Mars

SOL 40: AFTERNOON

It took almost two hours for Jamie to struggle into his hard suit. Exhausted and weak from his illness, he knew that he had to make the trek to the second rover carrying a lifeline that would at last bring his three companions across the ghost crater of treacherous sand to the safety of the rescuing vehicle.

Vosnesensky had objected strenuously.

“You are too sick to do it!” the Russian had insisted. “I am the only one remaining who has even half his normal strength…”

Jamie shut him down with an upraised hand. “Mikhail,” he said softly to the cosmonaut’s image on the comm screen, “if you get stuck out there too, then we’re all dead. If I get stuck, we still have Pete or even one of the women to try to get to you.”

“They are all in worse condition than you are!”

“You’ve got to stay with your vehicle,” Jamie said flatly, unemotionally, as if he were reading instructions from a printed form. “That is self-evident. The regulations are perfectly clear, and they’re entirely right, too.”

Vosnesensky scowled. But he no longer argued.

“I’m strong enough to make it around the perimeter of the crater,” Jamie said. “I’ll carry a line that we can use to bring the others across the lake.”

“Lake?”

“The crater full of sand.”

“It is more like a bog than a lake,” Vosnesensky grumbled.

“Whatever. That’s how we’ll do it,” said Jamie.

Vosnesensky muttered something in Russian.

“How’s Ivshenko?” Jamie asked.

The cosmonaut’s face went even darker. “Reed is taking care of his leg. Apparently it is not broken, but the knee is badly dislocated. He cannot walk. He can’t even stand up without support.”

“So it’s up to me.”

Now, after two hours of sweaty struggle, Jamie dogged down his helmet on the neck ring of his suit, trying to keep his doubts at bay. A couple of kilometers, he told himself. Two-three klicks, at most. I can do that. Yet his arms felt almost too heavy to lift; his legs were rubbery.

Connors had wanted to help him into the hard suit, but he was too weak to stand for more than a few minutes at a time. Joanna and Ilona assisted him, tight-lipped and silent, while Connors read off the checklist.

“Not bad,” the astronaut quipped, “having two gorgeous women help you dress.”

He was sitting on the edge of his own bunk, the checklist trembling in his hand, trying to keep a smile on his sweaty, weary face. Through the open hatch of the airlock Jamie could see that Connors was having trouble breathing; his chest heaved painfully, his mouth hung open.

The two women were not much better off. They moved slowly, listlessly. Their faces were drawn and pale. How many mistakes are they making? Jamie wondered. Are they killing me because they’re too weak to know what they’re doing?

The climbing harness, its tripod stand and winch mechanism, and its massive drum of cable was set against the airlock’s side bulkhead. As he slid the harness over his shoulders and fastened it across his chest Jamie thought ruefully, We won’t be using this to climb the cliffs and see my village. I’ll never get to see whether it’s a real village or not.

Finally he was fully suited, his backpack cinched tight and checked out, his harness ready to be connected with the cable. All systems working, unless they had overlooked something.

“Okay,” Jamie said, already feeling the enormous weight of the suit, the backpack, the responsibility on his wobbly legs. “Clear the airlock.”

Joanna reached up and touched his cheek. “Shut your visor first,” she said tenderly. “And may god go with you.”

God? Jamie thought. He remembered that his fetish was still in his coverall pocket. Buttoned up inside the hard suit he could not reach the pocket to touch it. It’s there, he told himself. I’m not going without it. It’s there where it should be.

Ilona cast him a wan smile as she and Joanna backed out of the airlock compartment. Jamie pulled the hatch shut after a desultory wave to Connors. Once the hatch was sealed he reached out a finger to push the control button that started pumping the air out of the chamber.

And saw that he had not put on his gloves.

His stomach lurched. Four of us checking out everything and the damned gloves are still tucked in my belt pouch. What the hell else have we screwed up?

He pulled the gloves on and sealed them to the suit cuffs. Then he started the pumps. In what seemed like mere seconds the light on the little square control panel went red. Jamie unconsciously drew in a deep breath. His chest felt strange, rasping, the way it did sometimes in the chill mountain air of winter.

The outer hatch popped open a few inches, then stopped. A trickle of reddish sand seeped into the airlock chamber.

It’s going to be a battle every step of the way, Jamie realized. Just be careful. Be damned careful.

He pushed the hatch all the way open, leaning against it with his weight to force it back against the sand. The powdery rust-colored stuff poured in around his boots, billowing up into feather-light clouds of dust as he moved. Despite the low gravity the climbing rig’s stand and reel of cable felt as if they weighed tons. The cable reel especially. It was meant to be rolled along the ground, not lifted.

There’s no way to carry it in one hand, he told himself. I’m going to have to make a couple of trips.

Grasping the folded tripod stand, Jamie reached with his free hand for the ladder rungs studding the rover’s flank just outside the hatch. Methodically he made his way up to the roof of the forward module and set the tripod down there.

“Jamie, are you all right?” Joanna’s voice asked.

“I’m up on top of the cab,” he reported. “I’ve got to figure out how to get that damned reel up here. It weighs a ton.”

He heard a mutter of voices, indistinct. Then Connors came on, weak, almost breathless. “Connect the cable to the winch motor… latch it so it won’t turn… then you can… power it up to you,” the astronaut said.

Jamie grimaced inside his helmet. “I guess I would have thought of that eventually. Thanks, Pete.”

“Nothing to it.”

Everything seemed to go so slowly. Jamie spent half a lifetime winching the reel up to the rover’s roof, then clomping down to the tail end of the vehicle and carefully climbing down onto the firm ground back there. Fumbling, sweating, cursing to himself, he set up the tripod stand and bolted it to the equipment attachment points built into the side of each of the rover’s modules. Then he once again hooked the cable to the winch motor built into the stand. This time he unlatched the reel so that it could turn freely.

“Okay,” he panted, breathless now himself. “I’m ready to start my little walk.”

“Good luck, man,” said Connors.

“Vai com deus,” Joanna replied.

Again with god, Jamie thought. Which god? The nasty old man of the Hebrews? The pacifist Christ? Or Coyote, the trickster? He’s the one who’s been working against us here on Mars. The old trickster. He must be howling with laughter at us, stuck in a stupid dry mud hole.

Vosnesensky’s voice cut into his thoughts. “Did you say you are starting toward us?”

“Yes, Mikhail. I’ll be moving to your right, around the perimeter of the crater’s edge.”

“I don’t see you.”

“You will in a few minutes… I’ll be there in an hour or so,” Jamie said, knowing he was being wildly optimistic. Even with the cable drum resting firmly on the ground now and unreeling easily, he felt as if he were dragging the entire rover and all its contents with each step he took.

“It would be good if you got here before the sun went down,” Vosnesensky said.

The thought startled Jamie. He turned halfway around and saw that the tiny, wan sun was already nearing the distant rocky horizon.

“I’ll try,” he said into his helmet microphone. “I sure don’t want to be out in the dark if I can avoid it.”

Dr. Li had started to write his report to Kaliningrad. He had wanted to be precise in his words, exact in the information he gave to the mission controllers. Knowing that the news that the ground team had contracted scurvy would hit like a thunderbolt and immediately be relayed up the chain of command to various national directors and then to the politicians, Li knew he had to be extremely careful in whatever he decided to say.

Hours later he still sat in his private quarters staring at the glowing computer screen. It was empty. He had not written a single word.

The only news from the ground was that Ivshenko had crippled his knee.

With a sigh of exasperation, more at his own failure of nerve than anything else, he tapped at the keyboard to get a status report from the ground team. Seiji Toshima’s round face appeared on the screen.

After a few Japanese bows and hisses, the meteorologist explained that he had the comm watch for the moment. Zieman was manning the link with Vosnesensky, in the second rover.

Li wanted to inquire about Vosnesensky’s rescue attempt, but instead he heard himself say, “Can you put me through to Dr. Reed, please?”

The only indication of surprise from Toshima was the barest instant of hesitation before he replied, “Yes, sir. Of course.”

It took a few minutes but at last Reed’s face appeared on his screen. The Englishman was sitting in the rover cockpit, the expression on his face wary, guarded.

“I would like to have a medical report,” Li said.

Reed ran a finger across his moustache. “Well—Ivshenko’s knee will need to be drained once we get back to the dome and I have the proper facilities for it. Vosnesensky is progressing well enough, but he’s exhausted and quite weak. It takes several days to recover from scurvy, even with high doses of vitamin C.”

“And the others?”

“Difficult to say. Waterman apparently feels well enough to walk from his rover to ours, although he seems to be moving awfully slowly.”

Li ran out of questions. He sat in front of the display screen, trying to find a polite way, a way that was not painful, to bring up the subject he really wanted to discuss.

“I am in the process of making my report to Kaliningrad,” he said at last.

“Yes,” Reed responded.

“I intend to give you full credit for deducing the nature of the illness and its cause.”

The Englishman seemed to stiffen. “And full blame, I should think, for not being clever enough to deduce it sooner.”

“There is no blame…”

“Responsibility, blame, it’s all the same thing, isn’t it? I was the responsible man, the medical officer. I fouled up. That’s the simple truth of it.”

“No one could foresee that a meteor strike would have such consequences.”

“No?” Reed almost smirked. “Then what are you going to put into your report, that it was an act of god?”

“It was an unforeseen chain of events,” Li said.

The Englishman shook his head. “That won’t wash. A mission such as this can’t admit to an unforeseen chain of events. The controllers in Kaliningrad and Houston want everything planned and spelled out in the finest detail. Unforeseen events are not allowed. For god’s sake, that’s why they’re called controllers, isn’t it?”

“I do not want you to be the scapegoat.”

“How can you avoid it?”

The answer came to Li as he spoke. “By emphasizing that you discovered the cause of the malady and have taken the necessary steps to cure it.”

“And deemphasizing that my clumsiness caused it, and it took me weeks to realize what had happened? No matter how you write your report, that fact will stand out like a lighthouse beacon. As it should.”

“You are too hard on yourself.”

“Not as hard as Kaliningrad will be. My career in the Mars Project is over. Or it will be, once we get back. We both know that.”

Li studied the Englishman’s image on his screen. Reed had changed; it seemed as if he had aged. There were lines around his mouth that he had never noticed before. And yet, he did not appear to be angry, or even particularly unhappy. Reed seemed strangely satisfied with the idea that he would be blamed for the illness. He seemed almost relieved to think that he would never be permitted to return to Mars.