“No, I won’t let us die,” Jamie said in a half whisper. He added silently, Not without a fight, at least.
A growing feeling of helplessness was beginning to overwhelm Dr. Li.
“Kaliningrad insists that a rescue flight is out of the question,” he said.
The expedition commander wanted to stand and pace, wanted to work off the nervous energy sizzling inside him. But in the low-ceilinged confines of the command module he had to content himself with sitting in one of the narrow padded chairs with his knees poking up ridiculously, clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke.
“But they’re stuck down there!” Burt Klein said.
Li shook his head. “Kaliningrad says the last lander is to be used only in the direst emergency.”
“The fact that four of our people are in danger of dying is not a dire emergency?” asked Leonid Tolbukhin sourly.
The cosmonaut and astronaut had quickly volunteered to pilot the expedition’s last remaining landing vehicle to the canyon to rescue the four stranded in the rover.
“We could sit her down within fifty yards of the rover,” Klein said confidently, “and then bring them straight back here. Nothing to it.”
“A piece of cake,” Tolbukhin confirmed, the British idiom sounding strange and deliberate in his deep Russian voice.
“Kaliningrad says no. You two are the only pilots left here in orbit.”
“Bring Ivshenko and Zieman back here,” Tolbukhin suggested. “Then Burt and I can go to the canyon.”
“Sure!” Klein said. “You’ll still have two L/AVs and four pilots at the dome. That’ll be plenty to bring the others back when the time comes.”
Li’s face was a picture of misery. “Ivshenko and Zieman cannot return here without Yang. We cannot leave both our doctors at the dome. What good would it do to bring the traverse team up here if there is no physician here to treat them?”
Tolbukhin nodded reluctantly.
“There is something more,” Li told them. “The medical staff at Kaliningrad has brought up the question of quarantine.”
“Quarantine?”
Li felt miserable as he said, “Since we do not know what is infecting the ground team, they fear that whatever it is might infect us here in orbit if we return the ground team here.”
“Holy shit,” Klein muttered. “They want us to leave them down there?”
Tolbukhin grasped the larger implication. “That means they will not allow us to return to Earth if we have not found the source of the disease.”
“Yes,” admitted Li. “We ourselves might be quarantined in Earth orbit.”
“If we live long enough to get back that far,” the Russian said.
“The alternative is to leave the ground team and return to Earth without them.”
“That’d kill them!” Klein snapped.
“Yes. But to rescue them and bring them back up to orbit with us might kill us all.”
For long moments neither the astronaut nor the cosmonaut spoke a word.
Finally Klein said, “Well, you’ve got to do something.”
Li knew he was right. The weight of responsibility was squarely on his shoulders. Let the four in the rover die, or risk the lives of everyone-including those in orbit-by allowing the last of their pilots to ride to the rescue on the last of the landing/ascent vehicles. Abandon the ground team altogether or risk catching their disease and killing everyone.
Li felt the weight of two dozen lives on him. The weight of two worlds.
When the last of the physicals was finished Tony Reed asked Yang Meilin, “What do you expect to find?”
She shot him a sharp glance from the chair on which she sat. “The cause of this epidemic.”
Reed had barely budged from the corner of the infirmary where he had watched her examine all the people in the dome. Now he made a puzzled shrug.
“Vosnesensky thinks it might be Martian dust that we’re inhaling,” he said.
Yang’s almond eyes watched him unblinkingly from beneath her straight bangs. “Do you believe that?”
“No, I don’t. We’ve tested the air here in the dome. It’s cleaner than the air in London, by far.”
She got up from the chair, a tiny Chinese woman with a nondescript figure and an utterly forgettable round, flat-featured face- except for those eyes. Reed thought they looked at him accusingly. Why not? Why shouldn’t she blame me for this calamity? It is my fault, my responsibility. I was put here to protect the health of these men and women. Some protector!