Tana called through the opening, “I’m done here. Come on in.”
Commander Radkowski came into the bubble-segment, then Trevor, and finally Estrela, Estrela managing to be graceful even when she was hunched over like a caveman. With five in the segment, it was extremely crowded.
Now Ryan was the center of attention, and he fidgeted.
“Something you said,” Tana remarked casually. “Right at the end. Do you remember it?”
“It’s kind of hazy,” Ryan said, but when Tana gave him a sharp glance, he added, “Yes, I think so.”
Tana looked over to Commander Radkowski, hoping he would help, but he didn’t seem ready to take over the questioning. “Only three of us can fit on the ship, was that what you said?”
Ryan nodded, and when everybody was silent, looking at him, he cleared his throat. “Well, it’s a small ship.” Nobody said anything. “I did tell the commander.”
Tana turned and looked at Commander Radkowski. “You knew this, and you kept it from us?”
“I—well, it seemed a good idea at the time.”
“You’re saying, if we do make it all the way to the pole, only three of us can go home? And you didn’t tell us?” She turned to Estrela. “And you?”
Estrela looked away. “It is our ship. I know the specifications.”
Tana looked at Trevor. He shook his head mutely. “So, the only ones who didn’t know that two of us have to die were the nigger and the kid, is that right?”
She’d used the word hoping for some shock value, and it seemed to work. Radkowski spread his hands out, and turned them palms up. “It’s not like that—”
“Really.” She crossed her arms. “Okay, explain it to me.”
“All I was thinking was, we get to the ship, anything can happen. We need to work as a team. We can’t have everybody worrying. And, besides, who knows? It’s a tough trek anyway, I can’t be sure everybody is going to make it. If two of us die—”
Tana widened her eyes dramatically. “You’re saying that you were actually planning for two of us to die on the road?”
“No! Not that at all! I just meant—” Radkowski lowered his head. “I just thought that if we went, at least three of us could be saved.”
“Or maybe we could fix the ship so it could launch four,” Ryan added. “I don’t know for sure that it can’t.”
“Okay,” Tana said, and looked back at Commander Radkowski. “Now, tell me another thing. What were you and Estrela doing in the rockhopper an hour ago?”
Tana didn’t think that Radkowski could blush, but he did. He looked down at his feet. “Nothing.”
“Nothing?” She looked at Estrela as she said it. Estrela looked back imperturbably, her head cocked slightly to the side. “You must have been doing something.”
“She wanted to talk to me.”
“Really? In private? About what?” She was still looking at Estrela, and Estrela’s slight hint of a smile told her more than she wanted to know.
Radkowski said, almost mumbling, “I should have realized she would know how big the ship was.” He looked up at her. “Nothing happened. She just wanted to talk to me.”
When Trevor’s broadcast had gone out, it had taken almost ten minutes for Radkowski to get to Ryan. It shouldn’t have taken him two.
They must have been doing something. Tana had a very good guess as to what.
15
Onward
The mood the next morning was subdued. Commander Radkowski told Trevor Whitman that it was time for him to practice driving the dirt-rovers, and sent Estrela to supervise him. Apparently Trevor’s reaction to the episode of anoxia had met some threshold of the commander’s approval. Or perhaps Ryan’s encounter with anoxia had impressed the commander with the fact that a crew member could be incapacitated at any time, and he might need the help of any of the crew, even Trevor.
Ryan, meanwhile, had finished analyzing the failure of the zirconia electrolysis unit in his suit. It was a replication, in miniature, of the same problem that had attacked the Dulcinea. The oxygen partial-pressure sensors had been suffused by sulfur radicals, and both the primary and backup sensor gave a false reading of oxygen overpressure. As a result, the feedback mechanism in the suit had turned down the oxygen production rate, until the gas mixture that Ryan had been breathing was nearly depleted of oxygen.
An overnight thermal bake-out of each of the sensors should be sufficient to clear away the accumulation before it reached a dangerous threshold. It would be best to do it every night. To be safe, Ryan changed the parameters in the oxygen control software so that if an apparent excess of oxygen occurred, the suit’s computer would keep oxygen production going, rather than cut it to zero. Finally, he suggested that when they were on the surface, everybody should run a manual oxygen level check on their suits twice a day—the manual system used a different sensor that should be immune from the problem—and they should swap out sensor elements if they saw any sign of trouble.
That would give them three layers of fail-safe against a recurrence of the failure. Nobody was happy about trusting their lives to a sensor that they knew could be faulty, but with the changes Ryan suggested, it should be as safe as anyone could make it. And he could see no alternative.
“What do we do now?” Tana asked.
“We continue north.” Commander Radkowski looked at her steadily. “We still have no other choice.”
Estrela and Trevor took the dirt-rovers ahead on pathfinder duty.
Ryan had worked most of the night on the problem, and Commander Radkowski assigned him to the first shift riding as passenger in the rock-hopper. Radkowski piloted the rockhopper himself, and Tana once again took up her position perched on top of the vehicle. The commander gave her a disapproving look. If he had been the pilot of the rockhopper on the previous day, he would have forbidden her to ride outside in the first place, but now that it was established, he didn’t bother to try to stop her. And, besides, it did make the rockhopper’s tiny cabin a little less crowded.
The morning sky was the color of adobe, streaked with feathery clouds, tiny crystals of carbon dioxide ice in the Martian stratosphere. The terrain was rockier, and Tana’s ride was quite a bit bumpier. Still, once she fit herself into the rhythm of it, it wasn’t a problem to keep her balance.
“Hey, Estrela, wait up!” Tana could hear everything that Trevor said over the communications link. “Hey, you’re going too fast! Slow up, okay? Wait for me!”
Estrela didn’t answer, but Tana could see that she was staying ahead much less than she had the previous day, probably in deference to Trevor’s inexperience.
16
João’s Secret
One day, for no reason that Estrela could say, she realized what had been really quite obvious all along.
João had his crowd, and despite the fact that he had almost no money, he was every evening at bars. He spent the nights drinking in the company of boys dressed in elaborately casual attire, bright primary colors adorned with sporting logos like Nike and Polo. They seemed an odd crowd for the João she knew, a João who was moody and studious and intently focused. But he hid this side of him well when he was with his American friends, assuming a mask of frivolity. Estrela assumed that he was social climbing.
She was herself climbing as high and as fast as she could, erasing her past and inventing a new one, studying the dress and the mannerisms of the North American girls and imitating everything, or at least as much as she could copy without thousands of cruzados to spend on clothes. Her origins in the street were a secret she never talked about, and most of the other girls, who knew only that she was from Brazil and had her tuition and living expenses paid from the charity of the order, assumed that she must be the daughter of a maid or a shop worker, poor but unexceptional.