"You’ve only been out two days," Reed muttered, "so it shouldn’t be any dietary deficiency…"

"It feels like we’re all coming down with the flu or something," Connors volunteered.

"I see." Reed scratched his chin, fingered his pencil-thin moustache, ran a smoothing hand over his sandy hair. The same symptoms were showing up in the dome.

"It’s difficult for me to do much for you remotely," he said to Connors. "I’m afraid it would be best if you started back before things get any worse."

"But we just got here! We’re scheduled to be in the canyon for a week…"

"Not if you’re all sick." Vosnesensky would have to see the necessity of it, Reed told himself. After all, as medical officer here I have the authority to order them back to base. Even if the Russian objects.

"Maybe if we all took a good shot of antibiotics?"

"I doubt that it would help."

"Give us another day, at least. We’re not going anywhere today if that storm hits. Let’s see what develops over the next twenty-four hours."

Reed considered the astronaut’s earnest, anxious face. Connors was pleading with him. I am the team’s physician. I should know what to do. I ought to be able to deal with this. If I order them back now Vosnesensky will be furious. He’ll think it’s a reflection on him, most likely.

"I’ve got to report this to Vosnesensky, you realize," he said.

"Yeah, I know."

"This transmission is automatically monitored by the orbiter. And Kaliningrad."

Connors nodded glumly.

Pursing his lips as though deep in careful thought, Reed at last offered, "I will recommend to Mikhail Andreivitch that you stay where you are for the next twenty-four hours. A dose of wide-spectrum antibiotic won’t hurt you; I’ll send specific written instructions over the computer link. Then we’ll see how you feel tomorrow morning."

"Okay! Great!" The astronaut was as grateful as a puppy.

Reed terminated the conversation, then turned to his medical computer file and tapped out a prescription for the antibiotic. He pushed himself up from the chair slowly, reluctantly. I must face Vosnesensky, he told himself. Nothing for it but to beard him in his own den. Still, he dreaded the confrontation.

The Russian was in the wardroom, huddled over a mug of steaming tea, talking in low earnest tones with Mironov in their native language. They both looked sick to Reed’s professional eye. Haggard, sallow complexions. Even their coveralls looked baggy and rumpled, not at all the neat aspect that they had presented only a few days earlier. Whatever it is, they’ve got it. And all the others, too. All except me. And possibly Toshima.

Reed felt absurdly normal: healthy and strong. Clear-headed and alert. He had even cut down on his morning amphetamine cocktail, to check whether or not his seeming good health was a chemically induced artifact.

The two Russians both looked up as Tony pulled out a chair and joined them.

"The team in the rover is down with it," Reed told them quietly, "whatever it is."

"Fatigue," Vosnesensky said immediately. "Psychological fatigue. I have seen it on long-duration missions in orbit."

"After only thirty-seven days?" Reed almost sneered.

"We have been in space for almost a year."

"Ah yes," Reed admitted. "True enough."

"The stresses of this environment…" Mironov started, but his voice trailed off weakly.

"Mars is no more stressful than the moon or an orbiting space station," Reed said. "Rather less stressful, actually, I should think."

"Then what is it?" Vosnesensky growled. "What is happening to us?"

Reed shook his head. "Whatever it is, it’s affecting everyone here with the same symptoms: weakness, pains in the limbs, headaches."

"It is the flu," Mironov said.

Cocking an eyebrow at him, Reed said, "How could we all come down with the flu nearly a year after leaving Earth? Influenza viruses don’t lie dormant for that long. If it were the flu we would have seen it long before this." Unless it’s a slow virus, Tony suddenly thought. Like Legionnaires’ disease, or some such.

Mironov looked stubbornly unconvinced.

"But no one in orbit has it," Reed pointed out, arguing as much with himself as with the cosmonaut.

"The Martian flu," Vosnesensky half joked.

"It is patently impossible to contract a disease from a planet that is without any life of its own," Reed snapped, almost angrily. "There are no viruses here to infect us. Even if there were Martian microbes, they would not be adapted to our cells. Mars could be covered with all sorts of bugs, but they wouldn’t bother us at all. Couldn’t, actually."

"That is the theory of the doctors," Mironov mumbled gloomily.

"Perhaps this is not a disease at all," Vosnesensky said.

"Not a disease?"

"Coal miners get black lung," Vosnesensky said, "not from germs but from breathing in coal dust."

Reed stared at him. This cosmonaut actually has a brain inside that thick skull!

"Perhaps there is something in the Martian dust that is affecting us," Vosnesensky said.

"But we take great care to keep the dust out of our suits and out of our living habitat," Reed pointed out.

"The dust is very fine. Perhaps we do not take great enough care."

"I hadn’t thought of that," said Reed.

Mironov said, "We could check the air in here, see how much dust is suspended in it."

"Yes," said Vosnesensky. "We must do that."

Reed was about to reply when Toshima came rushing up to the table. He was wide-eyed with excitement. If the "Martian flu" had hit him, he showed no evidence of it.

"The dust storm!" Toshima fairly shouted. "It has started!"

Grounded.

Jamie felt like an errant teenager being punished by his parents. The rover was in perfectly good shape, and even though he felt weak and headachy, he saw no reason why he should not be moving onward, closer to the "village" he had seen.

That’s where we’ve got to go, he kept telling himself. Maybe I can even climb up there, once we get to the base of the cliffs where that cleft is. I’ll bet there’s even a natural path up the cliff face to that cleft and the formation inside it. Or maybe they carved steps out of the rock.

The day outside seemed perfectly clear, despite Toshima’s insistence that a dust storm was howling down the length of the canyon and would soon engulf them.

There had even been the mists out there earlier in the morning, thin gray tendrils of haze that hovered in the early morning chill and slowly evaporated as the sun reached down into the canyon. Like ghosts that vanish when the light touches them, Jamie thought.

If the mists evaporate and then form again the next morning, he reasoned, either the moisture remains inside the canyon or it’s renewed from some source of water vapor underground. Or in the cliff walls.

Christ! There’s so much for us to look for and they’ve got us stuck inside this aluminum can!

For the fortieth time that morning he paced the length of the rover’s command module, from the cockpit bulkhead past the little galley and the narrow passage between the folded-up bunks to the equipment racks and finally the airlock at the back end.

Connors called from the cockpit, "I think it’s starting."

Jamie rushed the nine strides it took to span the module’s length and ducked his head past the bulkhead. Through the cockpit’s bulbous canopy the canyon outside seemed just the same as the last time he had looked.

Connors anticipated him. "Take a squint at the sky."

Jamie slid into the empty seat beside the astronaut so he could look upward. The pink sky seemed normal enough — almost.

"It’s gotten ten percent darker in the past five minutes," Connors said, holding up a color comparison chart.