Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [33]
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