OVERNIGHT: SOL 6/7
“ACTUALLY,” SAID TRUDY HALL, “MOST SCIENTIFIC WORK is crushingly boring.”
The four of them were sitting on the lower bunks in the module’s midsection, with the narrow foldout table between them and the remains of their dinners on the plastic trays before them. The two women sat on one side of the table, Trumball and Jamie on the other.
“Most of any kind of work is a bore,” said Trumball, reaching for his glass of water. “I worked in my old man’s office when I was a kid. Talk about boring!”
“That’s what they say about flying for the air force,” Stacy Dezhurova added, straight-faced. “Long hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”
They all laughed.
“I know we could move a lot faster if we didn’t have to plant the beacons,” Jamie said, “but they’re important to—”
“Oh, don’t be so serious!” Hall said, looking surprised. “I wasn’t complaining. I was merely making a philosophical point.”
“The English are very deep,” Trumball said, grinning across the table at her. “Really into philosophy and all that.”
“Rather,” agreed Hall.
Jamie made a smile for them.
“We have made good progress,” Dezhurova said. “We will get to within striking distance of the Canyon’s edge by sundown tomorrow.”
“We could make it to the edge itself if we spaced out the beacons a little more,” Trumball suggested. “Say, fifty klicks instead of thirty.”
Jamie felt his brows knit slightly. “Thirty klicks means we stop once every hour, more or less.”
Trumball turned on the cot to face Jamie, his grin knowing, certain. “Yeah, but if we spread ’em out to every hour and a half we could save six-seven stops tomorrow. I checked it out on the computer. We’ll make a helluva lot better time.”
Hall’s expression turned thoughtful. “How would that affect the data stream?”
Trumball shrugged. “Not much. We picked thirty klicks pretty much arbitrarily, right? Stop once an hour, and the rover’s top speed isn’t much more than thirty kilometers per hour, right?”
“So if we space the beacons out every fifty klicks—will you still get the data you want?” Hall asked.
Jamie studied her face across the narrow table from him. Her gray-blue eyes were focused on Trumball. Her chin was slightly pointed, her facial bones sculpted almost like a fashion model’s. She had been a runner back on Earth; even on the long flight to Mars she had jogged around the spacecraft’s outer passageway for hours on end during her free time.
Trumball waved a hand in the air. “Sure. Thirty klicks, fifty klicks, what’s the difference?” He was facing Hall, but he glanced sideways toward Jamie.
Taking in a breath to give himself a moment to consider, Jamie said, “Maybe you’re right, Dex. Spacing out the beacons a bit more won’t hurt all that much.”
Trumball’s eyes widened momentarily. Quickly, he added, “And we could make better time getting to the Canyon.”
Jamie nodded. “Why not? Good suggestion.”
Trumball’s grin seemed more triumphant than grateful.
While the others took turns using the lavatory and getting into their sleep coveralls, Jamie went forward to the cockpit and called the base dome.
Tomas Rodriguez’s chunky, dark-eyed face filled the dashboard screen. As Jamie went through his evening report, which Rodriguez would relay back to Tarawa, an inner part of his mind mused about the colors of the expedition’s members. There had been no deliberate attempt to achieve racial or national or even gender balance, yet the skin tones among their members ranged from Trudy Hall’s ivory to Rodriguez’s olive brown to Vijay Shektar’s near-ebony. I guess I’m somewhere between Tomas and Vijay, he realized.
Jamie had tried to plan out the assignments for field missions so that there would always be two women in each team. He knew he was being overly cautious, prudish even, but he thought the women would feel better with another female aboard, rather than alone with several men.
That left Vijay alone at the dome with Fuchida, Craig and Rodriguez, he knew, but he thought Vijay could take care of herself. Fuchida would be no problem and Craig would most likely behave like a benevolent uncle. Rodriguez had his store of testosterone, but he did not seem aggressive enough to worry Jamie.
Still, he wanted to see Vijay, talk with her.
Once he finished his report he asked, “Is Vijay still awake?”
“I think so,” Rodriguez said. “Hang two and I’ll get her.”
There was no intercom system in the base dome, only a public-address network of loudspeakers, reserved strictly for emergencies. Rodriguez simply got up from the comm console and walked to Shektar’s cubicle. Jamie waited, staring at an empty screen. Rodriguez came back in a few moments.
“She’s on her computer, talking to Dex, from the looks of it.”
Jamie turned in the cockpit seat and, sure enough, Dex was squatting on his upper bunk hunched over his laptop, its screen glowing on his grinning, young, handsome face.