“Interference from the storm?”
The computerman shook his head. “Not much static. Just silence. I don’t think this set has enough muscle to reach the ship without the main antenna and the amplifier up in the tent.”
Dan said nothing. He clumped to the airlock, stepped through it, and shut the inner hatch. The airlock cycled through, pumping all its air into storage tanks, then flashed the green “all clear” light.
Dan reached up and unsealed the outer hatch. He pushed it upward, and a fine powder of yellowish sand and ash trickled down onto his faceplate.
Stepping up the rungs of the metal ladder set into the airlock’s wall, Dan pushed the outside hatch all the way open and stuck his head up above the opening.
The camp looked as if it had been bombed. The tent was completely gone, not a shred of it left. The desks and consoles and other gear from inside the tent were nowhere in sight, either. Nothing there but the plastisteel foundation, and even that was buried under several centimeters of powdery sand and ash.
The sky overhead was gray now, sullen-looking. The clouds were high, but moving with great speed. Dan turned stiffly with the suit and tried to look in all directions. No break in the clouds anywhere: gray from horizon to horizon.
The refinery was a complete shambles. The big cylinders and spheres were cracked open, blackened and burned. Not much to salvage from it, Dan realized. He knew he should have been glad just to be alive, but somehow he felt terribly dejected, defeated, let down.
The communications mast was gone, of course. So were most of the trees. The grass was still there, though, poking through the sand and ash, its cheerful yellow strangely incongruous in the somber scene of destruction.
Dan stepped down the ladder again, lowering the hatch after him. He sealed it, set the airlock to recycling again; the native sulfurous air was pumped outside, the breathable air that had been stored away hissed out of the tanks and filled the tiny airlock once again. When the light flashed green, Dan opened the inner hatch and stepped back into the main area of the shelter.
He took off his helmet. It felt as if it weighed a ton.
Cranston was still seated in front of the radio. “No response. We can’t reach them.”
“They can’t see us, either,” Dan said grimly. “Cloud deck’s still covering us.”
“Isn’t there any way we can tell them we’re here? Can’t they spot us with radar or infrared or something?”
Dan plopped on the lower bunk and reached for the zips on his suit legs. “Radar won’t tell them if we’re alive or not. But if we could make a big enough hot spot, IR might pick it up—”
“A hot spot. With what?”
Dan shrugged. “I don’t think we’ve got anything bigger than the suit lasers. That won’t do.”
“Uhmm…” Cranston started to look concerned. “How much air and water do we have?”
“We pull our oxygen out of the planet’s air,” Dan answered. “Clean out the sulfur and other gunk so we can breathe it. That’s not problem. Water, though … our water purification gear was all topside. It’s gone—There’s probably not more than a couple days’ worth in here.”
“And how long will the clouds cover us?”
Dan shrugged. “Maybe we ought to try to figure out how to make a big hot spot.”
Larry was pacing back and forth along the bridge, followed by Joe Haller and Guido Estelella. The technicians working the various consoles kept their faces turned very carefully to their work.
“But you can’t let them sit down there without even trying to pick them up!” Haller was shouting.
Larry whirled and pointed to one of the viewscreens. It showed nothing but gray cloud scudding across the planet’s face.
“There’s absolutely no evidence that they’re still alive,” he snapped back, lower-keyed but still with an edge of anger to his voice. “You want me to risk our only qualified pilot and our only landing shuttle on the chance that they might have survived the storm?”
“Hell yes!”
“I’m willing to try it,” Estelella said.
Larry shook his head. “We have no idea of what conditions are like under those clouds. The whole surface could be buried under tons of volcanic ash.”
“We have other landing shuttles,” Haller insisted. “You can order them taken out of the storage depot and reassembled.”
“Can I replace our one qualified astronaut?” Larry demanded.
“But he’s volunteered to go!”
“No.” Larry pushed past Haller and started pacing the bridge again.
Haller followed doggedly. “You’re killing two men!”
“They’re already dead,” Larry said. “We’d have heard from them by now if they were still alive. The storm’s been over nearly two days.”
“Their communications gear might’ve been damaged. They could be hurt, trapped in wreckage…anything.”
Larry countered, “Nothing survived that storm. You saw the electrical signals we were getting from the lightning. Like a continuous sheet of flame. The wind speeds were right off the scale of our meteorological instruments. Those clouds are still moving at fifty kilometers an hour. How do we know what the wind and weather conditions are like under the clouds?”
Haller’s shoulders slumped. “How much longer are the clouds suppose^) to last?”
“Nobody knows,” Larry said. “They’re coming from the chain of volcanoes on the other side of the sea. It might end in a few hours or a few weeks. Nobody knows.”
“So we’re just going to sit here and wait.”
“That’s all we can do.”
Haller looked as if he wanted to say something more, but instead he turned abruptly away from Larry and marched off the bridge. Estelella stood there for a puzzled moment, then, with a shrug, he walked off too.
Larry turned to the viewscreens showing the planet’s surface. Gray clouds covered almost everything. He shook his head. They’re dead, he told himself. They must be dead.
But if they’re not, he knew, you’re killing them.
Abruptly, he went over to one of the technicians and said; “I’m leaving the bridge. Take over for me.”
The girl looked up at him, surprised, “Where will you be?”
“You can reach me on the intercom. Page me, if you need me.”
Larry ducked through the doorway into the corridor that connected to his office. He hesitated for just a moment, then entered the compartment. Without bothering to slide the door shut, he went to the phone and punched it on savagely.
“Get Valery Loring here, right away.”
The computer’s voice said calmly, “Working.”
Valery appeared at his door ten agonized minutes later.
Larry was still fidgeting beside his desk when she arrived.
“You sent for me?”
He wanted to reach out and hold her. Instead, he said flatly, “They think I want to kill Dan.”
“Who does?”
Larry saw his hands flutter angrily. “Haller, Estelella, the whole damned crew on the bridge, for all I know.”
Standing uncertainly by the door, Valery said, “Do you want to kill him?”
“No! Of course not! What kind of a question is that?”
“Then why are you afraid of what they think?”
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “None of you understands at all.”
“Understands what, Larry?”
“I’m the Chairman. Can’t you see what that means? I have to decide. Me. My decision. Life or death. I have to decide on sending Estelella down there… maybe getting him killed. Or forcing him to stay aboard the ship while we can’t tell for certain what the surface conditions are. And that’ll probably kill Dan, if he isn’t dead already.”