“Right,” he said at last. “Were you able to pick up any of that, Jeanie? We have to get a move on. Go faster.”
“Faster? In these conditions? You’re crazy. I know it’s slow going, but we all have plenty of air. Let’s do it right, and get there in one piece.”
“It’s not air I’m worried about.” He was crowding up behind us, so that we were all bumping into each other. “We have to be in the pod and off the surface in less than an hour. Sven’s been tracking the surges of seismic activity and dust speed, ever since they landed and everything went to hell. There’s a bad one coming an hour and a half from now — and I mean bad. Worse than anything we’ve felt so far. A lot of the minor cycles we’ve been feeling since we came out on the surface will all be in phase. They’ll all add together.”
Worse than anything we had felt so far. What would it be like? It wasn’t easy to imagine. Nor was the cause — but something had taken Vandell’s smooth and quiet surface and crumpled it to a wild ruin in the few hours since the other pod had landed.
Against my instincts I began to take more risks, to climb over more jagged rocks and to walk along shelves that might tilt and slide under our weight. I think that at this point it was worse for McAndrew and me than for Sven and Jan. They could walk blind and trust us to keep them safe; but we had to keep our eyes wide open, and study all the dangers around us. I wanted to ask Mac a hundred questions, but I didn’t dare to focus his attention or mine on anything except the immediate task.
At our faster pace we were within a hundred meters of the pod in twenty minutes, with what looked like a clear path the rest of the way. That was when I heard a grunt and curse over the suit radio, and turned to see McAndrew sliding away to one side down a long scree of loose gravel. Last across, he had pushed Sven Wicklund to safety as the surface began to break. He fell, scrabbled at the ground, but couldn’t get hold of anything firm. He rolled once, then within seconds was lost from view behind a black jumble of boulders.
“Mac!” I was glad that Jan couldn’t hear my voice crack with panic.
“I’m here, Jeanie. I’m all right.” He sounded as though he was out on a picnic. “My own fault, I could see it was breaking away when Sven was on it. I should have looked for another path instead of following him like a sheep.”
“Can you get back?”
There was a silence, probably thirty seconds. In my nerved-up state it seemed like an hour. I could hear Mac’s breath, faster and louder over the radio.
“I’m not sure,” he said at last. “It’s a mess down here, and the slope’s too steep to climb straight up. Damned gravel, I slide right back down with it. It may take me a little while. You three had better keep going and I’ll catch up later. Time’s too short for you to hang around waiting.”
“Forget it. Hold right there, I’m coming back after you.” I leaned to set my helmet next to Jan’s. “Jan, can you hear me?”
“Yes. But speak louder.” Her voice was faint, as though she was many meters away.
“I want you and Sven to stand right here and don’t move — not for anything. Mac’s stuck, and I have to help him. I’ll be just a few minutes.”
That was meant to be reassuring, but then I wondered what would happen if I was too optimistic about how long it would take me. “Give me twenty minutes, and if we’re not back then, you’ll have to get to the pod on your own. It’s straight in front as you’re facing now, about a hundred meters away. If you go in a straight line for fifty paces then clear your faceplates, you should be able to see it.”
I knew she must have questions, but there was no time to answer them. Mac’s tone suggested it would be completely fatal to be on Vandell’s surface, unprotected, when the next big wave of seismic activity hit us.
I knew exactly where Mac had gone, but I had a hard time seeing him. The rock slide had carried with it a mixture of small and large fragments, from gravel and pebbles to substantial boulders. His struggles to climb the slope had only managed to embed him deeper in loose materials. Now his suit was three-quarters hidden. His efforts also seemed to have carried him backwards, so with a thirty degree gradient facing him I didn’t think he’d ever be able to get out alone. And further down the slope lay a broad fissure in the surface, of indeterminate depth.
He was facing my way, and he had seen me too. “Jeanie, don’t come any closer. You’ll slither right down here, the same as I did. There’s nothing firm past the ledge you’re standing on.”
“Don’t worry. This is as far as I’m coming.” I backed up a step, nearer to a huge rock that must have weighed many tons, and turned my head so the chest of Mac’s suit sat on the crosshairs at the exact center of my display. “Don’t move a muscle now. I’m going to use the Walton, and we don’t have time for second tries.”
I lifted the crosshairs just a little to allow for the effects of gravity, then intoned the Walton release sequence. The ejection solenoid fired, and the thin filament with its terminal electromagnet shot out from the chest panel on my suit and flashed down towards McAndrew. The laser at the tip measured the distance of the target, and the magnet went on a fraction of a second before contact. Mac and I were joined by a hair-thin bond. I braced myself behind the big rock. “Ready? I’m going to haul you in.”
“Aye, I’m ready. But why didn’t I think of using the Walton? Damnation, I didn’t need to get you back here, I could have done it for myself.”
I began to reel in the line, slowly so that Mac could help by freeing himself from the stones and gravel. The Izaak Walton has been used for many years, ever since the first big space construction jobs pointed out the need for a way to move around in vacuum without wasting a suit’s reaction mass. If all you want is a little linear momentum, the argument went, why not take it from the massive structures around you? That’s all that the Waltons do. I’d used them hundreds of times in free fall, shooting the line out to a girder where I wanted to be, connecting, then reeling myself over there. So had Mac, and that’s why he was disgusted with himself. But it occurred to me that this was the first time I’d ever heard of a Walton being used on a planetary surface.
“I don’t think you could have done it, Mac,” I said. “This big rock’s the only solid one you could see from down there, and it doesn’t look as though it has a high metal content. You’d have nothing for the magnet to grab hold of up here.”
“Maybe.” He snorted. “But I should have had the sense to try. I’m a witless oaf.”
What that made me, I dreaded to think. I went on steadily hauling in the line until he had scrabbled his way up to stand by my side, then switched off the field. The line and magnet automatically ran into their storage reel in my suit, and we carefully turned and headed back to the other two.
They were just where I had left them. They stood, helmets touching, like a frozen and forlorn tableau in Vandell’s broken wilderness. It was more than fifteen minutes since I gone back to Mac, and I could imagine their uneasy thoughts. I leaned my helmet to touch both theirs.
“All present and safe. Let’s go.”
Jan gave my arm a great squeeze. We formed our chain again, and crabbed the rest of the way to the pod. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had looked, or as I suggested to Jan, but in less than fifteen minutes we were opening the outer hatch and bundling Sven and Jan into it.
The lock was only big enough for two at a time. They were out of their useless suits by the time that McAndrew and I could join them inside. Jan looked pale and shaky, ten years older than her seventeen years. Sven Wicklund was as blond and dreamy-looking as ever, still impossibly young in appearance. Like McAndrew, his own internal preoccupations partly shielded him from unpleasant realities — even now he was brandishing a piece of paper covered with squiggles at us. But Jan and Sven had both held together, keeping their composure well when death must have seemed certain. It occurred to me that if you wanted to find a rite of passage to adulthood, you wouldn’t find a tougher one than Jan had been through.