“No, I do not believe so…”
“Stay where you are. It’s my responsibility to find him,” Mironov shouted. “I don’t want two of you missing.”
But Jamie was already striding upslope as fast as he could in the hard suit. The slope was easy and his boots gave him good traction, but the rough ground was treacherous.
“Rava,” he called, “where did you see him last?”
The butter-yellow suit had not moved. “To your right,” Patel’s voice replied. “Perhaps twenty or thirty meters farther up.”
Jamie worked his way around a conical pit, a meteor strike that looked shining new compared to the more weathered craters dotting the ground. He saw a fissure snaking across the black rock, wide enough for a man to fall into. How deep?
Very, he saw, as he bent awkwardly to peer into it. Black and deep as hell. He turned on his helmet lamp, but the beam shone only feebly into the steep crevasse.
“Dr. Naguib?” he called.
Still no reply. If he’s stuck inside this fissure he ought to be able to hear my radio signal, Jamie said to himself. If he’s conscious. If he’s alive.
“Wait where you are!” Mironov called. “I am coming. I have the directional tinder.”
Jamie had to turn completely around to see the Russian bounding toward him in his fire-engine suit, a black box the size of a personal television set in one gloved hand. Patel was still frozen where he stood; his only motion had been to let his arm relax down.
A lot of good the directional finder will do, Jamie thought. If Naguib can’t hear us and we can’t hear him, there’s no radio signal for the directional finder to zero in on.
“He must be on the other side of this crevasse,” Jamie called to Mironov, unconsciously raising his voice, as if he had to shout to cover the distance between them.
Before Mironov could reply, Jamie took a few steps backward, then ran up and jumped across the fissure. In the low gravity it was easy, even with the cumbersome suit weighing him down.
“Wait!” Mironov bellowed. “I order you to wait!”
Jamie took a few more steps forward, swiveling his gaze back and forth as much as the helmet would allow. He’s up here somewhere. Got to be. Out of our line of sight. Out of radio contact. That means…
The uneven ground seemed to stop suddenly off to the left, as if it dropped away steeply. Jamie headed that way while Mironov’s puffing breath panted in his earphones.
“This way, I think,” Jamie called, heading for the break. It was a ravine, he saw. Pretty steep.
And there Naguib lay, crumpled facedown at the bottom of a ten-meter drop. The ravine was roughly twenty meters across, a ragged irregular trench carved into the solid basalt. Naguib’s deep-green hard suit sprawled at its bottom like a broken, discarded toy, legs spraddled, unmoving.
“He’s here!” Jamie shouted, turning enough to see Mironov sailing across the crevasse. “Come on. We’ll need a rope, a line.”
Gingerly, Jamie started down the steep side of the crevasse. It was all in shadow, with the sun dropping toward the horizon, but there was still enough light to see rough places to clutch and precarious footholds.
“Go back to the rover and get the climbing winch,” he heard Mironov call to Patel. The radio voice was noticeably dimmed once Jamie’s helmet dropped below the rim of the ravine.
It seemed to take an hour to work his way down to the Egyptian. It was dark down at the bottom; he needed his helmet lamp to see the final few meters.
In his earphones, though, he heard Naguib breathing raggedly. He’s alive. His suit hasn’t ruptured.
Finally he reached the geophysicist’s side. The backpack was badly dented. In the light of Jamie’s helmet lamp it was difficult to see how serious the damage might be.
“Is he alive?” Mironov’s voice was so loud it made Jamie wince.
“Yes. We’ll need a line to haul him up.”
“On the way.”
Slowly, tenderly, Jamie turned Naguib onto his back. Damned helmet’s banged up too, he saw. He peered into the visor, wiped at the red sand that had smudged it. Naguib’s eyes were fluttering. His face seemed covered with blood. He coughed.