“Yeah. Strange smell. Almost like… could it be ozone?”
Vosnesensky rubbed at his eyes. “Yes, I think you are right. Ozone.”
“The soil’s loaded with superoxides,” Jamie said.
“And in the high temperature inside here they are breaking down, baking out of the dust.”
Jamie’s own eyes were smarting now. The rover’s airlock was much smaller than the clean-up area in the dome. “Maybe we ought to get out of the airlock.”
“Not until we clean the suits.”
Jamie finished pulling off his boots and wriggled out of the hard suit’s pants. They vacuumed their suits thoroughly, yet the pungent odor remained in the airlock. Then he followed Vosnesensky through the hatch that led into the main compartment of the rover’s forward section.
Blinking his eyes, Jamie said, “Wow, it feels like downtown Houston in there.”
“The ozone will break down quickly enough,” said Vosnesensky. “It becomes molecular oxygen. Harmless.”
Scanning the shelves of equipment neatly stacked on either side of him Jamie muttered, “We have a GC/MS in here, don’t we? They’re not both back in the equipment section.”
Vosnesensky pointed to the lowest shelf. “That is the quadruple device. The magnetic one is in the equipment module.”
“This’ll do just fine.” Jamie knelt down to pull the instrument from the shelf. The gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer analyzed the chemical composition of materials, virtually atom by atom. It was neatly packaged in a gray plastic casing, surprisingly light. The manufacturer’s logo identified it as Japanese.
“I want to monitor the levels of ozone in the airlock. See how it decomposes, what else the soil might be outgassing.”
“Good,” said Vosnesensky.
“I’ll set it up in the airlock and connect it to the secondary display screen in the cockpit. You set up dinner. I’m starving.”
The Russian’s dark brows knitted slightly. “You are giving me orders? I am the commander.”
Jamie was already starting to open the airlock hatch, the spectrometer in one arm resting on his hip. He glanced back over his shoulder at the cosmonaut.
“I give the orders, Yankee. You set up the GC/MS while I prepare our meal.”
“Right, boss,” said Jamie, laughing.
Joanna watched the display screen as Vosnesensky and then Jamie Waterman made their evening reports. She was sitting on a spider-legged stool at the workbench in the biology lab, cocooned in the bulky equipment that surrounded her. She felt almost at home in the laboratory area; the microscopes and isolation boxes and racks of glassware made her feel more comfortable and protected here than in the bare narrow cubicle that served as her sleeping quarters.
She had patched her lab computer into the base’s communications system so that she could see the excursion team’s report in some privacy. Jamie’s face looked serious yet happy. He was not really smiling, but there was an excitement in his eyes that she had never seen before as he described his day’s observations.
“This is where we should have landed,” he was saying, looking out from the screen as if he knew his eyes would meet hers. “There’s moisture here and I’m willing to bet that the temperatures down at the bottom of the valley are significantly warmer than up here on the plain.”
He went on, his eyes sparkling as he described the rock formations that looked to him so much like the adobe cliff dwellings of southwestern America.
“He’s a handsome red devil, isn’t he?”
Joanna whirled on the stool. Tony Reed was standing there, one arm casually leaning on the transparent plastic hood of an empty isolation box. He wore a black turtleneck shirt beneath his tan coveralls. One corner of his lips was curved slightly in a strange sardonic smile. Joanna stared at him for a wordless moment. It was almost as if Reed’s face had been split in two: half his face was smiling, the other half not.
“Jamie makes a strong case for studying the canyon,” she said. “The chances for finding living organisms, or even the fossils of extinct species…”
Reed moved closer to her, pulled up the other stool, and straddled it. Gesturing toward the screen he said, “Our Indian friend seems to think he’s found the ruins of an ancient village. How preposterous.”