The outer hatch popped open a few inches, then stopped. A trickle of reddish sand seeped into the airlock chamber.
It’s going to be a battle every step of the way, Jamie realized. Just be careful. Be damned careful.
He pushed the hatch all the way open, leaning against it with his weight to force it back against the sand. The powdery rust-colored stuff poured in around his boots, billowing up into feather-light clouds of dust as he moved. Despite the low gravity the climbing rig’s stand and reel of cable felt as if they weighed tons. The cable reel especially. It was meant to be rolled along the ground, not lifted.
There’s no way to carry it in one hand, he told himself. I’m going to have to make a couple of trips.
Grasping the folded tripod stand, Jamie reached with his free hand for the ladder rungs studding the rover’s flank just outside the hatch. Methodically he made his way up to the roof of the forward module and set the tripod down there.
“Jamie, are you all right?” Joanna’s voice asked.
“I’m up on top of the cab,” he reported. “I’ve got to figure out how to get that damned reel up here. It weighs a ton.”
He heard a mutter of voices, indistinct. Then Connors came on, weak, almost breathless. “Connect the cable to the winch motor… latch it so it won’t turn… then you can… power it up to you,” the astronaut said.
Jamie grimaced inside his helmet. “I guess I would have thought of that eventually. Thanks, Pete.”
“Nothing to it.”
Everything seemed to go so slowly. Jamie spent half a lifetime winching the reel up to the rover’s roof, then clomping down to the tail end of the vehicle and carefully climbing down onto the firm ground back there. Fumbling, sweating, cursing to himself, he set up the tripod stand and bolted it to the equipment attachment points built into the side of each of the rover’s modules. Then he once again hooked the cable to the winch motor built into the stand. This time he unlatched the reel so that it could turn freely.
“Okay,” he panted, breathless now himself. “I’m ready to start my little walk.”
“Good luck, man,” said Connors.
“Vai com deus,” Joanna replied.
Again with god, Jamie thought. Which god? The nasty old man of the Hebrews? The pacifist Christ? Or Coyote, the trickster? He’s the one who’s been working against us here on Mars. The old trickster. He must be howling with laughter at us, stuck in a stupid dry mud hole.
Vosnesensky’s voice cut into his thoughts. “Did you say you are starting toward us?”
“Yes, Mikhail. I’ll be moving to your right, around the perimeter of the crater’s edge.”
“I don’t see you.”
“You will in a few minutes…. I’ll be there in an hour or so,” Jamie said, knowing he was being wildly optimistic. Even with the cable drum resting firmly on the ground now and unreeling easily, he felt as if he were dragging the entire rover and all its contents with each step he took.
“It would be good if you got here before the sun went down,” Vosnesensky said.
The thought startled Jamie. He turned halfway around and saw that the tiny, wan sun was already nearing the distant rocky horizon.
“I’ll try,” he said into his helmet microphone. “I sure don’t want to be out in the dark if I can avoid it.”
Dr. Li had started to write his report to Kaliningrad. He had wanted to be precise in his words, exact in the information he gave to the mission controllers. Knowing that the news that the ground team had contracted scurvy would hit like a thunderbolt and immediately be relayed up the chain of command to various national directors and then to the politicians, Li knew he had to be extremely careful in whatever he decided to say.
Hours later he still sat in his private quarters staring at the glowing computer screen. It was empty. He had not written a single word.
The only news from the ground was that Ivshenko had crippled his knee.
With a sigh of exasperation, more at his own failure of nerve than anything else, he tapped at the keyboard to get a status report from the ground team. Seiji Toshima’s round face appeared on the screen.