He had not dared to step out into the sand itself, for fear that he would sink through the powdery dust so deeply that he would not be able to extricate himself.
The mission rule book doesn’t cover this, Jamie had told himself as he slowly, carefully climbed the ladder. He had gone up as if mountain climbing, three points attached at all times. Move one gloved hand to the next rung. Grip it, then move the other hand. Grip, then one booted foot. Make sure it’s firmly seated on the rung, then pull up the other one. The dust frightened him. He pictured himself drowning in it like a man caught in quicksand.
Now at last he stood up on the roof. If you have any power to help at all, he said silently to the fetish, now’s the time to get it working.
“What’s it look like?” Connors’s voice came through his helmet earphones.
“Not good,” Jamie replied, surveying the scene. “She’s buried up over the fenders, all except the last half of the rear module. Not enough traction to pull us out.”
Connors said nothing, although Jamie could hear his ragged breathing.
“How’re you doing?” he asked.
“I’m fine. Just can’t get up on my fuckin’ feet, that’s all.”
Jamie’s head was swimming with dizziness. His body ached all over and he felt so tired that it was tempting just to stretch out right there and go to sleep. The canyon was so wide that he could actually see the sunset; the cliffs on the other side were too far away to be visible, tall as they were. He watched the sun for a moment, saw it touch the rocky horizon, felt the shadows of deathly freezing night reaching toward him. Inside his suit he shuddered, almost like a dog trying to shake off water.
He looked down at the tiny stone bear in the fading light. The leather thong holding the miniature arrowhead and the feather had been lovingly tied by his grandfather. An eagle’s feather, Jamie thought. Symbol of strength. I could sure use some now.
Into his helmet microphone he said, “I might as well come down. There’s nothing I can do up here and the sun’s going down.”
Tucking the miniature stone bear back into the pouch on the right leg of his hard suit, Jamie started slowly down the ladder. By the time he had painfully made his way back into the airlock it was dark outside. Connors was sitting in the heaped sand, his white hard suit coated with the red dust.
Jamie tried to sound cheerful. “You look like a snowman playing in a pile of rust.”
“I feel like a goddammed snowman-in July,” Connors grumbled.
Slowly, like two arthritic old men, they shoveled most of the sand outside and then closed the outer hatch.
“Gotta clean off the suits,” Connors muttered.
“We’ve got to get you on your feet first,” Jamie said.
It seemed like hours of tugging and pushing, but finally Connors was standing again and they went through the motions of vacuuming the dust off their suits. The suits were still stained rust-red, though, as they struggled out of them. The airlock smelled of ozone so heavily that Jamie’s eyes burned and watered.
Finally they staggered through the inner hatch and half collapsed on the midship benches. Both women were up in the cockpit, Joanna with a headset clamped over her thick dark hair.
“Vosnesensky wants to talk to you,” Joanna called back to them, her voice hoarse, labored.
Ilona muttered, “The Russian pig won’t trust a woman with his important messages.”
Jamie felt his temper snap. “Jesus Christ, Ilona, knock off the anti-Russian crap! We’re in a bad enough fix without your bullshit!”
She smiled languidly at him. “What difference does it make? We are all going to die here no matter what I say, aren’t we?”
Joanna clutched at her arm. “No! We are not going to die! Jamie won’t let us die.”
He looked into their faces as he painfully made his way toward them in the cockpit. The illness had changed them. Ilona was no longer the haughty, imperious beauty who flouted all the rules. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes ringed with dark circles. She had a look of near panic in her face; the smell of death was on her. Joanna’s eyes were burning, blazing. She still looked like a bedraggled little waif, but now there was something in her eyes that Jamie had never seen before: a strength, an endurance he had not realized was in her. Perhaps Joanna had not known it herself. She focused those eyes on Jamie, urgent, demanding.