Upon awaking, Steve Watanabe found that Brandon was gone. Considering the portion of the night he’d spent awake, this seemed frankly miraculous, nearly as miraculous as the fact that Steve was still alive. He had no food, he had almost no water, he hadn’t bathed in so long he could scarcely remember what pleasure was afforded by bathing. But he was alive. And he was in possession of the rover, and all he had to do was start it and drive around the long way, into the outflow channels of the chasma, and around, and he would be back among the living. It might take a little while, but still. That is assuming, you know, that he intended to rejoin the rest of the crew. Maybe it was some kind of residual guilt about Brandon, and about the bad shape that Brandon had appeared to be in when they last had a conversation, but Steve found that the one way he could expiate some of the remorse he felt about everything that had happened on the Mars mission was to drive back to the site of the dig, so that his son and his wife would be well looked after, so that things would be made right. He waited for the morning sun to charge up the rover, and then he began driving back toward the cliff wall, looking for the spot where they’d come up. This while keeping his eyes fixed on the sky for the marauding ultralight.
In time, he came upon the collapsed section of the wall, which looked quite a bit more fearsome going down than it had coming up, even with the gentler slope, the sort of clamshell slope of the collapse. This was when Steve Watanabe — because going down is always more dangerous than going up — somehow managed, first to get the rover stuck between a couple of sheets of rock, and then, in attempting to dislodge it through expert manipulation of gears and transmission, to plunge the rover off a steep incline, and, luckily separated from it, to free-fall, landing on a shelf about two hundred meters or so above the floor of the Ius Chasma. The rover landed facedown, at the bottom, so that many of its solar panels were shattered in the accident, and it would have taken any number of Martian colonists, a group of them, to overturn the vehicle and restore it to running condition. In the meantime, Steve Watanabe also fell into unconsciousness.