Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [68]
Three days later the bare rock ended, running under waves of blackish sand. It was just like coming on the shore of a sea. They had reached the great northern dunes, which wrapped the world in a band between Vastitas and the polar cap; where they were going to cross, the band was about 800 kilometers wide. The sand was a charcoal color, tinged with purple and rose, a rich relief to the eye after all the red rubble of the south. The dunes trended north and south, in parallel crests that occasionally broke or merged. Driving over them was easy; the sand was hard-packed, and they only had to pick a big dune and run along its humpbacked western side.
After a few days of this, however, the dunes got bigger, and became what Ann called barchan dunes. These looked like huge frozen waves, with faces a hundred meters tall, and backs a kilometer wide, and the crescent that each wave made was several kilometers long. As with so many other Martian landscape features, they were a hundred times larger than their Terran analogues in the Sahara and Gobi. The expedition kept a level course over the backs of these great waves by contouring from one wave back to the next, their rovers like tiny boats, paddle-wheeling over a black sea that had frozen at the height of a titanic storm.
One day on this petrified sea, Rover Two stopped. A red light on the control panel indicated the problem was in the flexible frame between the modules; and in fact the rear module was tilted to the left, shoving the left side wheels into the sand. Nadia got into a suit and went back to have a look. She took the dust cover off the joint where the frame connected to the module chassis, and found that the bolts holding them together were all broken.
“This is going to take a while,” Nadia said. “You guys might as well have another look around.”
Soon the suited figures of Phyllis and George emerged, followed by Simon and Ann and Edvard. Phyllis and George took a transponder from Rover Three and set it out three meters to the right of their “road.” Nadia went to work on the broken frame, handling things as little as possible; it was a cold afternoon, perhaps seventy below, and she could feel the diamond chill right down to the bone.
The ends of the bolts wouldn’t come out of the side of the module, so she got out a drill and started drilling new holes. She began to hum “The Sheik of Araby.” Ann and Edvard and Simon were discussing sand. It was so nice, Nadia thought, to see ground that wasn’t red. To hear Ann absorbed in her work. To have some work to do herself.
They had almost reached the arctic circle, and it was Ls = 84, with the northern summer solstice only two weeks away; so the days were getting long. Nadia and George worked through the evening while Phyllis heated supper, and then after the meal Nadia went back out to finish the job. The sun was red in a brown haze, small and round even though it was near setting; there wasn’t enough atmosphere for oblation to enlarge and flatten it. Nadia finished, put her tools away, and had opened the outer lock door of Rover One, when Ann’s voice spoke in her ear. “Oh Nadia, are you going in already?”
Nadia looked up. Ann was on the ridge of the dune to the west, waving down at her, a black silhouette against a blood-colored