facing the curving bulkhead in front of me, but it was on a swivel base, and I slowly rotated it toward the central shaft; my instincts wouldn’t let me keep my back to people, even though there was no one here but dead-as-a-doornail Denny and stainless-steel Rory. I looked more or less in the middle distance, at where the ladder began, but after a time my attention fell on the opposite bulkhead—which had a red door with a locking wheel in its center. Of course: the other exit—the one that would have led outside had the lander been sitting on the surface. But, damn it all, it wasn’t sitting on the surface. It was buried in the Martian permafrost.
What goes down must come up.
“Rory!” I said into my fishbowl’s headset.
“Yes?”
“Come down here.”
It didn’t take him long. “What?” he said, when he was standing between me and the red door.
“This is the descent stage, right?”
“Yes.”
“So beneath our feet,” I said, tapping the hull plating with my boot, “there are fuel tanks.”
“They’re actually in a torus around this level.”
“Ah, okay. But below us, there’s the descent engine, right? A big engine cone; a big landing rocket?”
“Yes.”
“So, assuming there’s any fuel left, what happens if we fire that engine?”
Pickover looked at me like I was insane. I get that a lot. “The engine cone is probably totally plugged with soil,” he said.
“Would we blow up, then?”
He frowned in a subdued transfer way. “I . . . I don’t know.”
“Well, let’s find out. There’s got to be a control center.”
“It’s here,” said Pickover, pointing to his right. I came over to the room he was standing next to. It had a curving control console, following the contour of the outer bulkhead. There was a bucket seat in front of it identical to the one I’d just vacated. I looked at Pickover.
“I don’t know how to fly a spaceship,” he said.
“Neither do I. And I bet Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t really, either. But the ship should know.” I waved my arm vaguely at the ceiling lights. “The electrical system is working; maybe the ship’s computer is, too.” I lowered myself into the seat, and Pickover took up a position behind me. I scanned the instruments, but Pickover spotted what I was looking for first and reached over my shoulder to press a switch.
There was a big square red light on the console that flashed in what looked like a random pattern—but I knew it wasn’t; it was one of those lights that robots in old sci-fi flicks used to have that flashed in time with spoken words, once per syllable. Such lights didn’t really serve any purpose on robots, but they were handy to indicate that a computer was talking in a spaceship cabin that might or might not be pressurized. There wasn’t much air in the lander, and all of it was unbreathable, but it was sufficient to convey faint sound. I cranked up the volume on my suit’s external microphones. “Repeat,” I said.
“I said, can I be of assistance?” replied a male voice; in the thin air, I couldn’t say much more about it than that, although I thought it sounded rather smug.
“Yes, please,” I said. “Can you open the hatch?”
“No,” the computer replied. “Both egress portals are manually operated.”
“Can you blow the top hatch?”
“That functionality is not available.”
“All right,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “We’d like to take off.”
“Ten. Nine. Eight.”
“Wait!” I said, and “Hold!” shouted Pickover.
“Holding,” said the voice.
“Just like that?” I said. “We can just take off? You know we’re buried in Martian permafrost.”
“Of course. I engineered the burial.”
“Um, is it safe to take off?” asked Pickover.
“Well, safe-ish,” said the computer.
“What kind of answer is that?” I asked.
“An approximate one,” replied the prim voice.
“I’ll say,” I said. And then it occurred to me to ask another question. “Do you know how long you’ve been turned off?”
“Thirty-six years.”
“Right,” I said. “Do you know why Simon Weingarten marooned Denny O’Reilly here?”
“Yes.”
“Spill it.”
“Voiceprint authorization required.”
“Whose?”
“Mr. Weingarten’s or Mr. O’Reilly’s.”
“They’re both dead,” I said.
“I have no information about that.”
“I can show you O’Reilly’s body. It’s upstairs.”
“Be that as it may,” said the computer.
I frowned. “What other information has been locked?”
“All navigational and cartographic records.”
I nodded. If the lander ever was moved, no one but Simon or Denny could ask the computer how to get back to the Alpha. “All right,” I said. “We need to get out of here. That door”—I pointed to the other side of the ship—“is