Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [90]
“The Alchemists’ Quarter still looks like something out of the Urals,” Arkady said. “We really have to do something about that.” He brought the dirigible out of its turn and headed east, moving with the wind. “Should I run us over Chernobyl and catch the updraft?”
“Why don’t we see what this thing can do unassisted,” Nadia said. She felt light, as if the hydrogen in the ballonets had filled her as well. The view was stupendous, the hazy horizon perhaps a hundred kilometers away, the contours of the land all clearly visible— the subtle bumps and hollows of Lunae, the more prominent hills and canyons of the channeled terrain to the east. “Oh, this is going to be wonderful!”
“Yes.”
It was remarkable, in fact, that they had not done anything like this before. But flying on Mars was no easy thing, because of the thin atmosphere. They were in the best solution: a dirigible as big and light as possible, filled with hydrogen, which in Martian air was not only not flammable, but also even lighter relative to its surroundings than it would have been on Earth. Hydrogen and the latest in superlight materials gave them the lift to carry a cargo like their windmills, but with such a cargo aboard they were ludicrously sluggish.
And so they drifted along. All that day they crossed the rolling plain of Lunae Planum, pushed southeast by the wind. For an hour or two they could see Juventa Chasm on the southern horizon, a gash of a canyon that looked like a giant pit mine. Farther east the land turned yellowish; there was less surface rubble, and the underlying bedrock was more rumpled. There were also many more craters, craters big and small, crisp-rimmed or nearly buried. This was Xanthe Terra, a high region that was topographically similar to the southern uplands, here sticking into the north between the low plains of Chryse and Isidis. They would be over Xanthe for some days, if the prevailing westerlies held true.
They were progressing at a leisurely ten kilometers per hour. Most of the time they flew at an altitude of about a hundred meters, which put the horizons about fifty kilometers away. They had time to look closely at anything they wanted to, although Xanthe was proving to be little more than a steady succession of craters.
Late that afternoon Nadia tilted the nose of the dirigible down and circled into the wind, dropping until they were within ten meters of the ground and then releasing their anchor. The ship rose, jerked on its line, and settled downwind of the anchor, tugging at it like a fat kite. Nadia and Arkady twisted down the length of the gondola, to what Arkady called the bomb bay. Nadia lifted a windmill onto the bay’s winch hook. The windmill was a little thing, a magnesium box with four vertical vanes on a rod projecting from its top. It weighed about five kilos. They closed the bay door on it, sucked out the air, and opened the bottom doors. Arkady operated the winch, looking through a low window to see what he was doing. The windmill dropped like a plumb and bumped onto hardened sand, on the southern flank of a small unnamed crater. He released the winch hook and reeled it back into the bay, and closed the bomb doors.
They returned to the cockpit, and looked down again to see if the windmill was working. There it stood, a small box on the outside slope of a crater, somewhat tilted, the four broad vertical blades spinning merrily. It looked like an anemometer from a kid’s meteorology kit. The heating element, an exposed metal coil that would radiate like a stovetop, was on one side of the base. In a good wind the element might get up to 200 degrees Centigrade, which wasn’t bad, especially in