“Sure.”
“You look like hell, Reese.Angina?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Get Lena to—”
“No. I’m fine, dammit. I’m fine.”
“At least rest a minute.”
“There’s no time. I have to know if that lander is going to work. It’s important.”
“To Morgan, yeah.”
“It’s important to me,” Reese said.“Just leave it at that for now, okay?”
“Sure,” Kane said.
Reese dropped through the hatch. Kane worked his fingers nervously, feeling the tension again.The wails of the ship constricted him, seemed to be pressing in on his ribs. His head was all right now and the chest pain was nothing he couldn’t handle. If he didn’t get out of the ship he might explode.
To hell with it, he thought. If Reese can keep going, so can I.
He poked his head into the Command Center and said,“I’m going out.” He had to raise his voice to get it to carry in the low pressure of the ship.
“You’re crazy,” Lena said. She seemed to push him away with the intensity of her stare.
“That’s right,” Kane said. He let himself fall through the center of the ship, braking himself against the gentle pull of the moon with open hands on the sides of the ladder.There was a way to breathe, he was sure, that wouldn’t hurt so badly. He just had to find it, that was all.
Takahashi was already in the airlock by the time Kane got to the quarters level. Reese was tightening the straps of his Portable Life Support System and reaching for his helmet.The atmosphere of the ship was pure oxygen, so they could use standard shuttle suits at 4 psi and not worry about nitrogen bubbles and the bends.
Kane pulled the lower torso of a suit over his trousers and then squatted and stood up inside the upper half, which was still racked to the wall. Raising his arms brought a new onslaught of pain, but Lena had said it wasn’t that serious, and he chose to believe her.
“Are you sure you’re up to this?” Reese asked, still holding his helmet.
“Yeah,” Kane said. He put on his black rubber gloves and locked the metal wrist-rings.
“Do something for me?”
“Like what?”
“See if you can get into the base.Takahashi and I can check out the lander by ourselves.”
“And if I can?”
“Just wait there for me.All right?”
“Sure.”
Reese’s head disappeared under the helmet as the airlock light went green. Kane closed the hatch after him and got into his own plss and helmet and waited while Reese cycled through.
Finally he was sealed into the narrow cylinder of the lock.The controls were clustered on a small box, painted off-white like every other inch of the room. Each switch was protected by an aluminum cap on a chain, and Kane screwed them back in place as he finished.
The hatch opened, and he fell gently to the surface of Deimos, his legs flexing slightly to take up his momentum, then straightening to send him halfway back into the lock.
He lowered himself more carefully and looked around.
Outside the burned, khaki-colored slab where they’d landed, the entire surface of the moon was pocked with craters, some of them smaller than Kane’s thumbnail, some fresher than the oldest footprints, whose familiar wide bars overlapped each other in a heavy crosshatching. His visor cut down the glare of the sun on the metal and the white powder of the surface, but made the black of the shadows impenetrable.
Lena’s voice cut into the silence.“Kane, uh, we’re showing the hatch still open...”
Kane slammed the hatch and moved away from the ship.The drastically foreshortened horizon gave him the feeling that he was standing in a low spot in some terrestrial desert; at the same time the ground seemed to slope away from him, confusing his spatial perceptions.
He took a few cautious steps toward the airlock of the base, then had trouble controlling his forward momentum.With a good run, he thought, he could probably jump into orbit.
Puffs of dust hung around his feet with every step. Even in the negligible gravity the dust seemed to weigh him down.After-effects of the aerobraking, he realized.According to the book, none of them should even be moving around yet, let alone trying to work.
He made it to the base entrance, a half-buried section of corrugated pipe that led to a cluster of metal and durofoam structures that looked as solidly built as a child’s tree house.
He held on to the hatch valve to get his breath, then looked back toward the ship.
Mars filled the sky.
For an instant he felt he was falling into the vast dark side of the planet. He groped behind him, found the edge of the steel tunnel, and clung to it.
He hung by his feet and hands over a brilliant yellow and white and orange crescent, suspended in absolute black. On the right-hand tip Kane could see the Argyre Planitia, white with frost; to the left was the great inflamed wound of the Valles Marinaris, torn from the upper right edge down to the center of the crescent, disappearing into the dawn along the Tharsis Ridge.Ascreus Mons, the only one of the Tharsis volcanoes touched by the rising sun, trailed a thick plume of ice crystals down toward the west.The Lunae and Chryse plains glowed ghostly white against the orange of the surrounding high ridges.
If Kane stood there long enough, the sun would reach Pavonis and the third volcano,Arsia Mons. He wondered if the ruins of the base would be visible from this far away, if the great foil mirrors would catch the sunlight. He could point to the spot where they’d be, there, northeast of Arsia Mons, toward Pavonis, still in darkness.
The speakers in his helmet buzzed and Reese said,“We’re inside. We’ve got power and the pressure’s coming up...looks good.”
“Oh, man,” Lena said.“Oh, man. I’m just starting to figure out how scared I’ve been.”
“Don’t break out any champagne,” Reese said.“There’s a ways still to go.”
Kane himself felt the first stirrings of relief, the easing of a knot of tension in his stomach that had been there so long he’d lost his awareness of it.
He turned his back on Mars and concentrated on the mechanics of the hatch.The station’s power was on standby and none of the automatic controls functioned. He finally found the manual release set into the recessed spokes of the cover, the flat of the handle barely wide enough to grip with his fingertips.The lever resisted the strength of his hands, but he finally forced the toe of his boot into the opening and threw the mass of his body against it.
The hatch swung open, and Kane scrambled to hold on to the lip of the tunnel above it.
Just a few more minutes, he thought, and I can go sleep this off.The light on his chest pack revealed the standard switches inside the air-lock, with an additional set for bringing the main power on line. He ran through the sequence, and a moment later the caged bulb overhead came to life.
“Reese,” he said.“I’ve got power up in here, too. Now what?”
“Go on in,” Reese said.“Check it out.”
“What’s going on?”Takahashi broke in.“Kane? Where are you? Are you inside the base?”
Kane lied without stopping to think about it, instinctively protecting Reese.“Morgan wanted to know if it was still habitable.”
“He didn’t say anything to me about it.”
“Come off it,Takahashi,” Kane said.“What difference does it make who he told?”
Takahashi let the silence drag on for a few seconds, and then said,“All right. But be careful.And you can make your report to me, and I’ll pass
it on. Understood?”
“Sure,” Kane said.
The telltales for internal pressure all showed green, so Kane gave his helmet a quarter-turn and pulled it off.With the servos operating, the inner hatch swung open easily, and Kane stepped inside.
The auxiliary generators had kept the air above freezing, but only slightly. Kane’s breath puffed out in thick clouds, and it took a second or two for the smell to penetrate.When it did, he fumbled his helmet back into the collar and turned the plss up to high.