Jamie took in the locations of the five other scientists with a swift glance. Connors was to his right, halfway between him and the dome’s airlock. Joanna was farther off, struggling with her corer.
“Now! Move it! Move it!” Connors was yelling so loud that it hurt Jamie’s ears. “Come on! Into the dome!”
Jamie angled off toward Joanna, watching the other hard-suited figures start into clumsy motion like a small herd of brightly colored hippos. A spurt of dust erupted near her, but she did not seem to notice. He ran as fast as he could toward her, feeling like a galumphing tortoise while he fiddled with the radio controls on his wrist to turn down the volume of Connors’s urgent voice.
He reached Joanna as she finally started to move toward the dome. Slowing to her pace, Jamie knew he could not speak with her because Connors was flooding the suit-to-suit frequency with his hollering. Instead, he reached out to touch her shoulder. He could not see her face through the tinted visor of her helmet, could not see how frightened she was. Then Jamie realized he himself was scared, sweating cold, innards shaking.
The ground was erupting into puffs of dust, as if a squad of riflemen had them under fire. Something banged at the back of his helmet, just a tap, really, but it startled him as if he’d been shot. He looked up and saw that the dome was dimpling here and there as meteoroids struck its surface. Oh my god, if one of them breaks through…
One did. Jamie saw the transparent fabric on the lower level of the dome pucker for an instant, and then a small geyser of spray erupted into the dry thin air, like a whale spouting.
“The dome’s punctured!” somebody screamed.
The hole spread into a growing rip as moisture-laden air geysered out into the Martian atmosphere and the plastic fabric of the dome began to sag noticeably.
After that first moment of near panic Vosnesensky turned coldly calm. While the others rushed for their suits, he veered aside and trotted around the inner periphery of the dome, checking to see if the repair patches were in their proper places. He had checked the patches only a day earlier, part of his regular inspection routine. But now he checked them again, while a patter of pock, pock sounds rained gently over his head, almost drowned out by the fearful voices of Toshima and the fliers as they struggled to don their hard suits.
He never saw the dome punctured. The meteoroid that punched through both layers of the plastic was a nearly microscopic grain of dust. But Vosnesensky heard a different sound, like a sudden gusting intake of breath, the kind of sound a man makes when he’s been stabbed in the chest.
He felt the breeze as the dome’s air rushed toward the puncture. Books fluttered open in the wind; loose papers flew across the dome like a covey of frightened birds. The hissing noise grew louder, a moan, a rushing torrent of air.
Vosnesensky whirled and saw dozens of the lightweight repair patches lifting off the floor to be sucked up against the wall of the dome. They flattened there, edges fluttering madly as the air rushed past them to escape the dome. The plastic walls began to sag between the dome’s stiff supporting ribs. The surface of the wall was ripping faster than the patches could cover it.
Ears popping, heart triphammering, Vosnesensky rushed to the spot, bent down to scoop up more of the repair patches, and slammed them over the widening hole. They slipped down, would not stay. They still fluttered, and Vosnesensky could hear the dome’s air roaring now as it rushed into the near-vacuum outside. In a few minutes it would all be gone. The force of the escaping wind was tugging at him, trying to suck him through the wall and out into the deadly open.
Without a word or a call to anyone, he braced himself and began to struggle back toward the center of the dome, leaning against the wind, staggering like a drunk, threading his way painfully past the scientists’ workstations, dodging chairs in the wardroom carelessly left scattered about the floor. His ears were screaming with pain, as if someone had jabbed icepicks into them.