Jamie felt rivulets trickling down his ribs and beads of perspiration dotting his forehead and upper lip. His insides felt jumpy, twitchy.
The middle module of the rover had been reconfigured for this traverse. Instead of being merely a housing for instruments and equipment, it now was set up as a miniature laboratory where the three scientists could examine the rocks and soil samples they were to gather and make preliminary analyses. They could step from the forward module to the makeshift lab through the airlock. The logistics modulo was filled with methane fuel for the electronic generator and fuel cells, plus their other consumables: emergency oxygen, extra water, and food.
Connors seemed utterly cool, despite his deathgrip on the steering wheel. He slowly maneuvered around a crater looming ahead like a hole punched out by an artillery shell, working the rover between its raised rim and the dangerously close edge of the landslide. In the back of his mind Jamie noted that the slide was old enough to have been hit time and again by sizable meteoroids.
“Where’s these mists you saw?” Connors asked. “Everything looks clear as a bell now.”
“I don’t know. Maybe they’ll come up later.”
“Funny thing about haze. From one angle everything can look clear, but if you’re coming in from a different angle, with the sun in a different position, the haze can cover up everything, look like a smoke screen.”
But there was no haze at all now. Jamie felt a tendril of fear worming through his mind. Maybe the haze Mikhail and I saw was a rare phenomenon, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe I’ve dragged us out here to chase a ghost that doesn’t exist.
The slope was strewn with rocks and pebbles, though nothing as big as the boulders they had encountered up on the surface. Jamie could not see any accumulations of dust piled against the bigger rocks. Either the wind doesn’t blow down here, he reasoned, or it blows hard enough to carry away any dust that’s accumulated.
The rover’s cleated metal wheels each had its own independent electric motor driving it, which gave the vehicle the best possible traction. Even so, now and again Jamie felt the ground sliding out from under them, heard a wheel motor whine suddenly before adjusting to the loose gravel beneath it.
Connors was muttering continuously under his breath, so low that even as close as he was Jamie could not tell if the astronaut was cursing or praying. Maybe some of both, he thought.
They passed the one geological probe that had landed on the slide. Its stubby white body stood out against the reddish ground and rocks like a garish advertising sign in the middle of the Sahara. Sure enough, the ground around the probe was firm and easy to drive across, its slope considerably flatter than the area they had just come through.
“Looks easier up ahead,” Connors said.
Jamie saw that the ground was flatter and smoother. No craters in sight.
“Good,” he said through gritted teeth.
A shadow flicked across the cockpit just as Ilona cried out, “Look!”
One of the RPVs flitted past them, low enough for Jamie to make out the glittering eyes of the camera lenses lining its belly. High above, he knew, the other RPV was soaring, watching the entire general area, piloted by Paul Abell. The low one scouted the terrain ahead. Mironov, at its controls, reported what he saw to Connors minute by minute through the earphone clamped to the side of his head.
“Should be getting to the end of it soon,” Connors muttered, whether to Mironov or to the rest of them in the rover Jamie could not tell.
Just then the rover skidded, fishtailing in the inexorable slow motion of a nightmare, the forward section suddenly being dragged almost sideways by the jackknifing of the heavier middle and rear segments. Wheel motors screeched and something made a loud thumping noise. They bounced and jolted, Connors jamming the wheel hard over first one way, then the other.
“Hang on!”
Jamie braced his booted feet and started to reach out his hands to plant them on the control panel. The rover banged into another rock, slewed at a crazy angle, and finally crunched to a stop.