"Voice check." Mironov’s boyish tenor in his earphones startled Jamie. He looked around and saw that his shadow stretched long across the ground. The sun was getting close to the horizon.
"Patel here."
The rover was parked a hundred meters or so down the slope, between a meteor crater twice its size and a zigzag fissure that might once have been a lava vent. You were right, Rava, Jamie said silently. These volcanoes have so much to tell us, and we won’t be here long enough to even begin to understand their story.
"Waterman okay," Jamie said. The voice checks were standard safety procedure when the scientists were out of visual range of the astronaut or cosmonaut in charge of the team. In this rough ground, Mironov could not possibly keep all three of his wandering teammates in sight.
There was a long silence.
"Naguib?" Mironov’s voice sounded sharp in Jamie’s earphones. "Dr. al-Naguib, voice check please."
No answer.
"Dr. al-Naguib?"
"He was over by the fissure there." Patel pointed further upslope. "Perhaps the terrain is blocking his radio transmission."
Jamie heard low guttural muttering, Mironov cursing in Russian. Following the outstretched arm of Patel’s yellow suit, Jamie called into his helmet microphone, "Let’s take a look, Rava. Maybe he’s in trouble."
"No, I do not believe so…"
"Stay where you are. It’s my responsibility to find him," Mironov shouted. "I don’t want two of you missing."
But Jamie was already striding upslope as fast as he could in the hard suit. The slope was easy and his boots gave him good traction, but the rough ground was treacherous.
"Rava," he called, "where did you see him last?"
The butter-yellow suit had not moved. "To your right," Patel’s voice replied. "Perhaps twenty or thirty meters farther up."
Jamie worked his way around a conical pit, a meteor strike that looked shining new compared to the more weathered craters dotting the ground. He saw a fissure snaking across the black rock, wide enough for a man to fall into. How deep?
Very, he saw, as he bent awkwardly to peer into it. Black and deep as hell. He turned on his helmet lamp, but the beam shone only feebly into the steep crevasse.
"Dr. Naguib?" he called.
Still no reply. If he’s stuck inside this fissure he ought to be able to hear my radio signal, Jamie said to himself. If he’s conscious. If he’s alive.
"Wait where you are!" Mironov called. "I am coming. I have the directional tinder."
Jamie had to turn completely around to see the Russian bounding toward him in his fire-engine suit, a black box the size of a personal television set in one gloved hand. Patel was still frozen where he stood; his only motion had been to let his arm relax down.
A lot of good the directional finder will do, Jamie thought. If Naguib can’t hear us and we can’t hear him, there’s no radio signal for the directional finder to zero in on.
"He must be on the other side of this crevasse," Jamie called to Mironov, unconsciously raising his voice, as if he had to shout to cover the distance between them.
Before Mironov could reply, Jamie took a few steps backward, then ran up and jumped across the fissure. In the low gravity it was easy, even with the cumbersome suit weighing him down.
"Wait!" Mironov bellowed. "I order you to wait!"
Jamie took a few more steps forward, swiveling his gaze back and forth as much as the helmet would allow. He’s up here somewhere. Got to be. Out of our line of sight. Out of radio contact. That means…
The uneven ground seemed to stop suddenly off to the left, as if it dropped away steeply. Jamie headed that way while Mironov’s puffing breath panted in his earphones.
"This way, I think," Jamie called, heading for the break. It was a ravine, he saw. Pretty steep.
And there Naguib lay, crumpled facedown at the bottom of a ten-meter drop. The ravine was roughly twenty meters across, a ragged irregular trench carved into the solid basalt. Naguib’s deep-green hard suit sprawled at its bottom like a broken, discarded toy, legs spraddled, unmoving.
"He’s here!" Jamie shouted, turning enough to see Mironov sailing across the crevasse. "Come on. We’ll need a rope, a line."
Gingerly, Jamie started down the steep side of the crevasse. It was all in shadow, with the sun dropping toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see rough places to clutch and precarious footholds.
"Go back to the rover and get the climbing winch," he heard Mironov call to Patel. The radio voice was noticeably dimmed once Jamie’s helmet dropped below the rim of the ravine.
It seemed to take an hour to work his way down to the Egyptian. It was dark down at the bottom; he needed his helmet lamp to see the final few meters.
In his earphones, though, he heard Naguib breathing raggedly. He’s alive. His suit hasn’t ruptured.
Finally he reached the geophysicist’s side. The backpack was badly dented. In the light of Jamie’s helmet lamp it was difficult to see how serious the damage might be.
"Is he alive?" Mironov’s voice was so loud it made Jamie wince.
"Yes. We’ll need a line to haul him up."
"On the way."
Slowly, tenderly, Jamie turned Naguib onto his back. Damned helmet’s banged up too, he saw. He peered into the visor, wiped at the red sand that had smudged it. Naguib’s eyes were fluttering. His face seemed covered with blood. He coughed.
Jamie checked the backpack monitoring gauges on Naguib’s wrist. Christ, he’s out of air! He must be breathing his own fumes in there.
Quickly, with the automatic reactions bred by long hours of training, Jamie reached to the side of his own backpack and yanked out the emergency air hose. He looked at the telltales on his own wrist. Not much to spare; we’ve all been out so damned long the regenerator filters are just about tapped out.
Plugging the free end of the hose into the emergency port in Naguib’s metal ring collar, he thumbed the release and let air flow from his own tank into Naguib’s battered helmet.
The Egyptian took in a deep, sighing breath, his whole body arching slightly. Then he coughed.
"Easy," Jamie said. "Easy. Take it easy and everything will be all right."
Coughing like a man who had been underwater too long, Naguib managed to ask weakly, "Waterman? You?"
"Yes. Alex and Rava are rigging the winch. We’ll have you out of here in a few minutes."
"I… slipped. Going down… the rock gave way and I started to fall."
"Can you sit up?"
"I think so."
Gently Jamie helped him up to a sitting position. With the hard suit it was like bending a length of stiff plastic pipe.
"How do you feel?" Jamie could not hear Mironov or Patel; he guessed that they had switched to another radio frequency.
"I think my nose is broken. I can’t breathe through it."
"Ribs? Arms, legs?"
Naguib was silent a moment, then, "Everything else seems to be in order. I think I can stand now."
"Not yet. Just relax." Looking up, Jamie saw that the sliver of sky above the ravine was still bright. There was still some daylight up there, although night could enfold them in a matter of minutes, he knew.
Don’t want to be out here with an injured man in the dark, he told himself, tapping on the control keys of his radio unit. His earphones erupted with Mironov’s snarling, growling Russian as he struggled to get the winch in place.
"Alex," he called. The cosmonaut’s voice cut off immediately, although Jamie heard him panting in his earphones. "Dr. Naguib seems to be okay, except that he might have broken his nose in the fall he took. His regenerator is ruptured, though. I’m sharing air with him."
Silence. Then Patel’s voice, high-pitched, frightened. "We do not have very much air left in any of our regenerators. We have been out all afternoon."