Return to Mars (38 page)

Jamie nodded inside his helmet as he walked over to the soarplane’s other wingtip and started tightening the lines already fastened there.

“DiNardo said,” Connors continued, “that you shouldn’t even think about resigning unless Trumball keeps up the pressure even after the storm blows out and it becomes clear that a majority of the board’s going to go along with him.”

“Resigning?” Jamie said aloud. “He thinks I should resign?”

Connors went on with his dolorous report, reminding Jamie several times more that he hated to bother him with this political maneuvering, but he thought Jamie ought to know about it.

Finally he said, “Well, that’s the whole story, up to now. I’ll wait for your answer. Be sure you mark it personal to me; that way nobody else’ll look at it. At least, nobody else should look at it. I don’t know how many people around here are reporting to Trumball on the sly.”

Wonderful news, Jamie groaned silently.

“Well, okay, that’s it, pal. I’ll wait for your answer. ‘Bye for now.”

Off on the eastern horizon, Jamie saw, the sky was darkening. Or is it just my imagination? He asked himself. I’ll check the instrumentation when I get back into the dome. The storm’s going to hit here, but it’s probably too early to see it yet. And now I’ve got another storm, a political storm, back on Earth.

The Navaho believe that clouds are the spirits of the dead, Jamie remembered. Will you come to visit me in a cloud, Grandfather? Or will it be the spirits from the Long Walk, come to take their vengeance on the whites who drove them off their land?

He shook his head to clear it of such irrational thoughts, then glanced down at the suit radio’s keypad on his wrist. Jamie said carefully, ‘ ‘Personal message to Pete Connors at Tarawa. Pete, I got your message. We’re battening down for the storm right now, so I don’t have time to reply at length. I want to think about this before I answer you, anyway. Thanks for the news—I guess. I’ll get back to you.”

Damn, he thought as he stared out at the eastern horizon. It sure looks like it’s clouding up out there. Maybe the storm’s picked up speed. That’d he good; it’ll roll over Dex and Craig and get them out into the clear sooner.

Starting back toward the dome’s airlock, Jamie said to himself, why is Trumball so clanked up? Why is he out to remove me as mission director? Prejudice? Just plain malice? Or is he the type that’s not happy unless he’s forcing other people to jump through his hoops?

Then Jamie heard his grandfather whisper, put yourself in his shoes. Find what’s bothering him.

Okay, Grandfather, he replied silently. What’s bothering the old man?

His son is in danger, came the immediate reply. He’s worried about Dex’s safety. That’s natural. That’s good.

But Trumball knew that exploring Mars carried its risks. Maybe he never considered that his own son would have to face those risks, just like the rest of us.

He was all in favor of going after the Pathfinder hardware. But he didn’t think his son would go on the excursion and place himself in danger. Now he knows differently and he’s scared. He’s sitting in an office in Boston and his son is out in the middle of a dust storm a hundred million kilometers away and there’s nothing he can do about it.

Except get angry and vent his fury on the most convenient target he can find: the mission director who allowed his son to go out into danger. Me. He’s pissed at me because he can’t do anything else about the situation. He’s scared and frustrated and trying to solve his problem the way he’s solved problems before: fire the guy he’s mad at.

Jamie took a deep breath and felt a calm warmth flow through him. He heard his grandfather’s gentle laughter. “Never lose your temper with a customer,” his grandfather had told him years ago, when Jamie had been a little boy angered by the pushy, demanding loud-mouthed tourists who yelled at Al in his shop. “Let ‘em whoop and holler, it don’t matter. Once they calm down, they’re so ashamed of themselves that they buy twice what they started out to buy, just to show they’re sorry.”

Damn! Jamie said to himself as he trudged back to the airlock. It would be so satisfying to get sore at Trumball, to send him a blistering message telling him to mind his own damned business. So easy to taunt the old man from a hundred million kilometers’ distance.

But I can’t get angry at him, Jamie realized. I understand what he’s going through. I understand him, and you can’t hate a man you understand.

As he stepped into the airlock and swung its outer hatch shut, he reminded himself, but just because you understand him doesn’t mean he can’t hurt you. You understand a rattlesnake, too, but you don’t let him bite you. Not if you can avoid it.

“Thai’s all she wrote,” said Craig.

He touched the brakes and brought the rover to a gentle stop.

“It’s not even six o’clock yet, Wiley,” Dex protested. “We can get in another hour or more.”

Craig got up from the driver’s seat. “I got an idea.”

The sky was a dismal gray above them, getting darker by the minute. Dex could hear the wind now, a thin screeching sound like the wail of a distant banshee.

“I’ll drive,” he offered.

“Nope,” said Craig, heading back toward the bunks. “You gotta know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. We sit still now and get ready for the storm.”

“It’s not that bad yet,” Dex insisted, turning in his seat to watch the older man. “We can push on a little more, at least.”

Craig knelt down and pulled open a storage drawer beneath the bottom bunk. “The real danger from the storm’s gonna be the damage the sand does to our solar panels, right?”

“Right,” Dex answered, wondering what his partner was up to.

Craig pulled a set of sheets from the storage drawer. “So we cover the solar panels.”

“Cover them? With bedsheets?”

“And anything else we got,” Craig said. “Coveralls, plastic wrap, anything we got.”

“But once they’re covered, they’ll stop producing electricity for us. We’ll have to go onto the batteries.”

Craig was emptying the drawer beneath the other bunk now. “Take a look at the instruments, buddy. It’s gettin’ mighty dark mighty quick. Those solar cells are already down to less’n thirty percent nominal, right?”

Dex glanced at the panel instruments. The solar panels’ output hovered just above twenty-five percent of their maximum output.

“Right,” he replied dismally.

“So don’t just sit there,” Craig called, almost jovially. “Get up and find the duct tape, for cryin’ out loud.”

Dex thought, this is just busywork. We won’t be able to keep the panels covered once the storm hits. Wind speeds are going to go over two hundred knots, for chrissake. That’ll rip off anything we try to cover the panels with.

But he pushed himself out of the chair, wormed his way past Craig, and started searching through the supply lockers, grateful for the chance to be doing something active instead of just sitting and watching the storm come up and smother them.

WILEY CRAIG RAN THE BEAM FROM HIS HAND LAMP ACROSS THE ROVER from nose to tail.

“Well … it ain’t a thing of beauty,” he said, “but it oughtta get the job done.”

Standing beside him, Dex thought that the rover’s top looked like a Christmas present wrapped by clumsy children. Bedsheets, plastic wrapping, a tarpaulin, even several sets of spare coveralls—sliced apart to cover more area—were spread over the solar panels and taped down heavily.

“Do you think they’ll stay put once the wind starts up?” he asked.

Craig was silent for a moment, then said, “Oughtta. Wind must be purty near seventy knots already and they’re not flappin’.”

Dex could hear the wind keening outside his helmet, softly but steadily, becoming insistent. He thought he also heard something grating across his suit’s outer skin, like fine grains of sand peppering him. He almost could feel the dust scratching against him.

It was fully dark now. Dex felt tired, physically weary, yet his insides were jumpy, jittery. In the light from Wiley’s lamp he could see that the air was clear; no dust swirling. None that he could see. Yet there was that gritty rasping on the suit’s hard shell.

“We could have driven another hour,” he said to Craig.

“Maybe.”

“Hell, Wiley, I’ve driven through snowstorms in New England.” Despite his words, Dex’s voice sounded quivery, even to himself.

“This ain’t the Massachusetts Turnpike out here, buddy.”

“So what do we do now? Just sit and bite our nails?”

“Nope. We’re gonna collect all the data we can. Then we’re gonna have dinner. Then we’re gonna get a good night’s sleep.”

Dex stared at Craig’s spacesuited figure. He doesn’t sound worried at all. The goddamned fuel cells are leaking and the solar panels are shut down and we’ll have to live off the batteries for god knows how long and he’s as calm and unruffled as a guy riding out a blizzard in a first-class ski lodge.

“Okay, boss,” Dex asked, trying to sound nonchalant, “what do you want me to do now?”

“You go inside and check the fuel cells, make sure all the comm systems are workin’, and call hack to the house, let ‘em know we’re buttoned up for the night.”

Dex nodded. The commsats in orbit will pinpoint our location. If anything happens to us, he thought, at least they’ll know where to find the bodies.

Craig whistled tunelessly as he trudged back to the airlock for a met/geo beacon to plant outside the rover. Dex went back inside and started to take off his hard suit. He knew that he should stay suited up and be prepared to go outside in case Craig got into trouble. But he was too tired, too drained, too plain frightened even to think about that.

His eyes smarted briefly as he painstakingly vacuumed the dust off his suit. Ozone, from the superoxides in the soil, he knew. We could keep ourselves supplied with oxygen just by dumping some of the red dirt in here, he told himself.

Once out of the suit, he went up to the cockpit and stared out at the darkening landscape, feeling his insides fluttering. I’m scared, Dex said to himself. Like a kid afraid of the dark. Scared. Wiley’s as calm as can be and I’m falling apart. Shit!

With nothing better to do, he checked the communications file for incoming messages. The usual garbage from the base, plenty of satellite data about the approaching storm. And a message marked personal for him.

Only one person in the solar system would be sending me a personal message, Dex thought. With a mixture of anger and relief he tapped the proper keys and saw his father’s glowering skull-like face appear on the rover’s control panel screen.

Just what I need, he thought. Comic relief from dear old Dad.

“Well,” Jamie said to the five of them, “we’re as ready for the storm as we can be.”

“So are Possum and Dex,” said Stacy Dezhurova.

“He wants to be called Wiley,” Jamie reminded her.

Dezhurova sighed dramatically. “The male ego. Perhaps I should change my name, too.”

They were sitting around the galley table, picking at their dinner trays. No one seemed to have much of an appetite, despite the hard labor they had put in getting ready for the storm.

Vijay asked lightly, “What name would you choose for yourself, Stacy?”

“Not Anastasia,” Dezhurova answered quickly. “And not Nastasia, either. It’s too … complicated.”

“I think Anastasia’s a pretty name,” Rodriguez said. “I like it.”

“Then you can have it,” Dezhurova said.

They all laughed. Nervously.

Jamie wondered if he should tell them about Trumball’s move to replace him as mission director. It affects them as much as it does me.

More, in fact.

Yet he remained silent, unready to burden them with the political maneuverings going on back on Earth. That’s a different world, Jamie said to himself. We’ve got our own problems to face here, our own realities.

It all seemed so unreal to him, so remote and intangible. Like the ghost stories his grandfather would make up for him when he was a child. Like the legends of First Man and First Woman when the world was new.

This is the new world, he realized. Mars. New and clean and full of mysteries. I can’t let Dex and his father turn it into a tourist center. I can’t let them start to ruin this world the way they destroyed the world of the People. That’s why I’ve got to fight them.

A new understanding flooded through him. It was as if he’d been lost in a trackless wilderness and suddenly a path opened up before his eyes, the path to harmony and beauty and safety.

I can’t let them bring tourists here. I can’t let them start to tear up the natural environment so they can build cities and colonies. Bring climbers to Olympus
Mons.
Build ski runs. I’ve got to fight them. But how?

“Listen to that!”

Jamie’s attention snapped back to the galley, the dome, and his five fellow explorers. The wind had keyed up to a higher pitch. He watched their five faces as they stared up into the shadows of the dome. Something creaked ominously.

“The dome is perfectly safe,” Fuchida said to no one in particular. “It was designed to withstand the highest winds ever recorded on Mars, with a huge safety factor added in.”

“Then what made that noise?” Trudy Hall asked, her voice small and hollow.

“The dome will flex a little,” Jamie told them. “Nothing to worry about.”

“Really?” Trudy seemed utterly unconvinced.

Jamie made a smile for her. “Really. In fact, if it didn’t flex, if it was built to remain totally rigid, it might crack under a high enough wind load.”

“Like the mighty oak and the little sapling,” Vijay said.

“Oh, yes, I know that one,” Hall said, looking slightly relieved. “The oak stands firm against the hurricane and gets knocked down, while the sapling bends with the wind and survives.”

“Exactly.”