Return to Mars (17 page)

He froze the image with a bang of a thick forefinger on a key. Yes, there was something in there, a formation of rock that was lighter than the rest. And it looked like it ran roughly parallel to the lip of the niche. Pretty straight.

A wall? Rodriguez puffed out a pent-up breath. Quien sabe?

“Is that Jamie’s village?”

Her voice startled him. Rodriguez spun around in his little wheeled chair and saw Vijay Shektar standing at the doorway to the lab cubicle, each hand holding a plastic mug. She was wearing coveralls, as everyone did. But the Velcro seal down the front was open a few inches, enough for him to notice. Jesus, but she’s a sexy one, Tomas thought.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she explained. “Thought some hot tea would help.”

Tomas noticed that both mugs were steaming slightly. And he realized that, when she spoke quietly like this, Vijay’s voice was a throaty, sultry purr.

“I heard the music. Mexican, isn’t it?” she said, stepping into the lab. “Thought you might like a cuppa.”

He took the cup and started to say thanks, but found that his voice stuck in his throat. Like a goddam kid, he thought. He took a breath, then said carefully, “Mexican, right. Mariachi. Their equivalent of country and western.”

“Really?”

He nodded. “Yeah. Same old stuff: I loved you but you left me. My heart’s broken because you were unfaithful.”

“And you took my pickup truck,” she added.

“And my dog.”

Vijay laughed. Then she said, “Somebody told me once that it’s music for losers.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “I like it.”

“Is that Jamie’s village?” she asked again. She remained standing, her eyes focused on the display screen, looking past him.

The mug of tea was hot in his hand. He sighed. “It’s no village.”

“Are you certain?”

“Pretty much.”

The tea felt too hot to drink, he thought, but she put it to her lips and drank with no qualms. He took a cautious sip. It was scalding. Suppressing a yowl of pain, Tomas put the cup down on the desk beside him.

“Pull up a chair,” he said, wondering if his tongue would blister, “and I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

As she sat in the lab’s other little wheeled chair, Vijay commented, “You’re up awfully late.”

“So are you.”

She shrugged, and the movement excited him. “I’m not much of a sleeper. Never have been.”

“Uh-huh.”

“What about you, though? Shouldn’t you be getting your rest? You ought to be taking tip-top care of yourself. We need you to be bright and shiny in the morning.”

According to the expedition’s regulations, Rodriguez was in charge at the dome while Jamie and Stacy Dezhurova were both away. He was the second-ranking astronaut, and that put him in command when the first astronaut and the mission director were absent. Not that the scientists paid any attention to such protocol. The only time they would obey his commands, Rodriguez was certain, would be if some emergency came up. Maybe not even then.

“I’m okay,” he said, thinking that he’d be more than willing to march off to bed this instant if she would come with him.

She turned her attention to the screen again. “So you don’t think it’s a village or anything artificial?”

She was wearing perfume, he was certain of it. Faint, but a scent of something feminine. It took an effort to keep from reaching out and taking her in his arms. Turning reluctantly back to the screen, Tomas found the strength to say, “See for yourself.”

They spent the next half-hour studying the imagery from the soarplane: visual, infrared, radar, false color, even the brief burst of data from the gas chromatograph that gave them nothing but the composition of the air in the Canyon.

She sat next to him, so close they were almost touching shoulders. Tomas felt a thin sheen of perspiration beading his upper lip.

Vijay sighed stirringly. “There’s certainly no signs saying, ‘Welcome Earthlings,’ are there?”

Is she doing that deliberately? Tomas wondered. Does she know how it affects a man?

“If it was anybody but Jamie, I’d say we’re wasting our time,” he told her.

“But Jamie’s different?”

“He’s the expedition’s director,” Rodriguez said. “And he’s been here before.”

AS THE DOME OF THEIR BASE CAMP APPEARED ABOVE THE RUST-RED HORIZON at last, Jamie heard in his mind the strains of Peter and the Wolf: the climactic march, with Peter leading the captured wolf back to his grandfather’s house.

They were dragging the old rover behind them, a triumphant return to their base camp with an extra piece of equipment to add to their inventory.

If Possum Craig and the two astronauts could get it to work.

Jamie was driving the rover, with Trumball in the right-hand seat. Stacy Dezhurova was taking a well-earned break after driving nearly every kilometer of the way back from the Canyon. Trudy Hall was already back by the airlock, struggling into her hard suit, ready to carry her samples of the lichen into the dome’s laboratory.

We ought to be able to construct an access tunnel, Jamie thought, so we can go from the rover’s hatch to the dome’s interior without needing to bundle into the damned hard suits.

“Y’know what we need?” Trumball asked, one foot planted jauntily on the control panel. Without waiting for Jamie to reply, he went on, “A flexible tunnel. You know, like the access ramps at airports. That way…”

The strains of the triumphal march disappeared. Jamie remembered that in science it doesn’t matter who gets the original idea; what matters is who publishes the idea first.

With a slow smile, Jamie said, “That’s a good idea, Dex. An access tunnel makes a lot of sense.”

Trumball’s eyes flashed with pleased surprise, but he quickly suppressed it.

Jamie spent the afternoon going over the old rover with Possum Craig. It was cramped inside, with both of them in their hard suits. Through his helmet earphones Jamie could hear Craig sighing and moaning like a neighborhood repairman trying to figure out just how high an estimate he could get away with and still be awarded the job.

“Fuel cells completely gone,” Craig muttered. Some time later, “Batteries ain’t worth shit now.”

When they went out again and clambered up the ladder built into the front module’s Hank to inspect the solar panels, Craig’s voice went from somber to dismal. “Y’all ain’t gonna get diddley-squat from these guys.”

By the time they had come back inside the dome and gotten out of their suits, Jamie was ready to write off the rover completely.

But Craig rubbed a hand across his stubbly chin and said, “Well, boss honcho, if the drill rig keeps on behavin’ itself and the creek don’t rise, I can get her runnin’ in about a week, I imagine.”

Surprised, Jamie blurted, “A week?”

“Give or take a coupla days.”

“Really?” Jamie sat on the bench that ran the length of the hard-suit lockers.

Craig nodded sagely and planted one foot on the bench beside Jamie. “Her structural integrity’s okay. We got replacement batteries and solar panel spares in th’ supplies.”

“Enough …?”

“Gotta check out the inventory on the computer and then find the sumbitches in the cargo bay. But we oughtta be okay.”

“Great!”

“Her fuel cells are a pain in th’ butt,” Craig complained. “Old style, run on hydrogen and oxy. We’ll have to electrolyze some of the water from the backup recycler, I expect.”

The fuel cells in the newer rovers used methane and oxygen, Jamie knew.

“Funny thing,” Craig went on. “I was more worried about damage to th’ windshield … you know, pitting or even crazing from the sandstorms. But you had her front end buried nice and cozy in the sand, so the windshield’s okay.”

Jamie got to his feet, a little shakily. “I never thought—”

“Electrical stuff we got backups for,” Craig went on. “But if that windshield had gone, that’d be all she wrote.”

When he checked the comm center, Jamie saw Rodriguez sitting at the communications console with a glum look on his swarthy face. And he noticed that the young astronaut seemed to be trying to grow a mustache; his upper lip sported a sprinkling of short, dark hairs.

“Que tal, Tomas?”

Rodriguez looked up at him with an almost guilty expression. “Troubles, man.”

“What’s the matter?” Jamie asked, pulling up the other wheeled chair to sit next to him.

“I lost contact with number two.”

“The soarplane?” Jamie felt a twinge of apprehension in his guts.

Rodriguez nodded unhappily. “Been trying to reestablish contact. No go.”

“Where was the plane?”

“Recce flight over Olympus Mons.”

The unmanned soarplane was mapping out the huge volcano for Fuchida’s upcoming mission to its peak.

“What happened?”

The astronaut shook his head. ‘ ‘I been going over the flight record. Hit some turbulence while she was climbing through twenty thousand meters, but then it cleared up.”

Olympus Mons was nearly thirty thousand meters tall, more than three times taller than Mt. Everest.

“Might’ve been wind shear,” Rodriguez guessed, “but up at that altitude the air’s so thin it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“How long has the plane been out of contact?” Jamie asked.

Rodriguez glanced at the digital clock set into the comm console. “Fifty-three minutes, fifty-four.”

Jamie let out his breath. “Well, we’ve got number one, and a backup in storage, at least.”

“Only the one backup.”

“We’ll have to use it if number two is down.”

“Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to send the backup out to the mountain until I figure out what went wrong with number two.”

Jamie pushed himself to his feet. Looking down at Rodriguez’s somber face once more, he grasped the younger man’s sturdy shoulder.

“Don’t blame yourself for this, Tomas. It isn’t your fault.”

The astronaut shook his head sadly. “How do you know?”

For the first time in almost two weeks, all eight of the explorers sat together for dinner. Trumball monopolized that conversation with his plans for recovering the Pathfinder/Sojourner hardware at Ares Vallis. He and Rodriguez got into a heated discussion on how reliable the backup fuel generator’s landing engines were.

“I don’t care what the computer simulations say,” Rodriguez said, with unaccustomed fervor. “You’re gonna be putting your necks on the line based on what some engineer assumed and put into the simulation program.”

Jamie knew that the astronaut was feeling the shock of losing the unmanned soarplane.

“You mean,” Trudy Hall corrected, “what some programmer assumed out of the engineer’s assumptions.”

“And they both worked for the company that built the rocket engines,” Stacy Dezhurova pointed out.

“Aw, come on,” Trumball disagreed. “We’ve got test data, for chrissakes. They fired those engines dozens of times.”

Jamie let them argue. Let Tomas work off some steam about the plane. He’s blaming himself for losing it, or at least for not being able to figure out what happened to it. Let him argue and make some points for safety and caution. It’ll do us all some good.

Jamie had decided to buck the decision on flying the backup generator to Pete Connors and the rocket experts back on Earth. Trumball wasn’t going to go traipsing off to Ares Vallis unless the top experts in the field agreed that the generator could be flown reliably and be positioned where they needed it for the excursion.

But Dex seemed to have every angle figured out. He’s been working on this plan for a long time, Jamie thought, probably from before we took off from Earth. He’s shrewd, all right. A very clever guy.