There was no answer, nor had he expected one. The quicker this part was over the better. They had been practicing the maneuver for weeks and he automatically took the position. Right arm straight forward ahead of him, left arm tight at his side. The matter transmitter screen grew like a great dark eye as the table rolled forward, until it was all he could see in front of him.
"Do it," he ordered, and they pushed smoothly against his feet.
Sliding. Hand wrist arm vanishing. Feeling nothing. A moment of recoil, of twisting pain, as his head went through, then he was looking at the coarse pebbles on the ground. He pushed aside the test cube and put his hand flat to break his fall. Then his other arm was through and his legs. Falling sideways in an easy roll his hip struck something hard.
Ben sat up, rubbing the sore spot and looked at the plastic container that he had landed on. Inside was a dead rat, rigid, wide-eyed, and frozen. A nice omen. He turned quickly away and went through the rest of the drill. The microphone was hanging in the same spot as on the mockup and he switched it on.
"Ben Duncan to control. Arrived okay. No problems." He should say more than that on this historical moment but his brain was empty of inspiration. He looked around at the low, dark hills, the crater nearby, the tiny, bright sun. There was nothing that really could be said.
"Send Otto through. Over and out."
He stood, brushing some dust from his side, and looked at the shining plate. Minutes passed before the loudspeaker rasped, the voice so distorted he had to strain for the meaning.
"We read you. Stand by for transmission. Thasler coming through."
Otto's hand appeared even before the voice ended. It took the radio waves nearly four minutes to reach Mars, but the matter transmission was almost instantaneous since it went through Bhattacharya space where time, as it is normally constituted, does not exist. Otto's arm dropped limply and Ben took him by the shoulders, a dead weight that he eased to the ground. Rolling him over Ben saw that his eyes were closed. But he seemed to be breathing regularly. He was probably unconscious. Transmission shock they called it. It wasn't uncommon. He should come to in a few minutes. Ben dragged him to one side and went back to the radio.
"Otto is here. Out cold but he okay. Send the junk through."
Then he waited. The wind made a thin whistling noise as it blew against his mask, and he felt the cold of it touching his cheeks. He did not mind: there was something almost reassuring that the wind could blow, the hard ground push against his feet, that the sun still shone. For all the evidence of his senses he could still he on Earth, perhaps on one of the high plateaus in Assam that he had so recently left. Consciously he knew that the sunshine here was half as strong as back on Earth. But he could remember cloudy, misty days with far less sun. Gravity? With all the equipment he was burdened with he was aware of no difference. Rounded, red hills in the distance, thin bluish clouds drifting across the sun. A remote corner of Earth, that's all it was. He could not grip the reality of Mars. If he had crossed space in a ship, taken weeks or months, he would have believed it. But a few minutes before he had been standing on Earth. He scuffed at the gravel with his boot and saw the second plastic tube that had been sent through with the struggling rat inside.
It was cold, freezing to death. It would scratch pathetically at the containing walls, then huddle up and shiver. And it had its mouth open, gasping. It appeared to have an even chance of running out of air or freezing. Just a laboratory animal; thousands like it died every day in the cause of science. On Earth. But this one was here, perhaps the only other living thing on the planet. Ben knelt and twisted the lid off the tube.
The end was quicker than he had thought possible. The rat took one breath of the Martian air, gave a convulsive contraction of its entire body — and died. Ben had not thought it would be like that. Of course he had been told on Earth that the great danger of the Martian atmosphere was its complete dryness, containing only an unmeasurable trace of water vapor. They had said that inhaling it would scorch the mucous membranes in the nose, throat, and lungs so fiercely that it would be the same as breathing concentrated sulphuric acid. This had seemed a little preposterous. Then. The rat's staring dark eye filmed as it froze. Ben straightened up and pushed his face mask tighter against his face. Then went to check Otto, still unconscious, to make sure his was correctly in place, too.
No, this was not Earth. He could believe it now.
"Attention please," the loudspeaker chattered. "Will you he able to handle equipment yourself? Is Thasler still unconscious? Loads were estimated for two-man manipulation. Report."
Ben grabbed the microphone.
"God damn you — send that stuff through! By the time you get this message twelve minutes will have been shot. Send it! If anything gets broken you can send replacements. We're alone here, can you understand that, with just the oxygen we have and nothing else, stuck at the other end of a one-way door a couple of hundred million miles from Earth. Send everything — now! Send it!"
Ben paced up and down, hammering his fist into his palm, kicking the test blocks and the rat sarcophagus to one side. The fools! He looked at Otto who seemed to be enjoying his rest. A wonderful beginning. He dragged the man to one side where he wouldn't get stepped on. He came back to the screen just as the end of a canister began to emerge.
"And about time!"
Grabbing the end he ran forward until the other end appeared and clanged to the ground. OXYGEN — FOOD the painted letters on it read. Fine. He kicked it rolling to one side and jumped for the next one.
The demand regulator on his back was clicking regularly, feeding him an almost steady flow of pure oxygen, and his head was swimming with fatigue. The ground all about was littered with containers, tubes, and bundles of all lengths, but with the same diameter. Otto tapped him on the shoulder and he dropped the case he was dragging.
"I passed out, I'm sorry. Is anything—"
"Shut up and grab that tube that's jamming up in front of the screen."
One, two more, then Ben looked on and blinked as a shining dural plate fell from the screen and clattered to the ground. He bent over and saw that someone had lettered on it with red grease pencil.
"SUGGEST YOU CHECK OXYGEN TANK LEVEL. ERECT SHELTER. CHANGE TANKS."
"Someone is thinking now," Ben muttered and jerked his thumb at the tank on his back. "What does it read?"
"Just a quarter left."
"They're right. Erecting the shelter gets priority."
Otto rooted about among the canisters while Ben stretched out the long and unwieldy fabric sausage The fastenings snapped open easily and he spread it out flat just as he had done in training. Only during training he had not hovered on the edge of exhaustion, fighting the heavy shelter material with clumsy gloves. It was finally done and he looked up to see Otto fastening a tank to an inlet tube with the quick fastening attachment.
"What the hell do you think you are doing?" Ben said, the words rasping in his dry throat. He hit Otto on the shoulder, knocking him sprawling.
Otto just lay there, wide-eyed and silent, as though he thought Ben had gone mad. Shaking with anger Ben pointed to the connection.
"Use your eyes. Stay alert. Or you will kill us both. You were attaching a red pipe to a green tank."
"I'm sorry… I didn't notice—"
"Of course you didn't, you stupid slob. But you have to here. Red is oxygen, what we breathe and what inflates the shelter. Green is the insulating gas that goes into the double wall. Not poisonous, but just as deadly because we can't breathe it."