FIFTEEN
The Hawk had three levels. The top level was the control room. That was where they had sat during the landing. It was the heart of the lander. Besides containing the propulsion controls, it also housed Friend’s brain and their communication system. On the second level were the personal quarters: two small bedrooms attached to a central living area. The second level was also used for storage. The bottom level they called the basement. It contained a kitchen, a bathroom, a laboratory, the airlock and the garage. The garage housed two extraordinary vehicles. One was a lightweight jeep with six-foot-tall wheels that could waltz over boulders. The other was more jet than car, a missile with four seats and a windshield attached. It had earned the nickname Hummingbird. Hummingbird floated and accelerated on an invisible jet cushion, and would be especially valuable when they explored around Olympus Mons, in the mountainous Tharsis region.
For all its three levels, the Hawk was a tight squeeze. Lauren was anxious to get outside and stretch. At present she was in the basement, checking her pressure suit for the third time. Jessica worked an arm’s reach away, preparing a soil sample for incubation to see if it contained organic compounds. Gary was in the basement, too, lying under a
massive insulated coil and repairing a generator that had been damaged in the landing. He was fuming to go outside, and was mad at Bill for making him repair the generator first. Lauren stepped on his toes as she climbed into the airlock.
‘Watch out for the natives, Doc,’ he called.
‘Gotcha,’ Lauren said. A door rifled shut behind her. Fans sucked the atmosphere away. When she returned inside she would be blasted with scalding steam and rinsed with disinfectant. They were infinitely cautious of an infection. An alien breed of germs, totally foreign to their bodies’ defenses, could wipe them out as surely as giant insect monsters. Such an infection could wipe out the entire world if they brought it home with them.
The external door of the airlock finally opened, and Lauren was face to face with Mars. She could have been on a Hollywood set. There were cameras pointed at her, and the rusty landscape and pink sky looked like one giant prop. There were rocks everywhere.
Lauren remembered that billions on Earth were watching. She started down the ladder, praying she didn’t look like a klutz, and worrying what her first words should be. Bill had stepped onto Mars and walked around for two minutes before saying a word. Jim had made a remark about opening a real estate office. Lauren paused on the last rung of the ladder, still thinking.
God. Destiny. The stars. The future. Evolution.
Finally she gave up and hopped off the ladder and said the first thing that came to her ‘This place is better than Disneyland!’
Gary snickered inside her helmet. Because the Martian atmosphere was extremely thin, normal conversation was impossible. However, scientists had devised acoustical
sensors that could pick up faint sound waves and boost them a hundredfold. With these instruments attached to the outside of their helmets - they were called vocals - they could talk to each other without the aid of radio. They could even hear the wind rising, and rocks falling, and monsters approaching. Lauren opened her vocals now and grabbed the cellophane-wrapped American flag that stood at the foot of the ladder. Bill had put it there and it was a stupid place; they would fry the flag when they fired their rockets at take off. Flag in hand, she bounced towards Jim, enjoying the gentle gravity. Jim had half buried himself in a hole he was digging.
‘Are you off line?’ Lauren asked.
‘Yes,’ Jim said.
‘Seen any monsters?’
‘No.’
‘Tired?’ she asked.
‘A bit.’ He killed his pneumatic drill and tried to wipe the perspiration from his brow. Then he laughed. ‘Is there no way to get the sweat out of your eyes?’
‘There is. Take a break. Doctor’s orders. Here, I’ll give you a hand.’ She pulled him out of the hole without effort. ‘Find anything interesting?’
‘A couple of humanoid skeletons. The usual.’
‘Want to help me replant the flag?’ Lauren asked.
‘Where?’
Lauren pointed. ‘On that rise. The camera is facing that way.’
As they scaled the shallow hill, Lauren noted how hard and brittle the ground was beneath the thin layer of covering dust, as if the surface had been baked in an enormous oven. Jim had a hammer with him, but pounding the flagpole into the ground took them several minutes.
‘Stay there,’ Jim said. He backed away and raised his camera.
‘Should I salute?’ Lauren asked.
Jim crouched down. ‘Only if you’re feeling patriotic’
Lauren gave an exaggerated salute and said, ‘I claim this world for all the future generations of mankind.’
The flag toppled the instant Jim snapped the picture. Brushing the red sand from the stars and stripes, Lauren wondered if she had said the wrong thing.
In the corner of the basement that was their kitchen, Jessica helped Lauren fix hot chocolate for the men. Six hours had passed since Lauren’s excursion, and the sun was two hours below the horizon. Outside the weather was lousy - seventy below - but that was the trouble with showing up during a million-year ice age. Bill was in the control room reporting to Houston on the progress of their mission. Jim and Gary were just up the ladder, in the living area. Gary was reading The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury and trying to defend himself against Friend’s emotionless criticism of the repair job he had done on the generator. Jim was studying soil samples. Now he asked if he could have a cup of coffee instead of hot chocolate.
‘But Lauren,’ he said, from the level above. ‘I’ve been awake a week. The caffeine won’t shock my system. Oreos don’t taste good without coffee. Plus I hate hot chocolate.’
‘NASA wouldn’t have given us the coffee,’ Gary added, ‘if we weren’t supposed to drink it.’
‘Jim smuggled it aboard,’ Lauren called.
‘God wouldn’t have given us coffee,’ Jim said, ‘if it wasn’t good for us.’
‘What about Oreo cookies?’ Lauren asked. ‘God didn’t give us Oreo cookies. All that junk is just junk. I won’t have you getting sick.’
‘It satisfies the soul,’ Jim said. ‘Man does not live by vitamin complexes and protein powders alone. I can’t work without my cup of coffee.’
Lauren looked at Jessica, saying, ‘All he eats is sweets. I should never have let him bring those cookies aboard the Hawk. We have strict menus that we’re supposed to follow.’
‘What about the chocolate in the hot chocolate?’ Jessica asked. ‘Doesn’t it have caffeine in it?’
Lauren lowered her voice. ‘It’s really carob.’
Jessica laughed. ‘My grandpapa used to drink twenty cups of coffee every day. He took it scalding hot, with a tablespoon of sugar. He lived to be ninety-seven.’
‘A great and wise man, no doubt,’ Jim said.
‘You are not helping me,’ Lauren complained to Jessica.
Jessica leaned over and whispered in her ear. ‘Make Jim his coffee. He’ll just sneak down here in the middle of the night and drink it, anyway. Then he won’t be able to sleep.’
‘I heard cookies dilute the effect of caffeine,’ Jim said.
Lauren snorted. ‘Now we know what killed the Russians. They landed on Mars and ate all their desserts at once in celebration and died of hypoglycemia.’ She opened the lid on Jim’s instant coffee jar. She’d had it out anyway. She put one - just one - teaspoon into a cup and added boiling water.
‘Make it strong,’ Jim called.
Lauren put in another teaspoon.
‘I want some, too,’ Gary said. ‘I hate hot chocolate. It gives me pimples.’
Lauren scowled and tossed Gary’s hot chocolate down the disposal chute. While she fixed another cup of coffee, Jessica began to sniff the air like a bloodhound.
‘My, that smells good,’ Jessica said, and sighed. 'When I was a little girl, my mom used to make a fresh pot of coffee
every morning. It would take the chill right out of your bones.’
‘Jesus Mars Christ,’ Lauren muttered.
Later, they gathered in the living area, each with a cup of strong coffee in hand, including Lauren. She sat next to a porthole, searching the bleak western horizon for signs of Phobos, the larger of Mars’s two moons. It was supposed to rise shortly.
Gary had reached over on the couch and poked her in the side with his big toe.
‘Don’t do that!’ she snapped.
He set his book face down on his chest and asked, ‘Is it up yet?’
‘You should know,’ she said.
‘What?’ Gary asked.
‘I haven’t seen it,’ Lauren said. She turned away from the window and removed the foot Gary had generously dropped in her lap. ‘I must be looking in the wrong part of the sky.’
‘Watch southwest,’ Jim said, bent over a picture of a rock he’d photographed earlier under a microscope. ‘Phobos comes up fast.’
‘Have you made any discoveries with the samples we collected today, Professor?’ Bill asked Jim. Jessica sat beside her husband on the other couch, brushing her hair.
Jim put an Oreo cookie in his mouth and took a sip of his coffee. ‘No discoveries,’ he said, chewing. ‘Just greater confirmation and refinement of the theories we have been forming about Mars since the Viking series. There was water here once. Not too recently, but not that long ago, either. I’d say between one and two million years ago.’
‘Explain,’ Bill said.
‘The planet’s river beds were carved by water,’ Jim said. 'Mars may be a volcanic planet, but no lava, no matter how
thin and runny, could have cut the ravines we have here. Of course, that’s not news. Since the Vikings everybody’s figured that Mars possessed surface water at one time. When that time was has always been the question. After studying these rocks and this soil, I feel the effects of erosion on Mars have been severely underestimated. The air here is thin, but we’ve already recorded winds as high as fifty miles an hour, far higher than we anticipated, and plenty high enough to make dust airborne. Do you all see my point? The ravines I studied today are relatively sharp edged. They couldn’t have been subject to erosion for too long. That means the water that dug the ravines must have been here as recently as a couple of million years ago. I’d say there was still water here when the human race was getting started.’
‘You’re saying there were canals here, then?’ Lauren asked, poking fun at him.
Jim smiled. ‘If you want to call them that.’
Lauren reminded herself why water could not exist in the liquid phase on Mars. In the thin atmosphere, it would immediately vaporize or freeze. It snowed on Mars, but it never rained.
‘But Jim,’ Lauren said, ‘that means the atmosphere was at least ten times thicker then. What could have blown it away?’
Jim pulled the two halves of another Oreo apart and began to lick the icing. ‘I wonder,’ he said.
‘What if Mars came into conjunction with the Sun?’ Bill said. ‘When the axis of the planet was tilted at such an angle that both poles were facing the sun at a relatively similar angle. In such a case, the layer of frozen carbon dioxide that covers the ice water at the poles could evaporate. That would cause the atmosphere to undergo a considerable rise in density. Is that not possible, Professor?’
Jim nodded. ‘Possible. However, I’ve always favored intense volcanic activity filling the atmosphere with dust and causing the greenhouse effect, and in turn raising the temperature. No conjunction to the sun would melt the ice water at the poles. Only the carbon dioxide would melt.’
‘But those are theories on how the atmosphere could become dense,’ Lauren said. ‘How did Mars lose its air in the first place?’
Jim shrugged. ‘Some cosmic catastrophe perhaps.’
[Message from Houston.]
‘What classification?’ Bill asked.
[Class F, Bill.]
That meant it was from a friend or relative. Lauren hoped it was Jennifer, and that she had finally joined Terry in Houston. Lauren worried about her, even though she was sure Daniel’s family were fine people. Lauren worried about cosmic catastrophes.
‘Who is it?’ Lauren asked.
[Kathy Johnson, Lauren.]
Gary howled. ‘My woman.’
‘Use my screen,’ Jim said. He erased the photo of his Martian rock. ‘I’m through for the night.’
‘Great,’ Gary said, getting up quickly. ‘On screen six Friend.’
[Yes, Gary.]
Kathy came on the screen, cute as ever, and started talking to a stoned, smiling Gary. Lauren continued her search out the porthole for Phobos, and pretended not to listen. Suddenly Gary howled again, this time in irritation.
‘Damnit,’ Gary said, his face crumpling. ‘It’s Lorraine.’ He slapped his knee. ‘She had me fooled for a minute. She was talking like Kathy. But listen to her now!’
‘It was very hairy,’ Lorraine was saying. 'I didn’t know what to do. I’ve never seen a loaded cannon with
ammunition like that. He tried to pin me, and I tried to squirm away. But Gary, I’m sorry, I guess I just didn’t try hard enough. He had me greased. Somehow he slipped inside. Do you forgive me?’
Lauren would have thought no one could laugh harder than she was laughing if Jessica hadn’t been in the same room with her. The two of them doubled up and fell off their respective couches. Jim’s cheeks looked as if they were ready to burst; he was trying to restrain himself. Bill was another matter. In a ridiculously even tone, he said, ‘If you don’t want to listen to the young lady, Major, have Friend break the connection.’
‘Turn that bitch off, Friend!’ Gary shouted.
[Which bitch is that, Gary?]
Gary pointed at Lorraine. ‘Her!’
[You mean the young lady on screen six, Gary?]
‘Yes!’
[I apologize for the delay, Gary. I did not know the young lady was a female animal or a vicious or immoral woman, and could thus be classified as a bitch.]
The screen went blank. But they weren’t through yet.
‘The rest of you shut up!’ Gary yelled, turning red.
‘Oh, my!’ Lauren gasped from her place on the floor, clutching her sides.’ “He had me greased”!’
’ “I’d never seen a cannon loaded with ammunition like that”!’ Jessica cried, choking on her laughter. ‘Oh, Gary! You sure know how to pick them!’
Gary appealed to Jim. ‘Would you tell these tramps that this is no laughing matter?’
Jim started to speak. But then he slapped his leg and burst into giggles. Lauren threw a cushion and hit Gary in the head. Even Bill began to chuckle. Finally, in the end, Gary began to laugh with them.
T could have sworn it was Kathy at first,’ Gary said, when
they began to sober up. ‘Hey, Friend. Put the bitch back on. But leave the audio off. I can look at her and pretend she’s Kathy.’
[Yes, Gary. The bitch on screen six.]
‘No, look at this,’ Lauren exclaimed, jumping back to the porthole. A dull elongated light outside the portal had caught her eye. It was rising too fast to be a star, and it was too big. The group gathered at her back and stared out into the night, where the temperature would have killed them in a minute without protection. Phobos inched steadily into the sky, and it seemed to Lauren a good omen that the moon appeared just at the end of their laughter.
Yet the night deepened, a night as long as Earth’s, but darker and more silent. More empty.
Lauren awoke from a troubled sleep to find her arms moving in the air above her head. She’d been having a nightmare, and had been trying to push something away. Quickly she brought her arms back to her sides and glanced to the other bed where Jessica lay snoring peacefully. Try as she might, Lauren could not remember any other details from her nightmare, except that something heaving and repulsive had been trying to climb on top of her, and that it had been smothering her.
Lauren sat up and swallowed, wondering at the foul taste in her mouth. It was as if she had eaten spoiled meat for dinner. She considered going down to the basement for a glass of water. She felt dry.
Instead, she got up and crossed to the porthole. The alien darkness drew her, although she couldn’t see a thing. She looked for a few seconds and then climbed back into bed. A few minutes later, though, she was at the porthole again, watching and waiting. Still, there was nothing there. She leaned her nose against the glass. The chill of the contact
made her whole body shiver. She felt suddenly alone, terribly alone.
‘Jenny,’ she whispered. ‘Jenny.’
In time Lauren returned to her bed and fell asleep.
The footprints that had crossed in front of the Rover were gone. But the Rover’s high-gain antenna had been snapped off its extension arm. It hung like a broken arm as they drove up to the probe in their jeep.
Lauren fingered the trigger on her laser rifle. Two miles in the distance she could see the Hawk, sleek and sharp in the afternoon sun. Bill and Jim climbed out of the jeep and stood nearby. Lauren had a headache. She’d slept very badly.
‘Where do you think they went?’ she asked.
Jim walked over in front of the Rover and knelt where the footprints had been photographed years before. ‘I think a Martian brushed them away,’ he said.
‘Seriously,’ Lauren said.
‘The wind. I told you it’s been much stronger than we anticipated.’
‘You think it’s the wind that made the prints, don’t you?’ Lauren climbed down from the jeep, still holding the laser.
Jim smiled. ‘Remember, I’m the one who saw canals.’
‘What are your plans, Professor?’ Bill asked.
Jim kicked the sand at his feet. It was primarily composed of hydrate ferric oxide. Indeed, the planet’s once respectable water and oxygen supply - if they listened to Jim - was not chemically bound in the soil.
‘I would like to brush away the dust in the area where the footprints were photographed,’ Jim said. ‘If there are holes where the prints used to be, then we can be fairly certain they were created by the wind.’
‘Do you wish to start on that today?’ Bill asked.
‘It could take me more than a day. But, yes, we may as well get going on it.’
‘What equipment will you need?’ Bill asked.
‘The same equipment I was using to dig yesterday. It’s back at the Hawk.’
‘I was thinking that you should install the seismometer first,’ Bill said.
‘Fine,’ Jim said. ‘This can wait. We should stick to our program. But while we are here, I want the Rover photographed from every direction at a distance of fifty feet. I also want to examine the Rover itself.’
‘Very well, Professor,’ Bill said, removing a camera from the front seat of the jeep. ‘I’ll take the pictures.’ He walked off.
‘Come, Lauren,’ Jim said. 'Let’s inspect this ‘nineties masterpiece.’
The Rover had been driving straight for a low hill when it stopped. Its oversized wheels appeared unharmed, and the ground immediately in front of it was as close to uncluttered as Mars got. Its cameras were filthy with dust. Still, it was the snapped antenna that held their attention.
‘Well, did a monster do this or not?’ Lauren asked.
Jim tugged unsuccessfully on the snapped arm, trying to break it free. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘What about the wind?’
‘It should be too thin to snap metal like this,’ Jim said.
Lauren shifted the laser rifle’s strap on her shoulder. She noticed they were in the patch of Bill’s picture-taking. ‘Let’s move to the side,’ she said, gesturing. ‘I always feel self-conscious in front of a camera.’
‘Why do you say that?’ Jim asked, his voice oddly alert.
‘We’re in the way. You said you wanted the Rover photographed from every angle.’
'No, Lauren. Why did you say you felt self-conscious in
front of a camera? I’ve seen you on TV. You could be an actress.’
The question caught her off guard. She had been looking back over her shoulder. She had done the same often during the entire drive to the Rover. It was fine to keep an eye out, but she realized she was being paranoid. Yet she felt suddenly defensive about her actions.
‘It’s natural to feel you’re being watched when you’re in front of a camera,’ she said.
‘Watched? Do you feel like you’re being watched?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Lauren said.
‘Did you have a good night’s sleep?’
‘No. Why do you ask? Did you?’
T slept horribly,’ Jim said.
Lauren shook her head. ‘I can’t place you, Jim. You weren’t excited about the footprints. You don’t think a monster snapped the antenna. Yet you’re worried about being watched. Or you’re worried that I feel like I’m being watched. Now tell me, yes or no, do you think this planet’s dead?’
Jim grabbed a handful of dust that had settled atop the Rover’s temperature sensor and squeezed it in his gloved hand. ‘Yes. I’ve never been in a place that felt so dead. We’ll continue our exploration and our experiments, but there’s no life here.’
‘Then what are you getting at?’
Jim tossed the dust in the air. Rather than falling straight down, it trailed slightly to the west. ‘I’m anxious to visit the spot where the Russians landed. We might find some answers there. But you see this dust? It’s scattering. The wind is coming up. We should be careful about the wind.’ He pulled once more on the broken antenna arm, and it dropped to the ground. ‘Even a dead planet could kill us.’
Later, they drove back to the Hawk in silence.
That night, Lauren helped Jessica with experiments on the soil. They were performing three types. The first was designed to test for both plant and animal life. It relied on the fact that if you gave an animal or plant something to eat, it sooner or later gave off gas. Here they were talking about microscopic plants and animals hidden in the dirt. They fed the dirt a special broth, and were at first excited when it gave off substantial amounts of carbon dioxide. Unfortunately the amount quickly diminished, and then disappeared altogether, which shouldn’t have happened if there was life in the soil; it should have been busy reproducing.
The second experiment also gave confusing results. It was designed specifically to test for plant life. On Earth, all plants took in sunlight and carbon dioxide. Would the soil sample absorb carbon dioxide when exposed to it? The answer was yes, and for a while they were excited again. But then soil continued to absorb carbon dioxide even when it had been baked to such a high temperature that all plant life should have been destroyed.
Their third experiment was the simplest, of all, and gave them perhaps the most information. They baked lumps of Martian soil and analyzed what gases were given off. All organic material gave off an aroma when it was heated. Yet the Martian soil didn’t smell at all. It was dead. It was beginning to look more and more as though Jim was right, as were most scientists on Earth who had never seen the Rover’s pictures.
It made sense to Lauren. Mars had no ozone layer to protect it from the sun’s ultraviolet. Consequently, the soil should be sterile. However, Jessica seemed uncertain that ultraviolet bombardment alone could account for the experimental results. Jessica said there were still plenty of
signs that there had been life on Mars long ago. There just weren’t any bodies left behind.
Lauren removed her hands from the gloves attached to the inside of the Hawk’s incubator and washed up while Jessica entered the bathroom to take a shower. Lauren was on the verge of leaving the basement when she became aware of the dust blasting the Hawk’s hull. It sounded eerie in a world where nothing was supposed to have changed much in a million years.
It sounds like an invisible monster.
Lauren climbed the ladder out of the basement.
Gary was alone in the living area, sprawled on the couch with a book in his hands, the science fiction classic Dune.
‘What happened to Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles?’ she asked.
‘I put it away,’ Gary said.
‘Why?’
‘At the beginning of the book they talk about the first few expeditions to Mars. It was depressing me.’
‘Why? I mean, what happened to them?’
‘In which expedition?’ Gary asked.
‘Oh. The first one?’
Gary rested Dune on his chest and looked at her with tired eyes. She couldn’t remember him having smiled all day. ‘A Martian murdered them when they landed,’ he said.
‘I see.’ It was only a story. ‘How about the second expedition?’
‘The same. But first the humans were mistaken by a Martian for insane Martians. Eventually they were all killed, though.’
‘What about the third expedition?’
Gary reached for his book and continued reading. 'You don’t want to hear about it.
‘Was it bad?’ Lauren asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Like the first two?’
‘Worse.’
‘I never knew it was a gloomy book,’ Lauren said.
‘Dune’s not much better. They have sandstorms in Dune. Storms like we’re having now.’
Lauren wanted to change the subject. ‘Where’s Jim? Has he gone to bed?’
Gary nodded. ‘He told me he was exhausted.’
Lauren made a mental note to examine him in the morning. ‘Keep an eye on him, Gary. Make sure he doesn’t overwork himself. Everything we do revolves around him.’
‘Sure.’
Lauren yawned. ‘I’m tired myself. I think I’ll hit the sack. Is Bill talking to Houston?’
‘Yeah,’ Gary mumbled, preoccupied. The United States had spent billions for them to come to this forsaken place, and he spent his time reading fiction.
‘I kind of wanted to talk to Jim before I went to bed,’ she said, mostly to herself. ‘Gary? Did he say what the wind was up to before he lay down?’
‘Seventy-nine miles an hour.’
‘Is that dangerous?’
‘If it gets any higher, yes.’
‘What would we do then?’
‘Leave,’ Gary said.
The word had a nice ring to it. ‘I have to admit I kind of miss old Earth already.’
Gary turned a page in his book. ‘If we leave here, we just go to where the Russians landed. We just go there.’
‘Oh. Yeah. I hadn’t forgotten.’
Strong hands gripped her neck, choking off her air. She
needed to scream but she couldn’t breathe. They were smothering her!
‘Don’t touch me!’ she finally managed to cry, bolting upright in bed. The relief was instantaneous. She had been asleep. Now she was awake. She was safe. Gary was sitting on her bed. Jim stood at his back.
‘What is it?’ she asked, dazed.
‘I didn’t mean to wake you so roughly,’ Gary said.
Lauren noticed it was still dark. They had not turned on the light. Jessica was no longer in her bed. ‘Why are you two up?’
‘Listen,’ Jim said.
Lauren couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed the sound at first. Whatever she had been dreaming about had muddled her whole brain. It sounded as if the Hawk was getting sandblasted in preparation for a new coat of paint.
‘How bad is it?’ she asked.
‘The sand has stripped away our exterior paint,’ Jim said. ‘Our communications are filled with static. I can’t even measure the speed of the wind. We have to get out of here.’
‘Can you do it, Gary?’ she asked.
Gary stood, and paced uneasily in the cramped quarters. ‘Not if it gets any worse. I would prefer to wait until it dies down, but Bill is worried that dust may filter into our engines. I see his point. If that happens, we’ll never get out of here.’
‘But can we blast off in this wind?’ she asked. ‘Won’t we wobble?’
‘Wobble?’ Gary said. ‘We’ll have our guts twisted inside out.’ He stepped to the door. ‘I’ve got to start my checks.’ He left.
Wearing only her underwear and her oversized Houston Oiler jersey, Lauren got up and followed Jim to the porthole. ‘Where’s Jessie?’ she asked.
‘Upstairs with Bill. He’s trying to consult with Houston. He’s not having much luck.’ Jim checked his watch. ‘Two hours before sunrise. Are you fully awake, Lauren? Gary had to shake you hard before you opened your eyes.’
‘We Wagners are funny sleepers,’ Lauren said, thinking of Jennifer. She pointed out the porthole. ‘What about our equipment?’
‘We have the jeep and Hummingbird aboard. The rest will have to fend for itself.’ Jim shook his head. ‘It’s incredible, this storm. The Rover didn’t detect winds one-fifth this magnitude.’
‘How will the Tharsis region be?’ Lauren asked.
‘It’s mountainous, it should be fairly well-sheltered. Of course, we won’t know how extensive the storm is until we’re in space and looking down.’ Jim pressed his face against the porthole. ‘It’s gone.’
‘What?’ Lauren asked.
‘Our flag. Mars buried it.’
‘Maybe the planet’s trying to give us a hint to get out of here while the going’s good.’
‘Maybe,’ Jim said softly. He closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead. ‘Or maybe it’s trying to trick us into going somewhere else.’
End of Chapter 15
