And then there was Tony. Something about the English physician worried Jamie. As the weeks had gone by Tony seemed to become — what? How to describe it? Sullen. Withdrawn. Maybe I’m just imagining it, Jamie thought. Tony looked the same: dapper, handsome, elegant even in project-issued coveralls. But he’s not acting quite the same as when we first landed. He’s quieter, he doesn’t talk as much, and when he does the old zing has gone out of him. Something’s wrong. Tony’s become distant. Cold. Almost hostile.
Has Ilona been riding him again about his not going outside? Then he shook his head. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just imagining it. I’m so busy preparing everything for this traverse I just haven’t had much time to spend with Tony. Or maybe he doesn’t feel well.
"Do you need help?"
Jamie looked up to see Vosnesensky standing before him, a relaxed smile on his face. Mikhail shaved every morning, yet his dark beard was never completely erased.
"Thanks. I think I can manage."
Jamie had put on the tubed thermal undergarment when he had dressed in his own cubicle. Now he was worming his legs into the bottom half of his hard suit.
"Why are you going outside?" Vosnesensky asked, beginning to peel off his own coveralls. They had faded considerably from their original coral red.
"I haven’t been out in more than a week," Jamie said. "All this planning for the traverse has turned me into an apparatchik."
"That is the price you must pay for leadership." Vosnesensky was grinning; he obviously meant it as a joke. Down to his briefs, he reached into his locker for his thermal undergarment.
"Well," Jamie half grunted as he tugged on his boots, "this leader is going to take his free hour this morning to just walk around the dome to admire the scenery. And think."
The old morose look came back into Vosnesensky’s eyes. "You know that you are not allowed to go outside by yourself."
"Just a walk around the dome, Mikhail."
"It is not allowed."
"I need some time by myself."
"I am still the commander here," the Russian said, fastening the front of his thermal undergarment. He looked like a fireplug wrapped in overcooked spaghetti.
Still sitting on the bench, Jamie smiled up at him. "Yes, I know you’re in charge, Mikhail. And you’re right, the mission regulations say no one is allowed outside by themselves. Would you be kind enough to come out with me?"
The Russian grinned broadly. "Me? The group commander! You expect a man as busy as I am to drop everything merely to take a walk with you?"
"I would appreciate it if you did."
Leaning his butt against the locker to pull on the stiff metal leggings of his pressure suit, Vosnesensky bantered, "The group commander is much too important a person to go strolling out in the desert on the whim of one of his underlings. Much too important."
Jamie got to his feet and stepped to the rack where the torso of his sky-blue suit hung empty and slack-armed, like a headless, legless display of armor.
"However," Vosnesensky said, raising a stubby finger in the air, "as one friend to another, I will be happy to go outside with you."
Jamie wriggled into the torso, popped his head up through the neck ring, and grinned back at the Russian. "As one friend to another, thanks."
"But only for the one hour," Vosnesensky said, more seriously. "We all have a busy morning ahead of us."
"Right."
In a few minutes more they were fully sealed into their suits. They checked each other’s backpacks, called in to Mironov, who was at the monitoring console for the morning, and entered the airlock.
It was not until they stepped out onto the dusty red ground and Jamie looked up at the pink sky of Mars once again that he remembered that the color of his suit was not the color of the sky here; the nearest blue sky was more than a hundred fifty million kilometers from where he stood.
With Vosnesensky following a few paces behind, Jamie walked slowly around the dome’s curving flank, out to the side where he could not see the landing vehicles and the litter of equipment and instruments surrounding them. This was his favorite vista, empty desert as far as the disturbingly close horizon, a wrinkled red line of cliffs out in the distance.
He blinked his eyes once and the view he saw was New Mexico, with scraggly thorn bushes and patches of scrub grass scattered across the sand and rocks. Another blink and it was Mars again, barren and cold.
Were you alive once? Jamie asked the world on which he stood. Will we find the spirits of your dead in the canyon? Are we the first to cross the gulf between us, or did your ancestors reach our world eons ago? Am I returning home?
The softly keening wind gave Jamie no answer. The spirits of Mars, if there were any, kept their secrets to themselves.
Jamie gave a heartfelt sigh. All right, then. I’ll have to go out and find you. I’ll have to see for myself what the truth is.
Finally he turned and smiled at the fire-engine red suit of Vosnesensky, even though he knew the Russian could not see his face through the tinted visor.
"All right, Mikhail. Let’s go back inside."
"That is all you want?"
"You were right. There’s a lot to do. We’d better go to work now."
Jamie could sense the Russian trying to shrug inside his hard suit. As they plodded back toward the airlock Jamie tried to remember the details of his dream. Something about school, something that bothered him. He put it down to anxiety and forgot about it.
Tony Reed had dreamed, too.
The English physician had gone straight from his sleeping cubicle to his infirmary, padding along the hard plastic flooring in a pair of woolen socks and nothing else except a frayed terrycloth robe of royal blue with the seal of his father’s club sewn on its left breast.
Reed could not recall his dream, merely the fact that he had awakened in a cold sweat, thankful that the visions that had haunted his sleep had winked out like the picture on a television tube the instant his eyes had snapped open. He carefully shut the accordion-fold door of the infirmary and began preparing his morning pick-me-up.
"I love coffee, I love tea," he sang tunelessly to himself in a sub-vocalized whisper. "But I love you best of all."
The perfect morning drink. Enough amphetamine to start the day brightly, but not so much that it’s harmful. Or noticeable. A touch of this and a touch of that. Just the thing to start another day on Mars.
Blasted Mars. Dangerous Mars. Dull, bleak, dead Mars.
Reed held the small plastic beaker up to the light, made certain that the liquid in it was exactly at the level it should be, then quaffed it down with relish.
There! Now, by the time I finish my morning ablutions my hands will be steady enough for shaving.
He was the last to enter the wardroom that morning. No one remained there except Monique and Ilona.
"All the bees out being busy, I see," Reed said brightly as he headed for the freezer.
"I must go too," Ilona said, dabbing her lips as she got up from the table.
She took her tray to the recycling slot while Reed slid his into the microwave oven.
"Will you miss me?" he asked Ilona, low enough so that Monique could not hear.
Ilona looked almost surprised. "I will see you every day, when we make our medical report."
"That’s not quite the same as being together, is it?"
She gave him a haughty smile. "We haven’t been together like that since we landed here."
"Yes. A pity, too."
"Do you miss me?"
"Certainly."
"But I thought it was Joanna you were interested in."
Reed looked into her tawny eyes. "Ah, that was merely a pastime. A game."