was churning along at a steady thirty klicks per hour, heading for the landslide that they had come down two days earlier.

Maybe we can make it before sundown, Jamie thought. If we can get all the way up the slope and onto the plain again before sundown, we can just keep going all night long. I’ll slow her down, of course, but the lights are good enough to keep us on the move. No need to stop for the night. We can even follow our own tracks, the tracks we made coming out here. If they haven’t been covered up by dust. If we can get to the top.

Connors slid into the right-hand seat. Jamie shot him a glance. The astronaut looked spent. He sat as if his bones could not hold him up, his head almost lolling on his shoulders.

“How’s it goin’?” Connors’s voice was hoarse.

“So far so good.”

“How far to the slide?”

Jamie gestured with his chin toward the map displayed in the control panel’s central screen. “Half an hour, maybe a little more.”

“We got a shot at getting to the top in daylight, then.”

“Yep.”

“Good.”

“How are the women doing?” Jamie asked.

“Ilona’s asleep. Joanna’s watching her. She don’t look too good herself, though.”

“Asleep? Or passed out?”

Connors tried to shrug. “Hard to tell.”

“And what about you? How do you feel?”

“Like a piece of shit that’s been stomped on by a herd of elephants. How ’bout you?”

“Not much better. But this go-mobile is easy to drive. It’s almost relaxing.”

“Just don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Not much traffic to worry about.”

“Yeah, but some of the potholes in the road can swallow you up.”

Despite Connors’s awful appearance, Jamie felt better with the astronaut sitting beside him. He pressed the accelerator a little harder and watched the digital speedometer climb to thirty-five; just over twenty miles an hour. He kept hearing Li’s voice telling him, “It is urgent that you reach the dome for treatment quickly. As quickly as you can.”

The ground seemed to be rising. At first Jamie did not notice it, but then he realized that their ride was getting bumpier.

“I think we’re almost… Hey! There it is!”

Through the canopy they saw the dark red slope of the ancient landslide rising off to their left like a stairway to heaven. The cliffs that towered before them were masked by the beautiful, gentle grade that ramped all the way up to the caprock and the plain that led back to their dome.

Connors’s dark face broke into a toothy grin. He turned in his seat, but said nothing. To Jamie he muttered, “They’re both asleep back there.”

“It’s okay. We’ll be up this slope and heading for home before the sun goes down.”

The grade was studded with rocks and boulders. Jamie could not see the tracks they had made on their way down; the dust storm had covered even the deep ruts where the rover had gotten temporarily stuck in loose sand.

“Don’t get into that loose stuff again,” Connors said.

“Not if I can help it.”

“Slow her down a little, but keep moving forward.”

“Yeah.”

The astronaut licked his lips. Jamie knew he wanted to take over, to drive the rover himself. Yet Connors stayed in the right-hand seat. To switch drivers now would mean stopping the rover, and neither of them had any intention of coming to a stop on the pebbly gravel of this ancient avalanche.

“You’re doin’ fine,” Connors muttered. “Just watch that depression on the right.”

Jamie skirted the edge of what looked to him like an old crater that had been partially filled in with sand. He turned around its flank, maneuvering past a boulder almost as big as the rover itself.

“Good. Good,” Connors mumbled. “Keep it goin’.”

It all happened in slow motion. The rover was making steady progress up the slope. Jamie could feel the gritty, bumpy texture of the surface beneath its wheels transmitted through the steering column to his hands. He was perspiring heavily, sweat stinging his eyes, Connors’s backseat driving in his ears, neck stiff with tension, arms aching with the effort of steering the lumbering vehicle.

Jamie felt the nose dip as if it had started down a steep incline. Automatically he leaned on the brakes, but the big blunt-nosed rover plowed into a lake of fine loose sand, throwing up a rust-red bow wave of dust that covered the canopy.

“Look out!” Connors yelled too late.

As inexorably as fate, with all the slow-motion horror of a nightmare, the rover dug itself into the loose sand like a burrowing mole. Jamie felt the wheels churning uselessly, spinning them deeper into the sand-filled pit.

“Stop! Stop everything!”

Jamie was already disengaging the wheel drives when Connors shouted it. The canopy was spattered so heavily with clinging red dust that they could barely see outside.

The rover slid to a stop. Jamie felt his heart thudding in his chest, heard its thunder in his ears. He looked across at Connors, who was staring outward, mouth hanging open, gasping for breath.

“I don’t think the rear module is in the stuff,” Jamie said. “I’m going to try to put its wheels in reverse.”

“Yeah. Maybe it can pull us out of this.”

The generator whined and they could hear the faint screech of wheels spinning without traction. Jamie shut them down before the bearings burned out.

“We’re stuck,” he said.

Connors’s bloodshot eyes were wide with fear. “Yeah. Looks that way.”