Return to Mars (37 page)

Trumball swung the camera back to his own face. His ragged dark beard made him look truculent, belligerent, as if he were daring Jamie to contradict him.

“Well?” he demanded. “What are your orders, chief?” The sarcastic stress he laid on the word orders was obvious.

“Keep on going,” Jamie heard himself say. “And good luck.”

Trumball looked surprised.

Vijay followed Jamie into his cubicle when they all filed out of the comm center. What the hell, Jamie thought. If the others didn’t realize we’ve been sleeping together, they know it now.

Later, cupped against one another in the narrow bunk, she whispered to him, “You did the right thing, Jamie.”

“Did I?”

“Dex wouldn’t have obeyed an order to turn around. He would have defied you openly.”

Jamie sighed in the darkness. “Yes, I suppose he would have.”

“It was smart to avoid an open conflict.”

“Maybe.”

“You don’t think so?”

“It’s not important,” he said.

“But it is!” She propped herself on one elbow and looked down at him. “Your authority shouldn’t be challenged.”

“That doesn’t worry me, Vijay.”

“It doesn’t? Then what does?”

He gazed up at her lovely face, outlined in the faint glow from the digital clock. So beautiful, so serious, so concerned about him.

“What bothers me is that I want Dex to be away from here. Away from you. Away from us.”

“WIND’S PICKIN’ UP,” WILEY CRAIG SAID.

Dex was driving the rover with single-minded concentration through a field of rocks big enough to stop army tanks, steering between the minivan-sized boulders while his geologist’s mind begged to go outside and see what they were made of. No time for that, Dex told himself, glancing up at the darkening sky. We’ll do the science on the way back.

Craig was peering at the readouts on the display screen. The wind was up to eighty-five knots: hurricane speed on Earth yet only a zephyr in the rarified atmosphere of Mars. But the wind speed was increasing, and off on the horizon before them an ominous dark cloud hung low over the land.

“How’re the fuel cells doing?” Dex asked, without taking his eyes from his steering.

Craig tapped a few keys on the control panel. “Down to sixty-three percent.”

“Might as well use them as soon as the solar cells crap out,” Trumball said, through gritted teeth. “Save the batteries.”

“Use ‘em or lose ‘em,” Craig agreed. “Get some work outta them before they fade to zero.”

It took a conscious effort for Dex to unlock his jaws. He had clamped his teeth together so hard it was giving him a headache. If it wasn’t so scary it’d be funny, he told himself. I’m steering this buggy like a kid in a video game, trying to get through this frigging rock field and out into the open before the storm hits us.

“Any new data on the storm?” he asked.

Craig tapped more keys, stared at the display screen a moment, then sighed mightily. “She’s gettin’ bigger.”

“Great.”

We should have gone back to the generator, Dex admitted silently. Jamie should’ve ordered us to go back. Wiley should’ve insisted on it. This isn’t a game; that storm could kill us, for chrissakes.

“Want me to drive?” Craig asked gently.

Dex glanced at the older man. “Wiley, if I wasn’t driving I’d be biting my fingernails up to the elbows.”

Craig laughed. “Hell, this isn’t all that bad, Dex. Lemme tell you about the time a hurricane hit us while we were tryin’ to cap a big leak on an oil platform in the dull of Mexico. Right near Biloxi it was …” Dex listened with only half his attention, but he was glad that Craig was trying to ease his tension. It wasn’t working, of course, but he was grateful that Wiley was at least trying.

“A dust storm, you say?”

Darryl C. Trumball felt a pang of alarm as he glared at the wall screen. Unconsciously he ran a nervous hand over his shaved scalp. It was already dark at four in the afternoon in Boston; out beyond his office windows he could see the Christmas lights strung along the trees of the Common and the Public Garden.

“Yessir,” answered Pete Connors’ image on the wall screen, his dark face set in an expression that was totally serious, even grim.

“And my son’s driving into it?”

“As a matter of fact, Mr. Trumball, your son insisted on driving into it. Jamie suggested that he turn back to…”

“Suggested?” Trumball snapped. “By god, he’s supposed to be running things up there! What do you mean, suggested? He should’ve ordered Dex to turn back!” He thumped his desktop for emphasis.

Connors seemed to think about that for a moment. “Mr. Trumball,” he said at last, “your son doesn’t take to following orders very well. Jamie could have stood on his head and I doubt that Dex would have listened to him.”

“That’s nonsense!” Trumball spluttered. “My son’s a team player. He knows how to follow my orders, by damn! This redskinned idiot you’ve got up there just isn’t fit to direct a team of prairie dogs, let alone the finest scientists in the world.”

“Jamie Waterman is one of the best men I’ve ever been privileged to meet,” Connors rebutted without an eye-blink’s hesitation. “You couldn’t ask for a better man to run the expedition.”

Trumball glowered at the image on the wall screen.

“The storm was totally unexpected,” Connors went on, more conciliatory. “It’s a big one, but we’ve seen bigger in the past. We have every confidence that your son and Dr. Craig will be able to ride it out without harm.”

“They’d better,” Trumball said, reaching for one of the ornate pens he kept on the desk.

“They will, I’m sure. I was in a dust storm with Jamie during the first expedition. We made it through without any real problems.”

“If anything happens to my son, I’ll hold that man personally responsible. Do you understand? Personally responsible. I’ll pin his balls to the nearest tree!”

Connors seemed to silently count to ten before he answered, “You’ll have to go through me to do that, Mr. Trumball. Me, and a whole lot of other people who have complete confidence in Jamie.”

Exasperated, Trumball banged a fist on his desktop phone console. Connors’ smoldering image winked out.

“I’ll get you,” the old man grumbled aloud. “You and Waterman and anybody else who gets in my way.”

He commanded the phone’s voice-recognition system to get Walter Laurence on the line. It’s time to pull the plug on this Indian. Don’t wait until Dex gets hurt, that’d make it look too personal. Nail his ass to the wall now.

“It’s definitely going to reach your base camp,” said the meteorologist. “At its present rate of growth and forward speed, the storm will overrun your area in two days—er, that’s two Martian days, sols.”

Jamie and Stacy Dezhurova watched the report in the comm center. The meteorologist appeared to be in Florida, perhaps Miami. Jamie could see palm trees and high-rise condos through the man’s office window, behind his youthful but intently serious face.

The young meteorologist went on to give all the data he could present: maximum wind speeds would be above two hundred knots; the storm’s forward progress was a steady thirty-five knots; height of the clouds; dust burden; opacity. Many of the numbers were estimates or averages.

“We must make certain all the planes are tied down really tight,” Stacy muttered as the meteorologist droned on.

Jamie nodded. “And the generator, too.” He knew, in the calculating side of his brain, that even a two-hundred-knot wind on Mars did not have the momentum to knock down the tall cylinder that housed the fuel and water generator when its tanks were full. The Martian atmosphere was so thin that there was little punch to its winds. Yet the other side of his mind pictured the generator toppling, blown over like a big tree in a hurricane.

Dezhurova nodded. “We must get on it right away.”

“Tomas and I will do the outside work,” Jamie said once the meteorologist finished his report. “You see that everything in here is buttoned up and everybody’s ready for a blow.”

He slid his wheeled chair to the screen where the meteorologist’s frozen image stared out at them, face lined with concern, and punched the transmit key.

“Dr. Kaderly thanks for your report. It helps a lot. Please keep us updated and let us know immediately if there’s any change in the storm’s progress.”

Then he turned back to Stacy, sitting beside him. “Send Kaderly’s report to Poss … I mean, to Wiley Craig and Dex. Then get the others started getting ready for the storm.”

“Right, chief.”

Jamie got up and headed for the airlock and the hard suits waiting by the lockers there. Somehow he didn’t mind it when Stacy called him chief. There was no mockery in her tone.

As he began pulling on the rust-stained leggings of his hard suit, Jamie thought about Dex and Craig out there between Xanthe and Ares Vallis. They’re going to be caught in the storm for two sols, at least. Without a backup electrical system. The batteries ought to see them through okay, if they power down to a minimum. That means they’re going to have to stop and sit there until the storm blows past them.

They’ll be okay. If they just keep their cool and wait it out, they’ll get through the storm all right.

If the dust doesn’t damage their solar panels.

”WHAT DO YOU THINK, WILEY?” ASKED DEX TRUMBALL AS SOON AS THE meteorologist’s detailed report ended.

Craig was driving the rover at a steady thirty klicks per hour. ‘ ‘How the hell fast is one knot? I always get confused.”

Sitting in the right seat, staring out at the darkening horizon in front of them, Dex said, “It’s one nautical mile per hour.”

“What’s that in real miles?”

“Does it make that much difference?”

Craig hunched his shoulders. “Naw, I guess not.”

“It’s about one point fifteen statute miles.”

“Fifteen percent longer’n a regular mile?”

“That’s right.” Trumball was starting to feel exasperated. What difference did fifteen percent make? They were driving straight into a dust storm. A big one.

“So it’ll take about two sols for the storm to pass over us.”

“If we’re sitting still, yes.”

Craig glanced over at Dex, then turned back to his driving. “You want to keep mushing ahead?”

“Why not? As long as the solar cells are working, why not push ahead? Get the hell out of this mess as quick as we can.”

“H’m.” Craig seemed to think it over carefully. “Hell of it is, we got some nice smooth territory here. Pretty easy driving.”

The land outside was not entirely free of rocks, but it was much more open and flat than the broken and boulder-strewn region of Xanthe they had been through. The ground was sloping downward gently, generally trending toward the lowlands of the Ares Vallis region.

“We’re going to turn this route into a regular excursion for the tourists, Wiley,” Dex said, mainly to take his mind off the ominous cloud spreading across the horizon before them.

“Build a road? Out here?”

“Won’t need a road. We’ll put up a cable-car system, like they’re doing on the Moon. Just put up poles every hundred meters or so and string a line between ‘em. The cars hang from the line and zip along, whoosh!” Dex made a swooping motion with one hand.

Craig fell into the game. “The cable carries the electrical current to run the cars, huh?”

“Right,” Dex said, trying not to look out at the horizon. “Cars can carry a couple dozen people. They’re sealed like spacecraft, carry their own air, heat, just like this rover.”

“Only they skim over th’ ground,” Craig said.

“They’ll be able to go a lot faster that way. A hundred klicks an hour, maybe.”

Without taking his eyes from his driving, Craig said softly, “Wish we had one of ‘em now.”

Dex stared out the windshield. It was starting to get dark out there. The mammoth cloud of dust was coming toward them like a vast Mongol horde of conquerors. Soon it would engulf them entirely and they would be lost in the dark.

He shivered involuntarily.

Jamie was outside with Rodriguez, adding extra tie-down lines to the planes, when the call from Connors came through.

Inside his hard suit, he could not see the former astronaut, only hear his caramel-rich baritone voice. Connors sounded concerned, worried.

“He’s on the warpath, Jamie. I just heard about it from Dr. Li. Old man Trumball called him and raised hell about you. He’s calling everybody on the ICU board. God knows who else he’s bitching to.”

Jamie had asked that Connors’ call be put on the personal frequency, so that he could listen to the man in privacy.

“I don’t need this,” he muttered as he tugged at the line that held the soarplane’s wingtip to one of the bolts they had sunk into the ground.

Connors’ voice went on, unhearing, more than a hundred million kilometers away. “I’ve talked to several of the board members myself. None of them really wants to remove you, but they’re pretty scared of Trumball. He must be threatening to cut off funding for the next expedition.”

Straightening in the hard suit was not an easy task. Jamie found himself puffing with exertion as he looked back toward the dome. Fuchida and Dezhurova were in the garden bubble, carefully checking its plastic skin for pinhole leaks or wrinkles where the wind might grab and tear the fabric apart.

Once the dust starts blowing, will the particles have enough force in them to penetrate the bubble’s skin? He wondered. Not likely, but then the odds against the dome being hit by meteoroids were a zillion to one.

Connors was still droning on. “I had a long talk with Father DiNardo about it. He’s a damned good politician, that Jesuit, you know that? He says you should sit tight and ignore the whole thing. It’ll probably blow over as soon as the storm dissipates and Trumball realizes nothing’s happened to his son.”