All afternoon the crawler traversed the plain, and the sky deepened from dark purple to utter black, and the untwinkling stars, which on Mars are visible even by day, became more brilliant with the passing hours, and Phobos came streaking by, and then came little hovering Deimos; and Oxenshuer, wandering around the ship, took readings on this and that and watched his screen and listened to Dave Vogel’s chatter; and Mission Control offered a comment every little while. And during these hours the Martian temperature began its nightly slide down the centigrade ladder. A thousand kilometers away, an inversion of thermal gradients unexpectedly developed, creating fierce currents in the tenuous Martian atmosphere, ripping gouts of red sand loose from the hills, driving wild scarlet clouds eastward toward the Gulliver site. As the sandstorm increased in intensity, the scanner satellites in orbit around Mars detected it and relayed pictures of it to Earth, and after the normal transmission lag it was duly noted at Mission Control as a potential hazard to the men in the crawler, but somehow—the NASA hearings did not succeed in fixing blame for this inexplicable communications failure—no one passed the necessary warning along to the three astronauts on Mars. Two hours after he had finished his solitary dinner aboard the ship, Oxenshuer heard Vogel say, “Okay, Johnny, we’ve finally reached the Gulliver site, and as soon as we have our lighting system set up we’ll get out and see what the hell we have here.” Then the sandstorm struck in full fury. Oxenshuer heard nothing more from either of his companions.
Making camp for the night, he took first from his pack his operations beacon, one of his NASA souvenirs. By the sleek instrument’s cool, inexhaustible green light he laid out his bedroll in the flattest, least pebbly place he could find; then, discovering himself far from sleepy, Oxenshuer set about assembling his solar still. Although he had no idea how long he would stay in the desert—a week, a month, a year, forever—he had brought perhaps a month’s supply of food concentrates with him, but no water other than a single canteen’s worth, to tide him through thirst on this first night. He could not count on finding wells or streams here, any more than he had on Mars, and, unlike the kangaroo rats, capable of living indefinitely on nothing but dried seeds, producing water metabolically by the oxidation of carbohydrates, he would not be able to dispense entirely with fresh water. But the solar still would see him through.
He began to dig.
Methodically he shaped a conical hole a meter in diameter, half a meter deep, and put a wide-mouthed two-liter jug at its deepest point. He collected pieces of cactus, breaking off slabs of prickly pear but ignoring the stiletto-spined chollas, and placed these along the slopes of the hole. Then he lined the hole with a sheet of clear plastic film, weighted by rocks in such a way that the plastic came in contact with the soil only at the hole’s rim and hung suspended a few centi-meters above the cactus pieces and the jug. The job took him twenty minutes. Solar energy would do the rest: as sunlight passed through the plastic into the soil and the plant material, water would evaporate, condense in droplets on the underside of the plastic, and trickle into the jug. With cactus as juicy as this, he might be able to count on a liter a day of sweet water out of each hole he dug. The still was emergency gear developed for use on Mars; it hadn’t done anyone any good there, but Oxenshuer had no fears of running dry in this far more hospitable desert.
Enough. He shucked his pants and crawled into his sleeping bag. At last he was where he wanted to be: enclosed, protected, yet at the same time alone, unsurrounded, cut off from his past in a world of dryness.
He could not yet sleep; his mind ticked too actively. Images out of the last few years floated insistently through it and had to be purged, one by one. To begin with, his wife’s face. (Wife? I have no wife. Not now.) He was having difficulty remembering Lenore’s features, the shape of her nose, the turn of her lips, but a general sense of her existence still burdened him. How long had they been married? Eleven years, was it? Twelve? The anniversary? March 30, 31? He was sure he had loved her once. What had happened? Why had he recoiled from her touch?
—No, please, don’t do that. I don’t want to yet.
—You’ve been home three months, John.
Her sad green eyes. Her tender smile. A stranger, now. His ex-wife’s face turned to mist and the mist congealed into the face of Claire Vogel. A sharper image: dark glittering eyes, the narrow mouth, thin cheeks framed by loose streamers of unbound black hair. The widow Vogel, dignified in her grief, trying to console him.
—I’m sorry, Claire. They just disappeared, is all. There wasn’t anything I could do.
—John, John, it wasn’t your fault. Don’t let it get you like this.
—I couldn’t even find the bodies. I wanted to look for them, but it was all sand everywhere, sand, dust, the craters, confusion, no signal, no landmarks, no way, Claire, no way.
—It’s all right, John. What do the bodies matter? You did your best. I know you did.
Her words offered comfort but no absolution from guilt. Her embrace—light, chaste—merely troubled him. The pressure of her heavy breasts against him made him tremble. He remembered Dave Vogel, halfway to Mars, speaking lovingly of Claire’s breasts. Her jugs, he called them. Boy, I’d like to have my hands on my lady’s jugs right this minute! And Bud Richardson, more annoyed than amused, telling him to cut it out, to stop stirring up fantasies that couldn’t be satisfied for another year or more.
Claire vanished from his mind, driven out by a blaze of flashbulbs. The hovercameras, hanging in midair, scanning him from every angle. The taut, earnest faces of the newsmen, digging deep for human interest. See the lone survivor of the Mars expedition! See his tortured eyes! See his gaunt cheeks! There’s the President himself, folks, giving John Oxenshuer a great big welcome back to Earth! What thoughts must be going through this man’s mind, the only human being to walk the sands of an alien world and return to our old down-to-Earth planet! How keenly he must feel the tragedy of the two lost astronauts he left behind up there! There he goes now, there goes John Oxenshuer, disappearing into the debriefing chamber—
Yes, the debriefings. Colonel Schmidt, Dr. Harkness, Commander Thompson, Dr. Burdette, Dr. Horowitz, milking him for data. Their voices carefully gentle, their manner informal, their eyes all the same betraying their single-mindedness.
—Once again, please, Captain Oxenshuer. You lost the signal, right, and then the backup line refused to check out, you couldn’t get any telemetry at all. And then?
—And then I took a directional fix, I did a thermal scan and tripled the infrared, I rigged an extension lifeline to the sample-collector and went outside looking for them. But the collector’s range was only ten kilometers. And the dust storm was too much. The dust storm. Too damned much. I went five hundred meters and you ordered me back into the ship. Didn’t want to go back, but you ordered me.
—We didn’t want to lose you too, John.
—But maybe it wasn’t too late, even then. Maybe.
—There was no way you could have reached them in a short-range vehicle.