MT. WASSER

the jump up to the summit was smoother this time. Standing beside Brennart, Doug realized that the man had entered the distance and altitude from their first flight into the hopper’s minuscule computer. Still, it took good piloting. One rather longish firing of the hopper’s rocket engine and they were soaring up, up the face of the mountain, breaking into brilliant sunlight, riding as smoothly as if they were on an elevator.

Everyone else was safely tucked inside the shelters. On Brennart’s orders, Rhee and Greenberg had been allowed to move into shelter one with Killifer and Deems. The two women who had been there had grudgingly pulled on their spacesuits and gone off to the fourth shelter, still only partially covered with protective rubble from the regolith.

Doug knew he should be worried about the radiation he was receiving, especially when they broke out of the shadows of the mountains and into the glaring sunlight. Yet somehow that danger seemed unreal compared to the thrill of flying up to the mountaintop again, the excitement of beating Yamagata to the claim for this rich territory.

This is fun! he told himself. We’re doing something nobody else would do.

Besides, the more sober part of his mind added, I made the rad dose calculations as conservative as I could. The numbers are okay. We’ll make it. We’ll be all right.

Their flimsy craft seemed to hover a hundred meters or so above the mountain’s summit, and Doug marvelled again at Brennart’s finely-tuned piloting. Without saying a word,

Brennart crabbed the craft sideways slightly and let it down almost exactly where they had landed before.

“That was terrific’ Doug said with genuine awe.

Brennart peered over the console at the ground and thi hopper’s broad round feet. “Missed our old landing spot by a good meter,” he muttered unhappily.

Doug laughed.

“All right,” said Brennart, slapping down the platform railing on his side of the hopper, “we’ve got to be quick now.”

Doug knocked down the railing on his side and they both bent to untie the astronomical instruments. Within a few minutes Doug was setting up the telescope and spectrometer while Brennart, kneeling beside him, unfolded the solar panels of the telemetry unit and began plugging wires from its base to the instruments.

It was clumsy work. Doug felt as if he were wearing thick mittens instead of the most flexible gloves that spacesuit engineers could design. He saw that the radiation patch on his sleeve was a deep orange. Brennart’s too.

“Ready to power up?” Brennart’s voice crackled in his earphones.

Doug swallowed hard and nodded inside his helmet ’Ready.”

The tiny display panels on the instruments lit up and the telescope swung automatically to focus on the Sun. Doug had to duck out of the way of its moving tube.

“Okay,” he said. “They’re working. Let’s drag our butts out of here.”

“Get it on tape,” Brennart said. “Make our claim legal.”

Fumbling with the vidcam in his hurry, Doug quickly panned across the little assembly of instruments with Brennart standing tall and unmistakable in his red-striped spacesuit beside them.

“Okay, got it,” he said, tucking the hand-sized vidcam back into his thigh pouch. “Now let’s get back to the shelter.”

“Wait one tick,” Brennart said. “I thought I saw something as we were coming in for the landing…’ And he loped off toward the edge of the summit in long lunar strides, almost oaring.

“Where’re you going?” Doug called, more puzzled than nnoyed or frightened.

“Come here, quick!” Brennart motioned with one long arm.

Doug tried to imitate Brennart’s lunar glide and hopped lumsily to the older man’s side.

“Down there. Can you see it?”

Doug peered into the inky blackness far below. “See what?” le asked.

“Lights. Like landing lights on a spacecraft.”

Doug stared. Far, far below he thought he saw two tiny gleams of lights, one red, one white. But when he looked directly at them, they disappeared.

“Masterson Aerospace to Yamagata lander,” he heard Brennart calling. “Can you hear me?”

That’s the Yamagata lander? Doug wondered. Down there?

“Masterson to Yamagata. Do you read?”

Doug was about to turn back to their hopper when he heard in his earphones, “Yamagata to Masterson. We read you.” The voice was weak, strained.

“We’ve just established legal claim to the mountaintop and we have a working base down at the ice field,” Brennart said, gloating happily. “You boys might as well pack up and go home.”

“We can’t. We crashed on landing. Both injured.”

Doug suddenly heard the pain in the man’s voice.

Brennart’s attitude changed instantly. “Does your base know of your condition?”

“No. Communications impossible in radiation storm.”

“We’ll try to get a team to you as soon as we can,” Brennart said.

“We are protected from radiation, but one of us is badly injured and needs medical attention.”

“We’ll do our best,” said Brennart. “Sit tight.”

“That is all we can do.”

Doug grabbed at Brennart’s arm. “Come on, we’ve got to get out of here.”

“We’ll get help to you as soon as the radiation dies down, Brennart said. “Hang in there, guys.”

“Thank you.”

Without another word Brennart turned and loped back to the hopper. Doug ran alongside, almost matching his long gliding strides. They jumped up onto the platform together and Brennart slid his boots into the foot restraints and pushed the throttle forward in one motion, not even bothering to put up the railings.

But the hopper did not move.

Doug slid his boots into the foot loops and grabbed the edge of the console to support himself.

But the hopper did not move.

MT. WASSER

“Christ on a surfboard,” Brennart yelled. “It’s dead.”

“What’s wrong?”

Brennart swiftly scanned the meager control panel. “Everything’s in the green, but the goddamned engine won’t light.”

Doug felt cold sweat breaking out on him. , “Damn!” Brennart tugged at the throttle again. Nothing happened.

“What’s wrong?” Doug asked again.

Brennart turned toward him. “No time to check it out. Come on.”

And he jumped off the hopper’s platform. Doug followed him without questioning. Brennart was unfastening the empty ’cargo pod.

“Undo the oxy tank,” he commanded. “Get it down on the ground. Fast!”

Doug found the clips that held the bulbous green tank and clicked them open, then rolled the tank off the edge of the platform into his waiting arms. Shocked at how heavy it felt, he let it slip and thump onto the rocky ground. He felt immense gratitude that it didn’t burst apart.

Turning, he saw that Brennart was rolling the canister of nanobugs along the bumpy ground. He wedged it against the hopper’s other side.

“Get under the platform,” Brennart urged, dropping to all fours. “Come on!”

Doug dropped to his hands and knees and crawled beneath the hopper’s platform, between the oxygen tank and thennanomachine canister, nearly banging his helmet on the dangling nozzle of the defunct rocket engine.

“How are we going to fix it from under here?” he asked Brennart. There was Barely room enough to turn on his side, Doug saw. They could never get onto their backs, not with the life-support backpacks they carried.

“We’re not going to fix it,” the older man said. “We’re going to sit out the storm down here. This is our own little radiation shelter. Cozy, huh?”

“We’re going to stay here?” Doug heard a tinge of fear in his own voice.

“Nothing else we can do,” Brennart said calmly. “Can’t poke around trying to check out the hopper’s systems, not in this radiation flux. We’d be fried by the time we figured out where the malf is.”

“Malf?”

“Malfunction.”