MORNING: SOL 58
“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 Gulf 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 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.