Dangerous Games

“What’s the matter?” Laci Thorens said. She was on the ground, assembling the engine into a subframe with a grim intensity.

“This strut doesn’t have the little fitting on the end,” Wende said. “It won’t stay in.”

“Aren’t there spares?”

“Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

Geoff shook his head and bent back to his work. Who cared about the prize? With his discovery, he would be so famous that he could name his price.

He’d set the IBM box in the lee of the transpo pod like the instructions said, digging down like they told him. He was supposed to let it go for a half hour, then take the whole thing with them.

Which was stupid. IBM was doing the same old thing, when all they had to do, really, was give him a bag and a microscope.

So he’d brought his own. Now it was just a matter of getting some dirt, throwing some water on it, putting it on the slide, and looking for wrigglies.

“There aren’t any spares,” Wende said.

“Shit. Let me see.” Laci hopped up to the top of the Wheel.

He fumbled the little vial of water out of the tiny pocket of his squeezesuit. The microscope was already out, sitting perched on top of a medium-sized rock, away from the dust and grit.

How had Viking done it? It had moved a rock, hadn’t it? And this new one from IBM was digging down. Probably best to just combine both techniques, Geoff thought, and shoved a medium-sized boulder out of the way.

He dug down into the dust with his fingers, feeling the chill seep through his squeezesuit. At about six inches down, he struck another rock and decided that was enough. The dust was clinging to his transparent header, and the front half of his suit was pink.

He took a pinch of dust from the shallow hole and dropped it onto a glass slide. The water had gone frosty around the top. He dropped a couple of drops on the slide and they froze almost instantly, making something that looked like red ice cream.

Damn, I didn’t think of that. There was no way he was going to see something with the microscope through all that gunk.

He sloshed some more water on it and pushed it around with the tip of his finger, trying to get the mixture thin enough to see through. After a couple of tries, he managed to get a thin pink film that looked reasonably transparent.

“Geoff!” Laci said. “We need your help!”

“Can’t,” he said. “In the middle of an experiment.”

“We need your help or we ain’t rolling anywhere!”

Geoff slid the slide into the microscope and looked at the watch embedded in his suit. “We have time.” And in fact, they did have almost twenty minutes left.

“We have to do it now!” Wende said.

“Wait a minute,” Geoff said. Slide in place. Microscope to eye. Nothing but fuzzy grey darkness. Focus. Dark, dark. Sliding into focus. Becoming great boulders.

“Geoff, now!” Laci said.

“Just a few seconds,” Geoff said. “Then you can have me.” Focus. Ah. Crystal-clear. Scan it over a bit and find a brighter area. There. Ah.

Water crystals. Boulders. Bright light. Nothing else.

Well, of course it wouldn’t move. But where was the rounded wall of a bacterium, or the jelly of an amoeba?

“Now,” Laci said, and strong hands picked him up. He felt his grip on the microscope slipping. He grabbed it tighter, and it popped from his hands. He was jerked back as he watched it fall, with agonizing slowness, into the dust and grit.

He wrenched out of Laci’s grip and scooped up the microscope. It was dusty, but looked okay. He looked through it. The slide was out of position, but he could still see. He reached for the focus knob…

The microscope was torn out of his hands. He looked up to see Laci standing in front of him, holding the microscope behind her back.

“Give it back!” he said. “This is important. I’m right…”

She punched his header. Hard. He could see the soft transparent plastic actually conform to her fist. It didn’t quite touch him, but the kinetic energy of the blow knocked him to the ground.

“Go,” she said. “Help Wende. You’ll get your toy back when you’re done.”

“Give it back!”

Laci raised the instrument and made as if to smash it on a boulder. Geoff lunged forward at her, but she danced away. “No,” she said. “Go help. I’ll give it back later.”

“Laci, this is important!”

“Yeah, and so is surviving. Go help.”

Geoff knew when he was beaten. He sighed and joined Wende atop the Wheel, where they quickly discovered another problem: the epoxy they’d provided for quick repairs wasn’t setting in the Martian cold.

“What do we do now?” Wende asked.

Geoff stopped looking longingly at the microscope-now sitting on top of their hydrazine engine-and inspected the problem. The strut was one of the main load-bearers that held them suspended under the top of the Wheel.

“What about the Kite?” Geoff said. “Doesn’t it share components with this? Maybe it has a strut with the right connector on it.”

“What about when we have to fly?”

“We make sure we don’t forget the damn thing.”

They dug into the bundle of struts and fabric. The components were the same, and many of them were the same length. When Geoff found one with the right connector on the end, he pulled it out and handed it to Wende.

“Just like Ikea,” he said.

“They aren’t the sponsor!”

“Same idea.”

Then he noticed that Laci was frantically tightening the straps that held the little engine in place. “We’re late!” she said. “Check the time! Come on come on come on! Let’s go!”

Laci started the engine. Near the Wheel, his microscope was still parked on top of a rock.

“Wait!” he said, running to get it.

The Wheel was already moving. “Hurry up!” Laci said.

He grabbed the microscope and ran back, throwing himself up the scaffold toward the perch by the cabin. The landscape sped by. The soft rim of the Wheel bounced over rocks and boulders.

But he had his microscope. Between that and the IBM package, he would surely find something. He would still be famous.

The IBM package!

Oh, shit, no! No no no!

He’d never picked it up.

“Stop! he cried. “You have to go back! I left the IBM package.”

Laci gave him a disgusted look. “How could you be that stupid?”

“Go back.”

She just looked at him. A slow smile spread on her face. “Sorry,” she said.

Geoff looked back at the remains of their transpo pod, but it had already disappeared over a hill. They were moving. And he was lost.

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“It seems like a lot of work for just a show,” said the shithead from P &G. He was looking at the model of