Red Mars(39)
She walked to one of the nearest landing vehicles, a freight container the size of a small house, set on a skeletal four-legged rocket assembly. It looked like it had been there for decades. The sun was overhead, too bright to look at even through her faceplate. It was hard to judge through the polarization and other filters, but it seemed to her that the daylight was much like that on Earth, as far as she could remember. A bright winter’s day.
She looked around again, trying to take it in. They stood on a gently bumpy plain, covered with small sharp-edged rocks, all half-buried in dust. Back to the west the horizon was marked by a small flat-topped hill. It might be a crater rim, it was hard to say. Ann was already halfway there, still quite a large figure; the horizon was closer than seemed right, and Nadia paused to take note of that, suspecting that she would soon become accustomed to it, and never notice. But it was not Earthlike, that strangely close horizon, she saw that clearly now. They stood on a smaller planet.
She made a concerted effort to recall Earth’s gravity, wondering that it should be so hard. Walking in the woods, over tundra, on the river ice in winter . . . and now: step, step. The ground was flat, but one had to thread a course between the ubiquitous rocks; there was no place on Earth that she knew of where they were distributed so copiously and evenly. Take a jump! She did, and laughed; even with her suit on she could tell she was lighter. She was just as strong as ever, but weighed only thirty kilos! And the forty kilos of the suit . . . well, it threw her off balance, that was true. It made her feel that she had gone hollow. That was it: her center of gravity was gone, her weight had been shifted out to her skin, to the outside of her muscles rather than the inside. That was the effect of the suit, of course. Inside the habitats it would be as it had been in the Ares. But out here in a suit, she was the hollow woman. With the aid of that image she could suddenly move more easily, hop over a boulder, come down and take a turn, dance! Simply pop in the air, dance, land on top of a flat rock— watch out—
She tumbled, landed on a knee and both hands. Her gloves broke through the duricrust. It felt like a layer of caked sand at the beach, only harder and more brittle. Like hardened mud. And cold! Their gloves weren’t heated the way their boot soles were, and there wasn’t enough insulation when actually touching the ground. It was like touching ice with the bare fingers, wow! Around 215 degrees Kelvin, she recalled, or minus 90 degrees Centigrade; colder than Antarctica, colder than Siberia at its worst. Her fingertips were numb. They would need better gloves to be able to work, gloves fitted with heating elements like their boot soles. That would make the gloves thicker and less flexible. She’d have to get her finger muscles back into shape.
She had been laughing. She stood and walked to another freight drop, humming “Royal Garden Blues.” She climbed the leg of the next drop and rubbed the crust of red dirt off an engraved manifest on the side of the big metal crate. One John Deere/Volvo Martian bulldozer, hydrazine-powered, thermally protected, semiautonomous, fully programmable. Prostheses and spare parts included.
She felt her face stretched in a big grin. Backhoes, front loaders, bulldozers, tractors, graders, dump trucks, construction supplies and materials of every kind; air miners to filter and collect chemicals from the atmosphere; little factories to render these chemicals into other chemicals; other factories to combine those chemicals; a whole commissary, everything they were going to need, all at hand in scores of crates scattered over the plain. She began to hop from one lander to the next, taking stock. Some of them had obviously hit hard, some had their spider legs collapsed, others their bodies cracked, one was even flattened into a pile of smashed boxes, half-buried in dust; but these were just another kind of opportunity, the salvage-and-repair game, one of her favorites! She laughed aloud, she was a bit giddy, she noticed the comm light on her wrist console blinking; she switched to the common band and was startled by Maya and Vlad and Sax all talking at once, “Where’s Ann, you women get back here, hey Nadia, come help us get this damned habitat online, we can’t even get the door open!”
She laughed.
• • •
The habitats were scattered like everything else, but they had landed near one that they knew was functional; it had been turned on from orbit some days before, and run through a complete check. Unfortunately the outer-lock door could not be included in the check, and it was stuck. Nadia went to work on it, grinning ; it was odd to see what looked like a derelict trailer home sporting a space-station lock door. It only took a minute for her to get it open, by tapping out the emergency open code while pulling out on the door. Stuck with cold, differential shrinking perhaps. They were going to have a lot of little problems like that.