"There they are!"
Joanna pointed eagerly, her wan face suddenly wreathed in a smile.
Following her extended arm, Jamie saw the rover nosing over the crest of the slope like a fat silver caterpillar with a big gleaming bulbous head inching their way.
"Greetings, fellow travelers!" Vosnesensky’s voice was harshly rasping in the control panel speaker. To the four of them it sounded like an angel’s sweet melody.
Jamie glanced down at the comm screen. The cosmonaut looked weak, strained, sweating as he sat at the controls of the second rover and guided it down the slope of the ancient landslide with excruciatingly deliberate, patient care. Tony Reed was hunched behind him, his face drawn, pale, nervous. Both men were in their coveralls.
Putting the binoculars to his eyes again, Jamie saw a figure in a brilliant red hard suit plodding slowly toward them on foot in front of the rover, poking at the ground in front of him with a long pole the way a blind man gropes along unfamiliar territory, the way a mountaineer feels his way across a snow-choked crevasse.
Ivshenko trailed a tether from his waist, connected to the nose of the rover, more than twenty meters behind him. The vehicle was inching along, but getting closer every moment. Trust Mikhail to use every safety precaution, Jamie thought. Does he think Ivshenko’s going to float away? For an absurd moment it looked as if the cosmonaut was towing the ponderous rover.
"They’re coming," Ilona said in a choked whisper. "They’re coming to save us."
"Three cheers for our side," said Connors weakly.
Jamie remained in the cockpit and watched their rescuers approaching. More than an hour went by as the rover trundled closer, agonizingly slow, with Ivshenko out front testing the ground. A blind man leading an elephant, Jamie thought.
"Now be careful," he said to the cosmonauts. "You see where the ground starts to break up into a series of little sand ripples?"
Vosnesensky’s image in the display screen nodded its head. Ivshenko said from inside his helmet, "Yes, it is about fifty meters in front of me."
"That’s where the crater rim is, I’m pretty sure," Jamie said. "It’s filled with this very loose sand, more like dust. You’ll have to take the rover around it. Otherwise you’ll get stuck too."
Vosnesensky was peering at it suspiciously. "It seems quite wide."
"I know. But you can work your way around it, can’t you?"
"Going down, perhaps. I wonder about going up again." Ivshenko’s voice said, "It might be best to stop the rover at the edge of the loose soil and let me go through the area on foot. Then we can connect a safety line and winch them across to our rover."
"Can all four of you get into your hard suits?" Vosnesensky asked.
"Yes," said Jamie. "I think so."
"I hesitate to risk getting the second rover stuck, too."
"I understand. We can get into suits and you can winch us across the soft stuff — if we can set up a line from your vehicle to ours."
"Very good. That is what we will do."
Dr. Li Chengdu had never in his life felt so hesitant about making a report. This could ruin everything, he knew. It will reflect poorly on my ability as a leader; it will devastate the mission control team. If the politicians and the media find out about it, it will destroy our chances for further missions to Mars.
Yet he had to report on the scurvy and the chain of events that had led to it. There was nothing else that Li could do except tell the facts to the men and women who directed the mission. There is no way to cover it up, Li realized. Nor would it be proper to do so. Even to think of a cover-up is criminal. No matter what affect this has on my career or the careers of others.
Scurvy. Everyone on the ground team nearly killed by scurvy because they had overlooked the fact that pure oxygen had deactivated their crucially needed vitamin C supply. The politicians will jump to the conclusion that the traverse team got stuck in their rover because the scurvy sapped their strength and their judgment. And now Vosnesensky, of all people, is disobeying orders and trying to rescue them.
Vosnesensky. Wait until the mission controllers sink their teeth into that morsel! What a mess. What a confounded, convoluted, unequivocal disaster.
Li knew he had to tell the facts to Kaliningrad. Still he hesitated.
Pacing his private cubicle in three long-legged strides, back and forth, back and forth, he passed his desktop computer a dozen times without even thinking of starting to file his report.
Even if I wanted to hide the facts it would be impossible. They will know soon enough that we are not evacuating the dome, as ordered. He agonized for hours. How to put the best face on this disaster. How to tell the news in a way that will not destroy any chance for future missions to Mars. How to admit my own inadequacy without ruining my chances for the future.
That is the important thing. How to tell this terrible news in a way that will not destroy our chances for the future. That is the vital thing.
Virtually all of the reports from the ground team were made orally and transcribed into hard copy automatically by the computers in the spacecraft and back at Kaliningrad. Li alone regularly wrote out his reports and transmitted them in written form. But what can I write now? What words can soften this news?
Like a caged cheetah he paced back and forth, seeking a way out and finding none. Finally, in an agony of reluctance, he sat at his little desk and began pecking on the computer keyboard with his long manicured fingers.
Dmitri Iosifovitch Ivshenko had the physique and the personality of the typical cosmonaut. Slight of build, lightning-fast reflexes, and enough youth to have survived being a fighter pilot and then a test pilot. Drinking all night, sobering up on oxygen in the morning, breakfasting on a cigarette and then throwing up behind the hangar before climbing into the cockpit of some supersonic jet. Yet once in the cockpit he became cool and calculating, capable of sizing up a situation in an instant and doing the right thing at precisely the right moment on a combination of instinct, training, and blindingly fast thought processes. He did not consider himself to be a bold pilot; the bold ones died young. Ivshenko was a cautious pilot who flew dangerous aircraft. When he transferred to the cosmonaut corps he was almost bored with the Newtonian predictability of each space mission.
He was not bored now. He was not particularly worried, either. Merely careful. No need to rush, he reminded himself as he cautiously poked his pole into the sandy ripples a meter in front of his boots. We are here to rescue those four wretches, not to get stuck alongside them.
Dust stirred up where he prodded the ground. The pole sank in a few centimeters, then seemed to hit firm soil. Ivshenko nodded inside his helmet and took a step forward, dragging his safety tether behind him.
"How is it?" Vosnesensky’s voice rasped in his earphones.
"Soft, like sand. Not good traction."
"Be very careful."
"I am always very careful, Mikhail Andreivitch."
"Then be doubly careful."
"Yes, sir, comrade group commander." Ivshenko chuckled to himself and took another step forward.
His foot slid out from under him. His body half turned as he grabbed at the pole with both hands but it too was sinking into the sand, suddenly the consistency of talcum. Clouds of pink dust billowed softly as Ivshenko felt himself slipping, sliding forward, his boots suddenly without purchase, sinking into a sea of soft red sand.