“I wish I could make it an order,” he replied. “I wish I had the power to change your behavior.”
“You don’t. No one does.” Ilona took a small breath, almost a sigh. “Not even I have that power.”
And then there was Tony. Something about the English physician worried Jamie. As the weeks had gone by Tony seemed to become- what? How to describe it? Sullen. Withdrawn. Maybe I’m just imagining it, Jamie thought. Tony looked the same: dapper, handsome, elegant even in project-issued coveralls. But he’s not acting quite the same as when we first landed. He’s quieter, he doesn’t talk as much, and when he does the old zing has gone out of him. Something’s wrong. Tony’s become distant. Cold. Almost hostile.
Has Ilona been riding him again about his not going outside? Then he shook his head. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m just imagining it. I’m so busy preparing everything for this traverse I just haven’t had much time to spend with Tony. Or maybe he doesn’t feel well.
“Do you need help?”
Jamie looked up to see Vosnesensky standing before him, a relaxed smile on his face. Mikhail shaved every morning, yet his dark beard was never completely erased.
“Thanks. I think I can manage.”
Jamie had put on the tubed thermal undergarment when he had dressed in his own cubicle. Now he was worming his legs into the bottom half of his hard suit.
“Why are you going outside?” Vosnesensky asked, beginning to peel off his own coveralls. They had faded considerably from their original coral red.
“I haven’t been out in more than a week,” Jamie said. “All this planning for the traverse has turned me into an apparatchik.”
“That is the price you must pay for leadership.” Vosnesensky was grinning; he obviously meant it as a joke. Down to his briefs, he reached into his locker for his thermal undergarment.
“Well,” Jamie half grunted as he tugged on his boots, “this leader is going to take his free hour this morning to just walk around the dome to admire the scenery. And think.”
The old morose look came back into Vosnesensky’s eyes. “You know that you are not allowed to go outside by yourself.”
“Just a walk around the dome, Mikhail.”
“It is not allowed.”
“I need some time by myself.”
“I am still the commander here,” the Russian said, fastening the front of his thermal undergarment. He looked like a fireplug wrapped in overcooked spaghetti.
Still sitting on the bench, Jamie smiled up at him. “Yes, I know you’re in charge, Mikhail. And you’re right, the mission regulations say no one is allowed outside by themselves. Would you be kind enough to come out with me?”
The Russian grinned broadly. “Me? The group commander! You expect a man as busy as I am to drop everything merely to take a walk with you?”
“I would appreciate it if you did.”
Leaning his butt against the locker to pull on the stiff metal leggings of his pressure suit, Vosnesensky bantered, “The group commander is much too important a person to go strolling out in the desert on the whim of one of his underlings. Much too important.”
Jamie got to his feet and stepped to the rack where the torso of his sky-blue suit hung empty and slack-armed, like a headless, legless display of armor.
“However,” Vosnesensky said, raising a stubby finger in the air, “as one friend to another, I will be happy to go outside with you.”
Jamie wriggled into the torso, popped his head up through the neck ring, and grinned back at the Russian. “As one friend to another, thanks.”
“But only for the one hour,” Vosnesensky said, more seriously. “We all have a busy morning ahead of us.”
“Right.”
In a few minutes more they were fully sealed into their suits. They checked each other’s backpacks, called in to Mironov, who was at the monitoring console for the morning, and entered the airlock.
It was not until they stepped out onto the dusty red ground and Jamie looked up at the pink sky of Mars once again that he remembered that the color of his suit was not the color of the sky here; the nearest blue sky was more than a hundred fifty million kilometers from where he stood.