“And if they are too weak to make it?”
The cosmonaut bit his lip. Vosnesensky waited for his answer, thinking, If he says that we should go back to the dome without going down there and getting them, I’ll throw him out the airlock without a suit.
“If they are too weak to make it,” Ivshenko said slowly, “then I suppose we will have to go down on foot and help them.”
“We?”
“Dr. Reed and myself,” Ivshenko said. “You should remain here in the rover, Mikhail Andreivitch.”
Vosnesensky felt his heart expand. He broke into a huge grin. “Well spoken, Dmitri Iosifovitch! Brave words! But I can think of something much better.”
Tony Reed thought, I should hope so. No one’s going to get me to go out there!
SOL 40: NOON
Jamie turned the ridged little dial on the binoculars; the rippled expanse of sand swam into sharp focus.
“It must be an ancient crater that’s been filled in with dust,” he said, as much to himself as the others clustered in the cockpit.
“Why doesn’t the wind blow the dust away?” Joanna asked.
He put the glasses down. She was sitting next to him, in the right-hand seat, her face pale, her hair tangled and matted. Her breath stank. Mine does too, Jamie told himself. Everybody’s does.
Connors, looking more ragged than ever, sat on the floor between the two seats. His coveralls were rumpled and dark with sweat stains. Ilona stood behind him, leaning wearily on the seat backs. She looked bedraggled too; like Joanna, she had not had the strength to brush her hair. Sick and weary as they were, though, they were all eager to catch the first glimpse of Vosnesensky’s rover.
“I don’t think there’s enough power in the wind to clean out the crater. The air’s too thin, even when it blows at two hundred knots. The crater must have steep walls. Probably made by a meteorite coming in from almost straight overhead.”
“The wind can gradually fill up the crater with dust,” Joanna surmised, “and once it is full it remains full.”
“Right,” said Jamie. We’re talking millions of years here, he added silently. Nothing goes quickly on Mars. Come back in a million years and the rover will still be sitting here, most likely.
He raised the binoculars to his eyes once again. If the oddly rippled sand represented the area of the crater, then it was more than a kilometer across. Jamie could see its boundary clearly, a wide circle where the little wavelets of red sand ended and the ground was more heavily littered with rocks and boulders.
He remembered arguing with Naguib about the frequency of such dust-filled craters. The Egyptian called them “ghost craters” and believed they peppered the landscape even where the ground looked relatively smooth. Jamie had disagreed. But Abdul was right; we’ve fallen into a ghost crater. I should have noticed the difference in the ground, Jamie berated himself. I should have avoided this area. If only I had been sharp enough…
“There they are!”
Joanna pointed eagerly, her wan face suddenly wreathed in a smile.
Following her extended arm, Jamie saw the rover nosing over the crest of the slope like a fat silver caterpillar with a big gleaming bulbous head inching their way.
“Greetings, fellow travelers!” Vosnesensky’s voice was harshly rasping in the control panel speaker. To the four of them it sounded like an angel’s sweet melody.
Jamie glanced down at the comm screen. The cosmonaut looked weak, strained, sweating as he sat at the controls of the second rover and guided it down the slope of the ancient landslide with excruciatingly deliberate, patient care. Tony Reed was hunched behind him, his face drawn, pale, nervous. Both men were in their coveralls.
Putting the binoculars to his eyes again, Jamie saw a figure in a brilliant red hard suit plodding slowly toward them on foot in front of the rover, poking at the ground in front of him with a long pole the way a blind man gropes along unfamiliar territory, the way a mountaineer feels his way across a snow-choked crevasse.
Ivshenko trailed a tether from his waist, connected to the nose of the rover, more than twenty meters behind him. The vehicle was inching along, but getting closer every moment. Trust Mikhail to use every safety precaution, Jamie thought. Does he think Ivshenko’s going to float away? For an absurd moment it looked as if the cosmonaut was towing the ponderous rover.