"Where’s these mists you saw?" Connors asked. "Everything looks clear as a bell now."
"I don’t know. Maybe they’ll come up later."
"Funny thing about haze. From one angle everything can look clear, but if you’re coming in from a different angle, with the sun in a different position, the haze can cover up everything, look like a smoke screen."
But there was no haze at all now. Jamie felt a tendril of fear worming through his mind. Maybe the haze Mikhail and I saw was a rare phenomenon, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe I’ve dragged us out here to chase a ghost that doesn’t exist.
The slope was strewn with rocks and pebbles, though nothing as big as the boulders they had encountered up on the surface. Jamie could not see any accumulations of dust piled against the bigger rocks. Either the wind doesn’t blow down here, he reasoned, or it blows hard enough to carry away any dust that’s accumulated.
The rover’s cleated metal wheels each had its own independent electric motor driving it, which gave the vehicle the best possible traction. Even so, now and again Jamie felt the ground sliding out from under them, heard a wheel motor whine suddenly before adjusting to the loose gravel beneath it.
Connors was muttering continuously under his breath, so low that even as close as he was Jamie could not tell if the astronaut was cursing or praying. Maybe some of both, he thought.
They passed the one geological probe that had landed on the slide. Its stubby white body stood out against the reddish ground and rocks like a garish advertising sign in the middle of the Sahara. Sure enough, the ground around the probe was firm and easy to drive across, its slope considerably flatter than the area they had just come through.
"Looks easier up ahead," Connors said.
Jamie saw that the ground was flatter and smoother. No craters in sight.
"Good," he said through gritted teeth.
A shadow flicked across the cockpit just as Ilona cried out, "Look!"
One of the RPVs flitted past them, low enough for Jamie to make out the glittering eyes of the camera lenses lining its belly. High above, he knew, the other RPV was soaring, watching the entire general area, piloted by Paul Abell. The low one scouted the terrain ahead. Mironov, at its controls, reported what he saw to Connors minute by minute through the earphone clamped to the side of his head.
"Should be getting to the end of it soon," Connors muttered, whether to Mironov or to the rest of them in the rover Jamie could not tell.
Just then the rover skidded, fishtailing in the inexorable slow motion of a nightmare, the forward section suddenly being dragged almost sideways by the jackknifing of the heavier middle and rear segments. Wheel motors screeched and something made a loud thumping noise. They bounced and jolted, Connors jamming the wheel hard over first one way, then the other.
"Hang on!"
Jamie braced his booted feet and started to reach out his hands to plant them on the control panel. The rover banged into another rock, slewed at a crazy angle, and finally crunched to a stop.
For long moments nothing could be heard inside the cockpit except the frightened gasping of four sweat-soaked people and the creaking and pinging of overheated metal.
Connors swallowed so hard they could all hear it. Then he said, "Must have been an old crater filled in with loose rubble."
"Or dust," Jamie heard himself say in a hollow voice.
"Felt more like sand, sort of."
"Are we stuck?"
Connors shook his head. "Might have to detach this section from the other two, but I think we can make it."
"Without the fuel tank and the lab?" Ilona asked.
"Lemme try first…"
As gently as a mother caressing her baby Connors touched his toe to the accelerator pedal. The electric motors hummed in a low register. Jamie felt the rover shudder, inch forward ever so slightly.
"Gotta get all three sections straightened out or we’ll start sliding again," Connors muttered. "Like driving a semi rig…"
Slowly, slowly they crawled. The astronaut’s long, serious face gradually evolved a tentative little smile. The electric motors whined to a higher pitch, the vehicle moved forward more assuredly, and Connors’s smile widened until they were rolling confidently and all his gleaming teeth were showing.
"Gracia a dios," came Joanna’s breathless voice from behind them.
Another few bumps, little ones, and Jamie saw that they were on level ground.
"That’s it," Connors said happily. "We’re on the canyon floor."
"Good work," said Jamie.
"Had a bad minute or two back there."
"Tell me about it!"
Their plan was to stop at the base of the landslide, go outside and take rock and soil samples, then traverse along the north face of the canyon cliffs until nightfall. They would take more samples first thing in the morning, then move forward again until they came to where Jamie had seen his "village." There they would see if they could climb up to the cleft where the rock formation stood. At the very least they could take more pictures of it and try to get a spectral analysis of the formation remotely, by using a laser to burn off a tiny amount of rock and photographing the spectrum of the cloud of gas that it gave off.
"I will take this first EVA with you," said Joanna, after they had eaten a quick cold meal.
Jamie was at the airlock hatch at the back end of the rover’s command module. Connors had returned to the cockpit to check all systems and make his report to Vosnesensky.
"Ilona’s on the schedule," he said.
"She does not feel well," Joanna replied.
Jamie glanced at Ilona. She was sitting on the edge of the folded-up bunk, pale and visibly trembling.
Jamie’s own guts were still churning and he felt sweaty from the harrowing descent down the landslide. But Ilona looked really sick.
"Okay," he said to Joanna. "Suit up."
Making his way back to the midsection, Jamie leaned over Ilona. She looked up at him. Her eyes were watery, her face covered with a sheen of perspiration.
"Why don’t you go up front and ask Pete to let you talk with Tony? I think you need medical attention."
"I’ll be all right," she said, her voice weak. "I feel foolish."
"Call Tony; get his advice."
She nodded.
Jamie made his way back to the airlock. His own legs felt wobbly, achy. He put it down to the tension of the descent. Christ, I hope we’re not all coming down with something. If any one of us has the flu, we’ll all get it and that’ll be the end of this excursion.
Joanna was halfway into her hard suit. Jamie began the laborious task of getting into his. It seemed to take an hour, but finally they were both suited up, backpacks connected, helmet visors fastened down. Connors came back into the airlock and checked them both. It felt unbearably crowded with three of them in there, even though Connors was in his coveralls.
"Stay within sight of the rover," the astronaut warned. "I’ll be watching you from the cockpit, once I get my suit on."
Standard procedure. There must always be a backup person fully suited and ready to go out at an instant’s notice in case of an emergency. It was bending the rules to have scientists go outside without an astronaut with them, but the change in procedure had been okayed by Kaliningrad — for this traverse only.
"We won’t be out long," Jamie said. "Looks like plenty of rocks strewn all around here. Joanna can do the collecting while I dig a couple of boreholes."
"Just take it easy and don’t strain yourselves," Connors said.
It was not until the astronaut had left the airlock that Jamie realized that Connors, too, had been sweating. As the airlock cycled down and the outer hatch popped open, Jamie wondered how Pete could be so absolutely cool at the wheel of the rover and perspiring now that they were safely on the canyon floor.