Return to Mars (32 page)

Dex grinned at the older man. “Yeah? What?”

“You wanta get so close to the generator that when Jamie comes to his decision point we’ll be closer to it than to th’ base. Right?”

With a nod, Trumball answered, “Why not?”

“You’re not scared of a dust storm?”

“Wiley, if Jamie weathered one of those storms during the first expedition, why can’t we?”

“Be smarter to be back at the base when a storm hits, nice ‘n’ cozy.”

“If a storm hits. How’d you feel if we turned tail and went back to the dome and then no storm materializes?”

“Alive,” said Craig.

Trumball considered the older man for a moment. Then, as he dug a plastic fork into the unidentifiable stuff on the tray before him, he asked, “If Jamie orders us back, what’ll you do?”

Craig stared back at him, sad, pouchy ice-blue eyes unwavering. “Don’t know yet,” he answered. “But I’m turnin’ over the possibilities in my mind.”

Trumball grinned at him. “Yeah? Well, turn this over, too, Wiley. There’ll be a finder’s fee for picking up the Pathfinder hardware. A nice sizable wad of cash for the guys who bring it back. That’ll be you and me, Wiley.”

“How much?”

Trumball shrugged. “Six figures, I guess.”

“H’mp.”

Watching the older man’s face carefully, Trumball added, “Of course, I don’t need the money. I’d be willing to give my half to you, Wiley. If we keep on going no matter what Jamie says.”

Craig’s face was impassive. But he said, “Now that sounds purty interesting, ol’ pal. Purty damn interesting.”

Rodriguez had forgotten about the ice.

He half-dragged Fuchida along the tunnel, the little pools of light made by their helmet lamps the only break in the total, overwhelming darkness around them.

“How you doing, buddy?” he asked the Japanese biologist. “Talk to me.”

Leaning his helmet against the astronaut’s, Fuchida answered, “I feel hot. Broiling.”

“You’re lucky. I’m freezing my ass off. I think my suit heater’s in refrigeration mode.”

“I … I don’t know how long I can last without the air fans,” Fuchida said, his voice trembling slightly. “I feel a little lightheaded.”

“No problem,” Rodriguez replied, with a false heartiness. “It’ll get kinda stuffy inside your suit, but you won’t asphyxiate.”

The first cosmonaut to do a spacewalk almost died of heat prostration, Rodriguez remembered. Alexei Leonov said his suit was “up to my knees” in sweat before he could get back into his orbiting capsule. The suit sloshed when he moved. The damned suits hold all your body heat inside; that’s why they make us wear the watercooled longjohns and put heat exchangers in the suits. But if the fans can’t circulate the air, the exchanger’s pretty damned useless.

Rodriguez kept one hand on the tether. In the wan light from his helmet lamp he saw that it led upward, out of this abyss.

“We’ll be back in the plane in half an hour, maybe less. I can fix your backpack then.”

“Good,” said Fuchida. Then he coughed again.

It seemed to take hours before they got out of the tunnel, back onto the ledge in the slope of the giant caldera.

“Come on, grab the tether. We’re goin’ up.”

“Right.”

But Rodriguez’s boot slipped and he fell to his knees with a painful thump.

“Damn,” he muttered. “It’s slick.”

“The ice.”

The astronaut rocked back onto his haunches, both knees throbbing painfully.

“It’s too slippery to climb?” Fuchida’s voice was edging toward panic.

“Yeah. We’re gonna have to haul ourselves up with the winch.” He got down onto his belly and motioned the biologist to do the same.

“Isn’t this dangerous? What if we tear our suits?”

Rodriguez rapped on the shoulder of Fuchida’s suit. “Tough as steel, amigo. They won’t rip.”

“You’re certain?”

“You wanna spend the night down here?”

Fuchida grabbed the tether with both his hands.

Grinning to himself, Rodriguez also grasped the tether and told Fuchida to activate the winch.

But within seconds he felt the tether slacken.

“Stop!”

“What’s wrong?” Fuchida asked.

Rodriguez gave the tether a few light tugs. It felt loose, its original tension gone.

“Holy shit,” he muttered.

“What is it?”

“The weight of both of us on the line is too much for the rig to hold. We’re pulling it out of the ground up there.”

“You mean we’re stuck here?”

“I SEE THAT NONE OF US ARE GOING TO GET ANY SLEEP.”

Stacy Dezhurova was smiling as she spoke, but her bright blue eyes were dead serious. Trudy Hall was still on duty at the comm console. Stacy sat beside her while Jamie paced slowly back and forth behind her. Vijay had pulled in another chair and sat by the doorway, watching them all.

The comm center cubicle felt crowded and hot with all four of them jammed in there. Jamie did not answer Dezhurova’s remark; he just kept on pacing, five strides from one partition to the other, then back again.

“Tommy must have found him by now,” Hall said, swiveling her chair slightly toward Stacy.

“Then why doesn’t he call in?” she demanded, almost angrily.

“They must still be down inside the caldera,” Jamie said.

“It is night,” Stacy pointed out, almost accusingly.

Jamie nodded and kept pacing.

“It’s the waiting that’s the worst,” Vijay offered. “Not knowing what—”

“This is Rodriguez,” the radio speaker crackled. “We got a little problem here.”

Jamie was at the comm console like a shot, leaning between the two women.

“What’s happening, Tomas?”

“Fuchida’s alive. But his backpack’s banged up and his battery’s not functioning. Heater, air fans, nothing in his suit’s working.” Rodriguez’s voice sounded tense but in control, like a pilot whose jet engine had just flamed out: trouble, but nothing that can’t be handled. Until you hit the ground.

Then he added, “We’re stuck on a ledge about thirty meters down and can’t get hack up ‘cause the rock’s coated with dry ice and it’s too slippery to climb.”

As the astronaut went on to describe how the tether winch almost pulled out of its supports when the two of them tried to haul themselves up the slope, Jamie tapped Hall on the shoulder and told her to pull up the specs on the hard suit’s air circulation system.

“Okay,” he said when Rodriguez stopped talking. “Are either of you hurt?”

“I’m bruised a little, Mitsuo’s got a bad ankle. He can’t stand on it.”

One of the screens on the console now showed a diagram of the suit’s air circulation system. Hall was scrolling through a long list on the screen next to it.

“Mitsuo, how do you feel?” Jamie asked, stalling for time, time to think, time to get the information he needed.

“His radio’s down,” Rodriguez said. A hesitation, then, “But he says he’s hot. Sweating.”

Vijay nodded and murmured, “Hypothermia.”

Strangely, Rodriguez chuckled. “Mitsuo also says he discovered siderophiles, inside the caldera! He wants Trudy to know that.”

“I heard it,” Hall said, still scrolling down the suit specs. “Did he get samples?”

Again a wait, then Rodriguez replied, “Yep. There’s water in the rock. Liquid water. Mitsuo says you’ve gotta publish … get it out on the Net.”

“Liquid?” Hall stopped the scrolling. Her eyes went wide. “Are you certain about—”

“Never mind that now,” Jamie said, studying the numbers on Hall’s screen. “According to the suit specs you can get enough breathable air for two hours, at least, even with the fans off.”

“We can’t wait down here until daylight, then,” Rodriguez said.

Jamie said, “Tomas, is Mitsuo’s harness still connected to the winch?”

“Far as I can see, yeah. But if we try to use the winch to haul us up, it’s gonna yank the rig right out of the ground.”

“Then Mitsuo’s got to go up by himself.”

“By himself?”

“Right,” Jamie said. “Let the winch pull Mitsuo up to the top. Then he takes off the harness and sends it back to you so you can get up. Understand?”

In the pale light of the helmet lamps, Fuchida could not see Rodriguez’s face behind his tinted visor. But he knew what the astronaut must be feeling.

Pressing his helmet against Rodriguez’s, he said, “I can’t leave you down here alone, without even the tether.”

Rodriguez’s helmet mike must have picked up his voice, because

Waterman replied, iron hard, “No arguments, Mitsuo. You drag your butt up there and send the harness back down. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to get you both up to the top.”

Fuchida started to object, but Rodriguez cut him off. “Okay, Jamie. Sounds good. We’ll call you from the top when we get there.”

Fuchida heard the connection click off.

“I can’t leave you here,” he said, feeling almost desperate.

“That’s what you’ve got to do, man. Otherwise neither one of us will make it.”

“Then you go first and send the harness back down to me.”

“No way,” Rodriguez said. “I can’t leave you down here with that bad ankle. Besides, I’m trained to deal with dangerous situations.”

Fuchida said, “But it’s my fault—”

“Bullshit,” Rodriguez snapped. Then he added, “I’m bigger and meaner than you, Mitsuo. Now get going and stop wasting time!”

“How will you find the harness in the dark? It could be dangling two meters from your nose and your helmet lamp won’t pick it up.”

Rodriguez made a huffing sound, almost a snort. “Tie one of the beacons to it and turn on the beacon light.”

Fuchida felt mortified. I should have thought of that. It’s so simple. I must be truly rattled; my mind is not functioning as it should.

“Now go on,” Rodriguez said. “Get down on your belly again and start up the winch.”

“Wait,” Fuchida said. “There is something—”

“What?” Rodriguez demanded impatiently.

Fuchida hesitated, then spoke all in a rush. “If … if I don’t make it … if I die … would you contact someone for me when you get back to Earth?”

“You’re not gonna die.”

“Her name is Elizabeth Vernon,” Fuchida went on, afraid that if he stopped he would not be able to resume. “She’s a lab assistant in the biology department of the University of Tokyo. Tell her … that I love her.”

Rodriguez understood the importance of his companion’s words. “Your girlfriend’s not Japanese?”

“My wife,” Fuchida answered.

Rodriguez whistled softly. Then, “Okay, Mitsuo. Sure. I’ll tell her. But you can tell her yourself. You’re not gonna die.”

“Of course. But if …”

“Yeah. I know. Now get going!”

Reluctantly, Fuchida did as he was told. He felt terribly afraid of a thousand possibilities, from tearing his suit to leaving his partner in the dark to freeze to death. But he felt more afraid of remaining there and doing nothing.

Worse, he felt hot. Stifling inside the suit. Gritting his teeth, he held on to the tether with all the pressure the servomotors on his gloves could apply. Then he realized that he needed one hand free to work the winch control on his climbing harness.

He tumbled for the control stud, desperately trying to remember which one started the winch. He found it and pressed. For an instant nothing happened.

Then suddenly he was yanked off the ledge and dragged up the hard rock face of the caldera’s slope, his suit grinding, grating, screeching against the rough rock.

I’ll never make it, Fuchida realized. Even if the suit doesn’t break apart, I’ll suffocate in here before I reach the top.

IT WAS A FEW MINUTES AFTER SIX IN THE EVENING IN MANHATTAN, A COLD, gusty, rainy gray autumn day in the Big Apple. Crowds scurried past store windows blazing with lights and elaborate Christmas displays, pushing through the hard slanting rain and down into the dank, noisy subway tunnels, heading for home and family and dinner and the evening’s Halloween trick-or-trick jaunts with the kids.

The dark-paneled lounge in the Metropolitan Club was hushed and calm, in contrast. While the wind shook the bare tree limbs of Central Park and rattled the lights on the trees outside the club’s awninged entrance, Darryl C. Trumball eased back in his favorite leather armchair to savor his first Old Fashioned of the evening.

Sitting in the next chair, at his elbow, was Walter Laurence, executive director of the International Consortium of Universities. Unlike the “self-made” Trumball, Laurence had been born to great wealth. Unlike the financier, Laurence had spent his adult life in public service, first in the U.S. Department of State, later in the tangled, often troubled world of academia. Very much like Trumball, Walter Laurence enjoyed wielding power, and appreciated the perquisites of high position.

Now he sat sipping delicately at a tall, chilled glass of vodka and tonic, looking very much like the elder statesman: sleek silver hair, a wisp of a gray mustache, impeccably tailored suit of pearl gray.

“What I don’t understand,” he was saying in his soft, well-mannered voice, “is why you invited that newshound to join us here. He’s such a boor.”

Trumball smiled knowingly, like the toothy grin of a skeleton. “You remember what Ben Franklin said about making love to older women?”

Laurence allowed a tiny frown to crease the space between his brows. “In the dark, all cats are gray?”

“No, no.” Trumball waved a hand impatiently. “He said the main benefit of making love to an older woman is that afterward, they’re so damned grateful!”

“H’mm.”

Trumball leaned closer and lowered his voice. “I want Newell— and his network—on our side.”

“And just which side is that?”

“We’ve got to get rid of this Indian up there: Waterman.”