Spence rose to his feet, scooping sand away from him. He crawled to the top of the dune and looked out over the red desert, fighting down the panic he felt rising within him. Nothing could be seen of the installation, not a glimmer in any direction.
The winds had calmed, but away toward the south—at least he considered it a southerly direction—the sky bore a distinct brownish-red smudge as if a prairie fire burned out of control just beyond the horizon. Overhead the sky was tinged with a pinkish cast which meant it was approaching noon, or just passing it.
Here was a problem. Clearly he could not sit by and wait for a search party to find him, and he could not walk in every direction at once. He glanced at his suit’s chronometer on his right forearm and set it on elapsed time mode, figuring that at best he had only seven hours before the temperature dropped and he began to freeze.
He decided to start walking toward the mountain peak he saw rising into the clear air, so close it looked as if he could touch it with an outstretched hand. He remembered the holomap and the fact that Olympus Mons, the tallest peak on Mars, stood some thirty kilometers distant from the installation. If he could reach it there was a chance he could see the installation from its slopes. It would be a race, for it meant traveling fifty or sixty kilometers in seven hours—eight hours at the most. To even have a chance at making it back to the base in time he would have to travel at a pace of seven or eight kilometers an hour.
Without wasting another second, he turned himself toward the mountain and began marching off in long, ground-eating strides.
He walked for hours, it seemed to him, and the great flattened cone of Olympus Mons did not seem perceptively changed. Periodically he had stopped to look around him lest he miss some sign of a search party, or some indication that he might be moving nearer to his goal.
On one of these reconnoitering stops he became aware of the fact that the brown smudge on the horizon to the south had grown considerably. It nearly filled the southern quadrant, towering several kilometers into the sky by his best estimation. As he stood gauging the size of the disturbance he felt the horror of realization creep over him—the Simoom! The storm was sweeping in on wings of awesome fury, racing toward him.
Spence began to trot in an awkward, bouncing gait, doubling his pace. He had to reach the mountain before the Simoom struck. It was his only chance.
THE FIRST GUSTS OF wind pummeled Spence like angry fists. Around his legs the sand sang away like steam escaping from a pipe. The force of the coming storm impelled him on, lifting his steps and blowing him forward. He lurched ahead drunkenly, exhausted, sweating inside his surface suit. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth in thirst. He stared at the dull brown overcast which crept over the sky like a discolored shade. The sun burned through with a throbbing white glare as he dragged himself on.
He walked mechanically now, not attending to his steps, not caring whether he reached the mountain or not. He despaired of ever seeing the installation through the thick clouds of red dust whipped up by the Simoom’s winds. Spence walked now to keep from thinking of the grisly end waiting for him just a few hours away.
On and on he walked and the wind howled around him, filling the sky with dust and blotting out the land. Tiny projectiles— grit, sand, and shards of rock—threw themselves into him, slicing at him. He could feel their sting through his surface suit and knew that it was only a matter of time before the steady blast tore the suit away from his body, stripped it off like a second skin to leave him naked in a deadly rain.
Packer’s grim forecast echoed in his ears: “You’d be erased in seconds.” Spence rehearsed the torturous details of such a death: flesh stripped molecule by molecule from his bones and then the bones themselves battered to pieces and scattered still warm over the surface of the planet to be ground into powder.
The scene held a grisly fascination for him, though he knew that it would likely be his own fate. It was that or death by freezing. Those were his choices.
The sun was lowering in the sky and already the wind whistling around him held a chill. Soon the temperature would plummet and he would stop moving as his body heat evaporated. This at least seemed preferable to the other death.
He stumbled blindly now. The dust obscured everything beyond the plastic perimeter of his visor. The rattle of tiny missiles filled his helmet like the crackle of static and his thoughts turned toward those who would mourn his death: his father would take it hard, of course; and his sister. Adjani would feel badly, but it was difficult for Spence to imagine the brown genius actually grieving over him.
Ari, of all he could name, alone embodied the sole regret of his heart. She alone he cared for. And he would never see her again—never see those bright blue eyes, never see her golden hair shining in the sunlight, or feel the cool touch of her long fingers as she brushed his face—the awful certainty of their separation saddened and frightened him more than death itself.
He hoped that in some small way he would leave a void in her life which would never be filled by another, that she would remember him fondly and weep when she heard the sad news of his death itself.
He remembered the words she had said the night before he left. He could hear her voice speaking to him once more: Be very careful, Spencer… I will pray for you every day.
Prayer cannot help me, thought Spence, then reflected that probably very little else would help either. At least prayer would not hurt. The idea seemed somehow appropriate to him now, and proper. He wished that he had the right words to say so that his first, and likely last, prayer would not be the feeble simpering of a dying agnostic.
He felt a rush of emotion and the tears brimmed up in his eyes to roll down his cheeks inside the helmet. He could not brush them away.
With the tears came the words, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry …” which he repeated over and over again. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “Help me.”
That was the prayer he prayed, though why he was sorry, and for what he should be forgiven, his heart alone knew.
Scarcely had the words crossed his lips when he felt himself slammed to the ground by a blast of cold wind with the force of a rocket thruster and the scream of a beast in agony.
He lay unmoving as pebbles and small stones tumbled over him. He could not raise his head much inside his helmet, but with the cold sweeping over him he knew he must keep moving to remain warm. Snakelike, on his belly, he inched forward.
He had not gone far when he felt the wind lessen. He pushed himself to his knees and stood. He tottered a few more steps and the wind hit him again, this time tumbling him forward and rolling him in a ball.
He felt himself rolling and rolling, as if all support had been yanked out from under him and he would go on forever. But he did not stop rolling, and it was then that the wind no longer assailed him. He had fallen headlong into an arroyo—one of the small canals which creased the surface of the planet. Here he was out of the wind and safe from the blast of windblown projectiles.
He could see only slightly better than before; thick clouds of dust filled the arroyo, rolling in on the wind. Spence put his head down and scuttled forward over the rocky terrain of the dry river bottom. Darkness increased rapidly and he could feel the cold increasing its hold with the setting of the sun.
Gradually he became aware of the downward slope to his path. The arroyo deepened and, from what he could see when the dust clouds parted, widened as it grew into a rift canal.
He walked woodenly on with no other thought than to keep walking until he dropped from hypothermia. He knew that death would follow quickly and he would not feel it. That at least was preferable to being blasted into particles by the wind.
The grade descended rapidly and then flattened out completely. Spence stopped and at the same instant the billowing clouds of red dust parted. In the last glimmering light of day he saw before him a sight which made his mind reel. His knees buckled as he made to draw away.
He had wandered to the very edge of the rift. He
now stood on the brink of a canyon stretching out before him hundreds of kilometers and carved deep into the crust of the planet. Another step would have sent him plunging to his death.
His reaction to this new danger was purely physical. In his mind the prospect of falling to his doom held less significance for him than it might have at another time. He was simply too exhausted, and too benumbed by the cold to care anymore; a fact, he noted, that indicated hypothermia was already beginning to affect him.
It would not be long now.
So this is what it is like to die, he thought. To feel the life force slipping away and to be acutely aware of it. He wondered if he would find the release others talked about, if he would meet his mother among the ranks of souls who had passed into the great beyond—or whether those, like so many other things, were simply the superstitions of a fading age.
He had no particular thought about the moment. He noticed how the shadows deepened to violet on the canyon walls and how the depths of the canyon were already sinking into darkness as black as any pit. Simoom wind above him shrieked like all the demons of hell released to vent their fury on the desolated land.
There came a rumble beneath his feet, a vibration of the rock shelf on which he stood. He turned to look behind him and his eye caught a glimpse of a churning mass moving down the rim of the rift toward him.
A rock outcropping, eroded by the wind, had broken free and started an avalanche that was now sweeping down the side of the canyon toward him. Spence had time only to throw himself to the ground before he was swept away in the sliding jumble of rocks and dirt.
The rock slide carried him tumbling far down into the canyon. Miraculously, the grinding, twirling, thundering mass did not crush him outright. When the slide stopped he lay panting on the topmost layer. Rocks and pebbles continued to pelt his body, but he had neither strength nor will to move.
The cruel Martian night closed its fist around him and he knew no more.
TSO
1
IT’S NO USE, ADJANI. He’s gone. We’ve got to turn back.”
Packer’s big hand flipped a switch and he talked into his headset. “Sandcat 2 to Sandcat 1—we are returning to base. Repeat. We are returning to base. Over.”
“Just one more pass along the rift valley,” pleaded Adjani. His eyes did not leave the thermograph screen. The Sandcat swayed on its springs as the Simoom screeched around them.
Packer, blue in the light of the thermoscreen, turned his face toward his friend. He placed a hand on his shoulder and gripped it firmly as if to establish a physical hold on reality. In a voice deepened with fatigue and sadness, he said, “It is twenty below out there and only an hour after sundown. In another hour it will be fifty below. The storm is bucking to full force by morning—we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. We lost visual four hours ago, and the thermograph shows a solid blue field. If we don’t head back now, we won’t make it.”
He paused and added, squeezing the shoulder once more, “It’s over.”
“I let him get away. I am responsible,” protested Adjani.
“You’re lucky he didn’t injure you for life. There was no stopping him. God knows we’ve done everything humanly possible.”
“He’s out there somewhere—alive. I know it. I feel it.”
“If he is still alive, he’s past help.” Packer turned the Sandcat and watched the instruments as he punched the return course into the onboard navigator. He took his hands from the wheel and let the computer guide them home.
Adjani buried his face in his hands and began rocking back and forth in his seat. Packer turned away. Neither one spoke for a long time. They sat and listened to the rattle of the sand and rocks upon the shields.
The radio on the overhead panel squawked to life. “Kalnikov at I-base. MAT units 1 and 2 return to I-base immediately. Acknowledge.”
The message was repeated and Packer responded, giving their ETA to the base. There was a long pause; static crackled over the speaker. “Your loss is to be regretted …”—more static— “I am sorry.” The transmission was lost once more to the storm. Packer reached up and switched the radio off.
“I guess I’ll send a report as soon as we get back to base. I don’t exactly know the proper procedure—this has never happened before.”
“Couldn’t we wait a few days? I want to look some more.”
“Sure, we can wait. But it won’t make any difference.”
“I would like to find the body at least.”
“Adjani, the storm is likely to blow for days. By the time you are able to search again there would be nothing left to find.”
“It is the least I can do. Please…”
“All right. I won’t stop you.”
They sat silent until the computer flashed the outline of the installation on the vidscreen. “We’re almost there,” sighed Packer heavily.
Adjani turned with an urgency, laying a hand on the big man’s arm. “Please, let us pray for him now. Before the others …”
“Of course.”
Both men bowed their heads and Adjani spoke a simple, heartfelt prayer as the Sandcat entered the installation compound, safe from the storm.
SPENCE LIFTED HIS THROBBING head. His limbs were numb; he could no longer feel his hands or feet. Heavy vapors of sleep tugged at him, luring him to slip lightly away on their easy-flowing stream to oblivion. For a moment he nearly gave in and let the stream take him where it would, but something about giving in that easily rankled him.
With an effort he pushed himself up, shifting the debris which had settled over him. He placed his unfeeling hands on the ground and steadied himself. Gritting his teeth with jaw muscles stiff with cold, he straightened and swayed unsteadily on his knees. Overhead the bright disk of Deimos shone down on him— the Simoom had abated for the moment, allowing the ghostly light to spill down into the rift canyon.
He looked around him as rattling shudders racked his body. His muscles were contracting violently in their last effort to produce life-saving warmth. These contractions would pass soon, he knew. And then he would lie still.
Spence did not want death to find him sitting down. He stood on wooden, unfeeling legs and tried to walk. The loose debris shifted and he was thrown down the incline of the canyon still further. His helmet struck a rock and he stopped.
He lay there exhausted, staring up at the black sky of Mars, imagining that he was the first man, and possibly the last, to ever lie awake under a Martian night sky.
The convulsions gradually lessened. He felt a tingling warmth spread through his frame—the illusion of warmth, the last remnant of his body’s defenses exhausting itself.
A misty darkness closed around him, narrowing his field of vision, blurring the edges with a velvet softness. But the stars above, in the center of his sight, still burned hard and bright. Untwinkling, unmoving, unlike stars at all. It was as if the eyes of the universe watched him to see how a man died.
“No!” he shouted, hearing the empty ring of his voice in his helmet. “No,” he said again; his voice was but a murmur.
Watching the stars he saw a pale white mist pass over them like a diaphanous veil. He thought it a trick of his failing eyesight. Then he saw it again—just the faintest trace of color against the night, the frailest of silken threads.
Odd, he thought. What could produce such a phenomenon?
His scientist’s brain turned over this bit of novelty. He raised his head and saw, a little below him on the slope, a silver tracery on the rocks, glowing in the light of the moon.
On nerves and determination alone he stirred his useless limbs and half-slid, half-swam to the spot. He touched a gloved hand to the faint white outline of the stuff on the rocks. It gleamed in the clear light. “Crystals,” he muttered to himself. “Ice crystals. Frost.”
All around the immediate area he noticed the white hoarfrost, and below, the wisps of mist rising out of the ground.
Scarcely thinking or attending to what he was doing,
he scrambled further down the slope and found himself peering into a pitch-dark hole. A fissure in the canyon wall had opened up, perhaps due to the rock slide earlier. Out of this fissure the slightest trace of pearly mist rose into the deathly cold Martian atmosphere.
The crack was just large enough for a man to squeeze head and shoulder through. Without thinking a second time, Spence thrust himself into the opening.
He found the hole beyond somewhat wider as he wriggled awkwardly into the opening. He inched forward into the blackness bit by bit and discovered the crevice dropped away at a sharp downward angle. He sat down and used his heels to pull himself along, sliding on his seat.
Down and down he went.
I have chosen my own grave, he thought. My bones will not be blown to dust on the winds.
The thought strangely cheered him.
DEEPER INTO THE BRITTLE crust of the Red Planet he went. Sometimes sliding, sometimes walking nearly upright, calling on his will alone to move his body. Blind as a cave bat he moved, abandoning himself to all else but the moving. Onward; deeper and deeper still.
How long he walked, how far he burrowed, he did not know. The blackness around him penetrated his mind, covering it with itself, removing all thought, all memory, leaving only the present moment and the raw will to move on.
When the first ghostly glimmer reached his eyes out of the darkness around him, he thought it a trick of his failing mind: his faltering brain cells firing off minute electrical charges and somehow producing light in the cortex or optic nerve.
But the faint greenish glow did not fade. Instead it grew stronger. Spence, shuffling forward like a zombie, willing his legs to carry him along, stumbling over the uneven downward pathway, stayed on his feet and moved toward the gleam he saw in the distance.
He reached a spot where the glow seemed brightest and found as he came upon it that the faint light was a reflection on a blank wall of stone. He placed his hand upon the stone and saw the green cast on his glove.
He turned to see what produced the glow, as one reeling in a dream. What he saw rocked him back against the wall in disbelief: a wide tunnel glowing with interlacing veins of living light stretched before him. The thin green color glistened on the walls and roof of the gallery like a luminous dew.
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