“I can wait,” Harry said. “It’s about time you took a break, anyhow.”
“I’ll get out of your way,” Kieran told them. He rose, squeezed himself through the gap between the armrest at the end of the bench seat and the hull, and moved to the door while Harry waited before going forward to change places with Rudi. On the far side of the bulkhead, Katrina Ersohn, the sixth member of the expedition, was pouring batter to prepare another pancake to go on the stack she had started. There was already a steel dish with strips of grilled bacon—large slices; Martian pigs grew bigger in the lower gravity. Katrina glanced up with a quick smile as Kieran came through.
“Boy, that didn’t need any announcing!”
“A hungry hoard is about to descend,” Kieran pronounced. “Can’t say I blame ’em. That looks good.”
“I wonder if I get credits for this, too.”
Slightly pudgy, pale-skinned with faint freckles across her nose, and with mousy hair that defied her efforts to comb it straight, curling instead into waves that would have delighted Juanita, Katrina was a graduate student from a private European college that had put up a significant part of Trevany’s funding to have her included in the expedition. Like Trevany and Rudi, she was a recent arrival from Earth.
“How are you finding things here so far?” Kieran asked her.
She answered while carrying on with what she was doing. “I didn’t really get a chance to see too much. Everything seems so unruly and chaotic. . . .”
“Unruled might be a better word.”
“But also, it’s so . . . alive.” Katrina nodded as she flipped the pancake with a spatula—the size of the galley didn’t go with aerial dynamic stunts. “If I had to, I think I could get used to it.”
“Be careful. You might end up finding you don’t want to go back.”
“I’ve heard of that happening. Is it really true? Don’t people miss things like the oceans, forests, walking in cities under an open sky? They never feel the need for those things again?”
“Lots of people have never known them,” Kieran pointed out. “But of those that have, yes, most of them probably do. But on the other hand, they get intoxicated by the freedom, the ruggedness, the vastness out here. Some say they find it’s like going back into a pressure cooker.” He watched her for a moment, and then came back suddenly from one of his inexplicable tangents. “Do you dance?”
She laughed. “What, in here? You’re crazy.”
“On Mars it’s a new experience. A fast Viennese waltz makes you feel like an ethereal being whirling among clouds. . . .” Rudi appeared in the doorway from the driver’s cab. “I bet a month of it would even make a romantic out of Rudi,” Kieran said.
“What’s this?” Rudi asked.
“Viennese waltzes,” Katrina said. “Shouldn’t you be an expert?”
“Actually, I consider myself quite proficient,” Rudi agreed.
Kieran decided not to risk provoking him with a response. “Want me to tell Walter and Juanita that grub’s nearly ready?” he asked Katrina as she began cracking eggs into a jug for scrambling.
“Sure.”
Kieran went back through the living and bunking area, and past the rear bulkhead into the lab section, which took up at least a third of the vehicle’s length. The rear window was unshuttered, providing a view of the supplies and equipment trailer rocking and bumping at the end of its tow bar, with the Martian wilderness creeping by behind. An arrangement of glass tubes and vessels connected to a piece of apparatus on one of the side benches, where Trevany and Juanita had been carrying out some kind of chemical test or calibration. Just at the moment, however, they were engrossed with an image on one of the screens at the c-com terminal in the far corner. It showed part of a surface of irregularly shaped blocks interlocked together in an unusual pattern. A figure in a light-duty Martian EV suit stood at lower left, its hand resting on one of the larger blocks at the base.
“I hope you’re near a good stopping place,” Kieran told them. “Katrina’s just about to dish out food. Pancakes, eggs, and bacon. It looks good.”