“You say your New Mexico looks like this?” the Russian asked.
Jamie heard his voice in his helmet earphones. Bent stiffly over a waist-deep gully that exposed a seam of basaltic rock, he said, “Yep. Cliffs and arroyos-canyons. Clear skies. Not much rain.”
“It must be very barren, then.”
Smiling to himself, Jamie replied, “Compared to this it’s the Garden of Eden.”
The Russian fell silent.
Jamie straightened up and took the video camera from his belt. The gully ran all the way out to the horizon, almost as straight as train tracks except for some slumping here and there where the ground had slid down to partially fill it in. A fault line, Jamie recognized. The area’s crisscrossed with them. But this one’s been eroded by running water. Had to be. Or mass wasting, permafrost melting beneath the surface and undermining everything. But when? There’s been no liquid water around here for hundreds of millions of years, most likely. Could a rill remain unchanged all that time?
He returned the camcorder to its clip on his belt and went to work chipping at the exposed rock ledge. Then he put the samples into a pouch and picked up the drill. As usual, the drill bit into the ground easily for the first meter or so, then hit resistance. Permafrost, thought Jamie. This whole region is sitting on top of a frozen ocean just a few feet below the surface. Once he had pulled the core sample from the drill bit and carefully deposited it in a sample case, he started back toward the rover.
Vosnesensky was standing there watching in his fire-engine red hard suit.
“Okay,” Jamie said. “I’m finished here. All I’ve got to do is…”
He realized that the Russian had already taken one of his sensor beacons from the equipment bay in the rover’s middle section. Jamie took it from him.
“Thanks, Mikhail.”
He could sense the man’s shrug. “I had nothing better to do.”
“Thanks,” Jamie repeated.
Minutes later they were back in the rover’s cockpit, Vosnesensky in the left seat. They had both removed their helmets and gloves; their hard suits bulked in the cockpit’s bucket seats like a pair of brightly colored armor-plated polar bears.
Vosnesensky steered between a boulder the size of a small house and a shallow circular depression that looked to Jamie like the weathered fossil of an ancient meteor crater. The Russian had small, almost delicate hands, Jamie noticed. He maneuvered the tiny steering wheel with nothing more than a fingertip’s pressure.
“We should reach the canyons today,” he said, “if we do not have to make more stops.”
Jamie took the hint. “We’ll stop only to fill in the net of beacons. Of course, if there’s some important change in the landforms…”
Vosnesensky smiled slightly without turning his eyes away from his driving. “Of course.”
Jamie tried to settle back and get comfortable, but the hard shell of the pressure suit was not meant to sit in. The damned armpit was still chafing despite the padding he had packed into it. He watched the landscape unrolling as they drove slowly toward the strangely close horizon. It bothered him, seeing the horizon so near. Almost frightened him down at the subliminal level where nightmares take root. Jamie felt as if they were driving toward the edge of a cliff.
“The horizon looks awfully close, doesn’t it?” he said to Vosnesensky.
The Russian bobbed his head once. “The smaller the planet the shorter the horizon. It is even closer on the moon.”
“I’ve never been to the moon.”
“Much closer than here. And much more barren.”
DiNardo had been on the moon, Jamie knew. I was called in so suddenly I never got farther off the Earth than the space stations until we started out for Mars.
He forced his attention away from the too-close horizon and concentrated on the land they were driving through. To anyone but a geologist the scenery would have looked dull, monotonous, barren. But Jamie’s mind was leaping from rock to fault crack, crater to sand dune, trying to puzzle out the forces that had shaped this land, sculpted it into its present form.
“I have flown over New Mexico,” Vosnesensky said, almost as if to himself. “In the Mir 3 space station, while training for this mission.”