Mars

SOL 38: SUNSET

Vosnesensky was the last one to be tested.

The Russian was in no mood for having a medic punch holes in his skin. Connors had just reported that the rover was stuck halfway up the landslide. They would need a rescue effort. But how? And who? Dr. Li refused to allow anything to be done until he had consulted with mission control in Kaliningrad. Meanwhile night was coming on and the four people in the rover were as sick as dogs.

Not that the people in the dome were much better off. Toshima had suddenly collapsed at his workstation; they had had to carry him to his bunk. Patel, Naguib, even Abell and Mironov were not much good for anything except sitting around and moaning. Monique Bonnet, who had been playing the cheerful, motherly nurse for the past two days, was dragging herself around, hollow eyed with exhaustion.

“And how do you feel, in general?” Dr. Yang asked as Vosnesensky sat on the little white stool in the infirmary.

The Russian glowered at her. “I have important work to do,” he said. “We have a crisis…”

Yang was barely taller than Vosnesensky even though he was seated and she was standing. But she stopped him cold with a snap of her almond eyes.

“You will not be able to do anything about your crisis if your medical condition continues to worsen,” she said. She did not raise her voice, but there was cold steel in her words. “Now please answer my questions and do as I tell you.”

Vosnesensky glanced at Reed, who was leaning against the patient’s couch in the corner of the tiny infirmary. Reed seemed to be in good health, his face pink. At least that damned superior smile of his was gone; he was frowning with puzzled frustration.

“The sooner you cooperate the sooner we will be finished,” Yang said.

Vosnesensky capitulated. “What must I do?”

“Roll up your left sleeve and tell me how you feel. Exactly how you feel.”

The Russian pulled in a deep breath as he unbuttoned the cuff of his coverall sleeve. “I am weak, my legs ache, I have no appetite.”

“Have you ever felt this way before?” Yang held a hypodermic syringe in one hand, its needle glinting in the overhead lights.

“Not that I can remember.”

“Are you coughing or sneezing? Does your chest hurt?”

Vosnesensky shook his head, then winced. The needle went in smoothly; Yang found a vein on her first try.

“Any rash on your body?” she asked.

Watching the syringe fill up with dark blood, Vosnesensky replied, “No. Not that I have noticed.”

Yang pulled the needle out and slapped a plastic bandage on the puncture. Reed watched in silence, his arms folded across his chest. The diminutive Chinese physician asked Vosnesensky to strip to the waist. Wordlessly the Russian pulled down the top of his coveralls and slipped his undershirt over his head.

Yang looked at his back. “No rash,” she muttered.

“Is that significant?” Vosnesensky asked.

“Perhaps.” She looked across the small cubicle toward Reed, then murmured absently to Vosnesensky, “You may go now.”

“Thank you.” The Russian tugged on his coverall top and scurried from the infirmary despite his aching legs, carrying his undershirt in one hand.

Jamie fingered his bear fetish through the hard suit’s gloves. Thin and flexible as they were, the gloves still robbed him of the true feeling of the stone’s polished warmth.

He was standing on the lab module’s roof in the last slanting rays of the dying sun. He and Connors had barely been able to push the airlock hatch open; then the astronaut had slumped to the floor of the airlock, too weak to move any farther. Jamie had left him sitting there in a pile of loose dust that had drifted in, while he clambered up the ladder set into the rover’s side to survey their situation.

He had not dared to step out into the sand itself, for fear that he would sink through the powdery dust so deeply that he would not be able to extricate himself.

The mission rule book doesn’t cover this, Jamie had told himself as he slowly, carefully climbed the ladder. He had gone up as if mountain climbing, three points attached at all times. Move one gloved hand to the next rung. Grip it, then move the other hand. Grip, then one booted foot. Make sure it’s firmly seated on the rung, then pull up the other one. The dust frightened him. He pictured himself drowning in it like a man caught in quicksand.

Now at last he stood up on the roof. If you have any power to help at all, he said silently to the fetish, now’s the time to get it working.

“What’s it look like?” Connors’s voice came through his helmet earphones.

“Not good,” Jamie replied, surveying the scene. “She’s buried up over the fenders, all except the last half of the rear module. Not enough traction to pull us out.”

Connors said nothing, although Jamie could hear his ragged breathing.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Just can’t get up on my fuckin’ feet, that’s all.”

Jamie’s head was swimming with dizziness. His body ached all over and he felt so tired that it was tempting just to stretch out right there and go to sleep. The canyon was so wide that he could actually see the sunset; the cliffs on the other side were too far away to be visible, tall as they were. He watched the sun for a moment, saw it touch the rocky horizon, felt the shadows of deathly freezing night reaching toward him. Inside his suit he shuddered, almost like a dog trying to shake off water.

He looked down at the tiny stone bear in the fading light. The leather thong holding the miniature arrowhead and the feather had been lovingly tied by his grandfather. An eagle’s feather, Jamie thought. Symbol of strength. I could sure use some now.

Into his helmet microphone he said, “I might as well come down. There’s nothing I can do up here and the sun’s going down.”

Tucking the miniature stone bear back into the pouch on the right leg of his hard suit, Jamie started slowly down the ladder. By the time he had painfully made his way back into the airlock it was dark outside. Connors was sitting in the heaped sand, his white hard suit coated with the red dust.

Jamie tried to sound cheerful. “You look like a snowman playing in a pile of rust.”

“I feel like a goddammed snowman—in July,” Connors grumbled.

Slowly, like two arthritic old men, they shoveled most of the sand outside and then closed the outer hatch.

“Gotta clean off the suits,” Connors muttered.

“We’ve got to get you on your feet first,” Jamie said.

It seemed like hours of tugging and pushing, but finally Connors was standing again and they went through the motions of vacuuming the dust off their suits. The suits were still stained rust-red, though, as they struggled out of them. The airlock smelled of ozone so heavily that Jamie’s eyes burned and watered.

Finally they staggered through the inner hatch and half collapsed on the midship benches. Both women were up in the cockpit, Joanna with a headset clamped over her thick dark hair.

“Vosnesensky wants to talk to you,” Joanna called back to them, her voice hoarse, labored.

Ilona muttered, “The Russian pig won’t trust a woman with his important messages.”

Jamie felt his temper snap. “Jesus Christ, Ilona, knock off the anti-Russian crap! We’re in a bad enough fix without your bullshit!”

She smiled languidly at him. “What difference does it make? We are all going to die here no matter what I say, aren’t we?”

Joanna clutched at her arm. “No! We are not going to die! Jamie won’t let us die.”

He looked into their faces as he painfully made his way toward them in the cockpit. The illness had changed them. Ilona was no longer the haughty, imperious beauty who flouted all the rules. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes ringed with dark circles. She had a look of near panic in her face; the smell of death was on her. Joanna’s eyes were burning, blazing. She still looked like a bedraggled little waif, but now there was something in her eyes that Jamie had never seen before: a strength, an endurance he had not realized was in her. Perhaps Joanna had not known it herself. She focused those eyes on Jamie, urgent, demanding.

“No, I won’t let us die,” Jamie said in a half whisper. He added silently, Not without a fight, at least.

A growing feeling of helplessness was beginning to overwhelm Dr. Li.

“Kaliningrad insists that a rescue flight is out of the question,” he said.

The expedition commander wanted to stand and pace, wanted to work off the nervous energy sizzling inside him. But in the low-ceilinged confines of the command module he had to content himself with sitting in one of the narrow padded chairs with his knees poking up ridiculously, clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke.

“But they’re stuck down there!” Burt Klein said.

Li shook his head. “Kaliningrad says the last lander is to be used only in the direst emergency.”

“The fact that four of our people are in danger of dying is not a dire emergency?” asked Leonid Tolbukhin sourly.

The cosmonaut and astronaut had quickly volunteered to pilot the expedition’s last remaining landing vehicle to the canyon to rescue the four stranded in the rover.

“We could sit her down within fifty yards of the rover,” Klein said confidently, “and then bring them straight back here. Nothing to it.”

“A piece of cake,” Tolbukhin confirmed, the British idiom sounding strange and deliberate in his deep Russian voice.

“Kaliningrad says no. You two are the only pilots left here in orbit.”

“Bring Ivshenko and Zieman back here,” Tolbukhin suggested. “Then Burt and I can go to the canyon.”

“Sure!” Klein said. “You’ll still have two L/AVs and four pilots at the dome. That’ll be plenty to bring the others back when the time comes.”

Li’s face was a picture of misery. “Ivshenko and Zieman cannot return here without Yang. We cannot leave both our doctors at the dome. What good would it do to bring the traverse team up here if there is no physician here to treat them?”

Tolbukhin nodded reluctantly.

“There is something more,” Li told them. “The medical staff at Kaliningrad has brought up the question of quarantine.”

“Quarantine?”

Li felt miserable as he said, “Since we do not know what is infecting the ground team, they fear that whatever it is might infect us here in orbit if we return the ground team here.”

“Holy shit,” Klein muttered. “They want us to leave them down there?”

Tolbukhin grasped the larger implication. “That means they will not allow us to return to Earth if we have not found the source of the disease.”

“Yes,” admitted Li. “We ourselves might be quarantined in Earth orbit.”

“If we live long enough to get back that far,” the Russian said.

“The alternative is to leave the ground team and return to Earth without them.”

“That’d kill them!” Klein snapped.

“Yes. But to rescue them and bring them back up to orbit with us might kill us all.”

For long moments neither the astronaut nor the cosmonaut spoke a word.

Finally Klein said, “Well, you’ve got to do something.”

Li knew he was right. The weight of responsibility was squarely on his shoulders. Let the four in the rover die, or risk the lives of everyone—including those in orbit—by allowing the last of their pilots to ride to the rescue on the last of the landing/ascent vehicles. Abandon the ground team altogether or risk catching their disease and killing everyone.

Li felt the weight of two dozen lives on him. The weight of two worlds.

When the last of the physicals was finished Tony Reed asked Yang Meilin, “What do you expect to find?”

She shot him a sharp glance from the chair on which she sat. “The cause of this epidemic.”

Reed had barely budged from the corner of the infirmary where he had watched her examine all the people in the dome. Now he made a puzzled shrug.

“Vosnesensky thinks it might be Martian dust that we’re inhaling,” he said.

Yang’s almond eyes watched him unblinkingly from beneath her straight bangs. “Do you believe that?”

“No, I don’t. We’ve tested the air here in the dome. It’s cleaner than the air in London, by far.”

She got up from the chair, a tiny Chinese woman with a nondescript figure and an utterly forgettable round, flat-featured face—except for those eyes. Reed thought they looked at him accusingly. Why not? Why shouldn’t she blame me for this calamity? It is my fault, my responsibility. I was put here to protect the health of these men and women. Some protector!

“Well,” he asked, “what do you think?”

She shook her head slightly. “I cannot tell. All the data from the tests we have just done are being analyzed by the medical computer aboard Mars 2. Until we get its results I cannot go further.”

Reed gave an exasperated sigh. “It won’t do any good, you know. The first thing I did when they started coming down with this malady was to run all the medical records through the computer diagnostic program. It just burped out nonsense.”

“Perhaps now, with more data…”

“I doubt it. The computer can only tell you what it already knows, and we’re facing something new and unprecedented here.”

“Perhaps not. It may be something ordinary but unexpected. That is the great strength of the computer: it is not clouded by human expectations or emotions. It analyzes all the symptoms and reports which medical conditions fit the data.”

“Yes,” Reed sniffed, feeling real anger surging up inside him. “I’ll tell you what the damned computer will give us. It will suggest that the malady might be a variation of influenza—which it isn’t, because we’ve found no influenza viruses in the blood workups; or malaria—which is ridiculous because the nearest mosquito is two hundred million kilometers from here; or radiation poisoning—which it can’t be, because the dosimeters show that every member of the team is well within tolerable limits; or a vitamin deficiency—which is ludicrous because I see to it that everyone takes their bloody vitamin supplements.”

Yang said, “Perhaps a slow virus? Perhaps an infection such as Legionnaires’ disease?”

“I thought of that,” Reed snapped. “The symptoms don’t match.”

The Chinese doctor murmured something too low for Reed to hear. Ignoring her, he went on:

“The marvelous computer analysis will also suggest the possibility of salmonellosis, tuberculosis, or typhoid fever—in decreasing probabilities, of course.”

He stopped, out of breath, seething with a rage that he had not realized was in him.

“Why are you angry with me?” Yang asked, her mask of impassivity gone. She looked shocked, hurt.

Tony stared at her, his insides jumping, his hands clenching into fists. He took a deep breath, then stepped back to his desk.

“I’m sorry. I apologize. It’s not you. I suppose I’m angry at myself, really. This thing—I can’t for the life of me figure out what it is!” He banged a fist on the flimsy desktop.

“That is why we need the help of the computer program.”

Reed cast her a cynical smile.

“Not to tell us what the disease may be,” Yang explained, “but to rule out definitely what it is not.”

“I don’t believe it can even do that.”

Yang tried to smile. “Was it not one of your English writers who said that once you have ruled out the impossible, then whatever is left-however improbable it may seem-must be the truth?”

Reed blinked at her. “Arthur Clarke?”

As politely as she could, Yang replied, “I believe it was Conan Doyle.”