Everyone crowded around to peer at the map, either upside down or over Emmett Bragg’s shoulder. “Seems all right,” Sarah said after a long, hard look. “Call Tolmasov, Emmett. Tell him I’m on my way. Find out what first aid supplies their rover has, too. I’ll save weight with my kit that way, because I won’t carry anything they already have.”
“Right.” Bragg turned to his wife and Irv. “Y’all heard the lady. Break out the pieces of Damselfly and get ‘em onto the towing carts. Pulling ‘em to the edge of the canyon, I. expect you’ll be working near as hard as Sarah will going over.” Louise simply nodded and left. Irv followed a moment later, shaking his head and muttering under his breath.
There’s nothing I can do about it, Sarah wanted to call after him. But he knew that as well as she did. Knowing and accepting were two different things-all she needed to do was think of Lamra to see the truth there.
“I’ll get my bike, too,” Pat Marquard said.
“What for?.” Sarah, Emmett, and Frank all spoke together. “So you can ride behind me,” Pat said to Sarah, as if the two men were not there. “You should be fresh when you get into Damselfly, not worn out from spending half a day pedaling.”
That made such plain good sense that Sarah could only nod her thanks and hug Pat, who returned the embrace. Emmett Bragg lifted the radio microphone. “Athena calling Soviet expedition.”
The reply was immediate. “Tolmasov here. Go ahead, old man.”
“Sergei Konstantinovich, our doctor will try, repeat try, to fly Damselfly across Jotun Canyon to help your injured crewman.”
“Thank you very much, Brigadier Bragg. We are in your debt.”
“You don’t thank me, you thank the lady, and I just may call in that debt one day, if I see a way to do it.”
“Er, yes.” Tolmasov sounded wary again, Sarah thought, frowning. Emmett never let up; he saw everything as a confrontation.
As if to belie that, the mission commander went on, “For now, though, we only need to know what your rover has in the way of medical gear, so we can avoid duplication.”
With Athena’s computers, any of the Americans could have called up the answer to that as fast as he typed in the question. Tolmasov’s promised “One moment, please,” stretched to sew eral minutes. At least he had what Sarah needed when he finally did come back on the air. That, she supposed, counted for something.
Mist and distance shrouded the land on the western side of Jotun Canyon. Sarah did stretching exercises to work out the kinks of a morning and early afternoon spent riding behind Pat Marquard. After a moment, Sarah turned her back on the canyon. She did not want to think about it before she had to.
Instead, she watched her husband and Louise Bragg reassemble Damselfly. Irv was whistling something as he made sure every wingnut was tight. Sarah took longer than she should have to recognize “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” She started to let out a snort, then stopped abruptly. If using a silly song helped remind him to be careful, that was all right with her.
“Ready when you are,” Louise said a little later. Pat, who had been reduced to a spectator once they got to the edge of the canyon, made herself useful by carrying the special wide stepladder to Damselfly.
“Let’s do it.” Sarah got out of her jacket and insulated pants and immediately started to shiver. Jogging over to Damselfly did nothing to warm her up.
Irv waited at the top of the stepladder to help her down into the ultra-ultralight. When she was seated, he handed her the clear plastic bag in which she had put her supplies-it was a pound or more lighter than her regular medical bag. She secured it to a spar behind her with duct tape.
“Be careful,” Irv said. “I love you.”
“I know. I love you, too.” She strapped the biking helmet under her chin. When she was done, she reached up to touch his cheek. “This is what you get for marrying a doctor. I’ll be all right.”
“You I wouldn’t worry about. But this damn contraption isn’t made for the kind of air you may get over the canyon.”
She shrugged. “People aren’t made for banging their heads, either.” Checking to be sure the prop was not engaged, she started pedaling furiously to charge the battery-and to stop her teeth from chattering. She hardly noticed Irv lowering the canopy over her and dogging it in place.
“Radio check,” Louise said. “Testing, one, two, three.”
“Read you five by five,” Sarah answered. “How do you read me?”
They went through the rest of the preflight checklist, making sure all the controls worked. Sarah watched the charge gauge climb. By the time the battery was all the way up, she was no longer freezing. She glanced to either side. Irv and Louise were standing by at Damselfly’s wingtips. She waved to show them she was ready. When they waved back, she flicked the propeller-control switch. The big airfoil, taller than she was, began to spin.
Damselfly rolled bumpily forward, the two wingpersons-a word Sarah formed and rejected in the same instant-running alongside to hold it level. “Airborne!” Irv yelled as the ultra-ultralight lifted off the ground.
“Roger,” Sarah said, to let him and Louise know she knew. As always, Damselfly was painfully slow gaining altitude. Even so, after less than a minute the ground dropped away as if the plane had a rocket in its tail. “Watch that first step,” she murmured to herself as she peered down and down and down into Jotun Canyon. “It’s a mother.”
“Say again, Damselfly?” Louise quested.
“Never mind,” Sarah said, embarrassed. Then she gave all her attention back to pedaling and to watching the little compass Irv had glued to the control stick. The far wall of the canyon was too far away to give her any landmarks toward which to steer and the sun was invisible through thick gray clouds. She laughed a little; Damselfly had not been designed for instrument night.
Some of the clouds were underneath her. Jotun Canyon was plenty big enough to have weather of its own. Sarah was just glad the clouds didn’t altogether block the western wall from view. Seeing it loom out of the fog too late to dodge was the stuff of nightmares.
“Everything all fight, hon?” Irv sounded as if he expected her to go spiraling down into the canyon any second now.
“No problems,” she answered, taking her left hand off the stick to flick on the radio’s send switch. “I’m even getting warm.
Exercise and all that.” Keeping Damselfly in the air was hard work, closer to running than to bicycling on the ground. “I should be across in less than half an hour. Off I go, into the wild gray yonder-”
“Oh, shut up,” Irv said. Chuckling, Sarah switched off. Her husband would be too busy fuming to worry about her for a while. She pedaled on. The breeze from the fresh air tube began to feel delicious, not icy.
Looking down between her busy feet, Sarah saw she was above the deepest part of the Jotun Canyon. Something moving down there caught her eye. She could not tell what sort of beast it was, any more than a jetliner passenger can name the makes of cars he sees from 30,000 feet. Just with level flight between the canyon’s walls, she was half that high over the bottom herself.
She wondered what lived down there. Whatever it was, it was not a fulltime resident, not unless it nailed itself to the biggest rock it could find when the yearly floods came through. Maybe not then, either.
Then all such mental busywork blew away with the gusting tailwind that swept Damselfly along with it and threatened to make the ultra-ultralight stall. Sarah gasped, pedaled harder, and hit the prop control switch to make the propeller grab more air. A moment later, she also turned on the plane’s little electric motor to add its power to hers.
For a few queasy seconds, she thought none of that would do any good. Gusts were the worst problem with human-powered aircraft; one of five miles an hour gave Damselfly as much of a jolt as a 30mph gust did to a Cessna. The flimsy little craft did not want to answer its controls. From the way the spars creaked, Sarah wondered if it was going to break up in midair. “Don’t you dare, you bastard,” she said fiercely, as if that would do any good at all.