They abandoned the superfiber cables used to descend the cliff; they had plenty of cable, and it was easier to leave the used cable behind than to retrieve it. Dangling down the cliff face, it was almost invisible against the light rock; in the places where it was in shadow it could not be seen at all. Over a few weeks, the harsh ultraviolet from the unshielded Martian sun would slowly chew away the covering, and once the fluoropolymer sheath was gone, the cable would disintegrate quickly. And all that would be left behind would be a few titanium bolts, anchored in rocks at the top of the cliff, to show that they had passed this way.
They had made it down. It had been a lot harder than he’d expected it would be, but they were all down, and they were all safe.
Maybe they would be able to take the big one after all.
11
On the Bottom
The talus slope at the bottom of the canyon was steep, but except for a few minor rockslides when the wheels dislodged loose boulders, the rubble held, and John Radkowski managed to drive the rockhopper down the incline the rest of the way to the bottom of the catena without catastrophe.
As he had expected from his surveying the territory from above, the terrain at the base of the canyon was rugged, cluttered with angular, refrigerator-sized boulders.
At the base of the slope he called a halt for the day, and they found a nearly flat spot and pumped up the habitat bubble. The catena stretched out to either side of them, gently curving cliff faces towering over them, stretching as far as they could see. In the evening sunlight the cliffs turned from yellow to an intense orange.
The habitat had an odd smell, the smell of Mars dust: a sharp, metallic scent, like the smell of a distant thunderstorm, or freshly machined aluminum. It was due to peroxides in the soil. Although they made efforts to keep the suits clean, a little dust had been brought into the habitat with each crew member’s return. It wasn’t a bad smell; in fact, it was almost refreshing—an improvement over the locker-room odor that the Don Quijote picked up, with six people living in it for half a year.
There were the usual evening tasks to accomplish. Each suit had to be checked and refurbished for the next day’s action, the filters cleared, the recycling catalysts renewed, the zirconia cells baked out to clear away the sulfur poisoning. The suits had not been designed for as many hours of continuous hard usage as they were getting; twenty hours was an absolute design limit for the suit’s oxygen generation capacity, and Radkowski wanted to make sure that they stayed well below that limit. Just keeping the suits in shape took an hour each night.
It was hard to sleep. Radkowski preferred free-fall, where a sleeping bag could be tethered to a wall in any quiet nook of the station and the sleeping accommodations would be softer than any feather bed on Earth. He couldn’t stop turning over the events of the day and worrying about how they could rescue the entire crew on a ship that was built for only two crew members. And, if the entire crew could not be returned, how he would choose? Eventually he fell into a restless sleep, but long before he was rested, it was day.
In the morning they set out across the bottom of the catena. The terrain was too rough for the dirt-rover to easily traverse, so Commander Radkowski left the bike strapped to the side of the rockhopper. After a bit of thought he gave piloting responsibility for the rockhopper to Ryan, with Estrela riding as passenger, and ceded Tana her perch on the top. It was a good place for her to scout for obstacles anyway, although he would have never allowed it initially, had he known. He and Trevor went ahead on foot along the route that he had memorized from the ledge above. Since the rockhopper had to pick a slow path over the broken terrain, they were as fast on foot as the rockhopper was.
For the most part, they walked in silence, occasionally making a brief comment over the radio to warn of an obstacle that the rockhopper would do well to avoid. From time to time Radkowski stopped and climbed to the top of one of the larger boulders to make a minute inspection of the terrain with the binoculars. From the far side he had noticed a place on the far rim where it appeared that a runoff channel had been cut into the side of the wall, and he thought that by following the cut upward, they might be able to take the rockhopper to the top with little or even no use of the winch. The bottom of the channel looked rocky, possibly even rockier than the land they were traversing, but nothing he saw made him change his opinion.
“Say, Commander, sir.” Trevor touched Radkowski’s arm, and then quickly looked away. Up to that point he had been unusually silent during the walk. Radkowski glanced at the radio indicator LEDs mounted on his suit helmet, and noted that Trevor was talking on the private channel.
“Here,” Radkowski said.
“I’ve been thinking,” Trevor said.
After a minute or so, Radkowski prompted, “Thinking about what, Trevor?”
“Is it really true, what Ryan Martin said? About the return space ship only being able to carry three of us? It’s true, isn’t it? Is it true?”
Radkowski didn’t say anything. He was tired. It wasn’t something he wanted to deal with right now. They were approaching the far wall of the canyon. He pulled out the binoculars and began to inspect the path up the talus slope. From here the route he had chosen didn’t look so much like a river channel any more, but it still looked like it might be a good way up.
“It is true,” Trevor stated.
“Maybe,” Radkowski admitted. But maybe they could do something.
They would have to look over the Brazilian ship, see what could be left behind, calculate fuel capacity and launch trajectories. At this point it was too early to tell.
But Ryan Martin had seemed worried, and Ryan was one hell of a wizard at back-of-the-envelope calculations.
“It is true,” Trevor said, more softly this time. “That’s like, a real problem, do you know it? Like, how are you going to decide? Have you thought about that yet?”
“No,” Radkowski said. He had thought about it over and over, almost obsessively. He had been unable to sleep. “No, I haven’t thought about it.”
“Oh,” Trevor said. “I though maybe you had.” He was silent for a while, then said, “But, when you do make the decisions, I’m with the ones going back to Earth, right? I mean, that’s not in question, is it? I mean, I’m like a passenger here, not one of the crew. I mean, I’m in the crew, but I’m not one of the professional astronauts.”
Radkowski was silent. The footing was a little tricky here; the rock was dusted with dirt and pea-sized loose stone; it would be easy to slip.
“Shit, Commander, you know? It’s like, I mean, you guys are old, no offense, right? And I’ve got my life ahead of me? So if there’s only room for three I should be one of them? You can see that, right? Right?”
Radkowski was silent, studying the talus slope and the cliff above it. When the silence got to be oppressive, he said, “I haven’t made any decisions one way or the other, Trevor.”
“Oh, come on,” Trevor said. His voice was rising in pitch, almost screeching. “You’ve got to. I mean, you know it’s right, don’t you? I’m the passenger here, for the love of God. You couldn’t leave me behind.”
The rockhopper was coming up behind them. Radkowski stepped aside, waved them around a house-sized boulder that marked the beginning of the upward slope, and pointed up the defile. Ryan, in the cockpit, nodded and waved. It really was a marvel the way the six wheels of the rockhopper rolled up and over the uneven terrain and yet kept the body of the rover nearly level.
“You wouldn’t leave me behind,” Trevor said. “I mean, it wouldn’t be right. You wouldn’t do that, would you? Would you?”