Mars

SOL 40: NOON

Jamie turned the ridged little dial on the binoculars; the rippled expanse of sand swam into sharp focus.

“It must be an ancient crater that’s been filled in with dust,” he said, as much to himself as the others clustered in the cockpit.

“Why doesn’t the wind blow the dust away?” Joanna asked.

He put the glasses down. She was sitting next to him, in the right-hand seat, her face pale, her hair tangled and matted. Her breath stank. Mine does too, Jamie told himself. Everybody’s does.

Connors, looking more ragged than ever, sat on the floor between the two seats. His coveralls were rumpled and dark with sweat stains. Ilona stood behind him, leaning wearily on the seat backs. She looked bedraggled too; like Joanna, she had not had the strength to brush her hair. Sick and weary as they were, though, they were all eager to catch the first glimpse of Vosnesensky’s rover.

“I don’t think there’s enough power in the wind to clean out the crater. The air’s too thin, even when it blows at two hundred knots. The crater must have steep walls. Probably made by a meteorite coming in from almost straight overhead.”

“The wind can gradually fill up the crater with dust,” Joanna surmised, “and once it is full it remains full.”

“Right,” said Jamie. We’re talking millions of years here, he added silently. Nothing goes quickly on Mars. Come back in a million years and the rover will still be sitting here, most likely.

He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again. If the oddly rippled sand represented the area of the crater, then it was more than a kilometer across. Jamie could see its boundary clearly, a wide circle where the little wavelets of red sand ended and the ground was more heavily littered with rocks and boulders.

He remembered arguing with Naguib about the frequency of such dust-filled craters. The Egyptian called them “ghost craters” and believed they peppered the landscape even where the ground looked relatively smooth. Jamie had disagreed. But Abdul was right; we’ve fallen into a ghost crater. I should have noticed the difference in the ground, Jamie berated himself. I should have avoided this area. If only I had been sharp enough…

“There they are!”

Joanna pointed eagerly, her wan face suddenly wreathed in a smile.

Following her extended arm, Jamie saw the rover nosing over the crest of the slope like a fat silver caterpillar with a big gleaming bulbous head inching their way.

“Greetings, fellow travelers!” Vosnesensky’s voice was harshly rasping in the control panel speaker. To the four of them it sounded like an angel’s sweet melody.

Jamie glanced down at the comm screen. The cosmonaut looked weak, strained, sweating as he sat at the controls of the second rover and guided it down the slope of the ancient landslide with excruciatingly deliberate, patient care. Tony Reed was hunched behind him, his face drawn, pale, nervous. Both men were in their coveralls.

Putting the binoculars to his eyes again, Jamie saw a figure in a brilliant red hard suit plodding slowly toward them on foot in front of the rover, poking at the ground in front of him with a long pole the way a blind man gropes along unfamiliar territory, the way a mountaineer feels his way across a snow-choked crevasse.

Ivshenko trailed a tether from his waist, connected to the nose of the rover, more than twenty meters behind him. The vehicle was inching along, but getting closer every moment. Trust Mikhail to use every safety precaution, Jamie thought. Does he think Ivshenko’s going to float away? For an absurd moment it looked as if the cosmonaut was towing the ponderous rover.

“They’re coming,” Ilona said in a choked whisper. “They’re coming to save us.”

“Three cheers for our side,” said Connors weakly.

Jamie remained in the cockpit and watched their rescuers approaching. More than an hour went by as the rover trundled closer, agonizingly slow, with Ivshenko out front testing the ground. A blind man leading an elephant, Jamie thought.

“Now be careful,” he said to the cosmonauts. “You see where the ground starts to break up into a series of little sand ripples?”

Vosnesensky’s image in the display screen nodded its head. Ivshenko said from inside his helmet, “Yes, it is about fifty meters in front of me.”

“That’s where the crater rim is, I’m pretty sure,” Jamie said. “It’s filled with this very loose sand, more like dust. You’ll have to take the rover around it. Otherwise you’ll get stuck too.”

Vosnesensky was peering at it suspiciously. “It seems quite wide.”

“I know. But you can work your way around it, can’t you?”

“Going down, perhaps. I wonder about going up again.” Ivshenko’s voice said, “It might be best to stop the rover at the edge of the loose soil and let me go through the area on foot. Then we can connect a safety line and winch them across to our rover.”

“Can all four of you get into your hard suits?” Vosnesensky asked.

“Yes,” said Jamie. “I think so.”

“I hesitate to risk getting the second rover stuck, too.”

“I understand. We can get into suits and you can winch us across the soft stuff—if we can set up a line from your vehicle to ours.”

“Very good. That is what we will do.”

Dr. Li Chengdu had never in his life felt so hesitant about making a report. This could ruin everything, he knew. It will reflect poorly on my ability as a leader; it will devastate the mission control team. If the politicians and the media find out about it, it will destroy our chances for further missions to Mars.

Yet he had to report on the scurvy and the chain of events that had led to it. There was nothing else that Li could do except tell the facts to the men and women who directed the mission. There is no way to cover it up, Li realized. Nor would it be proper to do so. Even to think of a cover-up is criminal. No matter what affect this has on my career or the careers of others.

Scurvy. Everyone on the ground team nearly killed by scurvy because they had overlooked the fact that pure oxygen had deactivated their crucially needed vitamin C supply. The politicians will jump to the conclusion that the traverse team got stuck in their rover because the scurvy sapped their strength and their judgment. And now Vosnesensky, of all people, is disobeying orders and trying to rescue them.

Vosnesensky. Wait until the mission controllers sink their teeth into that morsel! What a mess. What a confounded, convoluted, unequivocal disaster.

Li knew he had to tell the facts to Kaliningrad. Still he hesitated.

Pacing his private cubicle in three long-legged strides, back and forth, back and forth, he passed his desktop computer a dozen times without even thinking of starting to file his report.

Even if I wanted to hide the facts it would be impossible. They will know soon enough that we are not evacuating the dome, as ordered. He agonized for hours. How to put the best face on this disaster. How to tell the news in a way that will not destroy any chance for future missions to Mars. How to admit my own inadequacy without ruining my chances for the future.

That is the important thing. How to tell this terrible news in a way that will not destroy our chances for the future. That is the vital thing.

Virtually all of the reports from the ground team were made orally and transcribed into hard copy automatically by the computers in the spacecraft and back at Kaliningrad. Li alone regularly wrote out his reports and transmitted them in written form. But what can I write now? What words can soften this news?

Like a caged cheetah he paced back and forth, seeking a way out and finding none. Finally, in an agony of reluctance, he sat at his little desk and began pecking on the computer keyboard with his long manicured fingers.

Dmitri Iosifovitch Ivshenko had the physique and the personality of the typical cosmonaut. Slight of build, lightning-fast reflexes, and enough youth to have survived being a fighter pilot and then a test pilot. Drinking all night, sobering up on oxygen in the morning, breakfasting on a cigarette and then throwing up behind the hangar before climbing into the cockpit of some supersonic jet. Yet once in the cockpit he became cool and calculating, capable of sizing up a situation in an instant and doing the right thing at precisely the right moment on a combination of instinct, training, and blindingly fast thought processes. He did not consider himself to be a bold pilot; the bold ones died young. Ivshenko was a cautious pilot who flew dangerous aircraft. When he transferred to the cosmonaut corps he was almost bored with the Newtonian predictability of each space mission.

He was not bored now. He was not particularly worried, either. Merely careful. No need to rush, he reminded himself as he cautiously poked his pole into the sandy ripples a meter in front of his boots. We are here to rescue those four wretches, not to get stuck alongside them.

Dust stirred up where he prodded the ground. The pole sank in a few centimeters, then seemed to hit firm soil. Ivshenko nodded inside his helmet and took a step forward, dragging his safety tether behind him.

“How is it?” Vosnesensky’s voice rasped in his earphones.

“Soft, like sand. Not good traction.”

“Be very careful.”

“I am always very careful, Mikhail Andreivitch.”

“Then be doubly careful.”

“Yes, sir, comrade group commander.” Ivshenko chuckled to himself and took another step forward.

His foot slid out from under him. His body half turned as he grabbed at the pole with both hands but it too was sinking into the sand, suddenly the consistency of talcum. Clouds of pink dust billowed softly as Ivshenko felt himself slipping, sliding forward, his boots suddenly without purchase, sinking into a sea of soft red sand.

He did not call out. Even as he sank down into the clinging dust he let go of the useless pole and tried to twist his body around and reach back toward the last bit of firm ground. But inside the cumbersome hard suit he could barely turn a few degrees as he floundered, arms flailing, legs kicking. It was like sinking into gooey mud. Ivshenko imagined himself being sucked down into quicksand.

With those rapid reflexes and his ability to size up a situation quickly, Ivshenko stopped his struggling even as he heard Vosnesensky bellowing in his earphones: “What’s wrong? What’s happening?”

He felt something firm beneath the heel of his left boot and tried to balance all his weight on it. But the boot slipped off it and he continued to sink slowly, inexorably, into the fine red dust. It rose up to his chest, up to his armpits, to the lip of his helmet.

“I am sinking,” he reported glumly. The visor of his helmet was spattered with rust-colored dust. His arms were spread across the surface of the sand like a swimmer trying to float. He was afraid to move them for fear of sinking faster.

Vosnesensky swore in Russian.

“I’m sinking!” Ivshenko repeated, louder, his voice pitched higher. The talcumlike sand was crawling up the faceplate of his helmet.

Vosnesensky hesitated only a moment. It would be dangerous to try to back up on this slope, he knew, but Ivshenko’s tether was attached to a simple ring fastener on the nose of the vehicle. There was no winch to pull him up.

“Sit down,” he snapped at Reed as he punched the control panel buttons that put all the wheel motors into reverse.

Reed slipped into the right-hand seat, his eyes goggling at the scene in front of them. Ivshenko’s helmet had disappeared into the sand almost entirely. He was yelling something in Russian, but his radio voice was breaking up, garbled with static.

“Pull me up, dammit!” Ivshenko shouted into his helmet microphone. He was completely drowned in the red dust now. And still sinking. It was bottomless.

Then he felt the tether take hold. Like a parachute blossoming over his head. Ivshenko felt the same rush of gratitude and joy.

“Good! Good! Pull me back.”

He knew Vosnesensky would inch the rover backward with infinite care, infinite caution. That’s fine, Ivshenko said to himself. I have twelve hours of air, maybe more. Take your time, Mikhail Andreivitch. Take all the time you want, but keep pulling me up.

His head rose above the sand and almost instantly he could hear a babble of voices: Reed, Vosnesensky, the four in the other rover, all talking at once.

“I’m fine,” he said to them all. “Keep pulling.”

His shoulders came free of the dust. He could wave his arms at them all. Then his left boot seemed to catch on the same projection of underlying rock that had almost stopped him when he was sinking.

“Wait, I’m caught…”

But the tether kept pulling him. His left leg was pinned somehow. He tried to twist it free as he called on Vosnesensky to stop for a moment.

The tether was made of the same lightweight, high-strength carbon fiber composites as those that linked the spacecraft together. The underground rock was as hard and durable as granite. The rover continued to grind slowly backward despite Ivshenko’s yowls, stretching him as if he were being racked.

It only took a few seconds. Ivshenko felt his knee pop, a searing bolt of pain stabbing the length of his leg. He screamed a curse at the universe as the tether suddenly went slack.

Vosnesensky bellowed into the cockpit radio, “What’s the matter with you?”

“You’ve just broken my leg, that’s all,” Ivshenko answered in a voice sharp with misery.

“How…?”

“Never mind! Pull! I’m starting to sink again.”

It cost him excruciating pain, but Ivshenko dislodged his leg from the projection of rock while he snarled at Vosnesensky. He felt the tether tighten again. His leg throbbing terribly, he lapsed into a gritted-teeth silence as the rover pulled him out of the sand pit.

For long minutes he lay on the firm ground, panting, squeezing his eyes shut against the pain.

In the cockpit, Tony Reed stared at the prone red-suited figure, his heart pounding in his ears. “What’s happened to him?”

“He said his leg became caught on something,” Vosnesensky answered dourly. “When we pulled him, the leg snapped.”

“What are we going to do?”

“We’ve got to go out and get him!”

“Go out? You can’t!”

“I will suit up,” Vosnesensky said.

“You’re in no condition to go outside,” Reed insisted. “You haven’t had more than two hours’ sleep since we left the dome.”

“I must.” But his first try at getting up from the cockpit seat was a failure. His legs were too weak to support him. The Russian tried again; the best he could do was to stand shakily for a moment and then collapse back onto the seat.

“Don’t look at me!” Reed said, near panic. “I can’t go out! I… I’m not trained for EVA work.”

“Stop arguing,” Ivshenko’s voice came over the radio speaker, weak, gasping. “I can make it to the hatch… I think.”

The cosmonaut began crawling along the ground, pulling himself with his hands, dragging his useless left leg.

“If his suit ruptures…” Vosnesensky let the thought hang. Turning, sweaty-faced, to Reed he commanded, “Get into your hard suit, doctor. Now.”

“But I…”

“You need not go EVA,” Vosnesensky said, his voice heavy with distaste. “But our comrade will need someone to help him into the airlock. You can do that much, can’t you?”

Reed’s insides were fluttering, his hands trembling. “Yes, of course,” he said, desperately trying to calm himself. “Naturally. I can help him out of his suit and tend to his leg.”

“An angel of mercy,” Vosnesensky snarled.

From the cockpit of the stranded rover, Jamie and the three others had watched and listened to Ivshenko’s ordeal. With growing horror they saw their would-be rescuer sink into the sand, heard his shouts for help, watched the second rover carefully back up and pull the cosmonaut free, flinched at his scream when his leg went.

Now Jamie watched grimly as Ivshenko crawled painfully toward the rover’s airlock hatch. And he knew there was nothing left, no hope of their being rescued. Unless he did it himself.