The pumps stopped. The indicator light turned red. Mironov pushed the hatch open.
“We’ve only got three days here,” Jamie replied as they stepped through the hatch and down the short ladder to the rough, blackened ground. “We’ve got to make the most of them.”
“Patel makes you feel guilty.”
Jamie forgot himself and tried to shrug inside the suit. All he got for his effort was a fresh irritation under his armpit, where the suit chafed him.
“You must not drive yourself so hard,” Mironov went on. “When you are tired you make mistakes. Mistakes can kill a man.”
“I’ll be all right. The others are pushing just as hard,” Jamie said.
“I gave them the same lecture,” said the Russian. His voice sounded more disappointed than distressed.
“And?” Jamie asked.
Mironov pointed a gloved finger toward the butter yellow and dark green figures of Patel and Naguib. “They ignored me just as you are ignoring me.”
Patel and Naguib were already chipping samples of the dark basaltic rock that spread as far as the eye could see. Old lava flow, Jamie knew. Pavonis Mons had erupted over and over again, red-hot magma flowing in all directions. How long ago? The samples they were taking would give them the answer. They had decided to spend these three precious days at the base of the volcano’s shield, collecting as many samples from as many different locations as possible. They would start to analyze them on the trek back to the base, they had agreed.
Yet none of the three scientists could resist testing the samples they had collected. Last night they had stayed up for hours, while Mironov reminded them of the mission schedule like an ineffectual camp counselor. They ran a dozen samples through the portable GC/ MS in the rover’s lab module.
The mass spectrometer told them that their samples were iron-rich basalts, no more than five hundred million years old, based on their ratio of potassium to argon.
“But the argon might have outgassed,” Jamie warned. “Some of it may have escaped into the atmosphere.”
“Much of it may be missing,” Naguib agreed.
“Which means that the samples could be much older,” said Jamie.
Patel, still refusing to meet Jamie’s eyes, said to the Egyptian, “We will run more definitive tests back at the base, where we can irradiate the samples in the power reactor.”
Naguib nodded and said, “Yes. If the remote handling system is working. It was down…”
“Pete said he’d have it running by the time we got back,” Jamie said.
“Astronaut Connors!” Patel almost snorted. “He spends all his time flying the RPV instead of attending to maintenance.”
“Pete will have the remote handlers working by the time we get back,” Jamie insisted.
Finally they folded down their bunks for sleep: Patel and Naguib on the uppers, Mironov and Jamie below. Jamie fell asleep quickly, only to be awakened by a whining, almost sobbing sound from above. One of them’s having a nightmare, he realized. He turned his face toward the curving wall of the rover and went back to sleep. His last conscious thought was that the metal skin of the vehicle felt cold; the freezing night of Mars waited outside, less than an inch away.
Over breakfast they had agreed that their best strategy was to work along the line of fissures and sinkholes that ran up one side of the volcano’s massive base. They would go as far as they could up the gentle slope of the shield, with Mironov driving the rover behind them so they would not exceed the safe walk-back distance specified in the mission regulations.
All three of these volcanoes sit astride this big fault line, Jamie said to himself as he laboriously chipped away at the tough black basalt. Looking back toward the rover, he saw Mironov planting another beacon into the ground. It was not easy work; this was real rock, not the compacted sands they had found around their domed base. The thin layer of reddish dust that covered the rock was easily scuffed away. Jamie wondered why the wind did not remove it entirely.
Inside his hard suit Jamie could not feel any wind, and there were no clouds in the salmon sky to show air movements. Yet the meteorology instruments on their beacons showed a fairly steady breeze of more than forty miles per hour running up the long gradual slope toward the volcano’s distant summit. At night the wind direction reversed to downslope and slowed to little more than twenty miles per hour.