Blindly Konoye fired the thrusters of his excursion unit. In panic he fled from the overpowering presence of Mars.
“Wait!” shouted Tolbukhin. “What are you doing?”
Konoye was jetting away from Mars, away from Deimos, away from the spacecraft in which he had lived for more than nine months. His gloved hands clamped rigidly on the thruster controls, like a catatonic or a man already in rigor mortis.
“Stop!” Tolbukhin yelled, so agitated he lapsed into Russian. “You fool, you’ll kill yourself!”
But Konoye was fleeing, panic-stricken, unable to speak. The cosmonaut punched his own thrusters into life and jetted after him, even as his helmet earphones erupted in wild commands from the team in the Mars 2 spacecraft monitoring their excursion.
Under the remorseless hand of blind nature Konoye had turned himself into a miniature asteroid. At full thrust the propellants in his tanks quickly ran out. In the frictionless vacuum of space he continued to fly away in the same direction, straight out into the endless void between worlds.
Tolbukhin could not catch him. Within a few seconds his training asserted itself-abetted by the frenzied shouts of the monitoring team in his helmet earphones. He reversed course and headed bark for the safety of the Mars 2 craft.
It took no more than two hours for the rescue team to reach Konoye in one of the emergency transfer vehicles they all referred to as “tugboats.” The Japanese scientist still had several hours of air in his suit tanks. His heater and other life-support equipment were still functioning.
But he was quite dead. The autopsy promptly conducted by Dr. Yang aboard the Mars 2 craft found the cause of death to be a cerebral hemorrhage. Tolbukhin shook his head when he heard the verdict.
“He died of fright,” muttered the Russian. “He died of deimos, dread.”
SOL 9: EVENING
“He died of natural causes, then,” Jamie said.
Vosnesensky shrugged. “But would he have died if he had remained on Earth? Or if he had not gone on the EVA?”
Jamie shrugged back at the Russian. “We’ll never know.”
They were in the cramped confines of the airlock, slowly, laboriously pulling themselves out of their hard suits, tired from the day’s work, depressed by the news from orbit.
“I still don’t see why Li had to order us to return to base,” Jamie grumbled, “Doesn’t he understand what we’ve found here?”
“What have we found?” Vosnesensky smiled tolerantly. “An optical illusion?”
“Well… maybe,” Jamie admitted.
“When we get back to the base we can ask the team in orbit for computer enhancement of the videotapes. If there is any chance that the rock formations are man-made… er, Martian-made-we will certainly return here.”
“It’s more than that, Mikhail. This canyon is an open book of the history of the planet. We should be here, studying what the rocks have to tell us. Joanna and the life-sciences people should be down there where the mists hang around all day. That’s the best chance for life to be found.”
Vosnesensky had peeled down to his water-tubed skivvies. Jamie was still in his hard-shell pants, leaning against the airlock bulkhead to tug off a boot.
The Russian looked at the red dust on Jamie’s boots and sniffed loudly. “It smells different from the moon.”
“What?”
“After a moon walk your shelter smells as if someone had shot off a revolver inside. The lunar dust that clings to your suit and boots has a burnt odor to it. This stuff-” he fingered the thin film of rusty powder on the sleeve of his empty hard suit “-this Martian dust smells different.”
Jamie wrinkled his nose. “Now that you mention it-it smelled the same way back at the dome, didn’t it?”
Nodding, Vosnesensky pulled on his hard suit’s arm; it swung upward with the slight hissing sound of its slick Teflon shoulder joints.
“Smell.”
Jamie sniffed at the metallic arm. Pungent. Harsh. Then he pulled one of his own gloves from the rack where he had tucked them. Somewhere deep in his memory the picture of an approaching thunderstorm formed itself, strange eerie afternoon light, the summer air heavy and still. Lightning flickering against approaching black clouds.