Mars

"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." Co

Joa

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.

Joa

"The figures on the core samples are on the screen here," she said, tapping the computer humming beside her.

"Anything interesting?"

"See for yourself," she said, turning back to the work she and Ilona were doing.

Jamie frowned slightly at her abrupt ma

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.

Joa

"I’m going up front to see what the storm looks like," he said.

"Good," said Joa

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 Joa

Half puzzled, half angry, he made his way back into the command module. Co

"Toshima says we’ll be in this for the rest of the day," he a

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. Co

"Vosnesensky’s pissed because we don’t have a cover to put over the canopy," Co

"Is it? Scratching?"

Co

"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," Co

"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." Co

"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," Co

Jamie mentally converted the centigrade figure to fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

Toshima smiled toothily in the display screen. "Friction from dust particles heats the atmosphere. There could be lightning."

"Lightning?"

"It is possible. Be certain all equipment is protected."

Co

"It is grounded, isn’t it?"

"Sure, but how many amps will this lightning be packing?"

Toshima looked blank. Jamie realized that when he did not know the answer to a question he simply did not reply at all.

"Okay," Co

The meteorologist nodded.

"If you’ve got an emergency call for us, send it over the voice radio or the computer link. Those ante

"I understand."

Co

"That ante

The electric motor’s hum turned into a rasping growl.

"Kee-rap! It’s stuck. Fuckin’ dust must be packed into the joints." Co

"It is grounded, though," Jamie said, half a question.

"Yeah, but who knows how much juice a Martian lightning bolt might carry?"

Looking out at the dark clouds blowing past the cockpit, Jamie muttered, "Let’s hope we don’t have to find out."