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This time when Blake showed up at the dispatch office, everybody was quietly busy. Even the fat clerk seemed to be shuffling his numbers with great attention to duty.

 

“I got a ride, like you said,” Blake said.

 

“That right?” The clerk didn’t look at him.

 

“With Lydia Zeromski. Where do I find her?”

 

The clerk pointed through the big window that overlooked the yard. A truck was leaving the loading area, its turbines blowing blue flame into the orange dawn.

Blake walked through wisps of dust in the raking light, past the blasted fueling shed. The damage was impressive–the twisted remains of the manifold where the explosion had occurred loomed overhead like a plate of spaghetti frozen in midtoss–but the blackened and gutted crummies had been dragged to one side, pipes had been rerouted, and the yard was back in operation.

As he approached Lydia’s truck he caught the scream of its turbines through his helmet, even in the thin atmosphere.

In daylight a marstruck was an even more imposing piece of machinery than at night–part tractor, part caterpillar, part train. The turbines were mounted behind the cab, big gas-expansion turbines fueled and oxidized from smoking dewars of liquid hydrogen and oxygen, so that the tractor was almost as big as a locomotive. The two cargo beds behind it were covered with fiberglass cowlings to minimize wind resistance, although nearby trailers were uncovered–Blake knew from hanging out at the Porkypine that there was a debate among the drivers as to whether trailer cowlings were more efficient as streamlining or as windfoils to lift the whole rig off the ground; being an independent lot, the drivers rigged their trucks to personal specs.

Despite their size, there was something spidery about the marstrucks. The treads were steel mesh, not clanking metal plates, and they were mounted away from the body on struts that seemed too narrow to bear the weight. The cargo trailers were long, built like bridges, and looked too fragile for their wide loads.

All this was an Earthman’s illusion. Blake had yet to get used to a planet where things weighed a third of what they appeared and structures were effectively two and a half times as strong.

Lydia’s marstruck was pretty much standard issue, with all its cowlings in place, its paint bright and its chrome polished, and only her name on the door of the cab, in blue and white script painted like flames, to indicate the rig was hers. Blake clambered lightly over the treads on the passenger side and banged on the door of the bubble cab. Lydia looked up from the console, raised a cautioning hand, and then unsealed the door. Blake climbed in.
The inside of the bubble cab was neat and clean, undecorated except for a 19th-century crucifix of polished black wood that hung above the dashboard. Behind the seats was the opening to the fairly spacious sleeping box, veiled with feminine lace.

Lydia checked the dash lights that indicated the cab was sealed and then popped the air bottles. The cab pressurized. When the board went full green, she pulled open her helmet. Blake did the same.

 

“You’re late,” she said. “I’ve been sitting here burning gas.”

 

“Sorry. I thought you said dawn.”

 

“The sun’s been up five minutes, Mycroft. Work on your timing.”

 

“Okay, sure.”

 

She threw the levers and the treads began to roll.

The road out of the shuttleport was the longest highway on Mars. Fifteen minutes after setting out upon it, the last sign of human life–save for the rutted dusty tracks themselves–had disappeared behind them in the thin light of the Martian dawn. The desert crossed by this often-invisible web of ruts was the biggest and driest and deadest in the solar system. Except for the wrecks of other vehicles abandoned along the way, there would be no other sign of life until they reached the camp at the pipeline head, 3,000 kilometers to the northeast.

Blake looked through the bubble glass, fascinated.
Nothing
lived here. Not so much as a blackened ocotillo was rooted in the powdery soil; not so much as a horned lizard or a vinegaroon crouched under the desiccated rocks. Everywhere the landforms, down to the smallest rill, were covered with fine dust deposited by the global windstorms that cloaked the entire planet every few years. There was a reason Mars was called the dirtiest planet in the solar system.

As the small bright sun rose higher on his right and the woman doing the driving indicated that she was determined to keep her eyes on the road and her mouth shut, Blake began to face the superlatives: driest, deadest, dirtiest, widest. A dirt road long enough to cross Australia.

Better to be stranded in the Sahel in midsummer, better to be abandoned in Antarctica in midwinter, than to be lost on Mars.

The marstruck bounded over the sand like a running cat, legs stretched, belly to the earth. Wonderful how the human mind adjusts; what was terrifying becomes routine, what was ecstatic becomes dull. The truck’s speed at first astonished Blake, but he soon grew to think of it as normal.
The truck raced along the lonely road, following the shifting ruts in the sand but guided by satellite. The ruts were an immediate but untrustworthy trace; the road was there even when they blew away, for in reality the road was only a line on a map, and the map was in computer memory. One copy of the map was in the marstruck’s own inertial guidance system; another copy was in computers on Mars Station, which tracked everything that moved on the planet’s surface through its net of sensors–as long as the lines of communication were open.

In that sense this lonely road was not so lonely. It was in intimate contact with thousands of machines and people, on the planet and in orbit around it. A nice thought–which the unfolding landscape subtly denied.

Soon after leaving the environs of Labyrinth City the road began its descent and crossing of the western provinces of the Valles Marineris, and Blake faced that ragged planetary scar for the first time.

To those who have not seen it the Valles Marineris cannot be described. Earthbound analogies are too feeble, but Blake struggled to relate what he saw to what he had experienced before, to images from his youthful summer on the Mogollon Rim and from those other summers touring the North American west– climbing down the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or the slopes of Denali in summer, crossing the Salt River or the Scablands, coming into Zion from the east, dropping into Panamint Valley from the west, rolling down the Phantom Canyon behind Pikes Peak, winding down Grapevine Canyon into Death Valley . . . there was no easy comparison, no real comparison.

There is a path on Earth–it cannot be called a road–known as the Golden Stair, which descends into the Maze of the western Canyonlands of Utah, near the confluence of the Colorado and the Green rivers; desert aficionados call it the Golden Slide. Built as a mining road, hacked from the ringing rock of stark perpendicular mesas and the slick sides of wind-carved grabens, the sheer slippery slide has claimed many an ATV and even the lives of a few walkers.

The highway into the Valles Marineris was worse. Seconds after Lydia unhesitatingly pushed the speeding marstruck over the edge of the cliff, Blake looked upon the deepest canyon he had ever seen. In the depths of it the distant banded cliffs were lost in blue haze. He could not see ground over the dashboard, and in that instant he was convinced that Lydia was committing suicide and taking him with her, driving straight into thin Martian air.

When a moment later his heart started again, he found that there was still rock beneath the treads and he could even see the road by leaning his forehead toward the glass of the bubble. What he saw was almost as bad as what he had imagined.

The angle of attack was twice what it would have been on Earth, the angle of a playground slide rather than that of even the steepest roadgrade. Blake strained to persuade himself that this made sense–things fall more slowly on Mars, don’t they?–but he kept worrying about a diminished coefficient of friction and wondering about sidesway as the truck whipped around these rollercoaster corners. Inertia concerned itself with mass, not weight, wasn’t that true? So what was to keep the whole hurtling pile of pipe from flying into space?

“Lydia, do you always . . . ?”

 

“Shut up. This is tricky.”

 

Now that was comforting . . .

He did shut up, trying to convince himself that she knew what she was doing. Really there was no question about it, he reasoned; not only did she know what she was doing, she’d done it scores of times before.

Tell that to your stomach, Mycroft. . . .

The truck’s speed wasn’t as great as it seemed to Blake, nor was the road quite as narrow or steep, and Lydia was driving with more caution, leaving more margin for error, and employing far more experience than a naive off-worlder could know. Nevertheless, the big truck was rolling down a cliff of sheer slickrock a kilometer high.

There were more cliffs below it.

 

When at last Blake managed to persuade himself he would not die, he began to appreciate the scenery.

 

For the next five hours they descended without incident, down a series of rock terraces three kilometers high from plateau to valley floor.

Reaching bottom, the truck sped across a field of dunes that spread randomly across the crumbling banks of ancient superimposed gullies. Then it began slowly climbing another cliff as high as the one they had come down.

Going up, Blake could see the road without leaning forward, but seeing it, seeing that narrow, uneven track, was almost worse than hoping something unseen but substantial was under the treads. The red rock wall was on his side of the cab now, and when he looked at Lydia all he saw was the dazzling pink sky beyond her, silhouetting her stern profile.

They reached the top of the hogback ridge while the sun was still high. Lydia stopped the truck in the only flat place on the ridge, the middle of the road itself, and powered the turbines down.

In silence they ate their lunches–shrink-wrapped sandwiches and apples, grown in the greenhouses of Labyrinth City–and took turns visiting the pressurized privy behind the cab, reached through the little tunnel beneath the sleeping box.

Lydia revved up the turbines and they moved on. The road crossed the hogback and descended at a frightening pitch. Before long they came to a place where the road seemed to run straight forward off the cliff. Blake stared at the rapidly approaching edge in horror–there must be some trick to this, but he could not see it.

“What happened to the road? Landslide?”

 

“Later,” she said. She kept the truck rolling, right to the end of the road. Far below them the wrinkled and scarred valley floor stretched away under serrated cliffs.

Lydia flicked on the dashboard videoplate that showed the view behind the aft trailer. Now he saw it: the narrow road continued on down behind them. They had passed the branch point, like the fork of a wishbone; there was no room on the cliff for even a rover to turn around.

“We back down this stretch,” said Lydia.

 

“How do you . . . ?”

 

She looked at him contemptuously. “We’re built that way, Mycroft. The trailer treads are steerable. The computer does the work. I just aim.”

She just aims, Blake thought, by looking into a videoplate–steering forward while moving backward. He found a little wisp of cirrus cloud high in the sky and studied it intently as the marstruck crept slowly backward.

Within a few minutes the road ended at another cliff. Lydia kept backing up until the view in the videoplate was of empty air and distant cliffs. By then, the next switchback had revealed itself in front of them. She put the treads in forward and the truck lurched ahead. Blake felt the tension gradually drain out of his neck and shoulders.

Three more times they had to back down stretches of road with no turnarounds. Blake felt almost blithe about the last one.

This time the terraced cliffs and talus slopes descended deeper into the Valles than they had before. When Lydia and Blake reached the floor of the mighty chasm it was all in shadow, though the sky overhead was still bright.

They drove on an hour past sunset, their floodlights picking out the route through high dunes and scattered boulders. When they reached the edge of a geologically new lava flow–its edges of frozen splattered magma were still as sharp as broken glass, despite years, perhaps decades, of sandblasting– Lydia stopped the truck.

“I’m getting tired. We’ll spend the night here. Do you want chili and onions or dragon stew?”

 

“What’s dragon stew?”

 

“Textured protein and vegetables, Asian style.”

 

Not too exciting, but chili and onions in a confined space with a person who really didn’t want to know him all that well . . . hm. “Dragon stew sounds great.”

She reached into the food locker, dug out a couple of plastic packages, and tossed him one. He detached the fork and spoon from its cover, unzipped the self-heating package, waited ten seconds for the dinner to heat itself, and then dug in.

They ate dinner in silence, the same way they had eaten lunch.

Midway through the bland meal Blake snuck a look at the taciturn woman who had now driven fifteen hours with only one break and had said perhaps a couple of hundred words in that time. Her most succinct statement, shortly after he’d launched himself upon what he thought was going to be a cheerful process of getting-to-know-you, was “I don’t want to talk.”

Now Lydia was staring straight ahead into the starlit night, just as she had been for the whole long day. Her eyes were still fixed on the road.

Blake settled back into the cushioned seat, easing his safety straps. Things weren’t working as he’d planned. His scheme had been to get Lydia alone, to befriend her and gain her confidence, and then to learn what had really happened between her and Darius Chin on the night of the murders.

The name Darius Chin had never come up. Blake hadn’t even had a chance to indicate that he knew about the murders. If she were innocent–even if she weren’t–her grief and loss might have kept her from reaching out to anyone. Certainly she would find it hard to express her feelings to a stranger.

Something nagged him. She’d agreed to give him a lift, but now he was beginning to wonder why. It wasn’t because he’d charmed her into wanting his company, that was plain enough.