“It’s an old mnemonic for Mohs scale of mineral hardness. If he’d really been with the US Geological Survey, he’d have known it.”
We continued on. Soon enough, Pickover gestured at the terrain in front of us. “Voilà!”
I didn’t see what he was referring to. “Yes?”
He sounded disappointed in me. “Right there—see? A circle, forty meters in diameter?”
I tried to make it out, and—
Ah. It was almost exactly the same ruddy color as the surrounding terrain and it was covered with dust—but nothing else; it lacked the usual litter of small rocks, and had no little craters marring its surface.
I said, “How do we get at the descent stage?”
“Well, it can’t be very far down; the permafrost gives way to bedrock at a depth not much greater than the height of the descent stage, and its engine couldn’t blast through that. Its top is probably just below the surface.”
“Okay,” I said.
“There were two hatches in the descent stage,” Rory said. “One was on the outside of the hull for getting out onto the surface, and the other was on top, for connecting to the ascent stage. The upper access hatch should be right in the center of the circle.” He’d brought along his geological equipment, including a big pickax. “The descent stage is circular in cross-section, and about ten meters wide.” After taking a bead on a couple of distinctive rocks outside the circle, he assuredly made his way to its exact center.
I followed behind him. If I understood what Pickover had said, this whole round area had briefly been a massive quagmire of soil and water twenty mears ago. The footing didn’t seem any different from the rest of the plain.
He swung his pickax. The point only went in maybe ten centimeters before it clanged against something metallic. Pickover dropped to his robotic knees and started digging into the permafrost with his bare hands. I wasn’t strong enough to be of any use, so I simply watched, gloved hands on my surface suit’s hips.
It took him a few minutes to expose a circular metal hatch about eighty centimeters wide. It was slightly convex and had a wheel set into its center. Pickover gestured at it. “Be my guest, Alex.” I gripped the wheel with both of my gloved hands and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge; it was either locked from the other side, or the works were gummed up with Martian dust.
Pickover loomed in and grabbed the wheel with his naked fingers. It was odd watching a man exert himself without, you know, visibly exerting himself. He didn’t grunt or screw up his face; he just calmly did what I’d been incapable of doing: turning the wheel. He spun it through 180 degrees, then pulled on it to swing the hatch open.
It was dark inside, but a ladder with rungs that curved to match the circumference of the opening descended into the ship. He scrambled down into the blackness. I was startled a moment later when light started coming up at me. I hadn’t seen him take a flashlight with him, and—
No. It wasn’t portable lighting; it was the spacecraft’s internal system. Well, excimer batteries did hold charges for a long time…
I looked around for something to keep the hatch from closing. There wasn’t anything suitable at hand but, then again, the Martian zephyrs couldn’t possibly blow it shut. I made my way down the ladder.
The interior of the descent stage was maybe five meters tall, with that height divided into two levels. The ladder continued all the way down to the bottom, which is where Pickover was, so I got off on the upper floor and started looking around. This floor was a disk divided into six pie-shaped wedges.
The first wedge contained cupboards and lockers filled with mining equipment and medical supplies. I checked for the map, but it wasn’t there.
The second wedge—moving to the right—was a small galley, but the cupboards here were bare; well, running out of chow was one of the reasons their expedition would have come to an end.
Wedge three was a sleeping compartment with a wide foam mattress on the floor. I looked around, but, again, no map.
Wedge four was a toilet of a kind I had no idea how to use.
Wedge five was a little work area, with tools for cleaning fossils, much like the stuff I’d seen at Ernie’s shop or in Rory’s apartment.
I’d thought wedge six might be the other stateroom, but I guess that was down below; it was a storage room. A white space suit, streaked with Martian dust, was slumped way over on a chair. I tried to pick it up to get at the cabinets behind it, and—
Oh, my God! “Rory!” I shouted. “Up here!”
I felt the deck plates vibrate as he scrambled up the ladder from below. He was soon standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.
“It’s not empty,” I said, pointing at the space suit. “There’s a body inside.”
The suit was an old-fashioned one, with a gold-mirror-finish helmet visor that had been flipped down. There was no nameplate on the suit, nor any national flag or logo. “It must be Willem Van Dyke,” I said. “He’d have known they were planning to bury the third lander, maybe. When he came here to plant the land mines, he must have taken refuge down here—maybe there was a dust storm, or something?”
Rory loomed in and looked for the release that would let him flip up the visor to expose—what? Rotted flesh? A skull? I didn’t know what to expect after all these years. He found the release, and—
Rory gasped and staggered backward. I peered at the face—which seemed to be remarkably intact. The eyes were closed, and the chestnut hair was disheveled—but it was all still attached to the head. True, the skin was an ashen shade, but I’d seen people who were alive with worse complexions.
“My… God,” said Rory. He was now holding on to a ledge jutting from the wall. “My God.”
“What?” I said.
Rory’s mechanical eyes were wide. “That’s not Willem Van Dyke.”
“Then who is it?”
Rory shook his head slightly, as if he himself couldn’t believe what he was saying. “It’s Denny O’Reilly.”
I looked back at the corpse. “But—but he died on re-entering Earth’s atmosphere…”
Rory’s voice became a little sharp. “That’s O’Reilly, I tell you.”
“You mean… he was marooned here?”
“Apparently.”
“By Simon Weingarten?”
“It sure looks that way.” Rory pointed at a thick cable going from a red connector on the front of the suit to a similar connector on one of the straight walls. “He was plugged into the ship’s life-support system.”
“Surely they weren’t on bottled air all the time they were on Mars,” I said. “Shouldn’t he have been able to recycle it, or manufacture more?”
“Yes,” said Pickover. “For a time. The equipment was rated for months of use, but it would have given out at some point.” He shook his head. “Poor blighter.”
I don’t think I’d ever actually heard anyone say that before, but it certainly applied here. It must have been terrible for O’Reilly: abandoned alone for weeks, or maybe even months, on Mars, and then finally asphyxiating.
Suddenly there was a great clang audible even via the thin Martian air as—
Jesus!
—as the hatch overhead came crashing shut.
I looked up and saw the wheeled locking mechanism on this side of the hatch rotating. We were being sealed inside the same metal coffin Denny O’Reilly had been left in all those years ago.
TWENTY-FOUR
Iscrambled for the ladder—as much as one could scramble in a surface suit—but Dr. Pickover, unencumbered by such a thing, beat me to it. Probably just as well; he was stronger than me.