Mars

"Not that I can remember."

"Are you coughing or sneezing? Does your chest hurt?"

Vosnesensky shook his head, then winced. The needle went in smoothly; Yang found a vein on her first try.

"Any rash on your body?" she asked.

Watching the syringe fill up with dark blood, Vosnesensky replied, "No. Not that I have noticed."

Yang pulled the needle out and slapped a plastic bandage on the puncture. Reed watched in silence, his arms folded across his chest. The diminutive Chinese physician asked Vosnesensky to strip to the waist. Wordlessly the Russian pulled down the top of his coveralls and slipped his undershirt over his head.

Yang looked at his back. "No rash," she muttered.

"Is that significant?" Vosnesensky asked.

"Perhaps." She looked across the small cubicle toward Reed, then murmured absently to Vosnesensky, "You may go now."

"Thank you." The Russian tugged on his coverall top and scurried from the infirmary despite his aching legs, carrying his undershirt in one hand.

Jamie fingered his bear fetish through the hard suit’s gloves. Thin and flexible as they were, the gloves still robbed him of the true feeling of the stone’s polished warmth.

He was standing on the lab module’s roof in the last slanting rays of the dying sun. He and Co

He had not dared to step out into the sand itself, for fear that he would sink through the powdery dust so deeply that he would not be able to extricate himself.

The mission rule book doesn’t cover this, Jamie had told himself as he slowly, carefully climbed the ladder. He had gone up as if mountain climbing, three points attached at all times. Move one gloved hand to the next rung. Grip it, then move the other hand. Grip, then one booted foot. Make sure it’s firmly seated on the rung, then pull up the other one. The dust frightened him. He pictured himself drowning in it like a man caught in quicksand.

Now at last he stood up on the roof. If you have any power to help at all, he said silently to the fetish, now’s the time to get it working.

"What’s it look like?" Co

"Not good," Jamie replied, surveying the scene. "She’s buried up over the fenders, all except the last half of the rear module. Not enough traction to pull us out."

Co

"How’re you doing?" he asked.

"I’m fine. Just can’t get up on my fuckin’ feet, that’s all."

Jamie’s head was swimming with dizziness. His body ached all over and he felt so tired that it was tempting just to stretch out right there and go to sleep. The canyon was so wide that he could actually see the sunset; the cliffs on the other side were too far away to be visible, tall as they were. He watched the sun for a moment, saw it touch the rocky horizon, felt the shadows of deathly freezing night reaching toward him. Inside his suit he shuddered, almost like a dog trying to shake off water.

He looked down at the tiny stone bear in the fading light. The leather thong holding the miniature arrowhead and the feather had been lovingly tied by his grandfather. An eagle’s feather, Jamie thought. Symbol of strength. I could sure use some now.

Into his helmet microphone he said, "I might as well come down. There’s nothing I can do up here and the sun’s going down."

Tucking the miniature stone bear back into the pouch on the right leg of his hard suit, Jamie started slowly down the ladder. By the time he had painfully made his way back into the airlock it was dark outside. Co

Jamie tried to sound cheerful. "You look like a snowman playing in a pile of rust."

"I feel like a goddammed snowman — in July," Co

Slowly, like two arthritic old men, they shoveled most of the sand outside and then closed the outer hatch.

"Gotta clean off the suits," Co

"We’ve got to get you on your feet first," Jamie said.

It seemed like hours of tugging and pushing, but finally Co

Finally they staggered through the i

"Vosnesensky wants to talk to you," Joa

Ilona muttered, "The Russian pig won’t trust a woman with his important messages."

Jamie felt his temper snap. "Jesus Christ, Ilona, knock off the anti-Russian crap! We’re in a bad enough fix without your bullshit!"

She smiled languidly at him. "What difference does it make? We are all going to die here no matter what I say, aren’t we?"

Joa

He looked into their faces as he painfully made his way toward them in the cockpit. The illness had changed them. Ilona was no longer the haughty, imperious beauty who flouted all the rules. Her cheeks were sunken, her eyes ringed with dark circles. She had a look of near panic in her face; the smell of death was on her. Joa

"No, I won’t let us die," Jamie said in a half whisper. He added silently, Not without a fight, at least.

A growing feeling of helplessness was begi

"Kaliningrad insists that a rescue flight is out of the question," he said.

The expedition commander wanted to stand and pace, wanted to work off the nervous energy sizzling inside him. But in the low-ceilinged confines of the command module he had to content himself with sitting in one of the narrow padded chairs with his knees poking up ridiculously, clenching and unclenching his fists as he spoke.

"But they’re stuck down there!" Burt Klein said.

Li shook his head. "Kaliningrad says the last lander is to be used only in the direst emergency."

"The fact that four of our people are in danger of dying is not a dire emergency?" asked Leonid Tolbukhin sourly.

The cosmonaut and astronaut had quickly volunteered to pilot the expedition’s last remaining landing vehicle to the canyon to rescue the four stranded in the rover.

"We could sit her down within fifty yards of the rover," Klein said confidently, "and then bring them straight back here. Nothing to it."

"A piece of cake," Tolbukhin confirmed, the British idiom sounding strange and deliberate in his deep Russian voice.

"Kaliningrad says no. You two are the only pilots left here in orbit."

"Bring Ivshenko and Zieman back here," Tolbukhin suggested. "Then Burt and I can go to the canyon."

"Sure!" Klein said. "You’ll still have two L/AVs and four pilots at the dome. That’ll be plenty to bring the others back when the time comes."

Li’s face was a picture of misery. "Ivshenko and Zieman ca