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  “Want me to drive?” Craig asked gently.

  Dex glanced at the older man. “Wiley, if I wasn’t driving I’d be biting my fingernails up to the elbows.”

  Craig laughed. “Hell, this isn’t all that bad, Dex. Lemme tell you about the time a hurricane hit us while we were tryin’ to cap a big leak on an oil platform in the dull of Mexico. Right near Biloxi it was …” Dex listened with only half his attention, but he was glad that Craig was trying to ease his tension. It wasn’t working, of course, but he was grateful that Wiley was at least trying.

  “A dust storm, you say?”

  Darryl C. Trumball felt a pang of alarm as he glared at the wall screen. Unconsciously he ran a nervous hand over his shaved scalp. It was already dark at four in the afternoon in Boston; out beyond his office windows he could see the Christmas lights strung along the trees of the Common and the Public Garden.

  “Yessir,” answered Pete Connors’ image on the wall screen, his dark face set in an expression that was totally serious, even grim.

  “And my son’s driving into it?”

  “As a matter of fact, Mr. Trumball, your son insisted on driving into it. Jamie suggested that he turn back to…”

  “Suggested?” Trumball snapped. “By god, he’s supposed to be running things up there! What do you mean, suggested? He should’ve ordered Dex to turn back!” He thumped his desktop for emphasis.

  Connors seemed to think about that for a moment. “Mr. Trumball,” he said at last, “your son doesn’t take to following orders very well. Jamie could have stood on his head and I doubt that Dex would have listened to him.”

  “That’s nonsense!” Trumball spluttered. “My son’s a team player. He knows how to follow my orders, by damn! This redskinned idiot you’ve got up there just isn’t fit to direct a team of prairie dogs, let alone the finest scientists in the world.”

  “Jamie Waterman is one of the best men I’ve ever been privileged to meet,” Connors rebutted without an eye-blink’s hesitation. “You couldn’t ask for a better man to run the expedition.”

  Trumball glowered at the image on the wall screen.

  “The storm was totally unexpected,” Connors went on, more conciliatory. “It’s a big one, but we’ve seen bigger in the past. We have every confidence that your son and Dr. Craig will be able to ride it out without harm.”

  “They’d better,” Trumball said, reaching for one of the ornate pens he kept on the desk.

  “They will, I’m sure. I was in a dust storm with Jamie during the first expedition. We made it through without any real problems.”

  “If anything happens to my son, I’ll hold that man personally responsible. Do you understand? Personally responsible. I’ll pin his balls to the nearest tree!”

  Connors seemed to silently count to ten before he answered, “You’ll have to go through me to do that, Mr. Trumball. Me, and a whole lot of other people who have complete confidence in Jamie.”

  Exasperated, Trumball banged a fist on his desktop phone console. Connors’ smoldering image winked out.

  “I’ll get you,” the old man grumbled aloud. “You and Waterman and anybody else who gets in my way.”

  He commanded the phone’s voice-recognition system to get Walter Laurence on the line. It’s time to pull the plug on this Indian. Don’t wait until Dex gets hurt, that’d make it look too personal. Nail his ass to the wall now.

  “It’s definitely going to reach your base camp,” said the meteorologist. “At its present rate of growth and forward speed, the storm will overrun your area in two days—er, that’s two Martian days, sols.”

  Jamie and Stacy Dezhurova watched the report in the comm center. The meteorologist appeared to be in Florida, perhaps Miami. Jamie could see palm trees and high-rise condos through the man’s office window, behind his youthful but intently serious face.

  The young meteorologist went on to give all the data he could present: maximum wind speeds would be above two hundred knots; the storm’s forward progress was a steady thirty-five knots; height of the clouds; dust burden; opacity. Many of the numbers were estimates or averages.

  “We must make certain all the planes are tied down really tight,” Stacy muttered as the meteorologist droned on.

  Jamie nodded. “And the generator, too.” He knew, in the calculating side of his brain, that even a two-hundred-knot wind on Mars did not have the momentum to knock down the tall cylinder that housed the fuel and water generator when its tanks were full. The Martian atmosphere was so thin that there was little punch to its winds. Yet the other side of his mind pictured the generator toppling, blown over like a big tree in a hurricane.

  Dezhurova nodded. “We must get on it right away.”

  “Tomas and I will do the outside work,” Jamie said once the meteorologist finished his report. “You see that everything in here is buttoned up and everybody’s ready for a blow.”

  He slid his wheeled chair to the screen where the meteorologist’s frozen image stared out at them, face lined with concern, and punched the transmit key.

  “Dr. Kaderly thanks for your report. It helps a lot. Please keep us updated and let us know immediately if there’s any change in the storm’s progress.”

  Then he turned back to Stacy, sitting beside him. “Send Kaderly’s report to Poss … I mean, to Wiley Craig and Dex. Then get the others started getting ready for the storm.”

  “Right, chief.”

  Jamie got up and headed for the airlock and the hard suits waiting by the lockers there. Somehow he didn’t mind it when Stacy called him chief. There was no mockery in her tone.

  As he began pulling on the rust-stained leggings of his hard suit, Jamie thought about Dex and Craig out there between Xanthe and Ares Vallis. They’re going to be caught in the storm for two sols, at least. Without a backup electrical system. The batteries ought to see them through okay, if they power down to a minimum. That means they’re going to have to stop and sit there until the storm blows past them.

  They’ll be okay. If they just keep their cool and wait it out, they’ll get through the storm all right.

  If the dust doesn’t damage their solar panels.

  AFTERNOON: SOL 50

  ”WHAT DO YOU THINK, WILEY?” ASKED DEX TRUMBALL AS SOON AS THE meteorologist’s detailed report ended.

  Craig was driving the rover at a steady thirty klicks per hour. ‘ ‘How the hell fast is one knot? I always get confused.”

  Sitting in the right seat, staring out at the darkening horizon in front of them, Dex said, “It’s one nautical mile per hour.”

  “What’s that in real miles?”

  “Does it make that much difference?”

  Craig hunched his shoulders. “Naw, I guess not.”

  “It’s about one point fifteen statute miles.”

  “Fifteen percent longer’n a regular mile?”

  “That’s right.” Trumball was starting to feel exasperated. What difference did fifteen percent make? They were driving straight into a dust storm. A big one.

  “So it’ll take about two sols for the storm to pass over us.”

  “If we’re sitting still, yes.”

  Craig glanced over at Dex, then turned back to his driving. “You want to keep mushing ahead?”

  “Why not? As long as the solar cells are working, why not push ahead? Get the hell out of this mess as quick as we can.”

  “H’m.” Craig seemed to think it over carefully. “Hell of it is, we got some nice smooth territory here. Pretty easy driving.”

  The land outside was not entirely free of rocks, but it was much more open and flat than the broken and boulder-strewn region of Xanthe they had been through. The ground was sloping downward gently, generally trending toward the lowlands of the Ares Vallis region.

  “We’re going to turn this route into a regular excursion for the tourists, Wiley,” Dex said, mainly to take his mind off the ominous cloud spreading across the horizon before them.

  “Build a road? Out here?”r />
  “Won’t need a road. We’ll put up a cable-car system, like they’re doing on the Moon. Just put up poles every hundred meters or so and string a line between ‘em. The cars hang from the line and zip along, whoosh!” Dex made a swooping motion with one hand.

  Craig fell into the game. “The cable carries the electrical current to run the cars, huh?”

  “Right,” Dex said, trying not to look out at the horizon. “Cars can carry a couple dozen people. They’re sealed like spacecraft, carry their own air, heat, just like this rover.”

  “Only they skim over th’ ground,” Craig said.

  “They’ll be able to go a lot faster that way. A hundred klicks an hour, maybe.”

  Without taking his eyes from his driving, Craig said softly, “Wish we had one of ‘em now.”

  Dex stared out the windshield. It was starting to get dark out there. The mammoth cloud of dust was coming toward them like a vast Mongol horde of conquerors. Soon it would engulf them entirely and they would be lost in the dark.

  He shivered involuntarily.

  Jamie was outside with Rodriguez, adding extra tie-down lines to the planes, when the call from Connors came through.

  Inside his hard suit, he could not see the former astronaut, only hear his caramel-rich baritone voice. Connors sounded concerned, worried.

  “He’s on the warpath, Jamie. I just heard about it from Dr. Li. Old man Trumball called him and raised hell about you. He’s calling everybody on the ICU board. God knows who else he’s bitching to.”

  Jamie had asked that Connors’ call be put on the personal frequency, so that he could listen to the man in privacy.

  “I don’t need this,” he muttered as he tugged at the line that held the soarplane’s wingtip to one of the bolts they had sunk into the ground.

  Connors’ voice went on, unhearing, more than a hundred million kilometers away. “I’ve talked to several of the board members myself. None of them really wants to remove you, but they’re pretty scared of Trumball. He must be threatening to cut off funding for the next expedition.”

  Straightening in the hard suit was not an easy task. Jamie found himself puffing with exertion as he looked back toward the dome. Fuchida and Dezhurova were in the garden bubble, carefully checking its plastic skin for pinhole leaks or wrinkles where the wind might grab and tear the fabric apart.

  Once the dust starts blowing, will the particles have enough force in them to penetrate the bubble’s skin? He wondered. Not likely, but then the odds against the dome being hit by meteoroids were a zillion to one.

  Connors was still droning on. “I had a long talk with Father DiNardo about it. He’s a damned good politician, that Jesuit, you know that? He says you should sit tight and ignore the whole thing. It’ll probably blow over as soon as the storm dissipates and Trumball realizes nothing’s happened to his son.”

  Jamie nodded inside his helmet as he walked over to the soarplane’s other wingtip and started tightening the lines already fastened there.

  “DiNardo said,” Connors continued, “that you shouldn’t even think about resigning unless Trumball keeps up the pressure even after the storm blows out and it becomes clear that a majority of the board’s going to go along with him.”

  “Resigning?” Jamie said aloud. “He thinks I should resign?”

  Connors went on with his dolorous report, reminding Jamie several times more that he hated to bother him with this political maneuvering, but he thought Jamie ought to know about it.

  Finally he said, “Well, that’s the whole story, up to now. I’ll wait for your answer. Be sure you mark it personal to me; that way nobody else’ll look at it. At least, nobody else should look at it. I don’t know how many people around here are reporting to Trumball on the sly.”

  Wonderful news, Jamie groaned silently.

  “Well, okay, that’s it, pal. I’ll wait for your answer. ‘Bye for now.”

  Off on the eastern horizon, Jamie saw, the sky was darkening. Or is it just my imagination? He asked himself. I’ll check the instrumentation when I get back into the dome. The storm’s going to hit here, but it’s probably too early to see it yet. And now I’ve got another storm, a political storm, back on Earth.

  The Navaho believe that clouds are the spirits of the dead, Jamie remembered. Will you come to visit me in a cloud, Grandfather? Or will it be the spirits from the Long Walk, come to take their vengeance on the whites who drove them off their land?

  He shook his head to clear it of such irrational thoughts, then glanced down at the suit radio’s keypad on his wrist. Jamie said carefully, ‘ ‘Personal message to Pete Connors at Tarawa. Pete, I got your message. We’re battening down for the storm right now, so I don’t have time to reply at length. I want to think about this before I answer you, anyway. Thanks for the news—I guess. I’ll get back to you.”

  Damn, he thought as he stared out at the eastern horizon. It sure looks like it’s clouding up out there. Maybe the storm’s picked up speed. That’d he good; it’ll roll over Dex and Craig and get them out into the clear sooner.

  Starting back toward the dome’s airlock, Jamie said to himself, why is Trumball so clanked up? Why is he out to remove me as mission director? Prejudice? Just plain malice? Or is he the type that’s not happy unless he’s forcing other people to jump through his hoops?

  Then Jamie heard his grandfather whisper, put yourself in his shoes. Find what’s bothering him.

  Okay, Grandfather, he replied silently. What’s bothering the old man?

  His son is in danger, came the immediate reply. He’s worried about Dex’s safety. That’s natural. That’s good.

  But Trumball knew that exploring Mars carried its risks. Maybe he never considered that his own son would have to face those risks, just like the rest of us.

  He was all in favor of going after the Pathfinder hardware. But he didn’t think his son would go on the excursion and place himself in danger. Now he knows differently and he’s scared. He’s sitting in an office in Boston and his son is out in the middle of a dust storm a hundred million kilometers away and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  Except get angry and vent his fury on the most convenient target he can find: the mission director who allowed his son to go out into danger. Me. He’s pissed at me because he can’t do anything else about the situation. He’s scared and frustrated and trying to solve his problem the way he’s solved problems before: fire the guy he’s mad at.

  Jamie took a deep breath and felt a calm warmth flow through him. He heard his grandfather’s gentle laughter. “Never lose your temper with a customer,” his grandfather had told him years ago, when Jamie had been a little boy angered by the pushy, demanding loud-mouthed tourists who yelled at Al in his shop. “Let ‘em whoop and holler, it don’t matter. Once they calm down, they’re so ashamed of themselves that they buy twice what they started out to buy, just to show they’re sorry.”

  Damn! Jamie said to himself as he trudged back to the airlock. It would be so satisfying to get sore at Trumball, to send him a blistering message telling him to mind his own damned business. So easy to taunt the old man from a hundred million kilometers’ distance.

  But I can’t get angry at him, Jamie realized. I understand what he’s going through. I understand him, and you can’t hate a man you understand.

  As he stepped into the airlock and swung its outer hatch shut, he reminded himself, but just because you understand him doesn’t mean he can’t hurt you. You understand a rattlesnake, too, but you don’t let him bite you. Not if you can avoid it.

  “Thai’s all she wrote,” said Craig.

  He touched the brakes and brought the rover to a gentle stop.

  “It’s not even six o’clock yet, Wiley,” Dex protested. “We can get in another hour or more.”

  Craig got up from the driver’s seat. “I got an idea.”

  The sky was a dismal gray above them, getting darker by the minute. Dex could hear the wind now, a thin screeching sound like th
e wail of a distant banshee.

  “I’ll drive,” he offered.

  “Nope,” said Craig, heading back toward the bunks. “You gotta know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em. We sit still now and get ready for the storm.”

  “It’s not that bad yet,” Dex insisted, turning in his seat to watch the older man. “We can push on a little more, at least.”

  Craig knelt down and pulled open a storage drawer beneath the bottom bunk. “The real danger from the storm’s gonna be the damage the sand does to our solar panels, right?”

  “Right,” Dex answered, wondering what his partner was up to.

  Craig pulled a set of sheets from the storage drawer. “So we cover the solar panels.”

  “Cover them? With bedsheets?”

  “And anything else we got,” Craig said. “Coveralls, plastic wrap, anything we got.”

  “But once they’re covered, they’ll stop producing electricity for us. We’ll have to go onto the batteries.”

  Craig was emptying the drawer beneath the other bunk now. “Take a look at the instruments, buddy. It’s gettin’ mighty dark mighty quick. Those solar cells are already down to less’n thirty percent nominal, right?”

  Dex glanced at the panel instruments. The solar panels’ output hovered just above twenty-five percent of their maximum output.

  “Right,” he replied dismally.

  “So don’t just sit there,” Craig called, almost jovially. “Get up and find the duct tape, for cryin’ out loud.”

  Dex thought, this is just busywork. We won’t be able to keep the panels covered once the storm hits. Wind speeds are going to go over two hundred knots, for chrissake. That’ll rip off anything we try to cover the panels with.

  But he pushed himself out of the chair, wormed his way past Craig, and started searching through the supply lockers, grateful for the chance to be doing something active instead of just sitting and watching the storm come up and smother them.

  NIGHT: SOL 58