Mars (56 page)

Joanna cocked her head slightly to one side. “If you wish,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“I’m going to call Reed,” Connors said, sliding out from behind the table.

And I’m going to sit here like an idiot with nothing to do.
The lab module was too small for three of them to work in it simultaneously. “I guess I’ll clean up,” he said.

The women went slowly back to the airlock and through it to the lab module. Connors was already up in the cockpit calling Reed. Jamie stood alone at the narrow table littered with the remains of their breakfast, feeling a dull ache in his joints and a sullen throbbing in his head.

It can’t be the flu, he told himself. We would have come down with it months ago if it was flu or any other kind of infectious disease. It’s something we’ve caught here, something from Mars. Can’t be anything else.

He remembered his dream and shuddered.

He’s let the cat out of the bag, Tony Reed said to himself as he studied the face of Pete Connors on his communications screen. Is it my imagination or has his complexion gone sallow?

The astronaut was perspiring lightly, that much Reed could easily see. His eyes were bloodshot, his speech a bit slower than usual. And he had reported that all four of the people in the rover were feeling sick. Vosnesensky can’t hide that from Li. No matter how much Mikhail Andreivitch wants to cover this up, Connors has spilled the beans.

“And you say that all four of you are in the same condition?” Reed asked.

“Pretty much,” replied Connors. “Ilona seems the worst off. Jamie’s in the best shape—or at least he’s not complaining as much.”

The stoical Indian. He’d probably refuse to utter a peep even if he were being roasted at the stake.

“Any loss of appetite?” he asked aloud.

Connors frowned with thought. Then, “Doesn’t seem to be. But we’re all so damned tired, it’s hard to tell.”

“Hm, yes.” Reed chewed his bottom lip momentarily. “And you’re taking your vitamin supplements?”

“Yessir. I see that they all take the pills every morning.”

“You’ve only been out two days,” Reed muttered, “so it shouldn’t be any dietary deficiency. …”

“It feels like we’re all coming down with the flu or something,” Connors volunteered.

“I see.” Reed scratched his chin, fingered his pencil-thin
moustache, ran a smoothing hand over his sandy hair. The same symptoms were showing up in the dome.

“It’s difficult for me to do much for you remotely,” he said to Connors. “I’m afraid it would be best if you started back before things get any worse.”

“But we just got here! We’re scheduled to be in the canyon for a week …”

“Not if you’re all sick.” Vosnesensky would have to see the necessity of it, Reed told himself. After all, as medical officer here I have the authority to order them back to base. Even if the Russian objects.

“Maybe if we all took a good shot of antibiotics?”

“I doubt that it would help.”

“Give us another day, at least. We’re not going anywhere today if that storm hits. Let’s see what develops over the next twenty-four hours.”

Reed considered the astronaut’s earnest, anxious face. Connors was pleading with him. I am the team’s physician. I should know what to do. I ought to be able to deal with this. If I order them back now Vosnesensky will be furious. He’ll think it’s a reflection on him, most likely.

“I’ve got to report this to Vosnesensky, you realize,” he said.

“Yeah, I know.”

“This transmission is automatically monitored by the orbiter. And Kaliningrad.”

Connors nodded glumly.

Pursing his lips as though deep in careful thought, Reed at last offered, “I will recommend to Mikhail Andreivitch that you stay where you are for the next twenty-four hours. A dose of wide-spectrum antibiotic won’t hurt you; I’ll send specific written instructions over the computer link. Then we’ll see how you feel tomorrow morning.”

“Okay! Great!” The astronaut was as grateful as a puppy.

Reed terminated the conversation, then turned to his medical computer file and tapped out a prescription for the antibiotic. He pushed himself up from the chair slowly, reluctantly. I must face Vosnesensky, he told himself. Nothing for it but to beard him in his own den. Still, he dreaded the confrontation.

The Russian was in the wardroom, huddled over a mug of steaming tea, talking in low earnest tones with Mironov in
their native language. They both looked sick to Reed’s professional eye. Haggard, sallow complexions. Even their coveralls looked baggy and rumpled, not at all the neat aspect that they had presented only a few days earlier. Whatever it is, they’ve got it. And all the others, too. All except me. And possibly Toshima.

Reed felt absurdly normal: healthy and strong. Clearheaded and alert. He had even cut down on his morning amphetamine cocktail, to check whether or not his seeming good health was a chemically induced artifact.

The two Russians both looked up as Tony pulled out a chair and joined them.

“The team in the rover is down with it,” Reed told them quietly, “whatever it is.”

“Fatigue,” Vosnesensky said immediately. “Psychological fatigue. I have seen it on long-duration missions in orbit.”

“After only thirty-seven days?” Reed almost sneered.

“We have been in space for almost a year.”

“Ah yes,” Reed admitted. “True enough.”

“The stresses of this environment …,” Mironov started, but his voice trailed off weakly.

“Mars is no more stressful than the moon or an orbiting space station,” Reed said. “Rather less stressful, actually, I should think.”

“Then what
is
it?” Vosnesensky growled. “What is happening to us?”

Reed shook his head. “Whatever it is, it’s affecting everyone here with the same symptoms: weakness, pains in the limbs, headaches.”

“It is the flu,” Mironov said.

Cocking an eyebrow at him, Reed said, “How could we all come down with the flu nearly a year after leaving Earth? Influenza viruses don’t lie dormant for that long. If it were the flu we would have seen it long before this.” Unless it’s a slow virus, Tony suddenly thought. Like Legionnaires’ disease, or some such.

Mironov looked stubbornly unconvinced.

“But no one in orbit has it,” Reed pointed out, arguing as much with himself as with the cosmonaut.

“The Martian flu,” Vosnesensky half joked.

“It is patently impossible to contract a disease from a planet that is without any life of its own,” Reed snapped,
almost angrily. “There are no viruses here to infect us. Even if there were Martian microbes, they would not be adapted to our cells. Mars could be covered with all sorts of bugs, but they wouldn’t bother us at all. Couldn’t, actually.”

“That is the theory of the doctors,” Mironov mumbled gloomily.

“Perhaps this is not a disease at all,” Vosnesensky said.

“Not a disease?”

“Coal miners get black lung,” Vosnesensky said, “not from germs but from breathing in coal dust.”

Reed stared at him. This cosmonaut actually has a brain inside that thick skull!

“Perhaps there is something in the Martian dust that is affecting us,” Vosnesensky said.

“But we take great care to keep the dust out of our suits and out of our living habitat,” Reed pointed out.

“The dust is very fine. Perhaps we do not take great enough care.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Reed.

Mironov said, “We could check the air in here, see how much dust is suspended in it”

“Yes,” said Vosnesensky. “We must do that.”

Reed was about to reply when Toshima came rushing up to the table. He was wide-eyed with excitement. If the “Martian flu” had hit him, he showed no evidence of it.

“The dust storm!” Toshima fairly shouted. “It has started!”

Grounded.

Jamie felt like an errant teenager being punished by his parents. The rover was in perfectly good shape, and even though he felt weak and headachy, he saw no reason why he should not be moving onward, closer to the “village” he had seen.

That’s where we’ve got to go, he kept telling himself. Maybe I can even climb up there, once we get to the base of the cliffs where that cleft is. I’ll bet there’s even a natural path up the cliff face to that cleft and the formation inside it. Or maybe they carved steps out of the rock.

The day outside seemed perfectly clear, despite Toshima’s insistence that a dust storm was howling down the length of the canyon and would soon engulf them.

There had even been the mists out there earlier in the morning, thin gray tendrils of haze that hovered in the early morning chill and slowly evaporated as the sun reached down into the canyon. Like ghosts that vanish when the light touches them, Jamie thought.

If the mists evaporate and then form again the next morning, he reasoned, either the moisture remains inside the canyon or it’s renewed from some source of water vapor underground. Or in the cliff walls.

Christ! There’s so much for us to look for and they’ve got us stuck inside this aluminum can!

For the fortieth time that morning he paced the length of the rover’s command module, from the cockpit bulkhead past the little galley and the narrow passage between the folded-up bunks to the equipment racks and finally the airlock at the back end.

Connors called from the cockpit, “I think it’s starting.”

Jamie rushed the nine strides it took to span the module’s length and ducked his head past the bulkhead. Through the cockpit’s bulbous canopy the canyon outside seemed just the same as the last time he had looked.

Connors anticipated him. “Take a squint at the sky.”

Jamie slid into the empty seat beside the astronaut so he could look upward. The pink sky seemed normal enough—almost.

“It’s gotten ten percent darker in the past five minutes,” Connors said, holding up a color comparison chart.

“There’s really going to be a storm.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d better go back and tell the others.”

“Might as well. We got nothing else to do.” Connors slipped on his headset as he spoke and reached for the comm unit’s switch.

Joanna and Ilona were sitting so close together in the lab module that their shoulders almost touched. The lighting was low, more from the glowing displays on the computer screens than from the dimmed overhead strip lamp.

Neither of the women looked up as Jamie stepped in from the airlock. They were both bent over something on the workbench.

“The storm is starting,” Jamie said.

Joanna turned her head slightly to look at him over her shoulder. In the dimness he could not make out the expression on her face, only that she seemed terribly pale.

“The figures on the core samples are on the screen here,” she said, tapping the computer humming beside her.

“Anything interesting?”

“See for yourself,” she said, turning back to the work she and Ilona were doing.

Jamie frowned slightly at her abrupt manner. He leaned over, since there were no other chairs in the lab, and read off the figures on the screen.

Not much different from the values they had gotten from other corings, he saw. Except that there was no ice in the sample, no layer of permafrost.

Then where’s the water coming from? Jamie asked himself.

He punched up a side-by-side display that compared the results of the core samplings taken near the dome with those
from here in the canyon. Trivial differences, much less than Jamie had expected. Except for the water. There’s less water here than up on the plain. Less! That doesn’t make any sense.

The wind was keening outside. Straightening up, Jamie felt a kink in his back. He had been bent over longer than he had realized, The wind was really singing now. There were no windows in the lab module, no way to see what was going on outside.

Joanna and Ilona were still bent over their work. The diamond saw buzzed briefly, then whined as it bit through rock.

“I’m going up front to see what the storm looks like,” he said.

“Good,” said Joanna, without raising her head.

Curious, he asked, “What the hell are you working on that’s so fascinating?”

“Go up front, Jamie, and leave us alone. We will call you when we are ready to talk.”

Son of a bitch, Jamie grumbled to himself. Then he remembered how proprietary Joanna had become when they had found the green-streaked rock.

Half puzzled, half angry, he made his way back into the command module. Connors was still up in the cockpit, munching on a candy bar, headset still clamped against his ear although he had swung the microphone arm up and away from his mouth.

“Toshima says we’ll be in this for the rest of the day,” he announced glumly.

Jamie stared at the scene outside. The wind was howling like a squalling infant, high-pitched and thin. It had become quite dark out there, an eerie kind of fluctuating darkness, not like nighttime even though the lighting level was down to about its value just after sunset. Shadowy, like having a blanket thrown over your head. Menacing, somehow, deep down in the gut. Jamie could barely see the cliff face, less than fifty meters from the rover’s nose. The sky was obliterated by darkness.

He slid into the cockpit seat and looked down at the display in the instrument panel’s main screen. Connors had it showing a satellite view of the region. Jamie could see the canyon complex clearly, but the inside of the twisting labyrinth
of canyons was filled to the brim with billowing clouds of reddish-gray dust. They looked soft, undulating like the waves of the ocean, thick enough to buoy up your body if you cared to sprawl on them.

“Vosnesensky’s pissed because we don’t have a cover to put over the canopy,” Connors said. “He’s afraid the dust will scratch up the plastic so bad we won’t be able to see out of it”

“Is it? Scratching?”

Connors shook his head slowly. “Hard to tell, so far. Don’t hear anything that sounds like scratching, do you?”

“The dust particles are microscopic in size.”

“Yeah, but gritty.”

“Nothing we can do but wait,” Jamie said.

“How they doing back there?”

Jamie huffed. “They’re so busy they don’t even care about the storm.”