“Like you fast during Ramadan,” Bernstein sniped. O’Connor remembered one of their first days on Mars, when a clean-shaven Faiyum had jokingly asked which direction Mecca was. O’Connor had pointed up.
“Let’s not waste power,” Bernstein repeated.
“We have enough power during the day,” Faiyum pointed out. “The solar panels work fine.”
Thanks to Mars’s thin, nearly cloudless atmosphere, just about the same amount of sunshine fell upon the surface of Mars as upon Earth, despite Mars’s farther distance from the sun. Thank God for that, O’Connor thought. Otherwise, we’d be dead in a few hours.
Then he realized that, also thanks to Mars’s thin atmosphere, those micrometeoroids had made it all the way down to the ground to strafe them like a spray of bullets, instead of burning up from atmospheric friction, as they would have on Earth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he told himself.
“Tithonium here,” a voice crackled through the speaker on the cockpit control panel. All three of them turned to the display screen, suddenly tight with expectation.
“What’s your situation, E-three?” asked the face in the screen. Ernie Roebuck, they recognized: chief communications engineer.
The main base for the exploration team was down at Tithonium Chasma, part of the immense Grand Canyon of Mars, more than three thousand kilometers from their Excursion Three site.
O’Connor was the team’s astronaut: a thoroughly competent Boston Irishman with a genial disposition, who tolerated the bantering of Faiyum and Bernstein—both geologists—and tried to keep them from developing a real animosity. A Muslim from Peoria and a New York Jew: how in the world had the psychologists back Earthside ever put the two of them on the same team, he wondered.
In the clipped jargon of professional fliers, O’Connor reported on their dead fuel cell.
“No power output at all?” Roebuck looked incredulous.
“Zero,” said O’Connor. “Hydrogen all leaked out overnight.”
“How did you get through the night?”
“The vehicle automatically switched to battery power.”
“What’s the status of your battery system?”
O’Connor scanned the digital readouts on the control panel. “Down to one-third of nominal. The solar panels are recharging ’em.”
A pause. Roebuck looked away, and they could hear voices muttering in the background. “All right,” said the communicator at last. “We’re getting your telemetry. We’ll get back to you in an hour or so.”
“We need a lift out of here,” O’Connor said.
Another few moments of silence. “That might not be possible right away. We’ve got other problems too. You guys weren’t the only ones hit by the meteor shower. We’ve taken some damage here. The garden’s been wiped out, and E-one has two casualties.”
Excursion One was at the flank of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.
“Our first priority has to be to get those people from E-one back here for medical treatment.”
“Yeah. Of course.”
“Give us a couple of hours to sort things out. We’ll call you back at noon, our time. Sit tight.”
O’Connor glanced at the morose faces of his two teammates, then replied, “We’ll wait for your call.”
“What the hell else can we do?” Bernstein grumbled.
Clicking off the video link, O’Connor said, “We can get back to work.”
Faiyum tried to shrug inside his suit. “I like your first suggestion better. Let’s eat.”
With their helmets off, the faint traces of body odors became noticeable. Munching on an energy bar, Faiyum said, “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew were showering together in a YMCA . . .”
“You mean a YMHA,” said Bernstein.
“How would a Muslim get into either one?” O’Connor wondered.
“It’s in the States,” Faiyum explained. “They let anybody in.”
“Not women.”
“You guys have no sense of humor.” Faiyum popped the last morsel of the energy bar into his mouth.
“This,” Bernstein countered, “coming from a man who was named after a depression.”
“El-Faiyum is below sea level,” Faiyum admitted easily, “but it’s the garden spot of Egypt. Has been for more than three thousand years.”
“Maybe it was the garden of Eden,” O’Connor suggested.
“No, that was in Israel,” said Bernstein.
“Was it?”
“It certainly wasn’t here,” Faiyum said, gazing out the windshield at the bleak, cold Martian desert.
“It’s going to go down near a hundred below again tonight,” Bernstein said.
“The batteries will keep the heaters going,” said O’Connor.
“All night?”
“Long enough. Then we’ll recharge ’em when the sun comes up.”
“That won’t work forever,” Bernstein muttered.
“We’ll be okay for a day or two.”
“Yeah, but the nights. A hundred below zero. The batteries will crap out pretty soon.”
Tightly, O’Connor repeated, “We’ll be okay for a day or two.”
“From your mouth to God’s ear,” Bernstein said fervently.
Faiyum looked at the control panel’s digital clock. “Another three hours before Tithonium calls.”
Reaching for his helmet, O’Connor said, “Well, we’d better go out and do what we came here to do.”
“Haul up the ice core,” said Bernstein, displeasure clear on his lean, harsh face.
“That’s why we’re here,” Faiyum said. He didn’t look any happier than Bernstein. “Slave labor.”
Putting on a false heartiness, O’Connor said, “Hey, you guys are the geologists. I thought you were happy to drill down that deep.”
“Overjoyed,” said Bernstein. “And here on Mars, we’re doing areology, not geology.”
“What’s in a name?” Faiyum quoted. “A rose by any other name would still smell.”
“And so do you,” said Bernstein and O’Connor in unison.
The major objective of the Excursion Three team had been to drill three hundred meters down into the permafrost that lay just beneath the surface of Utopia Planita. The frozen remains of what had been an ocean billions of years earlier, when Mars had been a warmer and wetter world, the permafrost ice held a record of the planet’s history, a record that geologists (or aerologists) keenly wanted to study.
Outside at the drill site, the three men began the laborious task of hauling up the ice core that their equipment had dug. They worked slowly, carefully, to make certain that the fragile, six-centimeter-wide core came out intact. Section by section, they unjointed each individual segment as it came up, marked it carefully, and stowed it in the special storage racks built into the hopper’s side. “How old do you think the lowest layers
