“What is it?”
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“It moved. That rock, did you see it? It flowed, just like water.” Ryan knelt down to put his hand on the rock. “It’s moving. I can feel it.”
“Where?” Trevor put his hand against the rock, but felt nothing.
“Hey, feel the heartbeat? This rock is alive. It’s not a rock at all, it’s an animal. I can feel it. Here.” He took Trevor’s hand and pressed it against the rock. “Can you feel it?”
It felt like rock. Rough, pitted, volcanic rock.
Abruptly Ryan got up and walked away. He was swaying, unsteady on his feet. Could he possibly be drunk? Now he was listing to one side as if he was about to fall over.
The rocks couldn’t possibly be alive. Trevor pressed his hand against the boulder again, and closed his eyes and held his breath to better feel the surface. When he concentrated he could feel his own pulse in the tips of his fingers, but the rock was still just a rock.
“Maybe a dinosaur,” Ryan said. “It’s sleeping, though. Say, kid, you know something? I’ve figured it out. We’re not on Mars. It’s all a hoax. We’re somewhere in Nevada, not on Mars. Look, I bet that’s Vegas right there over the horizon.” He put his hand up to his visor to shield his eyes from the sun.
“Stupid suit. Why the hell do we have to wear these things, anyway?” He put his hand up to the helmet ring-fitting, but then dropped it. “Kid, they tricked us. It’s a training mission. Look, take a look at the gravity.” He picked up a rock and dropped it. It fell, taking a second or so to hit the ground. “Look, was that slow, or not? Was that Mars gravity? I couldn’t tell.” He picked up another rock and dropped it. “Maybe it is. How do they fake that, I wonder?” He picked up another rock, but then seemed to forget what do with it.
“Hey, this rock is carved,” he said. “Carved, I tell you.” He dropped it and tried to pick up another. “Look, it’s a bowling ball.” He tried to pick it up, and couldn’t.
Trevor was seriously frightened now. Was Ryan psychotic? Was he going to go off on a killing spree, like a psycho killer in the movies? He looked around, but they were out of sight of the rest of the party. In fact, he wasn’t quite sure exactly where they were in relationship to the habitat.
Ryan sat down with a thump that Trevor thought he could hear even through the thin atmosphere, and picked up a handful of dust. “If I had a bowling ball,” he sang, “I’d go bowling—”
Trevor walked up to him. Just under Ryan’s collar, in the control section of his suit, was the switch that turned on the emergency broadcast frequency. Trevor reached over, flipped up the protective cover, and tapped it. When it didn’t light, he hit it again, this time hard.
“Hey, what are you doing?”
“Brushing off some dirt.”
“Yeah?” Ryan looked down at his suit. “Say, the suit is dusty, isn’t it. You think I should take it off?”
“Uh, no, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Okay.” Ryan went back to his singing, changing tunes. “I was lost, and now I’m found—”
From over the ridge across from them, a figure in a bright purple spacesuit came racing up the hill toward them.
Ryan looked up. “Tana! Hey, Tana, join the party! Where’s the beer?” He started to get up.
“Stay right there!” Tana commanded. “Shit! Kid, how long has he been like this?”
Ryan staggered to his feet, but seemed to have trouble staying upright. His voice was puzzled. “I think I’m drunk. That’s funny, I haven’t had any beer yet.”
“Hold still, hold still, damn it!” She had a cylinder of compressed oxygen out, and was fumbling with the pressure fitting on Ryan’s backpack. “Trevor, hold him steady.”
Trevor held onto Ryan with both hands. He had never been so glad to see anybody.
“Say, Tana,” said Ryan conversationally, “have I ever told you how cute you are? I’d really like to—” He cut himself off. “But you don’t want to. No, you’d probably die.”
“Hold still. You’ll be okay. Hold still, I’ve gotta purge you.”
“Of course,” Ryan continued, “you’ll probably die anyway. Did I tell you that only three of us can fit on the ship? Little teeny ship. Those Brazilians were little teeny guys, too. Maybe just two.”
Then the oxygen purge got into his life support system, and his voice trailed off. “Kid,” he said. “Kid, I’ve been really really dumb.”
“You said it,” Tana replied.
14
Hobbit Hab
During the training exercises, Ryan had tagged the bubble habitat the “hobbit habit,” since it was so small that ordinary humans had to hunch over when standing inside. “Damn thing is built for hobbits, not humans,” he’d said. From the outside, the bubble habitat looked like three golden brown biscuits baked together into a single mass, with a smaller biscuit, an airlock, stuck to one side. The yellow was the natural color of Kapton, a puncture-resistant polyimide, reinforced with invisible strands of high-strength carbon superfiber. The walls were just translucent enough that, from the outside, the hobbit habit shone with a deep, almost incandescent glow.
All five of them were inside now. Tana had seated Ryan on one of the supply cases and had strapped an oxygen mask on him. She drew a sample of his blood to analyze later. “Who’s president?” She hit him on one knee and watched his reflexes critically.
“Yamaguchi.” From under the oxygen mask, it sounded something like “Yohmoosh.” “Unless he’s been impeached. Or better yet, hanged.”
“Dream on.” Yamaguchi was not well liked among the Mars crew. As a senator, he had sponsored the legislation that killed the NASA Mars program after the Agamemnon disaster; as president, he had tried—unsuccessfully—to stop the Quijote expedition by demanding a billion-dollar payment as usage fee for the government equipment.
She tapped his other knee and watched the reflex. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”
“Sagan, just like the astronomer. No relation.”
“Stick your hand out straight and hold it steady.” She watched it critically, looking for tremors. “Good. Touch your nose with your index finger, please. Good, now again with your left index finger. Excellent. Tell me, where are we right now?”
“Inside a teeny little hobbit room that smells like plastic and”—he sniffed—“something else, maybe peroxide.”
“And where is that?”
He grinned. “On Mars.”
“Good,” Tana said. She peeled one eyelid up and shone a flashlight in his eye, watching the pupil contract, then did the same in the other. “I’d say that you’re oriented times three. You had a bad case of anoxia there, and I’m not real happy about it, but it looks like there’s no permanent damage. You can take the oxygen mask off now if you want. Do you have a headache?”
Ryan pulled the mask off. “I’m okay.”
“Roll it up neatly and put it away. Any idea what happened?”
Ryan shook his head, wincing slightly as he did so. Tana thought that he probably did have a headache. She would have liked to do a full PET scan workup to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, but without equipment, that was obviously impossible. “I’d say that something went wrong with the zirconia cell, but I don’t know what,” he said. “It wasn’t feeding me oxygen. I’ll take it apart tomorrow.”
“Do it tonight. None of us are going anywhere until we know what’s happened and can be sure it won’t happen again.”
Ryan winced slightly again, but nodded his head. “You’re right. Okay, tonight.”