In the clipped jargon of professional fliers, O’Connor reported on their dead fuel cell.
«No power output at all?» Roebuck looked incredulous.
«Zero,» said O’Connor. «Hydrogen all leaked out overnight.»
«How did you get through the night?»
«The vehicle automatically switched to battery power.»
«What’s the status of your battery system?»
O’Connor scanned the digital readouts on the control panel. «Down to one-third of nominal. The solar panels are recharging ’em.»
A pause. Roebuck looked away, and they could hear voices muttering in the background. «All right,» said the communicator at last. «We’re getting your telemetry. We’ll get back to you in an hour or so.»
«We need a lift out of here,» O’Connor said.
Another few moments of silence. «That might not be possible right away. We’ve got other problems, too. You guys weren’t the only ones hit by the meteor shower. We’ve taken some damage here. The garden’s been wiped out and E-1 has two casualties.»
Excursion 1 was at the flank of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.
«Our first priority has to be to get those people from E-1 back here for medical treatment.»
«Yeah. Of course.»
«Give us a couple of hours to sort things out. We’ll call you back at noon, our time. Sit tight.»
O’Connor glanced at the morose faces of his two teammates, then replied, «We’ll wait for your call.»
«What the hell else can we do?» Bernstein grumbled.
Clicking off the video link, O’Connor said, «We can get back to work.»
Faiyum tried to shrug inside his suit. «I like your first suggestion better. Let’s eat.»
With their helmets off, the faint traces of body odors became noticeable. Munching on an energy bar, Faiyum said, «A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew were showering together in a YMCA…»
«You mean a YMHA,» said Bernstein.
«How would a Muslim get into either one?» O’Connor wondered.
«It’s in the States,» Faiyum explained. «They let anybody in.»
«Not women.»
«You guys have no sense of humor.» Faiyum popped the last morsel of the energy bar into his mouth.
«This,» Bernstein countered, «coming from a man who was named after a depression.»
«El-Faiyum is below sea level,» Faiyum admitted easily, «but it’s the garden spot of Egypt. Has been for more than three thousand years.»
«Maybe it was the garden of Eden,» O’Connor suggested.
«No, that was in Israel,» said Bernstein.
«Was it?»
«It certainly wasn’t here,» Faiyum said, gazing out the windshield at the bleak, cold Martian desert.
«It’s going to go down near a hundred below again tonight,» Bernstein said.
«The batteries will keep the heaters going,» said O’Connor.
«All night?»
«Long enough. Then we’ll recharge ’em when the sun comes up.»
«That won’t work forever,» Bernstein muttered.
«We’ll be okay for a day or two.»
«Yeah, but the nights. A hundred below zero. The batteries will crap out pretty soon.»
Tightly, O’Connor repeated, «We’ll be okay for a day or two.»
«From your mouth to God’s ear,» Bernstein said fervently.
Faiyum looked at the control panel’s digital clock. «Another three hours before Tithonium calls.»
Reaching for his helmet, O’Connor said, «Well, we’d better go out and do what we came here to do.»
«Haul up the ice core,» said Bernstein, displeasure clear on his lean, harsh face.
«That’s why we’re here,» Faiyum said. He didn’t look any happier than Bernstein. «Slave labor.»
Putting on a false heartiness, O’Connor said, «Hey, you guys are the geologists. I thought you were happy to drill down that deep.»
«Overjoyed,» said Bernstein. «And here on Mars we’re doing areology, not geology.»
«What’s in a name?» Faiyum quoted. «A rose by any other name would still smell.»
«And so do you,» said Bernstein and O’Connor, in unison.
The major objective of the Excursion 3 team had been to drill three hundred meters down into the permafrost that lay just beneath the surface of Utopia Planita. The frozen remains of what had been an ocean billions of years earlier, when Mars had been a warmer and wetter world, the permafrost ice held a record of the planet’s history, a record that geologists (or aerologists) keenly wanted to study.
Outside at the drill site, the three men began the laborious task of hauling up the ice core that their equipment had dug. They worked slowly, carefully, to make certain that the fragile, six-centimeter-wide core came out intact. Section by section they unjointed each individual segment as it came up, marked it carefully, and stowed it in the special storage racks built into the hopper’s side.
«How old do you think the lowest layers of this core will be?» Bernstein asked as they watched the electric motor slowly, slowly lifting the slender metal tube that contained the precious ice.
«Couple billion years, at least,» Faiyum replied. «Maybe more.»
O’Connor, noting that the motor’s batteries were down to less than fifty percent of their normal capacity, asked, «Do you think there’ll be any living organisms in the ice?»
«Not hardly,» said Bernstein.
«I thought there were supposed to be bugs living down there,» O’Connor said.
«In the ice?» Bernstein was clearly skeptical.
Faiyum said, «You’re talking about methanogens, right?»
«Is that what you call them?»
«Nobody’s found anything like that,» said Bernstein.
«So far,» Faiyum said.
O’Connor said, «Back in training they told us about traces of methane that appear in the Martian atmosphere now and then.»
Faiyum chuckled. «And some of the biologists proposed that the methane comes from bacteria living deep underground. The bacteria are supposed to exist on the water melting from the bottom of the permafrost layer, deep underground, and they excrete methane gas.»
«Bug farts,» said Bernstein.
O’Connor nodded inside his helmet. «Yeah. That’s what they told us.»
«Totally unproven,» Bernstein said.
«So far,» Faiyum repeated.
Sounding slightly exasperated, Bernstein said, «Look, there’s a dozen abiological ways of generating the slight traces of methane that’ve been observed in the atmosphere.»
«But they appear seasonally,» Faiyum pointed out. «And the methane is quickly destroyed in the atmosphere. Solar ultraviolet breaks it down into carbon and hydrogen. That means that something is producing the stuff continuously.»
«But that doesn’t mean it’s being produced by biological processes,» Bernstein insisted.
«I think it’s bug farts,» Faiyum said. «It’s kind of poetic, you know.»
«You’re crazy.»
«You’re a sourpuss.»
Before O’Connor could break up their growing argument, their helmet earphones crackled, «Tithonium here.»
All three of them snapped to attention. It was a woman’s voice, and they recognized whose it was: the mission commander, veteran astronaut Gloria Hazeltine, known to most of the men as Glory Hallelujah. The fact that Glory herself was calling them didn’t bode well, O’Connor thought. She’s got bad news to tell us.
«We’ve checked out the numbers,» said her disembodied radio voice. «The earliest we can get a rescue flight out to you will be in five days.»
«Five days?» O’Connor yipped.
«That’s the best we can do, Pat,» the mission commander said, her tone as hard as concrete. «You’ll have to make ends meet until then.»
«Our batteries will crap out on us, Gloria. You know that.»
«Conserve power. Your solar panels are okay, aren’t they?»