“I… I’ll stay inside,” Rosenberg said. “I need to, Sal.” He felt as if he were glued to the cockpit seat. He thought he couldn’t get up even if he wanted to. His legs were too weak to support him. He couldn’t even turn around to look at his partner.
“Okay,” Hasdrubal said, his voice sounding strange, suspicious, almost accusing. “You stay in.”
Jamie was poring over the latest communications from Selene, reports on their underground farms and the amount of electrical power they needed to keep the crops growing. We’ll have to devote a lot of acreage to solar panels, he thought. The maintenance is going to be tough, keeping them clean of dust. Maybe we can automate that, something like windshield wipers. Then he thought about the monstrous dust storms that swept across the planet. He remembered the storm that nearly buried the camper on his first excursion to Tithonium Chasma. With a shake of his head Jamie realized that maintaining a solar-energy farm was going to be a lot more difficult on Mars than on the airless, weatherless Moon.
“Uh, Dr. Waterman?” A soft voice interrupted his musing.
Looking up, Jamie saw that it was Billy Graycloud standing at the entrance to his cubbyhole of an office.
“Come in, Billy,” he said.
The youngster didn’t move. “There’s been an accident.”
“Accident?” Jamie shot up from his chair.
“Nobody hurt,” Graycloud said quickly. “It’s the excursion team, you know, the two guys tracing the old riverbed. Their resupply rocket blew up.”
Jamie could see a small crowd gathered around the entrance to the communications center halfway across the dome.
“They’re okay?” he asked, coming around his makeshift desk.
“Seem to be,” Graycloud replied. Then he added, “So far.”
Hasdrubal was holding a blackened chunk of metal in his hands as he sank his lanky frame into the padded cockpit seat. Rosenberg stared at it.
“Found this in the ground about a meter and a half from our left front wheels.”
“What is it?”
Turning the scorched fragment in his hands, Hasdrubal answered, “What it was was a piece of a storage container. I think. Hard to tell.”
“A meter and a half?”
“Give or take a skosh.”
“If it had hit us…”
“Would’ve gone through the skin of this bus like an antitank missile.”
Rosenberg shuddered visibly.
“Everything okay in here?” Hasdrubal asked.
“All the systems are on line. No internal damage.”
“Are you okay?” Hasdrubal stared at his partner.
Rosenberg took a deep, deliberate breath. “I’m… rather shaken, you know.”
“I can see that.”
“Control says the hopper’s oxygen line must have been leaking. It touched off the methane. That’s what caused the explosion.”
“They think.”
“That’s what the diagnostics indicate.” Rosenberg felt somewhat better, stronger, as he talked about the impersonal data from the controller’s monitoring systems. Yet he still saw in his mind’s eye that white-hot explosion. We could have been killed, his inner voice kept repeating. We came within a meter and a half of death.
“Dripped oxy on the hot methane pump, prob’ly,” Hasdrubal was saying.
Rosenberg nodded. “Yes, that’s their explanation.”
“How old was that hopper? Some of ’em date back to the first expeditions, don’t they?”
“I believe so.”
Holding the fragment of debris in one hand, Hasdrubal pointed to the comm screen, which was a blank gray. “Comm link still open?”
“It should be.”
“Okay. I’ll show this to the geniuses back at base. You go back and heat up some dinner.”
Rosenberg hesitated. “Why don’t we start back to the base?”
“Now? It’ll be dark in another few minutes.” The biologist jerked a thumb toward the scenery outside. The pale shrunken sun was almost touching the jagged horizon. The sky was already turning deep violet.
“I know, but… we’ll have to head back before we run out of supplies.”
“Tomorrow, after the sun comes up.”
“We can run at night.”
“And run down the fuel cells? No way. We’re not goin’ anyplace until the sun comes up,” Hasdrubal insisted. “That’s final.”
Tithonium Chasma: Night
Hasdrubal and Rosenberg ate a warmed-up prepackaged meal in tense silence, broken only by the controller calling from the base to ask about their condition.
Rosenberg went to the cockpit and spoke to the controller. The thermal shutters covered the bug-eye windows up there, preventing the camper’s internal warmth from leaking out into the bitter Martian night. When Rosenberg returned he slid into the folded-out bunk that now served as a bench. Across the narrow table sat Hasdrubal, his dark face watching Rosenberg thoughtfully.
“You’re scared, huh?”
“It’s… I’m not frightened, really.”
“Not much.”
“It’s just that… it’s unsettling. Hoppers shouldn’t blow up. We shouldn’t be stranded out here without supplies. It’s not right!”
A slow, patient smile eased across Hasdrubal’s face. “Now look, Izzy. We’re not stranded. We got plenty of food and water for the trip back to base. We’ll be fine.”
“The batteries are down.”
“We’ll recharge ’em tomorrow soon’s the sun comes up.”
“Hurry sunrise,” Rosenberg muttered.
They finished their meal, scraped the crumbs into the recycler and placed their plates and cups into the microwave for cleaning. Hasdrubal put a fingertip on the power button, then thought better of it. Save it for daytime, he told himself. Rosenberg folded the table and slid it into its place beneath his bunk.
“I’ll hit the John,” Hasdrubal said.
“If you don’t mind…” Rosenberg pushed past him and hurried into the lavatory.
Poor bastard’s scared shitless, Hasdrubal thought. Then he amended, But his bladder’s full.
Once they had peeled down to their skivvies and arranged the blankets over their bunks, Rosenberg said, “I’ve never liked the cold. That’s what’s bothering me, actually. The night and the dark and cold.”
“We’ll get through it.”
They climbed into their bunks and clicked off the lights. The camper’s interior was completely dark except for the faint ghostly greenish glow from the instrument panel up in the cockpit.
Rosenberg murmured into the darkness, “When I was a child in Cambridge, once my sister was born I had to sleep up in the attic. It was always cold up there. Even in the summertime. And drafty. I could feel the wind coming through chinks in the window frames. I could never get warm up there. Never.”
“Hey, you wanna talk about cold, you oughtta live in Chicago. Wind that can knock you off your friggin’ feet. And cold! Freeze your balls off.”
Rosenberg said nothing.
Chuckling, Hasdrubal said, “I remember one winter we had so much snow the whole friggin’ city stopped. Nothin’ was moving. Took two days before the damn snowplows cleared the streets in our neighborhood. Left snowbanks higher’n my head.”
“Higher than your head? Really?”
“I was just a kid then. A lot shorter.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll be okay. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better when the sun comes up.”
“Yes, I suppose so,” Rosenberg said. He closed his eyes. And heard the thin moan of the wind outside. He touched the curving skin of the camper. It felt ice cold. Just a few millimeters of metal between us and death, he thought. It’s down to a hundred below zero out there.