A few long icy moments passed.
‘The wind is coming from west north west, Sax! So you need to walk with the wind at your back and a touch to your left!’
‘I know. Be quiet now, until you see what course I’m making, and then correct it.’
He walked again, fortunately almost downwind. After five or six painful minutes his wrist beeped.
Aonia said, ‘You’re right on course!’
This was encouraging, and he carried on with a bit more speed, though the wind was penetrating through his ribs right to his core.
‘Okay, Sax! Sax?’
‘Yes!’
‘You and your car are right on the same spot!’
But there was no car in view.
His heart thudded in his chest. Visibility was still some twenty metres; but no car. He had to get shelter fast. ‘Walk in an ever-increasing spiral from where you are,’ the little voice on the wrist was suggesting. A good idea in theory, but he couldn’t bear to execute it; he couldn’t face the wind. He stared dully at his black plastic wristpad console. No more help to be had there.
For a moment he could make out snowbanks, off to his left. He shuffled over to investigate, and found that the snow rested in the lee of a shoulder-high escarpment, a feature he did not remember seeing before, but there were some radial breaks in the rock caused by the Tharsis rise, and this must be one of them, protecting a snowbank. Snow was a tremendous insulator. Though it had little intrinsic appeal as shelter. But Sax knew mountaineers often dug into it to survive nights out. It got one out of the wind.
He stepped to the bottom of the snowbank, and kicked it with one numb foot. It felt like kicking rock. Digging a snow cave seemed out of the question. But the effort itself would warm him a bit. And it was less windy at the foot of the bank. So he kicked and kicked, and found that underneath a thick cake of windslab there was the usual powder. A snow cave might be possible after all. He dug away at it.
‘Sax, Sax!’ cried the voice from his wrist. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Making a snow cave,’ he said. ‘A bivouac.’
‘Oh, Sax – we’re flying in help! We’ll be able to get in next morning no matter what, so hang on! We’ll keep talking to you!’
‘Fine.’
He kicked and dug. On his knees he scooped out hard granular snow, tossing it into the swirling flakes flying over him. It was hard to move, hard to think. He bitterly regretted walking so far from the rover, then getting so absorbed in the landscape around that ice pond. It was a shame to get killed when things were getting so interesting. Free but dead. There was a little hollow in the snow now, through an oblong hole in the windslab. Wearily he sat down and wedged himself back into the space, lying on his side and pushing back with his boots. The snow felt solid against the back of his suit, and warmer than the ferocious wind. He welcomed the shivering in his torso, felt a vague fear when it ceased. Being too cold to shiver was a bad sign.
Very weary, very cold. He looked at his wristpad. It was four p.m. He had been walking in the storm for just over three hours. He would have to survive another fifteen or twenty hours before he could expect to be rescued. Or perhaps in the morning the storm would have abated, and the location of the rover become obvious. One way or another he had to survive the night by huddling in a snow cave. Or else venture out again and find the rover. Surely it couldn’t be far away. But until the wind lessened, he could not bear to be out looking for it.
He had to wait in the snow cave. Theoretically he could survive a night out, though at the moment he was so cold it was hard to believe that. Night temperatures on Mars still plummeted drastically. Perhaps the storm might lessen in the next hour, so that he could find the rover and get to it before dark.
He told Aonia and the others where he was. They sounded very concerned, but there was nothing they could do. He felt irritation at their voices.
It seemed many minutes before he had another thought. When one was chilled, blood flow was greatly reduced to the limbs – perhaps that was true for the cortex as well, the blood going preferentially to the cerebellum where the necessary work would continue right to the end.
More time passed. Near dark, it appeared. Should call out again. He was too cold – something seemed wrong. Advanced age, altitude, CO2 levels – some factor or combination of factors was making it worse than it should be. He could die of exposure in a single night. Appeared in fact to be doing just that. Such a storm! Loss of the mirrors, perhaps. Instant ice age. Extinction event.
The wind was making odd noises, like shouts. Powerful gusts no doubt. Like faint shouts, howling, ‘Sax! Sax! Sax!’
Had they flown someone in? He peered out into the dark storm, the snowflakes somehow catching the late light and tearing overhead like dim white static.
Then between his ice-crusted eyelashes he saw a figure emerge out of the darkness. Short, round, helmeted. ‘Sax!’ The sound was distorted, it was coming from a loudspeaker in the figure’s helmet. Those Da Vinci techs were very resourceful people. Sax tried to respond, and found he was too cold to speak. Just moving his boots out of the hole was a stupendous effort. But it appeared to catch this figure’s eye, because it turned and strode purposefully through the wind, moving like a skilful sailor on a bouncing deck, weaving this way and that through the slaps of the gusts. The figure reached him and bent down and grabbed Sax by the wrist, and he saw its face through the faceplate, as clear as through a window. It was Hiroko.
She smiled her brief smile and hauled him up out of his cave, pulling so hard on his left wrist that his bones creaked painfully.
‘Ow!’ he said.
Out in the wind the cold was like death itself. Hiroko pulled his left arm over her shoulder, and, still holding hard to his wrist just above the wristpad, she led him past the low escarpment and right into the teeth of the gale.
‘My rover is near,’ he mumbled, leaning hard on her and trying to move his legs fast enough to make steady plants of the foot. So good to see her again. A solid little person, very powerful as always.
‘It’s over here,’ she said through her loudspeaker. ‘You were pretty close.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘We were tracking you as you came down Arsia. Then today when the storm hit I checked you out, and saw you were out of your rover. After that I came out to see how you were doing.’
‘Thanks.’
‘You have to be careful in storms.’
Then they were standing before his rover. She let go of his wrist, and it throbbed painfully. She bonked her faceplate against his goggles. ‘Go on in,’ she said.
He climbed carefully up the steps to the rover’s lock door; opened it; fell inside. He turned clumsily to make room for Hiroko, but she wasn’t in the door. He leaned back out into the wind, looked around. No sight of her. It was dusk; the snow now looked black. ‘Hiroko!’ he cried.
No answer.
He closed the lock door, suddenly frightened. Oxygen deprivation – he pumped the lock, fell through the inside door into the little changing room. It was shockingly warm, the air a steamy blast. He plucked ineffectively at his clothes, made no progress. He went at it more methodically. Goggles and face-mask off. They were coated with ice. Ah – possibly his air supply had been restricted by ice in the tube between tank and mask. He sucked in several deep breaths, then sat still through another bout of nausea. Pulled off his hood, unzipped the suit. It was almost more than he could do to get his boots off. Then the suit. His underclothes were cold and clammy. His hands were burning as if on fire. It was a good sign, proof that he was not substantially frostbitten; nevertheless it was agony.
His whole skin began to buzz with the same inflamed pain. What