Red Mars (29 page)

When she had prepped all the solar panels she banged down the passageway to the cockpit. “Ann says the winds will be slowest close to the ground,” Arkady said.

“Good. We need to land to get the panels outside.”

So that afternoon they descended blind, and let the anchor drag until it hooked and held. The wind here was slower, but even so Nadia’s descent in the sling was harrowing. Down and down into rushing clouds of yellow dust, swinging back and forth . . . and there it was right under her boots, the ground! She hit and dragged to a halt. Once out of the sling she found herself leaning into the wind; thin as it was it still struck like blows, and her old feeling of hollowness was extreme. Visibility billowed back and forth in waves, and the dust flew past so fast it was disorienting— on Earth a wind that fast would simply pick you up and throw you, like a broom-straw in a tornado.

But here you could hold your ground, if only just. Arkady had been slowly winching the dirigible down on the anchor line, and now it bulked over her like a green roof. It was weirdly dark underneath it. She unreeled the wires out to the wingtip turboprops, taped them to the dirigible and crimped them to the contacts inside, working fast to try to reduce their exposure to dust, and to get out from under the
Arrowhead
, which was bouncing on the wind. With difficulty she drilled holes in the bottom of the gondola fuselage, and attached ten solar panels with screws. As she was taping the wiring from these to the plastic fuselage, the whole dirigible dropped so fast that she had to collapse onto her face, her whole body spread-eagled on the cold ground, the drill a hard lump under her stomach. “Shit!” she shouted. “What’s wrong?” Arkady cried over the intercom. “Nothing,” she said, jumping up and taping faster than ever. “Fucking thing— it’s like working on a trampoline—” Then as she was finishing the wind picked up strength yet again, and she had to crawl back down to the bomb bay, her breath rasping in and out of her.

“The damn thing almost crushed me!” she shouted forward to Arkady when she had her helmet off. While he worked to unhook the anchor she staggered around the interior of the gondola, picking up things that they wouldn’t need and taking them into the bomb bay: a lamp, one of the mattresses, most of the cooking utensils and dinnerware, some books, all the rock samples. In they went, and she jettisoned them happily. If some traveler ever came upon the resulting pile of stuff, she thought, they would really wonder what the hell had happened.

They had to run both props full out to get the anchor unhooked, and when they succeeded they were off and flying like a leaf in November. They kept the props on full, to gain altitude as fast as possible; there were some small volcanoes between Olympus and Tharsis, and Arkady wanted to pass several hundred meters over them. The radar screen showed Ascraeus Mons falling steadily behind. When they were well north of it they could turn east, and try to chart a course around the northern flank of Tharsis, and then down to Underhill.

But as the long hours passed they found that the wind was rushing down the north slope of Tharsis, across their bow, so that even when running full power toward the southeast, they were still only moving northeast at best. In their attempts to fly across the wind the poor
Arrowhead
was bouncing like a hang glider, yanking them up and down, up and down, up and down, as if the gondola were indeed attached to the underside of a trampoline. But despite all that, they still weren’t going in the direction they wanted to go.

Darkness fell again. They were carried farther northeast. On this heading, they were going to miss Underhill by several hundred kilometers. After that, nothing; no settlements at all, no refuge. They would be blown over Acidalia, up onto Vastitas Borealis, up to the empty petrified sea of black dunes. And they did not have enough food and water to circumnavigate the planet again and give it another try.

Feeling dust in her mouth and eyes, Nadia went back to the kitchen and heated them a meal. Already she was exhausted, and, she realized as the smell of food filled the air, extremely hungry. Thirsty, too, and the water recycler ran on hydrazine.

Thinking about water, an image came to her mind, from the trip to the north pole: that broken permafrost gallery, with its white spill of water ice. Now how was that relevant?

She worked her way back up to the cockpit, holding onto a wall with every step. She ate a dusty meal with Arkady, trying to figure it out. Arkady watched their radar screen, saying nothing, but he was looking concerned.

Ah. “Look,” she said, “if we could pick up the signals from the transponders on our road to Chasma Borealis, we could come down and land by it. Then one of the robot rovers could be sent up to get us. The storm won’t matter to the robot rovers, they don’t go by sight anyway. We could leave the
Arrowhead
tethered, and drive back home.”

Arkady looked at her, finished swallowing. “Good idea,” he said.

But only if they could actually pick up the road’s transponder signals. Arkady flicked on the radio and called Underhill. The connection crackled in a storm of static almost as dense as the dust, but they could still make themselves understood. All through that night they conferred with the crowd back home, discussing frequencies, bandwidths, the power of the dust to mask the transponder’s fairly weak signals, and so on. Because the transponders were designed only to signal rovers that were nearby and on the ground, it was going to be a problem hearing them. Underhill might be able to pinpoint their location well enough to tell them when to descend, and their own radar map would give them a general fix on the road’s location as well; but neither of these methods would be very exact, and it would be almost impossible to find the road in the storm if they didn’t land right on it. Ten kilometers either way and it would be over the horizon, and they would be out of luck. It would be a lot more certain if they could just latch onto one of the transponder signals, and follow it down.

In any case, Underhill dispatched a robot rover on the road north. It would arrive in the area of the road they were expected to cross in about five days; at their current speed they would cross the road themselves in about four days.

When the arrangements were finished, they traded watches through the rest of the night. Nadia slept uneasily on her off watches, and spent much of the time lying on the bed feeling the wind bounce her. The windows were as dark as if curtains had been drawn. The roar of the wind was like a gas stove, and then occasionally like banshees; once she dreamed they were inside a great furnace full of flame demons, and woke sweating, and went forward to relieve Arkady. The whole gondola smelled of sweat and dust and burnt hydrazine. Despite all the gaskets’ micron seals, there was a visible whitish film on all the surfaces inside the gondola. She wiped her fingers across a pale blue plastic bulkhead, and stared at her fingers’ mark. Incredible.

They bounded along through the gloom of the days, through the starless black of the nights. The radar showed what they thought was Fesenkov Crater, running under them; they were being carried northeast still, and there was absolutely no chance they would be able to buck the storm and get south to Underhill. The polar road was their only hope. Nadia occupied her off watches by looking for things to throw overboard, and cutting away at parts of the gondola frame she judged inessential, until the engineers in Friedrichshafen would have shuddered. But Germans always overengineered things, and no one on Earth could ever really believe in Martian g anyway. So she sawed and hammered until everything inside the gondola was latticed nearly to nothing. Every use of the bay brought in another small cloud of dust, but she figured it was worth it; they needed the loft, her solar panel arrangement was not getting sufficient power to the batteries, and she had tossed everything not attached to the hull long before. Even if she had had them, she would not have gone back under the dirigible to install them; the memory of the incident still gave her the shivers. Instead she kept cutting further and further. She would have tossed out pieces of the dirigible frame too, if she could have gotten into the ballonets.

While she did this Arkady padded around the gondola cheering her on, naked and dust-caked, the red man incarnate, singing songs and watching the radar screen, jamming down quick meals, planning their course such as it was. It was impossible not to catch a bit of his exhilaration, to marvel with him at the strongest buffets of the wind, to feel the dust flying wild in her blood.

And so three long intense days passed, in the grip of the dark orange wind. And on the fourth day, a bit after noon, they turned the radio receiver up to full volume, and listened to the crackly roar of static at the transponders’ frequency. Concentrating on the white noise made Nadia drowsy, for they had had very little sleep; she was almost unconscious when Arkady said something, and she jerked up in her seat.

“Hear it?” he asked again. She listened, and shook her head. “There, it’s a kind of
ping
.”

She heard a little
bip
. “Is that it?”

“I think so. I’m going to get us down as fast as I can, I’ll have to empty some of the ballonets.”

He tapped away at the control keyboard, and the dirigible tilted forward and they began to drop at emergency speed. The altimeter’s numbers flickered down. The radar screen showed the ground below to be basically flat. The
ping
got louder and louder— without a directional receiver, that was going to be their only way to tell if they were still approaching it or moving away.
Ping… ping… ping
… In her exhaustion it was hard to tell whether it was getting louder or softer, and it seemed every beep was a different volume, depending on the attention she could bring to bear.

“It’s getting softer,” Arkady said suddenly. “Don’t you think?”

“I can’t tell.”

“It is.” He switched on the props, and with the whir of the motors the signal definitely seemed quieter. He turned into the wind, and the dirigible bounced wildly; he fought to steady its downward movement, but there was a delay between every shift of the flaps and the dirigible’s bucking, and in reality they were in little more than a controlled crash. The ping was perhaps getting softer at a slower rate.

When the altimeter indicated they were low enough to drop the anchor they did so, and after an anxious bit of drifting it caught, and held. They dropped all the anchors they had, and pulled the
Arrowhead
down on the lines. Then Nadia suited up and climbed into the sling and winched down, and once on the surface she began walking around in a chocolate dawn, leaning hard into the irregular torrent of wind. She found she was more physically exhausted than she could ever remember being, it was really hard to make headway upwind, she had to tack. Over her intercom the transponder signal pinged, and the ground seemed to bounce under her feet; it was hard to keep her balance. The ping was quite distinct. “We should have been listening on our helmet intercoms all along,” she said to Arkady. “You can hear better.”

A gust knocked her over. She got up and shuffled slowly along, letting out a nylon line behind her, adjusting her course as she followed the volume of the pings. The ground flowed underfoot, when she could see it; visibility was actually down to a meter or less, at least in the thickest gusts. Then it would clear a touch and brown jets of dust would flash by, sheet after sheet, moving at an awesome speed. The wind buffeted her as hard as anything she had ever felt on Earth, or harder; it was painful work to keep her balance, a constant physical effort.

While inside a thick, blinding cloud, she nearly shuffled right into one of the transponders, standing there like a fat fence post. “Hey!” she shouted.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! I scared myself running into the roadmark.”

“You found it!”

“Yeah.” She felt her exhaustion run down into her hands and feet. She sat on the ground for a minute, then stood again; it was too cold to sit. Her ghost finger hurt.

She took up the nylon line and returned blindly to the dirigible, feeling she had wandered into the ancient myth, and was following the only thread out of the labyrinth.

During their rover trip south, blind in the flying dust, word came crackling over the radio that UNOMA had just approved and funded the establishment of three follow-up colonies. Each would consist of 500 people, all to be from countries not represented in the first hundred.

And the subcommittee on terraforming had recommended, and the General Assembly approved, a whole package of terraforming efforts, among them the distribution on the surface of genetically engineered microorganisms constructed from parent stock such as algaes, bacteria, or lichens.

Arkady laughed for a good thirty seconds. “Those bastards, those lucky bastards! They’re going to get away with it.”

Life adapts, you see. It has only a few needs, some fuel, some energy; and it is fantastically ingenious at extracting these needs from a wide range of Terran environments. Some organisms live always below the freezing point of water, others above the boiling point; some live in high radiation zones, others in intensely salty regions, or within solid rock, or in pitch black, or in extreme dehydration, or without oxygen. All kinds of environments are accommodated, by adaptive measures so strange and marvelous they are beyond our capacity to imagine; and so from the bedrock to high in the atmosphere, life has permeated the Earth with the full weave of one great biosphere.

All these adaptive abilities are coded and passed along in genes. If the genes mutate, the organisms change. If the genes are altered, the organisms change. Bioengineers use both these forms of change, not only recombinant gene splicing, but also the much older art of selective breeding. Microorganisms are plated, and the fastest growers (or those that exhibit most the trait you want) can be culled and plated again; mutagens can be added to increase the mutation rate; and in the quick succession of microbial generations (say ten per day), you can repeat this process until you get something like what you want. Selective breeding is one of the most powerful bioengineering techniques we have.