Red Mars(230)

So for an entire day Ann drove along the ragged edge of the flood, and out onto its surface, and they made 160 kilometers, their best day in two weeks.

Near sunset it began to snow. The west wind poured out of Coprates, driving big gritty clumps of snow past them as if they weren’t moving at all. They came to a fresh-slide zone, which spilled right out onto the ice of the flood. Big boulders scattered over the ice gave it the air of an abandoned neighborhood. The light was dusky gray. They needed a foot guide through this maze, and in an exhausted conference Frank volunteered, and went out to do the job. At this point he was the only one of them with any strength left, more even than the younger Kasei; still boiling with the heat of his anger, a breeder fuel that would never give out.

Slowly he walked ahead of the car, testing routes and returning, either shaking his head or waving Ann on. Around them thin veils of frost steam lofted into the falling snow, the two mixing and gusting off together on the powerful evening wind, off into the murk. Watching the dark spectacle of one hard gust, Ann misread the configuration of the ice’s meeting with the ground, and the rover ran up onto a round rock right at the frozen shoreline, lifting the left rear wheel off the ground. Ann gunned the front wheels to roll them over the rock, but they dug into a patch of sand and snow, and suddenly both rear wheels were barely touching the ground, while the front two merely spun in the holes they had dug. She had run the rover aground.

It had happened before several times, but she was annoyed with herself for getting distracted by the irrelevant spectacle of the sky.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Frank shouted over the intercom. Ann jumped in her chair; she would never get used to Frank’s biting vehemence. “Get going!” he shouted.

“I ran it onto a rock,” she said.

“Damn you! Why don’t you watch where you’re going! Here, stop the wheels, stop them! I’m gonna put the grip cloths under the front wheels and lever you forward, and then you get it off this rock and up the slope as quick as you can, understand? There’s another surge coming!”

“Frank!” Maya cried. “Get inside!”

“Soon as I get the fucking pads down! Be ready to go!”

The pads were strips of spiked metal mesh, set under wheels that had dug holes into sand, and then pegged out ahead so that the wheels had something to grip. An ancient desert method, and Frank ran around the front of the rover cursing under his breath and snapping directions to Ann, who obeyed with her teeth clenched and her stomach knotted.

“Okay, go!” Frank shouted. “Go!”

“Get in first!” Ann cried.

“There’s no time, go, it’s almost here! I’ll hang on the side, go, damn it, go!”

So Ann gently accelerated the front wheels, and felt them catch on the grips and scrape the car forward over the rock, until the rear wheels touched down again and they scraped off and were free. But the roar of the flood suddenly doubled and redoubled behind them, and then there were chunks of ice bounding past the car, bursting along with a hideous cracking, and then the ice was overwhelmed by a dark wave of steaming bubbling slurry, a surge that washed up over the windows of the car. Ann floored the accelerator and held the wheel with a death grip as it bounced in her hands. Mixed with the crashing of the surge wave she heard Frank’s voice shouting “Go, idiot, go!” and then they were hit hard and the car slewed off to the left, out of control. Ann hung onto the wheel as it threw her from side to side. Her left ear throbbed with pain, she had hit something with it. She held on to the wheel and kept her foot jamming the accelerator to the floor. The wheels caught on something and the rover ground through water, it poured from right to left and there was a dull banging against the side of the car. “Go!” She kept the accelerator floored and turned uphill, bouncing wildly in the driver’s seat, all the windows and TV screens liquid madness. Then the water ran under the rover, and the windows were clear. The rover’s headlights showed rocky ground, falling snow, and ahead a bare flat area. Ann kept it floored and jounced wildly toward it, the flood still roaring behind them. When she reached the flat rise she had to pull her leg and foot away from the accelerator with her hands. The car stopped. They were above the flood, on a narrow bench terrace. It looked like the surge was already receding. But Frank Chalmers was gone.

• • •



Maya insisted that they return and look for him, and as it was likely that the initial surge would be the largest one they did so, but it was futile. In the twilight the headlights cut fifty meters into the snowfall, and in the two intersecting yellow cones, and the dark gray world outside them, they saw only the ragged surface of the flood, a pouring sea of flotsam and jetsam without the slightest hint of any regular shape; in fact it looked like a world in which such shapes were impossible. No one could survive in such madness. Frank was gone, either knocked off the car in its jouncing, or swept off it in its brief and nearly fatal encounter with the wave.