the early morning chill and slowly evaporated as the sun reached down into the canyon. Like ghosts that vanish when the light touches them, Jamie thought.
If the mists evaporate and then form again the next morning, he reasoned, either the moisture remains inside the canyon or it’s renewed from some source of water vapor underground. Or in the cliff walls.
Christ! There’s so much for us to look for and they’ve got us stuck inside this aluminum can!
For the fortieth time that morning he paced the length of the rover’s command module, from the cockpit bulkhead past the little galley and the narrow passage between the folded-up bunks to the equipment racks and finally the airlock at the back end.
Connors called from the cockpit, 'I think it’s starting.'
Jamie rushed the nine strides it took to span the module’s length and ducked his head past the bulkhead. Through the cockpit’s bulbous canopy the canyon outside seemed just the same as the last time he had looked.
Connors anticipated him. 'Take a squint at the sky.'
Jamie slid into the empty seat beside the astronaut so he could look upward. The pink sky seemed normal enough — almost.
'It’s gotten ten percent darker in the past five minutes,' Connors said, holding up a color comparison chart.
'There’s really going to be a storm.'
'Yeah.'
'I’d better go back and tell the others.'
'Might as well. We got nothing else to do.' Connors slipped on his headset as he spoke and reached for the comm unit’s switch.
Joanna and Ilona were sitting so close together in the lab module that their shoulders almost touched. The lighting was low, more from the glowing displays on the computer screens than from the dimmed overhead strip lamp.
Neither of the women looked up as Jamie stepped in from the airlock. They were both bent over something on the workbench.
'The storm is starting,' Jamie said.
Joanna turned her head slightly to look at him over her shoulder. In the dimness he could not make out the expression on her face, only that she seemed terribly pale.
'The figures on the core samples are on the screen here,' she said, tapping the computer humming beside
'Anything interesting?'
'See for yourself,' she said, turning back to the work she and Ilona were doing.
Jamie frowned slightly at her abrupt manner. He leaned over, since there were no other chairs in the lab, and read off the figures on the screen.
Not much different from the values they had gotten from other corings, he saw. Except that there was no ice in the sample, no layer of permafrost.
Then where’s the water coming from? Jamie asked himself.
He punched up a side-by-side display that compared the results of the core samplings taken near the dome with those from here in the canyon. Trivial differences, much less than Jamie had expected. Except for the water. There’s less water here than up on the plain. Less! That doesn’t make any sense.
The wind was keening outside. Straightening up, Jamie felt a kink in his back. He had been bent over longer than he had realized. The wind was really singing now. There were no windows in the lab module, no way to see what was going on outside.
Joanna and Ilona were still bent over their work. The diamond saw buzzed briefly, then whined as it bit through rock.
'I’m going up front to see what the storm looks like,' he said.
'Good,' said Joanna, without raising her head.
Curious, he asked, 'What the hell are you working on that’s so fascinating?'
'Go up front, Jamie, and leave us alone. We will call you when we are ready to talk.'
Son of a bitch, Jamie grumbled to himself. Then he remembered how proprietary Joanna had become when they had found the green-streaked rock.
Half puzzled, half angry, he made his way back into the command module. Connors was still up in the cockpit, munching on a candy bar, headset still clamped against his ear although he had swung the microphone arm up and away from his mouth.
'Toshima says we’ll be in this for the rest of the day,' he announced glumly.
Jamie stared at the scene outside. The wind was howling like a squalling infant, high-pitched and thin. It had become quite dark out there, an eerie kind of fluctuating darkness, not like nighttime even though the lighting level was down to about its value just after sunset. Shadowy, like having a blanket thrown over your head. Menacing, somehow, deep down in the gut. Jamie could barely see the cliff face, less than fifty meters from the rover’s nose. The sky was obliterated by darkness.
He slid into the cockpit seat and looked down at the display in the instrument panel’s main screen. Connors had it showing a satellite view of the region. Jamie could see the canyon complex clearly, but the inside of the twisting labyrinth of canyons was filled to the brim with billowing clouds of reddish-gray dust. They looked soft, undulating like the waves of the ocean, thick enough to buoy up your body if you cared to sprawl on them.
'Vosnesensky’s pissed because we don’t have a cover to put over the canopy,' Connors said. 'He’s afraid the dust will scratch up the plastic so bad we won’t be able to see out of it.'
'Is it? Scratching?'
Connors shook his head slowly. 'Hard to tell, so far. Don’t hear anything that sounds like scratching, do you?'
'The dust particles are microscopic in size.'
'Yeah, but gritty.'
'Nothing we can do but wait,' Jamie said.
'How they doing back there?'
Jamie huffed. 'They’re so busy they don’t even care about the storm.'
'They’ll miss the show.'
He wondered again about the lack of water in the core samples. Something must be wrong. We’re missing something.
'If we covered the canopy we wouldn’t be able to see this,' Connors said. His voice sounded tired.
'What about the cameras?'
'They’re all on automatic. We’ll get a complete record of the storm, unless the sand chews up the lenses too bad.'
'We’ve got replacement lenses aboard, don’t we?'
'Sure.' Connors puffed out a weary sigh. 'I wouldn’t have the strength to put a cover over her anyway.'
'Still feel bad?'
'Worse. How ’bout you?'
'Pretty lousy.'
'Think we oughtta check in with Reed?'
'If he had anything to tell us he’d call,' Jamie said.
'Yeah. Guess so.'
Jamie leaned back and watched the dust storm billowing outside, tired and perspiring despite having done nothing all day. The gauges on the instrument panel told him that the wind was blowing a steady two hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour, with gusts up to nearly two-ninety. He could hear its high-pitched shrieking. Yet the rover was not rocked; it remained solid, without so much as a quiver. Jamie knew that the thin air of Mars packed very little punch. At almost three hundred kilometers per hour the wind had the force of a twenty-mile- per-hour zephyr on Earth.
Toshima called in and asked for the air temperature outside the rover.
'Goin’ up,' Connors reported, surprised. 'It’s up to just about ten degrees.'
