Everyone took vitamins, of course. Reed slid the box of vitamin bottles out of its rack in the container bin and toted it to his desk. Four big bottles of five hundred each. Just one of the pills provided all the daily vitamin supplement a person required; carrying two thousand of them to the surface was typical mission overkill.
With a light pen Reed began to check the bar codes printed on the lids of each jar, like a supermarket clerk checking out groceries. Damned silly busywork, he grumbled to himself. Yet if the computer did not show a bottle-by-bottle check of the inventory, Vosnesensky would be up in arms. All mission tasks must be accomplished, as far as the Russian was concerned, no matter how trivial or boring.
Then a new thought struck him. If Jamie has his way and returns to the Grand Canyon he’ll probably want to take Joanna with him. She’s the mission biologist, after all. Damn him! Reed snarled silently. There’s got to be a way to get this insolent red man separated from the Brazilian princess. Let’s hope they banish him to orbit.
Pock! The same sound again, only fainter this time. What could it be? Reed asked himself as he unscrewed the first of the vitamin bottles. Might as well transfer them to the smaller bottles while I’ve got them out. Tony grumbled to himself about the efficiency experts who had planned the mission logistics; they had overlooked the fact that these giant-sized bottles did not fit in the galley shelves. He had to transfer the vitamin capsules by hand to smaller bottles that did. Utterly stupid nonsense.
Pock! Pock!
Reed jumped to his feet, knocking over the open bottle. Vitamin pills spilled across his desk, rolled onto the floor.
"Everyone into your suits!" Vosnesensky’s heavy voice roared through the dome. "At once! Into your hard suits! Now!"
Cosmonaut Leonid Tolbukhin was on duty in the command center of Mars 2 when the first pinging noise made him sit up rigidly in his chair. Cold sweat beaded across his upper lip.
My god, it must be me, he thought. I’m a Jonah, a jinx. First Konoye and now this.
But while his mind raced, his hands moved almost as fast. He flicked on the radar display and almost immediately, with the speed of a reflex action, he hit the alarm.
"Meteors! We’re running into a swarm of meteors!" he yelled into the ships’ intercom microphone, so excited that he said it in Russian.
Will Martin, the American geophysicist, happened to be at the comm console, in the middle of taping a long report back to Earth.
"What is it?" he shouted over the hooting of the alarm. "Speak English, dammit!"
"Meteors!" Tolbukhin shouted back. "Get into your hard suit at once!"
Vosnesensky was at the dome’s command center, locked in an earnest conversation with Mironov and Abell about the logistics of the upcoming traverse to Pavonis Mons, while ostensibly monitoring the scientists who were outside with Pete Connors. He had not heard the first soft warning sounds of meteoroids striking the dome’s exterior shell.
Both the dome and the orbiting spacecraft were double walled: the ships of metal, the dome of plastic. Although Mars’s atmosphere was almost vanishingly thin by terrestrial standards, it still offered enough resistance to incoming meteors to burn most of them to ashes long before they reached the ground.
The greatest danger, according to the mission planners, came from meteors plunging almost straight in from overhead: they would have the most energy and be most likely to survive the blazing heat of their atmospheric ride and reach the ground sizable enough to do damage. Meteors coming in from lower angles would have to traverse a longer path in the atmosphere, burning every centimeter of the way. Therefore the dome’s double walls were filled in along its top half with spongy plastic material that could absorb the energy of an impact.
Tolbukhin’s warning blared in the dome’s radio speakers, as well as throughout the orbiting ships.
Vosnesensky stopped in midword and bellowed, "Everyone into your suits! At once! Into your hard suits! Now!"
Only after he started running for the suit lockers by the airlock section did the Russian feel the fear that squeezed inside his chest like a cold fist.
Connors was the first to notice the tiny puff of dirt spouting out of the ground as if a rifle bullet had struck. The astronaut blinked, watching the dust settle slowly back to the ground, thinking, Good thing that didn’t hit any…
Another puff sprouted ten meters away.
"Jesus Christ!" he yelled into his helmet microphone. "Meteors! Everybody back to the dome! Double quick!"
All six of the geology and biology scientists were spread across several hundred meters of the rock-strewn plain, trying to survey in detail the depth of the permafrost layer beneath the ground. The mapping work was slow, since they were doing it on foot. All excursions in the rovers were on hold until the mission controllers decided exactly where the rovers would be allowed to go.
Jamie was holding a digging pole whose toothed bit end drilled into the ground. He jerked to attention at Connors’s shouted warning. The pole’s bit stopped as soon as his gloved hands released the control stud, and the pole leaned lopsidedly out of the hole in the ground.
Jamie took in the locations of the five other scientists with a swift glance. Connors was to his right, halfway between him and the dome’s airlock. Joanna was farther off, struggling with her corer.
"Now! Move it! Move it!" Connors was yelling so loud that it hurt Jamie’s ears. "Come on! Into the dome!"
Jamie angled off toward Joanna, watching the other hard-suited figures start into clumsy motion like a small herd of brightly colored hippos. A spurt of dust erupted near her, but she did not seem to notice. He ran as fast as he could toward her, feeling like a galumphing tortoise while he fiddled with the radio controls on his wrist to turn down the volume of Connors’s urgent voice.
He reached Joanna as she finally started to move toward the dome. Slowing to her pace, Jamie knew he could not speak with her because Connors was flooding the suit-to-suit frequency with his hollering. Instead, he reached out to touch her shoulder. He could not see her face through the tinted visor of her helmet, could not see how frightened she was. Then Jamie realized he himself was scared, sweating cold, innards shaking.
The ground was erupting into puffs of dust, as if a squad of riflemen had them under fire. Something banged at the back of his helmet, just a tap, really, but it startled him as if he’d been shot. He looked up and saw that the dome was dimpling here and there as meteoroids struck its surface. Oh my god, if one of them breaks through…
One did. Jamie saw the transparent fabric on the lower level of the dome pucker for an instant, and then a small geyser of spray erupted into the dry thin air, like a whale spouting.
"The dome’s punctured!" somebody screamed.
The hole spread into a growing rip as moisture-laden air geysered out into the Martian atmosphere and the plastic fabric of the dome began to sag noticeably.
After that first moment of near panic Vosnesensky turned coldly calm. While the others rushed for their suits, he veered aside and trotted around the inner periphery of the dome, checking to see if the repair patches were in their proper places. He had checked the patches only a day earlier, part of his regular inspection routine. But now he checked them again, while a patter of pock, pock sounds rained gently over his head, almost drowned out by the fearful voices of Toshima and the fliers as they struggled to don their hard suits.
He never saw the dome punctured. The meteoroid that punched through both layers of the plastic was a nearly microscopic grain of dust. But Vosnesensky heard a different sound, like a sudden gusting intake of breath, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s been stabbed in the chest.