They stood for a long moment in inky blackness, letting their retinas shed the afterimage of the lamps. Finally Marc asked, “Where’s the light coming from?”
“Marsmat glows. Phosphoresces, is more correct.”
“How can it do that?”
“Don’t know. The more interesting question is why.”
A long pause in the darkness that seemed to press in on all sides.
Marc said, “Did you hear? Airbus is incoming, within hours.”
“No, too much static. I could barely recognize your voices. What’d Viktor say?”
“They got a message relayed from the satellite. Airbus will be in tonight. We’re to be back by then.”
“Damn. I’d hoped…” She sighed. “What did you tell him?”
“Not much. I didn’t want him to know you were down here alone, so I was pretty brief.”
“Good move.”
“How’s Airbus going to deliver Raoul’s repair kit?”
“They don’t say. Maybe drop it to us?”
“What’s their landing site?”
“Viktor says they just don’t answer that. Or other questions, either.”
“So okay, big mystery, standard Airbus bullshit. That doesn’t have any effect on us here.”
“I guess not. Good to know Raoul’ll get his kit, though.”
“Yeah. Let’s think in the here and now, though.”
She knew now that time and oxygen would set the limits. They had this day and now were to return to the base. Solid orders. Team loyalty.
“Plenty of oxy up there,” Marc said later as they rested and ate lunch—a squeeze-tube affair she hated, precisely described in one of her intervideos as eating a whole tube of beef-flavored toothpaste.
“So we trade tanks for time.”
“Viktor’s gonna get miffed if we don’t check in at the regular time.”
“Let him.” She wished they had rigged a relay antenna at the vent mouth. But that would have taken time, too.
Tick, tick, tick.
“I don’t want us to haul out of here dead tired, either.”
“We’ll be out by nightfall.”
“We won’t be so quick going back up.”
Field experience had belied all the optimistic theories about working power in low gravity. Mars was tiring. Whether this came from the unrelenting cold or the odd, pounding sunlight (even after the UV was screened out by faceplates) or the simple fact that human reflexes were not geared for 0.38 g, or some more subtle facet, nobody knew. It meant that they could not count on a quick ascent at the end of a trying day.
“You want geological samples, I want biological. Mine weigh next to nothing, yours a lot. I’ll trade you some of my personal weight allowance for time down here.”
He raised his eyebrows, his eyes through his smeared faceplate giving her a long, shrewd study. “How much?”
“A kilogram per hour.”
“Ummm. Not bad. Okay, a deal.”
“Good.” She shook hands solemnly, glove to glove. A fully binding guy contract, she thought somewhat giddily.
“Viktor’s counting on using some of your allowance to drag back more nuggets and ‘jewels,’ y’know.”
“It’s my allowance.”
“Hey, just a friendly remark. Not trying to get between you two.”
“Thanks for the thought, but I’ll deal with Viktor. Ready to go? We’re eating into my hard-bought hours.”
They returned to the ledge where Julia had her accident, two hundred meters further in. On the other side of the fortuitous overhang they found a pool covered with slime on a ledge. It was crusty, black and brown, and gave reluctantly when she poked it with a finger.
“Defense against the desiccation,” she guessed.
Marc swept his handbeam around. The mat hung here like drapes from the rough walls. “Open water on Mars. Wow.”
