“Anything wrong?” Connors asked.
Almost startled, Jamie pulled himself out of his reverie. The astronaut was grinning at him good-naturedly.
“You were frowning as if your shoes are too tight,” Connors said.
“Just thinking about geology,” said Jamie.
“Does it hurt?”
Jamie laughed and shook his head.
A few minutes later, Jamie asked, “Pete, what does the ‘T’ stand for? Why don’t you use your first name?”
Connors’s long face sank into a frown. “Tyrone,” he muttered.
“Tyrone?”
“Don’t toll anybody.”
“Why not? It’s a fine old Irish name.”
Connors’s grin returned, but somehow it looked almost sad. “The white kids in Nebraska didn’t think so. Got me into a helluva lot of fights. Didn’t look right for the minister’s son to have skinned knuckles all the time. ‘Pete’ is a lot easier to live with.”
I wonder how many extra battles he had to fight in the Air Force, Jamie thought. And the space agency.
They kept on driving as the distant, pale sun sank toward the red horizon. Connors was muttering into the microphone of the comm set clipped over his short-cropped hair. Jamie did not have his earphones on, but he knew that the astronaut was checking their position on the satellite-generated photo map and calling in to Vosnesensky at home base.
According to the display screen in the middle of the cockpit control panel they were less than five kilometers from the canyon. Jamie checked his wristwatch; about fifteen minutes of daylight remained.
Connors slewed the segmented rover almost ninety degrees off its course and eased it to a stop. The electric generator that powered the wheel motors hummed to a lower pitch.
“Okay, that’s it for today,” he said.
Before Jamie could ask why he had turned off course Connors called over his shoulder to the women, “Come on up and watch the sunset!”
They crowded into the cockpit and watched in silence as the strangely small sun sunk below a line of bluffs. The sky turned from pink to burning red, then went utterly black. Jamie strained his eyes for a glimpse of the aurora, but either it was too delicate to be seen through the tinted canopy or there was none. Maybe it’s only there when the sun’s active, he guessed.
None of them moved. No one said a word. Jamie felt the cold of the Martian night seeping through the plastic bubble of the cockpit. Slowly, as their eyes adjusted, a few of the brightest stars gleamed through the bulbous tinted plastic.
“That must be the Earth,” Ilona said in her breathy sultry voice.
“Nope. It’s Sirius,” Connors corrected. “According to the ephemeris Earth is already below the horizon.”
“We cannot see it at all?” Joanna asked.
“Not until she becomes a morning star. And we’ll be on our way home by then.”
Jamie stared out at the dark night sky. He could see only a sparse sprinkling of stars. The sky looked lonely, abandoned.
Connors reached-up and pulled the thermal shroud over the plastic canopy. Then, “Could you let me squeeze past, please?” he said to the women. “I’ve got to get some aspirin.”
“Headache?” Ilona asked.
“Yeah. Too many hours driving. It’s a lot easier flying a plane.”
“Me too,” said Ilona. “I’ll join you at the aspirin bottle.”
Jamie wondered if Ilona was going to make a play for the astronaut. Not here, he thought. It’s too crowded, there’s too much at stake. Then he realized that his own temples were throbbing. It had been a tense day, driving constantly.
By the time they finished dinner, though, they all seemed to feel better. Connors regaled them with stories about his days as the “tail-end Charlie” with the U.S. Air Force’s acrobatic flying team, the Thunderbirds.
“…so we pull out of the loop, wingtip to wingtip, and my goddam canopy pops off, pow! just like that. We’re pulling four g’s and battin’ along close to Mach 1 and all of a sudden I’m in the middle of a regular hurricane right there in my cockpit!”
His black face was alive with expression, his hands twisting to show the positions of the airplanes. Both women were listening raptly, their wide eyes riveted on Connors. Jamie listened with half an ear and let his mind wander to the task they would face in the morning: finding a safe slope down the landslide to the floor of the canyon. Would the ground be firm enough to hold them? Would it be too rocky for the rover’s wheels?