Return to Mars (41 page)

Jamie felt his brows hike up. He didn’t feel very brave. With a shrug he replied, “Seemed like the right thing to do. We had to get those patches in place.”

“You could have been killed.”

“I never even thought of that,” he confessed. “It all happened so fast …”

“You’re a bloody hero, Jamie.” She wasn’t joking, he saw. She was in dead earnest.

Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, Jamie changed the subject. “I haven’t been able to raise Dex and Wiley yet.”

“You expected that, din’t you?”

He nodded. “Probably a lot of dust on their antennas by now. We’ll just have to be patient.”

“You’re good at that,” she said, with a smile.

He caught her implication. “It’s a lot more fun being patient with you than with them,” he said, low and swift, afraid of being overheard.

Before she could reply, Rodriguez burst in, white teeth gleaming in a huge grin. “Well, we made it through the night,” he said, then burst into a hearty laughter.

Jamie threw a perplexed glance at Vijay, who shrugged her shoulders.

“You were terrific, boss,” the astronaut said, beaming at Jamie. “Saved our necks, man.”

Jamie shook his head, but Vijay nodded agreement. “If the garden had gone, we’d have to pack up and leave, wouldn’t we?”

“Maybe,” Jamie conceded. “Anyway, the garden’s going to be all right. So let’s get on with the program, okay?”

“Right!” Rodriguez said. “You had breakfast yet, boss? I’m hungry enough to eat a Martian buffalo.”

From the doorway, Stacy Dezhurova said, “You will have to find one first, Tom.”

“Lemme grab some juice,” Rodriguez said, still grinning buoyantly, “then I’ll spell you at the console while you guys grab breakfast.”

“I thought you were starving,” Jamie said, getting up from the chair.

“Yeah, I know, but I can wait. You guys go eat. I’ll hold the fort here.”

Jamie looked to Dezhurova, who said, “I will get your juice, Tom.”

“Okay, thanks.”

Jamie said. ‘ ‘Well, if you’re going to take over, see if you can raise Craig and Dex.”

“Right.” Rodriguez sat heavily on the little chair, making it roll away from the console a few feet.

As he went to the galley with Vijay and Dezhurova, Jamie wondered aloud, ‘ ‘Tomas sure is chipper this morning. He must have had a good restful sleep.”

Dezhurova sputtered into laughter. “Not exactly.”

“What do you mean?”

Stacy looked up into Jamie’s face. “Didn’t you hear them? Him and Trudy? They were at it all damned night long.”

Inadvertently, Jamie glanced at Vijay, who was trying to suppress a smirk.

“At least you two are quiet about it,” Stacy went on, matter-of-factly. “But my cubicle is next to Trudy’s. Tom was snorting all night like Ferdinand the Bull. He drowned out the storm, for god’s sake.”

Vijay broke out in laughter.

They had just started to eat breakfast when Fuchida limped up to the table, looking distressed.

“What’s wrong, Mitsuo?” Jamie asked.

“Am I the only one who wonders why the garden dome began to rip apart?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

The biologist sat across from Jamie and Vijay and propped his bandaged ankle on an empty chair.

”How can the dust rip the dome fabric?” he asked, like a professor posing a problem for his class.

Dezhurova got up from the table. ‘ ‘I promised Tomas I would bring him juice,” she remembered. “He probably needs it.”

Fuchida did not catch her insinuation. “The dome’s plastic cannot be punctured by sand particles,” he said quietly, firmly. “Yet the fabric was punctured.”

“I thought it ripped along the base where it connects with the flooring,” Jamie said.

“No,” Fuchida replied, raising one finger for emphasis. “There are two small punctures. If not repaired so quickly, they would have grown into a rip that would have torn the entire dome off its foundation.”

“But we did catch it in time,” Vijay said. “Jamie did, that is.”

Fuchida acknowledged the fact with a small dip of his chin. “Still, we must ask how the dome was punctured.”

Jamie suggested, “Small rocks blown by the wind?”

“I doubt it,” the biologist said.

“Then how?”

“I don’t know. But it troubles me. The dome should not have failed. That plastic fabric has been tested under much more severe conditions in wind tunnel simulations. It should not have failed.”

“Yet it did,” Vijay said, almost in a whisper.

“It did indeed.” Fuchida looked like a prosecuting attorney to Jamie. Suspicious, almost angry.

“Well,” Jamie said, “I don’t know how it failed, but we ought to figure out some way of making certain it doesn’t happen again.”

“Hey, buddy,” Craig said cheerfully, “we made it through the night.”

From across the narrow table between their bunks, Dex nodded glumly. He felt exhausted, sleepless eyes gummy, coveralls rumpled and stinking of fear.

The wind was still screeching outside. Particles of iron-cored grit were still grinding against the rover’s thin skin, like an endless army of soldier ants working tirelessly to break through their defenses and come in and devour them.

“Communications’re out, of course,” Craig added.

“Of course,” said Dex Wearily.

“Soon’s the wind dies down to less’n a hundred knots, we’ll go outside and dust off the antennas. Squirt a signal back to base, let ‘em know we’re okay.”

“If they’re okay,” Dex replied gloomily.

“They’ll be all right,” said Craig. “That big dome’s built like the Rock of Gibraltar. Been through dust storms before, y’know, over the six years it’s been settin’ out there.”

“I suppose so,” Dex admitted.

Unbidden, his mind was cataloguing all the things that might not be okay. If the covers had ripped off during the night, the solar cells could be scratched and pitted so badly they’d be useless. The fuel cells were already down to zero; they were living off the batteries. The gritty dust could have worked its way into the wheel bearings, immobilizing them completely. Then we’ll have a choice of starving or suffocating,

Dex thought. Or the dust could have scoured the antennas so badly their eomin systems would he completely shot. Then we couldn’t navigate, couldn’t get positioning data from the satellites, we’d be lost out here forever.

Or the whole frigging base dome might have blown down during the night, he added.

“Hey!” Craig snapped. “You listenin’?”

“Sorry,” Dex said, trying to sit up a little straighter.

“I said we’d better stick to a cold breakfast. No sense drainin’ the batteries by usin’ the microwave.”

“I’ll get breakfast,” Dex said, pushing himself up from his bunk. “You can do the systems check.”

“Already did that. After breakfast we power down. Shut off the freezer, let it coast; food’ll keep cold inside okay. Air fans on low. Lights to minimum. Until we get the solar panels uncovered and work-in’ again.”

“If they’ll work again,” Dex muttered as he went back to the compact stand of racks that served as the rover’s galley.

“Didn’t get much sleep last night, huh?”

“How’d you guess?” Dex pulled out the first two cereal packages he could reach.

“Listen, kid, the worst is over. We made it through the storm. It’s peterin’ out now. In another couple hours—”

Dex whirled on him. “You listen, pal! You don’t like being called Possum? Well I don’t like being called kid. Got that?”

“NOT AS BAD AS IT COULD’VE BEEN,” CRAIG PRONOUNCED. BUT HIS VOICE sounded heavy, unhappy, in Dex’s earphones.

The sky was still gray, sullen. The wind was still keening, although nowhere near as loud as it had been. Dex was surprised that inside the hard suit he felt no push from the wind at all. He had expected to have to lean over hard and force himself forward, like a man struggling through a gale. Instead, the thin Martian air might just as well have been totally calm.

On one side the rover was half buried in rust-red sand. From the nose of the cockpit to the tail of the jointed vehicle’s third segment, the sand had piled up as high as the roof on the windward side.

“Good thing the hatch was on the leeward side,” Dex said. “We might’ve had trouble getting it open if it was buried in this stuff.”

“Naw, I don’t think so,” Craig answered, kicking at the pile. Dust flew like ashes, or like dry autumn leaves when a child scuffs at them.

“Maybe.”

“Besides,” Craig added, “I turned her so the hatch’d be on the sheltered side when we stopped for the night.”

Dex blinked inside his helmet, trying to remember if he was driving then or Craig. Wiley’s not above taking credit for good luck, he thought.

“Come on, let’s see what’s happened topside.”

As they trudged around the rover, back to the side that was almost free of the dust, Dex could see that at least part of the makeshift coverings they had taped down over the solar panels had been blown loose. One sheet was flapping fitfully in the wind.

As Craig climbed up the ladder next to the airlock hatch to inspect the solar panels, Dex caught sight of the most beautiful apparition he had seen on Mars: the dull gray dust-laden clouds thinned enough, for a few moments, for him to see the bright orange sky overhead. His heart leaped inside him. The storm’s breaking up! It’s breaking up at last.

“Worse than I hoped for,” Craig’s voice grated in his earphones, “but better’n I was scared of.”

Craig came down from the ladder. “We got some scratches and pittin’ up there where the tarp came loose. The rest of the panels look okay, though.”

“Good,” said Dex, suddenly enthusiastic. “Listen, Wiley, I’m going to duck back inside and put on the VR rig. Nobody’s ever recorded a Martian dust storm before. This’ll make great viewing back home!”

He heard Craig chuckling inside his helmet. Then the older man said, “Startin’ to get some of your spirit back on-line, huh?”

“I …” Dex stopped, perplexed for a moment. Then he put a gloved hand on the shoulder of Craig’s suit. “Wiley, you really helped me. I was scared shitless back there, and you pulled me through it.”

“You did it for yourself,” Craig said, “but I’ll be glad to take the credit for it.”

Dex felt his insides go hollow.

As if he sensed it, Craig said, “Don’t worry, son. What happened here is between you and me, nobody else.”

“Thanks, Wiley.” The words sounded pitifully weak to Dex, compared to the enormous rush of gratitude and respect that he felt.

“Okay,” Craig said gruffly. “Now before you start doin’ your VR stuff, let’s get the antennas cleaned off so we can tell Jamie and the gang that we’re okay.”

Rodriguez gave a sudden whoop from the comm center.

“Wiley’s calling in!”

Jamie bolted up from the galley table while Vijay stayed to help the limping Fuchida. In the comm center Jamie saw Craig’s scruffy-bearded face on the main screen.

“… solar panel output’s degraded by four-five percent,” Craig was reporting. “Coulda been a lot worse.”

“What about the fuel cells?” Rodriguez asked.

“Dex’s electrolyzing our extra water; gonna feed the hydrogen and oxy to ‘em. That way we can rest the batteries.”

Poking his head into the comm camera’s view, Jamie asked, “Do you have to dig yourselves out?”

Craig looked very pleased. “Nope. The wheels and drive motors are all okay. We just put ‘er in gear and pulled ourselves loose. We’re movin’ now.”

“Wow!” Rodriguez exclaimed.

“That’s great,” said Jamie, feeling genuinely pleased and relieved. “That’s just great, Wiley.”

“Oughtta be at Ares Vallis in another three-four days,” Craig said. Then he added, “If the weather holds up.”

Rodriguez, laughed. “There’s not another storm in sight.”

“Good.”

When Craig signed off, Rodriguez began checking the telemetry from the rover and Jamie went back to the inventory list. The wind was still yowling outside like dead spirits begging to come in out of the cold.

The wind was appreciably softer and sunlight actually lanced below the overhanging clouds as the day drew to a close.

Jamie was tired, physically and emotionally drained, as he made his way back to the comm center for what must have been the hundredth time that day.

As the storm wound down, he had spent most of the day in the greenhouse dome, checking and rechecking the area that had been damaged. He had even suited up and gone outside to inspect the damaged areas without the emergency patches and epoxy covering them. It was hard to say, but the areas seemed to have been punctured, not torn. Of course, once punctured the plastic fabric began to rip along the seam where it connected to the foundation of the dome.