Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [49]
And that was what it was like, for several days: a wild swirl of time passing. Nadia would wake to the bip of her wrist console, and eat a quick breakfast looking out the habitat’s little east window. Dawn stained the sky rich berry colors for a few minutes, before shifting rapidly through a series of rosy tones to the thick pink-orange of daytime. All over the floor of the habitat her companions slept, on mattresses that would fold up against the wall during the day. The walls were beige, tinted orange by the dawn. The kitchen and living room were tiny, the four toilet rooms no more than closets. Ann would stir as the room lightened, and go to one of the four toilets. John was already in the kitchen, moving around quietly. Conditions were so much more crowded and public than they had been on the Ares that some of them were having trouble adjusting; every night Maya complained she couldn’t sleep in such a crowd, but there she was, mouth open girlishly. She would be the last to rise, snoozing through the noise and bustle of the others’ morning routines.
Then the sun would crack the horizon, and Nadia would be done with her cereal and milk, the milk made of powder mixed with water mined from the atmosphere (it tasted just the same); and it was time to get into her walker, and out to work.
The walkers were designed for the Martian surface, and were not pressurized like spacesuits, but were rather made of an elastic mesh, which held in the body at about the same pressure that the Terran atmosphere would have. This prevented the severe expansion bruising that would result if skin were exposed to Mars’s minimal atmosphere, but it gave the wearer a lot more freedom of movement than a pressurized spacesuit would have. Walkers also had the very significant advantage of being fail-operational; only the hard helmet was airtight, so if you ripped a hole at knee or elbow you would have a badly bruised and frozen patch of skin, but would not suffocate and die within minutes.
Getting into a walker, however, was a workout in itself. Nadia wriggled the pants over her long underwear, then got in the jacket and zipped the two sections of the suit together. After that she jammed into big thermal boots, and locked their top rings to the suit’s ankle rings; pulled on gloves, and locked the wrist rings; put on a fairly standard hard helmet, and locked it to the suit’s neck ring; then shouldered into an airtank backpack, and linked its air tubes to her helmet. She breathed hard a few times, tasting the cool oxygen-nitrogen in her face. The walker’s wristpad indicated that all the seals were good, and she followed John and Samantha into the lock. They closed the inner door; the air was sucked back into containers, and John unlocked the outer door. The three of them stepped outside.
It was a thrill every morning to step out onto that rocky plain, with the early morning sun casting long black shadows to the west, and the various small knolls and hollows revealed clearly. There was usually a wind from the south, and loose fines moved in a sinuous flow over the ground, so that the rocks sometimes seemed to creep. Even the strongest of these winds could scarcely be felt against an outstretched hand, but they hadn’t yet experienced one of the storm winds; at 500 kilometers per hour they were pretty sure to feel something. At twenty, nearly nothing.
Nadia and Samantha walked over to one of the little rovers they had uncrated and climbed in. Nadia drove the rover across the plain to a tractor they had found the day before, about a kilometer to the west. The morning cold cut through her walker in a diamond pattern, as the result of the X-weave of the heating filaments in the suit material. A strange sensation, but she had been colder in Siberia many a time, and she had no complaints.