MORNING: SOL 59
JAMIE WAS STILL AT THE COMM CONSOLE WHEN THE SUN FINALLY came up and the others began to stir. The wind was still yowling, but with the sunrise the visibility outside improved somewhat. In the screens that showed the outside camera views Jamie could see that the planes were all still there, although one of the soarplane’s wings seemed bent oddly. One of the cameras had ceased functioning, but otherwise everything seemed to be in reasonably good shape.
“D’you want some coffee?”
It was Vijay, standing at the comm center doorway with a steaming mug in her hands.
“Good idea,” said Jamie, reaching for it.
“How is everything?” she asked, sliding into the chair next to his.
“We’re in reasonably good shape.”
“How much damage to the garden was there?”
“Trudy was almost in tears over the tomatoes and some of the soybeans. All the strawberries are gone. But most of the plants are all right. We caught the leak in time.”
“We won’t have to pack up and go home, then?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. We might have to go without soyburgers for a while, but the garden will still feed us.”
“That was a very brave thing you did, dashing in there like that.”
Jamie felt his brows hike up. He didn’t feel very brave. With a shrug he replied, “Seemed like the right thing to do. We had to get those patches in place.”
“You could have been killed.”
“I never even thought of that,” he confessed. “It all happened so fast …”
“You’re a bloody hero, Jamie.” She wasn’t joking, he saw. She was in dead earnest.
Feeling suddenly uncomfortable, Jamie changed the subject. “I haven’t been able to raise Dex and Wiley yet.”
“You expected that, din’t you?”
He nodded. “Probably a lot of dust on their antennas by now. We’ll just have to be patient.”
“You’re good at that,” she said, with a smile.
He caught her implication. “It’s a lot more fun being patient with you than with them,” he said, low and swift, afraid of being overheard.
Before she could reply, Rodriguez burst in, white teeth gleaming in a huge grin. “Well, we made it through the night,” he said, then burst into a hearty laughter.
Jamie threw a perplexed glance at Vijay, who shrugged her shoulders.
“You were terrific, boss,” the astronaut said, beaming at Jamie. “Saved our necks, man.”
Jamie shook his head, but Vijay nodded agreement. “If the garden had gone, we’d have to pack up and leave, wouldn’t we?”
“Maybe,” Jamie conceded. “Anyway, the garden’s going to be all right. So let’s get on with the program, okay?”
“Right!” Rodriguez said. “You had breakfast yet, boss? I’m hungry enough to eat a Martian buffalo.”
From the doorway, Stacy Dezhurova said, “You will have to find one first, Tom.”
“Lemme grab some juice,” Rodriguez said, still grinning buoyantly, “then I’ll spell you at the console while you guys grab breakfast.”
“I thought you were starving,” Jamie said, getting up from the chair.
“Yeah, I know, but I can wait. You guys go eat. I’ll hold the fort here.”
Jamie looked to Dezhurova, who said, “I will get your juice, Tom.”
“Okay, thanks.”
Jamie said. “Well, if you’re going to take over, see if you can raise Craig and Dex.”
“Right.” Rodriguez sat heavily on the little chair, making it roil away from the console a few feet.
As he went to the galley with Vijay and Dezhurova, Jamie wondered aloud, “Tomas sure is chipper this morning. He must have had a good restful sleep.”
Dezhurova sputtered into laughter. “Not exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
Stacy looked up into Jamie’s face. “Didn’t you hear them? Him and Trudy? They were at it all, damned night long.”
Inadvertently, Jamie glanced at Vijay, who was trying to suppress a smirk.
“At least you two are quiet about it,” Stacy went on, matter-of-factly. “But my cubicle is next to Trudy’s. Tom was snorting all night like Ferdinand the Bull. He drowned out the storm, for god’s sake.”
Vijay broke out in laughter.
They had just started to eat breakfast when Fuchida limped up to the table, looking distressed.
“What’s wrong, Mitsuo?” Jamie asked.
“Am I the only one who wonders why the garden dome began to rip apart?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
The biologist sat across from Jamie and Vijay and propped his bandaged ankle on an empty chair.
“How can the dust rip the dome fabric?” he asked, like a professor posing a problem for his class.
Dezhurova got up from the table. “I promised Tomas I would bring him juice,” she remembered. “He probably needs it.”
Fuchida did not catch her insinuation. “The dome’s plastic cannot be punctured by sand particles,” he said quietly, firmly. “Yet the fabric was punctured.”
“I thought it ripped along the base where it connects with the flooring,” Jamie said.
“No,” Fuchida replied, raising one finger for emphasis. “There are two small punctures. If not repaired so quickly, they would have grown into a rip that would have torn the entire dome off its foundation.”
“But we did catch it in time,” Vijay said. “Jamie did, that is.”
Fuchida acknowledged the fact with a small dip of his chin. “Still, we must ask how the dome was punctured.”
Jamie suggested, “Small rocks blown by the wind?”
“I doubt it,” the biologist said.
“I don’t know. But it troubles me. The dome should not have failed. That plastic fabric has been tested under much more severe conditions in wind tunnel simulations. It should not have failed.”
“Yet it did,” Vijay said, almost in a whisper.
“It did indeed.” Fuchida looked like a prosecuting attorney to Jamie. Suspicious, almost angry.
“Well,” Jamie said, “I don’t know how it failed, but we ought to figure out some way of making certain it doesn’t happen again.”
“Hey, buddy,” Craig said cheerfully, “we made it through the night.”
From across the narrow table between their bunks, Dex nodded glumly. He felt exhausted, sleepless eyes gummy, coveralls rumpled and stinking of fear.
The wind was still screeching outside. Particles of iron-cored grit were still grinding against the rover’s thin skin, like an endless army of soldier ants working tirelessly to break through their defenses and come in and devour them.
“Communications’re out, of course,” Craig added.
“Of course,” said Dex blearily.
“Soon’s the wind dies down to less’n a hundred knots, we’ll go outside and dust off the antennas. Squirt a signal back to base, let ’em know we’re okay.”
“If they’re okay,” Dex replied gloomily.
“They’ll be all right,” said Craig. “That big dome’s built like the Rock of Gibraltar. Been through dust storms before, y’know, over the six years it’s been settin’ out there.”
“I suppose so,” Dex admitted.
Unbidden, his mind was cataloguing all the things that might not be okay. If the covers had ripped off during the night, the solar cells could be scratched and pitted so badly they’d be useless. The fuel cells were already down to zero; they were living off the batteries. The gritty dust could have worked its way into the wheel bearings, immobilizing them completely. Then we’ll have a choice of starving or suffocating, Dex thought. Or the dust could have scoured the antennas so badly their comm systems would be completely shot. Then we couldn’t navigate, couldn’t get positioning data from the satellites, we’d be lost out here forever.
Or the whole frigging base dome might have blown down during the night, he added.
“Hey!” Craig snapped. “You listenin’?”
“Sorry,” Dex said, trying to sit up a little straighter.
“I said we’d better stick to a cold breakfast. No sense drainin’ the batteries by usin’ the microwave.”
“I’ll get breakfast,” Dex said, pushing himself up from his bunk. “You can do the systems check.”
“Already did that. After breakfast we power down. Shut off the freezer, lei it coast; food’ll keep cold inside okay. Air fans on low. Lights to minimum. Until we get the solar panels uncovered and workin’ again.”
“If they’ll work again,” Dex muttered as he went back to the compact stand of racks that served as the rover’s galley.
“Didn’t get much sleep last night, huh?”
“How’d you guess?” Dex pulled out the first two cereal packages he could reach.
“Listen, kid, the worst is over. We made it through the storm. It’s peterin’ out now. In another couple hours—”
Dex whirled on him. “You listen, pal! You don’t like being called Possum? Well I don’t like being called kid. Got that?”
“Then stop behavin’ like a kid,” Craig shot back, scowling.
Dex started to reply, but found he had no answer for the older man.
“You’re scared, okay. I am too. What th’ hell, we’re stranded out here in the middle of downtown Mars. For all I know we’re covered with sand twelve feet deep and ever’body in the base is dead. Okay! We’ll have to deal with that. You do what you can do. You don’t sit around mopin’ and grumblin’ like some teenager with an acne problem.”
Despite himself, Dex laughed. “Is that what I’ve been doing?”
Still sitting on his bunk, Craig’s leathery face rearranged itself into a small smile. He nodded. “Sort of,” he said.
“I’m scared, Wiley,” he admitted. “I don’t want to die out here.”
“Shit, buddy, I don’t want to die at all”
As he put both cereal packages on the table, Dex said, “Maybe we ought to go outside and see how bad the damage is.”
“Still blowin’ pretty strong out there. Be better to wait a couple hours.”
“I’ll go nuts sitting in here with nothing to do but listen to that wind.”
Craig nodded. “H’m. Yeah, me too.”
“So?”
“So let’s have us a nice leisurely breakfast and then take our time suitin’ up.”
“Good,” said Dex, feeling some of the fear ease away. Not all of it. But he felt better than he had during the night.