Blue Mars (9 page)

There were clouds coming up over the nearby hillocks to the west,
their bottoms resting on a thermal layer as levelly as if pressing down on
glass. Streamers like spun wool led the way east.

Sax stood up and climbed out of the pool’s depression. Out of the
shelter of the hole, the wind was shockingly strong—in it the cold intensified
as if an ice age had struck full force that very second. Windchill factor, of
course; if the temperature was 262 K, and the wind was blowing at about seventy
kilometers an hour, with gusts much stronger, then the windchill factor would
create a temperature equivalent of about 250 K. Was that right? That was very
cold indeed to be out without a helmet. And in fact his hands were going numb.
His feet as well. And his face was already without feeling, like a thick mask
at the front of his head. He was shivering, and his blinks tended to stick
together; his tears were freezing. He needed to get back to his car.

He plodded over the rockscape, amazed at the power of the wind to
intensify cold. He had not experienced wind-chill like this since childhood, if
then, and had forgotten how frigid one became. Staggering in the blasts, he
climbed onto a low swell of the ancient lava and looked upslope. There was his
rover—big, vivid green, gleaming like a spaceship—about two kilometers up the
slope. A very welcome sight.

But now snow began to fly horizontally past him, giving a dramatic
demonstration of the wind’s great speed. Little granular pellets clicked
against his goggles. He took off toward the rover, keeping his head down and
watching the snow swirl over the rocks. There was so much snow in the air that
he thought his goggles were fogging up, but after a painfully cold operation to
wipe the insides, it became clear that the condensation was actually out in the
air. Fine snow, mist, dust, it was hard to tell.

He plodded on. The next time he looked up, the air was so thick
with snow that he couldn’t see all the way to the rover. Nothing to do but
press on. It was lucky the suit was well insulated and sewn through with
heating elements, because even with the heat on at its highest power, the cold
was cutting against his left side as if he were naked to the blast. Visibility
extended now something like twenty meters, shifting rapidly depending on how
much snow was passing by at the moment; he was in an amorphously expanding and
contracting bubble of whiteness, which itself was shot through with flying
snow, and what appeared to be a kind of frozen fog or mist. It seemed likely he
was in the storm cloud itself. His legs were stiff. He wrapped his arms around
his torso, his gloved hands trapped in his armpits. There was no obvious way of
telling if he was still walking in the right direction. It seemed like he was
on the same course he had been when visibility had collapsed, but it also
seemed like he had gone a long way toward the rover.

There were no compasses on Mars; there were, however, APS systems
in his wristpad and back in the car. He could call up a detailed map on his wristpad
and then locate himself and his car on it; then walk for a while and track his
positions; then make his way directly toward the car. That seemed like a great
deal of work—which brought it to him that his thinking, like his body, was
being affected by the cold. It wasn’t that much work, after all..

So he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and tried the method.
The theory behind it was obviously sound, but the instrumentation left
something to be desired; the wristpad’s screen was only five centimeters
across, so small that he couldn’t see the dots on it at all well. Finally he
spotted them, walked awhile, and took another fix. But unfortunately his
results indicated that he should be hiking at about a right angle to the
direction he had been going.

This was unnerving to the point of paralysis. His body insisted
that it had been going the right way; his mind (part of it, anyway) was pretty
certain that it was better to trust the results on the wristpad, and assume
that he had gotten off course somewhere. But it didn’t feel that way; the
ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The
contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal
torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his
body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was
telling him—the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was
amazing. It almost made one believe in the existence of an internal magnet in
the body, as in the pineal glands of migrating birds—but there was no magnetic
field to speak of. Perhaps his skin was sensitive to solar radiation to the
point of being able to pinpoint the sun’s location, even when the sky was a
thick dark gray everywhere. It had to be something like that, because the
feeling that he was properly oriented was so strong!

Eventually the nausea of the disorientation passed, and in the end
he stood and took off in the direction suggested by the wristpad, feeling
horrible about it, listing a little uphill just to try to make himself feel
better. But one had to trust instruments over instincts, that was science. And
so he plodded on, traversing the slope, shading somewhat uphill, clumsier than
ever. His nearly insensible feet ran into rocks that he did not see, even
though they were directly beneath him; he stumbled time after time. It was
surprising how thoroughly snow could obscure the vision.

After a while he stopped, and tried again to locate the rover by
APS; and his wristpad map suggested an entirely new direction, behind him and
to the left.

It was possible he had walked past the car. Was it? He did not
want to walk back into the wind. But now that was the way to the rover,
apparently. So he ducked his head down into the biting cold and persevered. His
skin was in an odd state, itching under the heating elements crisscrossing his
suit, numb everywhere else. His feet were numb. It was hard to walk. There was
no feeling in his face; clearly frostbite was in the offing. He needed shelter.

He had a new idea. He called up Aonia, on Pavonis, and got her
almost instantly.

“Sax! Where are you?”

“That’s what I’m calling about!” he said. “I’m in a storm on
Daedalia! And I can’t find my car! I was wondering if you would look at my APS
and my rover’s! And see if you can tell me which direction I should go!”

He put the wristpad right against his ear. “Ka wow, Sax.” It
sounded like Aonia was shouting too, bless her. Her voice was an odd addition
to the scene. “Just a second, let me check! . . . Okay! There you are! And your
car too! What are you doing so far south? I don’t think anyone can get to you
very quickly! Especially if there’s a storm!”

“There is a storm,” Sax said. “That’s why I called.”

“Okay! You’re about three hundred and fifty meters to the west of
your car.”

“Directly west?”

“—and a little south! But how will you orient yourself?”

Sax considered it. Mars’s lack of a magnetic field had never
struck him as such a problem before, but there it was. He could assume the wind
was directly out of the west, but that was just an assumption. “Can you check
the nearest weather stations and tell me what direction the wind is coming
from?” he said.

“Sure, but it won’t be much good for local variations! Here, just
a second, I’m getting some help here from the others.”

A few long icy moments passed.

“The wind is coming from west northwest, Sax! So you need to walk
with the wind at your back and a touch to your left!”

“I know. Be quiet now, until you see what course I’m making, and
then correct it.”

He walked again, fortunately almost downwind. After five or six
painful minutes his wrist beeped.

Aonia said, “You’re right on course!”

This was encouraging, and he carried on with a bit more speed,
though the wind was penetrating through his ribs right to his core.

“Okay, Sax! Sax?”

“Yes!”

“You and your car are right on the same spot!”

But there was no car in view.

His heart thudded in his chest. Visibility was still some twenty
meters; but no car. He had to get shelter fast. “Walk in an ever-increasing
spiral from where you are,” the little voice on the wrist was suggesting. A
good idea in theory, but he couldn’t bear to execute it; he couldn’t face the
wind. He stared dully at his black plastic wristpad console. No more help to be
had there.

For a moment he could make out snowbanks, off to his left. He
shuffled over to investigate, and found that the snow rested in the lee of a
shoulder-high escarpment, a feature he did not remember seeing before, but
there were some radial breaks in the rock caused by the Tharsis rise, and this
must be one of them, protecting a snowbank. Snow was a tremendous insulator.
Though it had little intrinsic appeal as shelter. But Sax knew mountaineers
often dug into it to survive nights out. It got one out of the wind.

He stepped to the bottom of the snowbank, and kicked it with one
numb foot. It felt like kicking rock. Digging a snow cave seemed out of the
question. But the effort itself would warm him a bit. And it was less windy at
the foot of the bank. So he kicked and kicked, and found that underneath a
thick cake of windslab there was the usual powder. A snow cave might be
possible after all. He dug away at it.

“Sax, Sax!” cried the voice from his wrist. “What are you doing!”

“Making a snow cave,” he said. “A bivouac.”

“Oh Sax—we’re flying in help! We’ll be able to get in next morning
no matter what, so hang on! We’ll keep talking to you!”

“Fine.”

He kicked and dug. On his knees he scooped out hard granular snow,
tossing it into the swirling flakes flying over him. It was hard to move, hard
to think. He bitterly regretted walking so far from the rover, then getting so
absorbed in the landscape around that ice pond. It was a shame to get killed
when things were getting so interesting. Free but dead. There was a little
hollow in the snow now, through an oblong hole in the windslab. Wearily he sat
down and wedged himself back into the space, lying on his side and pushing back
with his boots. The snow felt solid against the back of his suit, and warmer
than the ferocious wind. He welcomed the shivering in his torso, felt a vague
fear when it ceased. Being too cold to shiver was a bad sign.

Very weary, very cold. He looked at his wristpad. It was four P.M.
He had been walking in the storm for just over three hours. He would have to
survive another fifteen or twenty hours before he could expect to be rescued.
Or perhaps in the morning the storm would have abated, and the location of the
rover become obvious. One way or another he had to survive the night by
huddling in a snow cave. Or else venture out again and find the rover. Surely
it couldn’t be far away. But until the wind lessened, he could not bear to be
out looking for it.

He had to wait in the snow cave. Theoretically he could survive a
night out, though at the moment he was so cold it was hard to believe that.
Night temperatures on Mars still plummeted drastically. Perhaps the storm might
lessen in the next hour, so that he could find the rover and get to it before
dark.

He told Aonia and the others where he was. They sounded very
concerned, but there was nothing they could do. He felt irritation at their
voices.

It seemed many minutes before he had another thought. When one was
chilled, blood flow was greatly reduced to the limbs—perhaps that was true for
the cortex as well, the blood going preferentially to the cerebellum where the
necessary work would continue right to the end.

More time passed. Near dark, it appeared. Should call out again.
He was too cold—something seemed wrong. Advanced age, altitude, CO2 levels—some
factor or combination of factors was making it worse than .it should be. He
could die of exposure in a single night. Appeared in fact to be doing just
that. Such a storm! Loss of the mirrors, perhaps. Instant ice age. Extinction
event.

The wind was making odd noises, like shouts. Powerful gusts no
doubt. Like faint shouts, howling “Sax! Sax! Sax!”

Had they flown someone in? He peered out into the dark storm, the
snowflakes somehow catching the late light and tearing overhead like dim white
static.

Then between his ice-crusted eyelashes he saw a figure emerge out
of the darkness. Short, round, helmeted. “Sax!” The sound was distorted, it was
coming from a loudspeaker in the figure’s helmet. Those Da Vinci techs were
very resourceful people. Sax tried to respond, and found he was too cold to
speak. Just moving his boots out of the hole was a stupendous effort. But it
appeared to catch this figure’s eye, because it turned and strode purposefully
through the wind, moving like a skillful sailor on a bouncing deck, weaving
this way and that through the slaps of the gusts. The figure reached him and
bent down and grabbed Sax by the wrist, and he saw its face through the
faceplate, as clear as through a window. It was Hiroko.

She smiled her brief smile and hauled him up out of his cave, pulling
so hard on his left wrist that his bones creaked painfully.

“Ow!” he said.

Out in the wind the cold was like death itself. Hiroko pulled his
left arm over her shoulder, and, still holding hard to his wrist just above the
wristpad, she led him past the low escarpment and right into the teeth of the
gale.