Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [356]
Ann was looking uncomfortable in her restraints, holding to the cockpit rail for dear life, a sight that gave part of Sax’s mind satisfaction: she showed no inclination to let go, none at all. In fact she leaned over so that she could shout in his ear, and he turned his head to listen.
“We can’t stay here!” she shouted. “When we tire— the impacts are going to tear us up— ah!— like dolls!”
“We can strap ourselves to our beds,” Sax shouted.
She frowned doubtfully. And it was true that those restraints might not be any better. He had never tried them out; and there was the problem of getting secured in them by oneself to consider. Amazing how loud the wind was— shrieking wind, roaring water, thunking ice. The waves were growing larger and larger; when the boat rose on their faces, it took them ten or twelve heart-stopping seconds to shoot to the crests, and now when they got up there they saw chunks of ice being thrown clear of the waves, thrown off with the flying foam to crash down into their fellows below, and sometimes into the boat’s hulls and decking, and even the clear thin cockpit shell, with a force they could feel all through their bodies.
Sax leaned over to shout again in Ann’s ear. “I believe this is one of those situations in which we are meant to use the lifeboat function!”
“. . . lifeboat?” Ann said.
Sax nodded. “The boat is its own lifeboat!” he shouted. “It flies!”
“What do you mean?”
“It flies!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No! It becomes a— a blimp!” He leaned over and put his mouth right to her ear. “The hulls and the keels and the bottom of the cockpit empty their ballast. They fill with helium from tanks in the bow. And balloons deploy. They told me about it back in Da Vinci, but I’ve never seen it! I didn’t think we’d be using it!” The boat could also become a submarine, they had said in Da Vinci, quite pleased with themselves at the new craft’s versatility. But the ice packing against the lee shore made that option unavailable to them, something that Sax did not regret; for no particular reason, the idea of going down in the boat didn’t appeal to him.
Ann pulled back to look at him, amazed at this news. “Do you know how to fly it!” she shouted.
“No!”
Presumably the AI would take care of that. If they could get it into the air. Just a matter of finding the emergency release, of flicking the right toggles. He pointed at the control panel to mime this thought, then leaned forward to shout in her ear; her head swung in and banged his nose and mouth hard, and then he was blinking with bright pain, the blood running out of his nose like water from a faucet. Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he grinned and split his lip even wider, a painful mistake. He licked and licked, tasting his blood. “I love you!” he shouted. She didn’t hear him.
“How do we launch it?” Ann cried.
He indicated the control panel again, there beside the AI, the emergency board under a protective bar.
If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring about a dangerous moment. Once they were moving at the wind’s speed, of course, there would be very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply blimp along. But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly stationary, the howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably, and this might disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the ice-choked breakers, or onto the lee shore. He could see Ann thinking this through herself. Still— whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the bone-jarring impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary thing, one way or the other.
Ann looked at him, scowled at the