“Mars 2 is all right,” Vosnesensky announced. “Everyone in the storm cellar with no trouble.”
They’ve got the extra man, Jamie thought. Dr. Li makes it thirteen they have to squeeze into their shelter.
Pete Connors got up and went to stand between Vosnesensky and the other Russian. “All the ship’s systems are working okay?” he asked loudly.
“Yes, yes.” Vosnesensky pointed to the panels of lights that showed the condition of the rest of the ship. Most of the lights were green. “The equipment was built to withstand radiation. It is only we fragile creatures of flesh and bone who need protection.”
Cheerful, Jamie thought. Very cheerful.
Fourteen hours later the radiation levels outside the shelter had not gone down discernibly. Jamie had dozed for a while, slumped back on the bench that lined the compartment’s wall. Joanna and the Polish biochemist who was Ilona’s backup had found enough room on the opposite bench to curl up and sleep. There were foldout cots built into the walls above the benches, but no one had bothered to use them.
Looking around with blurry eyes, Jamie saw that all four pilots were sitting up near the hatch and the comm console. The Christmas tree of monitoring panels still showed mostly green lights, although there were more red ones than before. Tony Reed was chatting amiably with Ilona and the Aussie geologist, George O’Hara, at the other end of the compartment, where food and drink dispensers were built into the rear wall.
Jamie pulled himself to his feet, feeling stiff and dull-headed. O’Hara was redhaired, rawboned, tall enough to need to stoop slightly unless he stood exactly in the midline of the compartment. Otherwise his head brushed the curving ceiling panels. He seemed an amiable enough sort. Jamie had not detected a trace of jealousy over the fact that O’Hara was to stay aboard the ship while he would be the one to go down to the surface.
“… in Coober Pedy the miners live underground most of the year,” O’Hara was saying. “Too bloody hot to live up on the surface, so they’ve built a by-damn city down in the shafts and galleries. Swimming pools and everything.”
Ilona was not impressed. “How much longer must we stay in here?”
“Don’t be so anxious to go out,” Tony said. “This is the best place in the entire solar system to be, right now.”
“Except for Earth,” said Jamie.
“Ah well,” Reed admitted, “we can’t have everything now, can we?”
“Reminds me of being stuck inside a bloody airliner,” O’Hara said, grinning down at Ilona. “I remember once a couple years ago at Washington National, they had us buttoned up on the rampway and made us wait five bloody hours inside the bloody airplane before we could take off. Some mechanical problem they took their sweet time fixing. We drank all the booze on board and we still hadn’t moved a fucking inch. It was like a zoo by the time we actually took off.”
“I’m feeling as if I’m in a zoo,” Ilona muttered. “In a cage.”
“Steady on,” Tony said in his best British stiff-upper-lip manner. But he looked tight to Jamie, tense, his smile forced.
“How much longer will it be?” Joanna’s sleepy voice came from behind Jamie.
It was a rhetorical question. She pushed past them and went into the lavatory.
“Ever wonder why they always put the pisser next to the water fountain?” O’Hara asked no one in particular.
“Plumbing,” Jamie said.
“Or recycling?” suggested Reed.
Jamie walked the length of the compartment, as much to stretch his legs and get some circulation going as to reach the pilots up by the comm console and equipment monitors. Katrin Diels, the German physicist, was deep in earnest conversation, a headset clamped over her blonde curls.
“When did the intensity peak?” she asked into the pin-sized microphone in front of her lips.
Jamie almost smiled at the fierce intensity on her snub-nosed freckled face. She was slight of frame, as butter blonde and blue-eyed as the people you would see in a travel poster advertising Oktoberfest. The pilots had made room for her and she sat on the end of the bench where she could operate the communications console.