Mars (62 page)

Although Dr. Li said it was not necessary for him to be outside when the lander arrived, Vosnesensky quoted regulations until the expedition commander reluctantly bowed acquiescence.

I may be sick, Vosnesensky told himself, but I still know my duty. The regulations call for a cosmonaut to be suited up and ready to assist the landing party once they touch down. There is a good reason for this rule and as long as I can stand on my own two legs I will, not allow any rule to be broken.

So he tottered weakly out through the airlock hatch and stood waiting, a fire-engine red figure standing stolidly on the rusty soil of Mars. Exactly on schedule the L/AV streaked across the pink sky and deployed its parachutes. They billowed into perfect white hemispheres dangling the cup-and-saucer lander beneath them. At the precise moment the chutes detached the retro-rockets fired. The lander, with cosmonaut Dmitri Iosifovitch Ivshenko at its controls and astronaut
Oliver Zieman beside him, touched the sands of Mars about two hundred meters away.

The lander had one passenger only: Dr. Yang Meilin. And a cargo of pharmaceuticals packed in hard plastic boxes.

In less than half an hour the diminutive Dr. Yang was deep in conference with Tony Reed in the dome’s infirmary.

Hard to tell what’s going on behind those slanted eyes, Reed said to himself as he showed her the data from all his tests of the ground team.

“The people in the rover seem to be the worst off,” Reed was saying aloud. “Although god knows that most of the people here in the dome are in bad-enough shape.”

“How did you permit this to happen?” Dr. Yang asked. Her voice was silky, low. But still the question startled Reed.

“Permit it?” His voice sounded shrill, defensive, even to himself. “How can anyone combat a disease unless he has a clear diagnosis?”

“You have no idea of what is affecting your comrades?”

“None,” he snapped. “Do you?”

Her face was a perfectly impenetrable mask. “I cannot say until I have performed some tests.”

Reed pushed back his stubborn lock of sandy hair. “Then I suggest we get started on your tests.”

“Yes. I notice that you do not seem to be troubled by this illness. Therefore I will use you as a baseline control, if you have no objection.”

“None whatsoever.”

“Good,” said Dr. Yang. Then, matter-of-factly, “Roll up your sleeve, please.”

Reed obediently bared his left arm, thinking, You come down here all fresh and businesslike, certain that you’ll discover whatever it is that I’ve overlooked. Perhaps you will. Perhaps you’ll be luckier than I’ve been. Or smarter. It’s my own fault. I’ve missed something, I’ve done something wrong. Or failed to do something I should have. And she knows it. They all know it. They all blame me.

As Dr. Yang deftly slipped a needle into his vein, Tony insisted silently, But it isn’t me. It’s this blasted alien world we’re on. We have no business here. We’re out of our depth. I’m out of my depth. I should never have come to Mars. None of us should have. Mars has defeated me. Mars has defeated us all.

•   •   •

Jamie thought his vision was blurring, but then the stinging made him realize that sweat was getting into his eyes. He blinked and rubbed his eyes with one hand, keeping a firm grip on the wheel with the other. The rover was churning along at a steady thirty klicks per hour, heading for the landslide that they had come down two days earlier.

Maybe we can make it before sundown, Jamie thought. If we can get all the way up the slope and onto the plain again before sundown, we can just keep going all night long. I’ll slow her down, of course, but the lights are good enough to keep us on the move. No need to stop for the night. We can even follow our own tracks, the tracks we made coming out here. If they haven’t been covered up by dust. If we can get to the top.

Connors slid into the right-hand seat. Jamie shot him a glance. The astronaut looked spent. He sat as if his bones could not hold him up, his head almost lolling on his shoulders.

“How’s it goin’?” Connors’s voice was hoarse.

“So far so good.”

“How far to the slide?”

Jamie gestured with his chin toward the map displayed in the control panel’s central screen. “Half an hour, maybe a little more.”

“We got a shot at getting to the top in daylight, then.”

“Yep.”

“Good.”

“How are the women doing?” Jamie asked.

“Ilona’s asleep. Joanna’s watching her. She don’t look too good herself, though.”

“Asleep? Or passed out?”

Connors tried to shrug. “Hard to tell.”

“And what about you? How do you feel?”

“Like a piece of shit that’s been stomped on by a herd of elephants. How ’bout you?”

“Not much better. But this go-mobile is easy to drive. It’s almost relaxing.”

“Just don’t fall asleep at the wheel.”

“Not much traffic to worry about.”

“Yeah, but some of the potholes in the road can swallow you up.”

Despite Connors’s awful appearance, Jamie felt better with the astronaut sitting beside him. He pressed the accelerator a little harder and watched the digital speedometer climb to thirty-five; just over twenty miles an hour. He kept hearing Li’s voice telling him, “It is urgent that you reach the dome for treatment quickly. As quickly as you can.”

The ground seemed to be rising. At first Jamie did not notice it, but then he realized that their ride was getting bumpier.

“I think we’re almost … Hey! There it is!”

Through the canopy they saw the dark red slope of the ancient landslide rising off to their left like a stairway to heaven. The cliffs that towered before them were masked by the beautiful, gentle grade that ramped all the way up to the caprock and the plain that led back to their dome.

Connors’s dark face broke into a toothy grin. He turned in his seat, but said nothing. To Jamie he muttered, “They’re both asleep back there.”

“It’s okay. We’ll be up this slope and heading for home before the sun goes down.”

The grade was studded with rocks and boulders. Jamie could not see the tracks they had made on their way down; the dust storm had covered even the deep ruts where the rover had gotten temporarily stuck in loose sand.

“Don’t get into that loose stuff again,” Connors said.

“Not if I can help it.”

“Slow her down a little, but keep moving forward.”

“Yeah.”

The astronaut licked his lips. Jamie knew he wanted to take over, to drive the rover himself. Yet Connors stayed in the right-hand seat. To switch drivers now would mean stopping the rover, and neither of them had any intention of coming to a stop on the pebbly gravel of this ancient avalanche.

“You’re doin’ fine,” Connors muttered. “Just watch that depression on the right.”

Jamie skirted the edge of what looked to him like an old crater that had been partially filled in with sand. He turned around its flank, maneuvering past a boulder almost as big as the rover itself.

“Good. Good,” Connors mumbled. “Keep it goin’.”

It all happened in slow motion. The rover was making steady progress up the slope. Jamie could feel the gritty, bumpy texture of the surface beneath its wheels transmitted through the steering column to his hands. He was perspiring heavily, sweat stinging his eyes; Connors’ s backseat driving in his ears, neck stiff with tension, arms aching with the effort of steering the lumbering vehicle.

Jamie felt the nose dip as if it had started down a steep incline. Automatically he leaned on the brakes, but the big blunt-nosed rover plowed into a lake of fine loose sand, throwing up a rust-red bow wave of dust that covered the canopy.

“Look out!” Connors yelled too late.

As inexorably as fate, with all the slow-motion horror of a nightmare, the rover dug itself into the loose sand like a burrowing mole. Jamie felt the wheels churning uselessly, spinning them deeper into the sand-filled pit.

“Stop! Stop everything!”

Jamie was already disengaging the wheel drives when Connors shouted it. The canopy was spattered so heavily with clinging red dust that they could barely see outside.

The rover slid to a stop. Jamie felt his heart thudding in his chest, heard its thunder in his ears. He looked across at Connors, who was staring outward, mouth hanging open, gasping for breath.

“I don’t think the rear module is in the stuff,” Jamie said. “I’m going to try to put its wheels in reverse.”

“Yeah. Maybe it can pull us out of this.”

The generator whined and they could hear the faint screech of wheels spinning without traction. Jamie shut them down before the bearings burned out.

“We’re stuck,” he said.

Connors’s bloodshot eyes were wide with fear. “Yeah. Looks that way.”

Vosnesensky was the last one to be tested.

The Russian was in no mood for having a medic punch holes in his skin. Connors had just reported that the rover was stuck halfway up the landslide. They would need a rescue effort. But how? And who? Dr. Li refused to allow anything to be done until he had consulted with mission control in Kaliningrad. Meanwhile night was coming on and the four people in the rover were as sick as dogs.

Not that the people in the dome were much better off. Toshima had suddenly collapsed at his workstation; they had had to carry him to his bunk. Patel, Naguib, even Abell and Mironov were not much good for anything except sitting around and moaning. Monique Bonnet, who had been playing the cheerful, motherly nurse for the past two days, was dragging herself around, hollow eyed with exhaustion.

“And how do you feel, in general?” Dr. Yang asked as Vosnesensky sat on the little white stool in the infirmary.

The Russian glowered at her. “I have important work to do,” he said. “We have a crisis …”

Yang was barely taller than Vosnesensky even though he was seated and she was standing. But she stopped him cold with a snap of her almond eyes.

“You will not be able to do anything about your crisis if your medical condition continues to worsen,” she said. She did not raise her voice, but there was cold steel in her words. “Now please answer my questions and do as I tell you.”

Vosnesensky glanced at Reed, who was leaning against the patient’s couch in the corner of the tiny infirmary. Reed seemed to be in good health, his face pink. At least that
damned superior smile of his was gone; he was frowning with puzzled frustration.

“The sooner you cooperate the sooner we will be finished,” Yang said.

Vosnesensky capitulated. “What must I do?”

“Roll up your left sleeve and tell me how you feel.
Exactly
how you feel.”

The Russian pulled in a deep breath as he unbuttoned the cuff of his coverall sleeve. “I am weak, my legs ache, I have no appetite.”

“Have you ever felt this way before?” Yang held a hypodermic syringe in one hand, its needle glinting in the overhead lights.

“Not that I can remember.”

“Are you coughing or sneezing? Does your chest hurt?”

Vosnesensky shook his head, then winced. The needle went in smoothly; Yang found a vein on her first try.

“Any rash on your body?” she asked.

Watching the syringe fill up with dark blood, Vosnesensky replied, “No. Not that I have noticed.”

Yang pulled the needle out and slapped a plastic bandage on the puncture. Reed watched in silence, his arms folded across his chest. The diminutive Chinese physician asked Vosnesensky to strip to the waist. Wordlessly the Russian pulled down the top of his coveralls and slipped his undershirt over his head.

Yang looked at his back. “No rash,” she muttered.

“Is that significant?” Vosnesensky asked.

“Perhaps.” She looked across the small cubicle toward Reed, then murmured absently to Vosnesensky, “You may go now.”

“Thank you.” The Russian tugged on his coverall top and scurried from the infirmary despite his aching legs, carrying his undershirt in one hand.

Jamie fingered his bear fetish through the hard suit’s gloves. Thin and flexible as they were, the gloves still robbed him of the true feeling of the stone’s polished warmth.

He was standing on the lab module’s roof in the last slanting rays of the dying sun. He and Connors had barely been able to push the airlock hatch open; then the astronaut had
slumped to the floor of the airlock, too weak to move any farther. Jamie had left him sitting there in a pile of loose dust that had drifted in, while he clambered up the ladder set into the rover’s side to survey their situation.

He had not dared to step out into the sand itself, for fear that he would sink through the powdery dust so deeply that he would not be able to extricate himself.

The mission rule book doesn’t cover this, Jamie had told himself as he slowly, carefully climbed the ladder. He had gone up as if mountain climbing, three points attached at all times. Move one gloved hand to the next rung. Grip it, then move the other hand. Grip, then one booted foot. Make sure it’s firmly seated on the rung, then pull up the other one. The dust frightened him. He pictured himself drowning in it like a man caught in quicksand.

Now at last he stood up on the roof. If you have any power to help at all, he said silently to the fetish, now’s the time to get it working.

“What’s it look like?” Connors’s voice came through his helmet earphones.

“Not good,” Jamie replied, surveying the scene. “She’s buried up over the fenders, all except the last half of the rear module. Not enough traction to pull us out.”

Connors said nothing, although Jamie could hear his ragged breathing.

“How’re you doing?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Just can’t get up on my fuckin’ feet, that’s all.”

Jamie’s head was swimming with dizziness. His body ached all over and he felt so tired that it was tempting just to stretch out right there and go to sleep. The canyon was so wide that he could actually see the sunset; the cliffs on the other side were too far away to be visible, tall as they were. He watched the sun for a moment, saw it touch the rocky horizon, felt the shadows of deathly freezing night reaching toward him. Inside his suit he shuddered, almost like a dog trying to shake off water.