MORNING: SOL 56
“BY GOLLY, THERE SHE IS!”
Wiley Craig pointed with his right hand while keeping his left on the steering wheel.
Dex Trumball squinted into the bright morning sun. Off on the rough, crimson horizon he saw a tall metal shape, gleaming and alien-looking in the Martian landscape.
The rover was plunging at top speed across a field of rocks, its spindly, springy wheels jouncing and rattling them so hard they had both strapped themselves into the cockpit seats.
“We’ve drifted too far north, Wiley,” said Trumball.
“it’s going to cost us a half a day to get to her.”
Craig’s bristly, bearded face was split by a big, gap-toothed grin. “Don’t care how far away she is; she shore looks purty, don’t she?”
Dex nodded and admitted, “Yeah, she sure does.”
The dust storm in the southern hemisphere had petered out at last, according to the previous night’s weather report. Craig had expressed great relief. Trumball, equally grateful that the storm would not hit them, played it much cooler.
“Even if it had crossed the equator, we could’ve ridden it out.”
“I don’t know, Dex,” Craig had said soberly. “Some of those storms last for weeks.”
“Not this time of year.”
“Uh-huh. And it never rains in California.”
Trumball got up and staggered back toward the equipment racks near the airlock, lurching from one handhold to another, while Craig steered the rover through the rock field and onto smoother, slightly higher ground. The generator took shape before his eyes, a tall polished aluminum cylinder catching the glint of the morning sun, resting on three slim-looking metal legs, the nozzles of three rocket engines hanging beneath the vehicle’s end skirt.
“Come on,” Dex called from the rear of the rover module, “goose her up a little more. Let’s make as much time as we can.”
“Let’s not throw a wheel, either,” Craig countered. “Another half-hour ain’t gonna kill us.”
Trumball grumbled to himself as he checked out the video monitoring equipment. The outside cameras were recording everything; not only would the views be a bonanza for geologists studying Mars, they would be great background material for the virtual reality tours that Dex would beam Earthward.
By the time Craig pulled the rover to a stop next to the generator Dex was suited up and already stepping into the airlock.
“You just wait a minute there, buddy,” Craig called to him. “You’re not goin’ outside without being checked out.”
“Aw, come on, Wiley. I went through the checklist myself. Don’t chickenshit me.”
But Craig would not be put off. He checked Trumball’s suit quickly but thoroughly, then pronounced him ready to go outside.
“I’ll holler when I’m suited up and you come back in and check me over.”
The generator was chugging away, sucking up water from the line it had drilled down to the permafrost level under Craig’s remote guidance; pulling in the thin Martian air and separating its components automatically.
By the time Craig came through the airlock hatch and stepped onto the rusty ground, Trumball had ascertained that the methane and water tanks were both filled almost to capacity.
“Okay, great,” Wiley said. “Now we gotta fill our tanks.”
It took more than an hour. While Craig handled the hoses and watched the gauges, Dex beamed a VR session back to Tarawa: the intrepid explorers hacking their way through the Martian wilderness have made their rendezvous with the refueling generator. On to Pathfinder!
Once they climbed back inside the rover, Dex scrambled quickly out of his suit and made his way to the cockpit. A brief scan of the control panel showed everything in the green, except for the glowering red light of the fuel cells. We’ll get that into the green, too, he told himself. Soon as Wiley electrolyzes enough of our water to feed ’em.
By sundown they were well on their way toward Ares Vallis, the generator below their horizon and out of sight. Dex was still driving, Craig in back tinkering with the fuel cells.
“How’re they holding?” Trumball called over his shoulder.
Craig’s exasperated sigh was audible even from the rear of the module. “Leakproof welds my hairy butt,” he groused.
“What’s the matter?”
“These damn dewars are supposed to hold liquid hydrogen,” Craig said, kicking a booted toe on the stainless-steel cylinder on the rover floor.
“Yeah?”
“Well, the damned welds on ’em leak like a sieve that’s been shotgunned.”
“Does the pope eat spaghetti?”
“How bad?”
Craig clumped up toward the cockpit and slid into the right-hand seat. “I gotta do some calculations. It ain’t good, though, I can tell you that without a computer,”
Trumball saw that Craig was more disgruntled than worried. We can get along without the fuel cells, he thought. Hell, we’ve been getting along without ’em for a week now. Still, it’d be good to get that damned red light off the board.
“The newest fuel cells back on Earth use nanotube filaments to store the hydrogen,” Craig was muttering. “Nanotubes work, pardner. They soak up molecular hydrogen like a sponge and hold onto it like a vise. But all we got is these leaky damned dewars.”
The sun was nearing the horizon, Dex saw. A thin patch of cloud high above was already reflecting brilliant red highlights.
“We’re going to have a beautiful sunset, Wiley.”
Craig looked up from the panel’s computer display. “Yep. A purty one. Reminds me of Houston. We used to get some bee-yootiful sunsets there, thanks to all the industrial waste the refineries poured into the air.”
Trumball laughed. “No factories out here.”
“No, but …” Craig’s voice petered off into thoughtful silence.
“What’s the matter, Wiley?”
“Those clouds.”
At that instant the communications chime sounded Trumball tapped the ON button and Stacy Dezhurova’s somber face appeared on the panel screen.
“Latest weather report,” she said, looking worried “New dust storm has started, this time in the norther hemisphere.”
“Where?” Trumball asked.
“Exactly where you are heading,” came her reply.