“Not a disease?”
“Coal miners get black lung,” Vosnesensky said, “not from germs but from breathing in coal dust.”
Reed stared at him. This cosmonaut actually has a brain inside that thick skull!
“Perhaps there is something in the Martian dust that is affecting us,” Vosnesensky said.
“But we take great care to keep the dust out of our suits and out of our living habitat,” Reed pointed out.
“The dust is very fine. Perhaps we do not take great enough care.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” said Reed.
Mironov said, “We could check the air in here, see how much dust is suspended in it.”
“Yes,” said Vosnesensky. “We must do that.”
Reed was about to reply when Toshima came rushing up to the table. He was wide-eyed with excitement. If the “Martian flu” had hit him, he showed no evidence of it.
“The dust storm!” Toshima fairly shouted. “It has started!”
SOL 37: AFTERNOON
Grounded.
Jamie felt like an errant teenager being punished by his parents. The rover was in perfectly good shape, and even though he felt weak and headachy, he saw no reason why he should not be moving onward, closer to the “village” he had seen.
That’s where we’ve got to go, he kept telling himself. Maybe I can even climb up there, once we get to the base of the cliffs where that cleft is. I’ll bet there’s even a natural path up the cliff face to that cleft and the formation inside it. Or maybe they carved steps out of the rock.
The day outside seemed perfectly clear, despite Toshima’s insistence that a dust storm was howling down the length of the canyon and would soon engulf them.
There had even been the mists out there earlier in the morning, thin gray tendrils of haze that hovered in the early morning chill and slowly evaporated as the sun reached down into the canyon. Like ghosts that vanish when the light touches them, Jamie thought.
If the mists evaporate and then form again the next morning, he reasoned, either the moisture remains inside the canyon or it’s renewed from some source of water vapor underground. Or in the cliff walls.
Christ! There’s so much for us to look for and they’ve got us stuck inside this aluminum can!
For the fortieth time that morning he paced the length of the rover’s command module, from the cockpit bulkhead past the little galley and the narrow passage between the folded-up bunks to the equipment racks and finally the airlock at the back end.
Connors called from the cockpit, “I think it’s starting.”
Jamie rushed the nine strides it took to span the module’s length and ducked his head past the bulkhead. Through the cockpit’s bulbous canopy the canyon outside seemed just the same as the last time he had looked.
Connors anticipated him. “Take a squint at the sky.”
Jamie slid into the empty seat beside the astronaut so he could look upward. The pink sky seemed normal enough-almost.
“It’s gotten ten percent darker in the past five minutes,” Connors said, holding up a color comparison chart.
“There’s really going to be a storm.”
“Yeah.”
“I’d better go back and tell the others.”
“Might as well. We got nothing else to do.” Connors slipped on his headset as he spoke and reached for the comm unit’s switch.
Joanna and Ilona were sitting so close together in the lab module that their shoulders almost touched. The lighting was low, more from the glowing displays on the computer screens than from the dimmed overhead strip lamp.
Neither of the women looked up as Jamie stepped in from the airlock. They were both bent over something on the workbench.
“The storm is starting,” Jamie said.
Joanna turned her head slightly to look at him over her shoulder. In the dimness he could not make out the expression on her face, only that she seemed terribly pale.
“The figures on the core samples are on the screen here,” she said, tapping the computer humming beside her.
“Anything interesting?”
“See for yourself,” she said, turning back to the work she and Ilona were doing.
Jamie frowned slightly at her abrupt manner. He leaned over, since there were no other chairs in the lab, and read off the figures on the screen.