“Hey, come on,” Trevor said at last. “Can’t I look too?”
“This isn’t a game,” Ryan snapped, and then instantly regretted it. “Wait, I’m sorry.” He wasn’t getting anywhere, might as well let the kid try. He handed him the binoculars “Here. See if you can find a good way up.”
Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate, adjusted the electronic focus, and scanned upward. After a few seconds he stopped. “There,” he said.
“What?”
“Right there.” Trevor lowered the binoculars and pointed. “See?”
Ryan took the binoculars back and looked at where Trevor was pointing. “Where?” He didn’t see anything.
“Wait, let me guide you. See the big boulder that looks like a thumb?”
Ryan didn’t see anything that looked like a thumb. He scanned left and right, and then suddenly saw a peach-colored boulder that sat alone, sticking straight up out of the ground. It did look like a thumb, now that Trevor had pointed it out. “Got it.”
“Okay, go up from there. Up and a little left of that there are two boulders together, almost round? They look like a pair of tits. Okay, now right behind that and a little left you can see a groove. Looks like a stream bed. That’s a natural path up the slope.”
“Yeah, got it,” Ryan said. “But I don’t see a path.”
“Give me the binoculars for a moment,” Trevor said, and Ryan handed them to him before he even had a chance to think, Why the hell am I giving these to him?
Trevor put the binoculars to his faceplate. “Okay, from the two breasts, look upward and left. There’s one shaped like a skull, kind of, and one shaped like, um, maybe sort of like an elephant’s ass. The path goes between those.” He handed the binoculars back to Ryan. “Take a look.”
A skull. He found that one, and then the elephant’s buttocks. Shit, it was rough, but if you looked at it right, it almost did look like a path.
“See how it goes up toward that notch?” Trevor said. “Okay, now follow it up, keep going. Where it meets the cliff, see that? It’s dried up, but looks like it used to be a waterfall. Just to the right there’s a big splinter of rock, looks like a knife blade, leaning up against the cliff. You could climb right up that. And then at the top, see the groove in the cliff? That’s a natural chimney. Climb up that just as easily as walking down the street, I bet. Easier.”
Ryan could see it now. He wasn’t sure about the waterfall part, but the rest looked right. He felt foolish. He had been scanning the cliff face for ten minutes, looking for a possible way to get up it, and then in twenty seconds Trevor pointed out a route he hadn’t even noticed. “Hey, kid, that’s good. How could you find that so fast?”
Trevor shrugged and looked away, but Ryan could tell he was pleased with the praise. “Heck, I live in Arizona. I’ve been looking at rocks since, I don’t know, my big brother used to take me when I was just a kid. Since forever.”
Ryan looked around, and saw that the two women were watching him. They’d seen the whole exchange. He cleared his throat, which had been awfully dry and scratchy lately. “Okay. Let’s get back on the road. We’ll get to the base of the slope and camp. I think that Trevor has just found us a path.”
24
Inspection Detail
Again at sunrise the sky was a luminous white, with a halo surrounding the true sun. Ryan was annoyed to see that Trevor had once again gotten up far earlier than the rest of them—didn’t that kid need sleep? By the time the rest of them awoke, he had already donned his suit and was doing the suit check to go out on a morning walk. Radkowski would never have let him get away with it; he’d been quite strict about nobody going out without a buddy. Ryan thought about telling him to forget it, to stick around and help with the deflation of the hobbit hab, but he didn’t really feel like being the bad guy first thing in the morning, and really there was little Trevor could do to help until the others had breakfasted. So he let Trevor go out, with the admonition that he was not to get out of view of the hab.
They finished breakfast and deflated and packed away the habitat before Trevor wandered back. Ryan doubted if he had stayed in sight.
“Find anything?” Tana asked, when he came back to the rockhopper.
Trevor shook his head.
“What were you looking for out there, anyway?”
“Anything. Maybe fossils, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Or old NASA Mars probes.”
“Didn’t find anything at all?”
“Rocks.” Trevor shrugged again. “Lots of rocks.”
“Well, keep looking,” Tana said cheerfully. “Maybe you’ll get lucky.”
In the early morning sunlight Ryan drove the rockhopper as far up the slope as he dared. He gained almost a kilometer and a half of altitude above the canyon floor. When the wheels of the rockhopper started to slide on loose rock, he stopped, backed down to a less slippery spot, and chocked the wheels of the rockhopper with rocks.
He detailed Tana and Trevor to climb the slope on foot.
He still intended to drive the rockhopper up to the base of the cliff under its own power, but the slope was getting dangerous, and a slide would mean the end of the expedition. He wanted a superfiber rope—better, two superfiber ropes—as a safety line.
Ryan wondered if he should do a centimeter by centimeter inspection of each line. He had examined the severed ends of the fibers that had broken to kill commander Radkowski. They had broken cleanly, both the main rope and the safety line the same way, with no sign of wear, friction, or damage. The breaks were so clean that they might have been done with a razor blade. The superfiber wouldn’t break like that from simple overload; a clean break like that had to have happened by some preexisting nick or flaw in the rope.
Or a deliberate action. But he wasn’t going to think about that. They had to be able to trust each other, they just had to, or else they would all die.
No, it must have been a nick in the fiber. He had discarded the spool that had held the superfiber that had failed, just in case there was a problem with the batch.
An inspection would be a good cautionary step, he decided. Tedious, but safe. As they paid the line out from the reel on the rockhopper, he watched it as it came off the spool, alert for any infinitesimal flaws.
“You’re just going to sit there and watch it unreel?” Trevor asked, incredulous. “Every inch of it?”
“Every centimeter.”
“Wow,” Trevor said. “I don’t know if that’s dedication or stupidity.”
Ryan shrugged. “A flaw killed one of us. I’d just as soon it didn’t kill another.”
It wasn’t easy.
25
Elective Surgery
“Overall, I’d say you’re in fine shape,” Doctor Geroch said to Tana. “I can tell you, I wish I had a heart like yours.” She laughed.
Julie Geroch, the NASA flight surgeon assigned to oversee the mission, wasn’t in bad shape herself, but she was a little overweight. If Tana had been her physician, she would have suggested exercising more. But there was no point in saying that. The point of the exam was for Tana to get certified as medically fit for the mission, not for her to give advice to others on their personal habits. “Thanks,” she said. She slipped off the hospital gown and reached behind the door to fetch her shirt.
“I’ll be scheduling you for surgery a week from Thursday,” Geroch said. “Is that date okay for you?”
With her brassiere halfway fastened, Tana suddenly froze. “Surgery?”
Dr. Geroch looked at her in surprise. “Sure.” She flipped through the stack of papers on her clipboard, and pulled out a color printout, an MRI image of Tana’s abdomen. “Your appendectomy.”