“Going up?” asked Dmitri playfully in an effort to release the tension.
“After you,” teased Garrison.
They climbed into a stairwell which seemed to go on for many stories of back-and-forth climbing. Neither astronaut counted the number of steps, but both were glad that they were doing this climb in the gravity of Mars and not Earth. At last, they arrived on a low landing where the concrete stairs ended abruptly. There was about four feet of distance from the floor to the ceiling, so both astronauts were kneeling here. Shining their torches upward revealed a yellow painted square which marked the boundary of the trap door. Reaching up, Dmitri felt for a release mechanism and found a handle with a trigger. With a click and a grunt which was audible through their helmet comm system, he tried to force the door open.
“Won’t budge?” asked Garrison.
“No,” grunted the Russian as he pushed upward with his arms and back, attempting to gain leverage on the door.
Garrison came to Dmitri’s side and assumed a similar position. As the two pushed together, they could feel the door give about an inch or two, and after several moments gave up the effort.
“It feels like there’s something blocking it,” pointed out Garrison.
“I can’t imagine that would be true. We do not have junk just lying around the crater.”
“Either way,” shrugged Garrison. “What are we going to do now, Dmitri. This door, as you have said, is our only hope to assessing the power failure at the array. But why can’t we go back through the main entrance. With the pressure door deployed, we can use it as a pressurization chamber.”
“We lose too much oxygen in main tunnel. We would risk not surviving a rescue effort, if this situation gets that far.”
“Well, we’ve got to get through there, Dmitri, somehow.”
“Do you have a crowbar in that tool box? Perhaps we could pry the hatch open?” Garrison brainstormed out loud.
“I didn’t bring crowbar. It didn’t make much sense for a power repair. But, it is good idea. I should return to get one. You wait here.” Dmitri began his descent into the bunker.
“Dmitri, wait.”
Dmitri turned, flashed his torch upward to look at Garrison.
“Is it a good idea for us to separate?”
“Perhaps not,” admitted Boronov. “But you are not at 100 percent health. I prefer you not to have to climb stairs again so soon. Our headsets will remain in range should we need to communicate.”
Garrison deferred his judgment to that of the senior astronaut and sat down on the landing with his back against the slab of concrete forming the wall of the tunnel. He turned off his torch to save battery, and watched as the dim light of Dmitri’s light descended deeper and deeper into the ground until it had disappeared completely from view.
Garrison was not sure how long Dmitri had been gone, as he nodded off in the quiet darkness of the tunnel, until his partner had arrived with the crowbar. The two worked with the crowbar for some minutes before having to admit defeat again.
“It’s budging farther with the crowbar,” admitted Garrison, “but we still can’t get it to open enough to exit. I don’t get it, Dmitri.”
“The hinges must be frozen from inactivity.”
“We really need to get out there and assess the situation.” Garrison lowered and shook his head, frustrated at the chain of events that was starting his mission so ominously.
“I have two ideas. First, we try light explosive.”
“Explosive?” asked O’Ryan.
“We have small charge which can blast the hinge without damaging tunnel.”
“I don’t know, Dmitri. If the explosive causes a cave in, then we cut ourselves off from our only exit. Let me hear your second idea.”
“Cutting torch. We cut through steel, but the torch will be difficult to bring way up here. It is big and heavy.”
“Then, we’ll take turns carrying it up,” offered Garrison. “The idea of an explosive… it sounds too risky.”
“You are not at full health,” pointed out Dmitri. “It would not be advised for you to carry the torch.”
“Dmitri, I’m well enough. We simply must get through that door. Besides, you have been exhausted walking up the stairs twice. You’ll need to do yet a third trip. That’s nearly 500 feet of stair climbing in one day.”
“Yes, but at a third of gravity, it’s more like 150 feet, or 15 flights of stairs. It is no problem, really.”
“But you pointed out that this next trip will be a bigger deal, dragging up a heavy cutting torch up—Dmitri, let’s not argue. I will come down and help you bring the torch up.”
The senior astronaut yielded to the persistence of his younger companion, and the two shared the job of hauling the torch up 500 feet of stairs, a task which proved less tiring since they were able to have periods of rest while the other grunted up the stairs.
Boronov did the cutting, which proved tedious because of the thickness of the door, and the fact that the work was entirely overhead. Since there was little room to work on the top landing of the stairwell, O’Ryan remained on the landing below to watch his companion work. Boronov began cutting by making four perforated straight cuts along each side, just next to the yellow lines marking the edge of the square door. Then he connected one perforated edge to another to form corners of cuts. He worked on connecting the corners closest to him, so that when the door finally gave on any remaining connected steel, it would drop down from the ceiling in such a manner as to swing away from him.
“Just two more cuts to go,” Dmitri called to his companion.
A hazy brown light from outside began to filter through the cracks where the cuts had been made. He set the torch to work on the second to last cut, and jumped back when he noticed a sudden increase in light indicating that the door was finally collapsing into the stairwell. The door swung away from Boronov as anticipated, but what he wasn’t expecting was the vast quantity of debris which came flowing into the tunnel as well. Broken chunks of concrete and asphalt mingled with Martian dirt rushed into the tunnel, forcefully knocking Dmitri to the concrete ground.
“Dmitri!” screamed Garrison shielding himself from a shower of rocks which were now bouncing down the stairs. He jumped away from the falling debris until the commotion ceased. Working past rubble on the landing and stairs, he was finally able to make his way to the upper landing. Obscured by dust, Garrison at first was having difficulty assessing the situation. “Dmitri! Are you okay? Can you hear me?”
There was no immediate response from Boronov, and O’Ryan feared that he might have been knocked unconscious from the blow. As the dust settled, he saw nothing but a pile of rubbish filling much of the upper landing. Boronov had been completely buried. Garrison furiously pulled chunks of concrete and asphalt off of the landing using nothing but his hands for tools. With each effort, the sound of rock and concrete bouncing down the stairs kept rhythm with O’Ryan’s effort to extricate his companion. After fifteen minutes of work, he felt a soft lump, which he quickly recognized as the spacesuit of Dmitri. Working harder, he continued to sweep the debris away, until he had removed his companion, who was able to sit up against the wall of the stairwell, still shaken from the incident. He looked up to see streams of light through the pile of debris.
“Dmitri! Can you hear me? Are you in pain?”
“What—happened?” Dmitri asked in a daze.
“When the trap door opened, a flood of debris came down on top of you. Are you in pain?”
“A little, but I do not think injuries are too bad,” Boronov stated. “I simply do not understand. There should be nothing blocking this emergency hatch. Camp is kept free of stuff like this, and yet it is clearly garbage from camp. Blocks of concrete, road asphalt? There is a landfill, but it is on east side of crater near SAR pad, where junk is recycled as material for SAR operation. This hatch should not lead us there.”
“Well, we will know where this came from once we can get above ground and see
what it is and where we are at,” pointed out Garrison looking at the streams of ruddy light. “But that will have to wait. We must see to your injuries first. Do you think you can stand?”
Boronov nodded, and slowly, Garrison helped him to his feet with a few grunts and Russian words which O’Ryan assumed to be cursing.
“This is very frustrating, Garrison. All day long we have been just feet away from ground level and we just cannot seem to get there.” Dmitri looked at his watch. “17 hours 13 minutes. Even if we can clear this pile today, it will be dark again, and we will not be able to work on power array.”
“We must not work on it today,” insisted Garrison. “Your injuries must be tended to, and then we must rest and hopefully return to complete this stubborn job tomorrow.”
Defeated, the pair of damaged astronauts walked slowly and quietly back down the stairs, Garrison sulking in the misfortunes of the last 24 hours, and Dmitri hobbling on a swollen foot.
…
Through the slits in his eyes, Garrison saw the same green glow that had greeted him the morning before. He sat up, yawned, and saw his companion tightly wrapping his right ankle with a bandage.
“How is it, Dmitri?” asked Garrison. “The foot?”
“It is some swollen, but not so much as I feared. I can walk, and this bandage will help us with our day of work.”
“Well, let’s get packed.” Garrison stood on his feet and clapped his hands together. He felt optimistic about the day ahead of them. Besides, it couldn’t get any worse than the last couple of days, could it?
“I have packed some hand tools to help with debris,” Dmitri mentioned. “Hand shovel and small pick axe should get us through tunnel and onto Martian soil. But, do eat some breakfast first.”
Garrison was beginning to wonder if Dmitri ever slept. By the time he awoke in the mornings, his partner had already finished breakfast and began preparations for the day. He completed his meal while Dmitri was gone. By the time he was finished suiting up, Dmitri had returned and the two proceeded into the depressurization chamber and ensuing tunnel again. They climbed the stairs slowly, feeling the muscle fatigue of yesterday’s climbs as well as the pain from their respective injuries.
When they reached the top landing, they discovered that there was not enough room on the stairs for both to safely work, so Boronov began by removing debris from under the trap door and O’Ryan cleared a path off of the stairs, while trying to dodge rocks and dirt flying from his companion’s shovel. Every now and then, the pair would trade roles in order to catch a breather from the digging and shoveling, but later in the morning, they were able to extricate enough of the material to give an opening large enough for an astronaut to fit through.
“I think we might be able to make it now.” It was Garrison’s turn on the pile when he announced the opening to his partner.
Dmitri was a couple of flights down, spreading the debris evenly down the stair well in order to not create a barrier in their return to the bunker. “I will be there in one moment.”
As Dmitri made it to the pile, he saw a dust-filled chamber filtering an orange glow from the hole above, now adequately sized to allow the pair to climb out of the tunnel. Garrison was already scaling the remaining rocks and disappeared slowly through the hole.
“What do you see?” asked Dmitri. “Where are we, and why is this pile of junk here in first place?”
“I really can’t tell,” responded Garrison. “The visibility is simply awful. This must be one of those dust storms that they taught me in Martian Weather 101.”
“I come up and see too,” Dmitri replied with both curiosity and concern.
The curiosity and concern only deepened when he reached the surface, and saw a lot of dust in the air, and a lot of uneven debris on the ground.
“Well, it is dust storm, but it is not right.” Dmitri said sullenly.
“Why?”
“Little wind,” pointed out Dmitri matter-of-factly. “Dust storm of this nature requires much wind. Where is wind?”
“So, you haven’t seen this kind of activity before?”
“It is most unusual weather.”
“Let’s take a look around and see if we can find our way out of the landfill,” said Garrison.
“Garrison, this is not landfill.”
“But what about this pile of junk underneath us?”
“I don’t know, but I know what landfill looks like. There is too much concrete and rocks and… broken asphalt?” Dmitri wandered slowly through the uneven terrain and came to a section that consisted of more significant amounts of asphalt, which was only used on the road surfaces of Camp Mars. No road work had been redone during Dmitri’s mission, and there was none that he could recall at the landfill either.
“Dmitri, does it make sense to go to the power grid with all of this dust? Will we be able to see anything to make a diagnosis?”
“No, it does not make sense. Nothing makes sense right now.”
“Should we head over to the barracks, at least? We can wait out this dust storm there to make a better assessment.”
Dmitri was leaning down onto the pile of debris picking at the pile with the axe.
“Dmitri?” Garrison carefully stepped over rocks and jagged concrete to meet up with his companion. “Dmitri?”
“This is road, here.” Dmitri indicated with the end of his axe.
“What?”
“The road goes here, under these rocks. The asphalt is largely broken up and tossed about, but here, I see asphalt, but over there it is just dirt.”
“I don’t understand.”
“This concrete,” Dmitri said as he sat on a rock and hefted a concrete chunk. “It is rounded. Based on the arc, I believe this is part of very large cylinder.”
He paused to see if Garrison understood.
“It is fuel tank, Garrison.”
“The fuel tank blew up, then, and left this pile of rubble here? But how does that relate to the pow—”. O’Ryan stopped in mid sentence as he was able to piece together a theory. “Shrapnel! Dmitri, shrapnel from the tank must have flown over the runway and landed on the solar array as well, or worse, all the way to the other side of the crater to the distribution subsystem. Oh, no… the communication array. Dmitri, this is a huge blow to our camp.”
Dmitri shook his head. “We must not draw hasty conclusion. “The atmosphere is not sufficient for that kind of explosion of fuel.”
“An earthquake, then?” suggested Garrison eager for answers.
“We would feel a marsquake in bunker. Besides, you know that Mars is not geologically active.”
“We must explore the camp and assess the extent of damage, Dmitri.”
“No,” said Dmitri quickly as he stood up. “We must not risk becoming lost in this dust storm. Remember… since Mars is one of few planets with no magnetic field, we only rely on visual landmarks, sky navigation, or vehicle navigation system.”
“Okay, so we can’t see landmarks, but we can see a faint bright circle through the dust that indicates the position of the Sun. We can use the Sun to help us reach the MTV and then drive around the camp to assess the extent of damage.”
“Too risky. We must first wait out dust storm.”
“Dmitri, why can’t we wait in the barracks instead of the bunker?”
Boronov’s voice raised slightly. “What if we find barracks damaged also, and then we grow disoriented and can’t find hole in the ground with this sea of debris around it? Too risky, Garrison.”
Garrison nodded, and turned around, straining to survey anything through the haze of dust. At last, he asked, “How long will the dust last, Dmitri? When will we be able to venture about and restore some sanity to this camp?”
“Winds are not strong. I am hopeful that tomorrow, we will have clear day to assess damage and make repairs.”
A frustrated sigh was audible to Dmitri.
“I’m sorry, comrade. We must return to bunker and wait.”
Dmitri lead
the way back to the trap door. Pausing, he kneeled down and picked up an object that Garrison did not recognize.
“What is it, Dmitri?”
Boronov showed Garrison the contents of his hand. “It is fuel gauge that needed repair.”
Garrison hung his head and sighed. “Looks like it’s going to need more than repair now, my friend.”
…
Joram Anders sat upright in bed, his heart started by the sound of a telephone ringing next on a table next to his bed. He answered the phone.
“Hello.”
“Joram, this is Professor Zimmer. Can you meet me in the common room?”
Joram looked at his clock. 11:25 AM. He just went to bed a couple of hours earlier after a third straight night of investigating the Martian dilemma. Rest had not come easily, either, as his body was struggling to cope with his sudden change of schedule. In fact, this was the first morning where he was able to quickly go to sleep, and even if it was Carlton Zimmer on the phone, he couldn’t help feeling agitated at being awoken from such a sound sleep.
“Um… Yes, professor… I’ll be there in just a minute.”
Joram’s room on Palomar observatory was smaller than a motel room. It held a twin size bed, night stand, and a small closet for a few changes of clothes and personal affects. He went into a tiny bathroom, washed his face in cold water, dabbed with a towel, and proceeded to put on a pair of clothes he had tossed in a corner.
When Joram entered the common room, which really was a library stocked with astronomy and science texts, he noticed that Zimmer was already conversing with Kath and Reyd. Spinning around towards the door, Zimmer clapped his hands. “Ah, right. Let’s head to the video conference room at the observatory, then.”
“What’s going on, Professor?” Joram prompted Zimmer for a briefing of their morning activity.
“Ravid called Dr. Gilroy a couple of hours ago. He is confident that we will get a visual of the camp during this Earthrise. We will be getting a live video feed from an observatory in Istanbul which is already focused on the eastern Martian horizon, waiting to get the first visual into our hands.”
The Orthogonal Galaxy Page 13
