They barely said a dozen words to one another. Mumbles. Grunts. Sighs that turned into gasping, labored breathing.
Jamie slid past them, the coffee mug in one hand, and forced himself to the cockpit. Sliding into the right-hand seat, he punched up the comm unit and put in a call to the dome.
Paul Abell’s face appeared on the screen. He was smiling — weakly, but smiling. His cheeks and chin looked freshly shaved, slightly red. His bulging frog’s eyes were clearer than Jamie remembered them.
"Good morning!" Abell was almost cheerful.
"How are you?" Jamie’s voice was a scratchy croak.
"Yang’s vitamin doses seem to be helping," Abell said brightly. "Got a good night’s sleep. I feel better this morning than I have in days. Not one hundred percent yet, but better."
"That’s good."
Abell pointedly did not ask how Jamie felt. He could see.
"Heard from the Russkies yet?"
"Who?"
"Mikhail and Ivshenko. They ought to be just about at the canyon’s edge by now."
"No. No contact yet."
"This morning, for sure," Abell said.
"This morning," Jamie echoed.
"Be careful now," Vosnesensky muttered. "The horizon is so close that you could become confused."
Ivshenko, driving the rover, shot him a dark glance. "Mikhail Andreivitch, I have had as many hours in the simulators and in training exercises as you, have I not? I drove this beast most of the night, did I not? Why do you constantly…"
"Stop!" Vosnesensky bellowed. Ivshenko tromped his booted foot on the brakes so hard that they would have both pitched into the canopy if Vosnesensky had not insisted that they wear the safety harnesses. Tony Reed, standing behind Vosnesensky’s seat, lunged into the chair back with a painful grunt.
The Grand Canyon of Mars stretched out in front of them, its rim a bare twenty meters from the rover’s nose. Ivshenko gaped, jaw slack, chest heaving.
"Good god!" Reed gasped.
"That is what I was trying to warn you about," Vosnesensky said calmly. "What appears at first to be the crest of another ridge is actually the edge of the precipice."
"You… you should have said so."
Vosnesensky chuffed out a weary sigh, like a teacher disappointed with a pupil.
The canyon was filled with mist, billowing gently in the morning sun, looking almost thick enough to walk on. From inside the cockpit they could not see the bottom of the canyon; it was far too deep for that even if the air had been perfectly clear. To their right and left the cliff walls marched off beyond the horizon, red rock battlements, rugged with untold eons of weathering, tall and proud. Looking straight across the canyon, Vosnesensky thought he could make out the jagged outline of the opposite wall, faint and wavering in the hazy distance. So far away.
"I don’t see the landslide," Reed said.
"Nor do I. We must have drifted off course during the night. I will take a navigational fix. Dmitri Iosifovitch, you contact the base and tell them we have reached the canyon — without falling into it."
Ivshenko muttered to himself as he leaned over slightly to reach the comm unit switches. He did not see the slight grin on his commander’s face.
Within a quarter hour they had pinpointed their location with a fix from one of the navigation satellites deployed around the planet and were on their way to the lip of the landslide, some five kilometers westward.
Vosnesensky felt almost relaxed as he rode in the right-hand seat. Ivshenko had driven most of the night, slept a few hours, and now was driving again. He seemed fresh; his reflexes were sharp. Mikhail himself felt little better than he had since the scurvy had hit him; he was still weak, still achy; he had barely slept at all during the night.
The body affects the mind, he said to himself as they creaked along at twenty kilometers per hour across the boulder-strewn red landscape. When the body hurts, the mind becomes tired, easily confused, quick to despair. I must remember that. I must keep my thinking clear, no matter how my body feels.
"I think I see it."
Ivshenko’s words snapped Vosnesensky out of his musings. He followed the pilot’s pointing finger with his eyes and saw, through the morning haze, what appeared to be a wide semicircle cut into the cliff edge, with a rusty-red pile of dirt slumping down from its rim toward the bottom of the canyon, far below.
"Yes, that must be it."
While Vosnesensky checked the navigational display, Ivshenko said, "You don’t expect to go down that slope, do you?"
"We have come to rescue the team in the other rover," Vosnesensky said. The nav screen showed that they were in the right area. The trapped rover was sitting roughly two thirds of the way down the ancient avalanche.
"Comrade cosmonaut," Ivshenko said, "what good would it do for us to trap ourselves alongside them?"
"What do you suggest?" Vosnesensky growled, feeling a sudden impatience with his cohort.
"I suggest," Ivshenko put an ironic emphasis on the verb, "that we stop at the lip of the canyon and let them walk to us. That is the safest thing to do."
"And if they are too weak to make it?"
The cosmonaut bit his lip. Vosnesensky waited for his answer, thinking, If he says that we should go back to the dome without going down there and getting them, I’ll throw him out the airlock without a suit.
"If they are too weak to make it," Ivshenko said slowly, "then I suppose we will have to go down on foot and help them."
"We?"
"Dr. Reed and myself," Ivshenko said. "You should remain here in the rover, Mikhail Andreivitch."
Vosnesensky felt his heart expand. He broke into a huge grin. "Well spoken, Dmitri Iosifovitch! Brave words! But I can think of something much better."
Tony Reed thought, I should hope so. No one’s going to get me to go out there!
SOL 40: NOON
Jamie turned the ridged little dial on the binoculars; the rippled expanse of sand swam into sharp focus.
"It must be an ancient crater that’s been filled in with dust," he said, as much to himself as the others clustered in the cockpit.
"Why doesn’t the wind blow the dust away?" Joanna asked.
He put the glasses down. She was sitting next to him, in the right-hand seat, her face pale, her hair tangled and matted. Her breath stank. Mine does too, Jamie told himself. Everybody’s does.
Connors, looking more ragged than ever, sat on the floor between the two seats. His coveralls were rumpled and dark with sweat stains. Ilona stood behind him, leaning wearily on the seat backs. She looked bedraggled too; like Joanna, she had not had the strength to brush her hair. Sick and weary as they were, though, they were all eager to catch the first glimpse of Vosnesensky’s rover.
"I don’t think there’s enough power in the wind to clean out the crater. The air’s too thin, even when it blows at two hundred knots. The crater must have steep walls. Probably made by a meteorite coming in from almost straight overhead."
"The wind can gradually fill up the crater with dust," Joanna surmised, "and once it is full it remains full."
"Right," said Jamie. We’re talking millions of years here, he added silently. Nothing goes quickly on Mars. Come back in a million years and the rover will still be sitting here, most likely.
He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again. If the oddly rippled sand represented the area of the crater, then it was more than a kilometer across. Jamie could see its boundary clearly, a wide circle where the little wavelets of red sand ended and the ground was more heavily littered with rocks and boulders.
He remembered arguing with Naguib about the frequency of such dust-filled craters. The Egyptian called them "ghost craters" and believed they peppered the landscape even where the ground looked relatively smooth. Jamie had disagreed. But Abdul was right; we’ve fallen into a ghost crater. I should have noticed the difference in the ground, Jamie berated himself. I should have avoided this area. If only I had been sharp enough…