Firstborn(Time Odyssey 3) - By Arthur C. Clarke Page 0,128

rovers with sublimation mats and other essentials. They left one rover at Lowell for the crews use there, and then drove the other rover all the way back to Wells. That journey, a quarter of the planets circumference each way through falling dry-ice snow, had been numbing, depressing, exhausting. Myra and Yuri hadnt left the environs of the base since.

Well speak again, Paula said. Take care. Her image disappeared. Myra looked at Yuri. So thats that. Back to work, he said.

Coffee first? Give me an hour, and well break the back of some of the days chores. Okay.

The routine work had got a lot harder since the final evacuation. Without the scheduled resupply and replacement drops it wasnt just the nuke that was failing but much of the other equipment as well. And now there were only two of them, in a base designed for ten, and Myra, though she was a quick learner, wasnt experienced here.

However Myra had thrown herself into the work. This morning she tended clogging hydroponic beds, and cleaned out a gunged-up bioreactor, and tried to figure out why the water extraction system was failing almost daily. She also had work to do with the AI, managing the flood of science data that continued to pour in from the SEPs and tumbleweed balls and dust motes, even though the sensor systems were steadily falling silent through various defects, or were simply getting stuck in the thickening snow.

Mostly the AI was able to work independently, even setting its own science goals and devising programs to achieve them. But today was PPP day, planetary protection, when she had to make her regular formal check to ensure the environment was properly sampled in a band kilometers wide around the station, thus monitoring the slow seepage of their human presence into the skin of Mars. There was even a bit of paper she had to sign, for ultimate presentation to an agency on Earth. The paper was never going to get to Earth, of course, but she signed it anyway.

After an hour or so she had the AI hunt for Yuri. He was supposed to be out in the drill rig tent, mothballing equipment that had been shut down for the final time, thus fulfilling a promise he had made to Hanse Critchfield. In fact he was in Can Six, the EVA station.

She made some coffee, and carried it carefully through the locks to Six. She kept a lid on the cups; she still hadnt quite got used to one-third-G coffee sloshes.

She found Yuri kneeling on the floor of Six. He had gotten hold of a Cockell pulk, a simple dragging sled; adapted for Martian conditions it was fitted with fold-down wheels for running over basalt-hard water ice. He was piling up this little vehicle with a collapsed tent, food packets, bits of gear that looked to have been scavenged from life support.

She handed hI'm his coffee. So what now?

He sat back and sipped his drink. Ive got an unfulfilled ambition. Ive got many, actually, but this ones killing me.

Tell me.

An unsupported solo assault on the Martian north pole. I always planned to try it myself. Id start at the edge of the permanent cap, see, just me and an EVA suit and a sled. And Id walk, dragging the sled all the way to the pole. No drops, no pickup, nothing but me and the ice.

Is that even possible?

Oh, yes. Its a thousand kilometers tops, depending on the route you take. The suit would slow me downand no suit weve got is designed for that kind of endurance and mobility; Id have to make

some enhancements. But remember, with one-third G I can haul three times as much as I could in Antarctica, say four hundred kilograms. And in some ways Mars is an easier environment than the Earths poles. No blizzards, no white-outs.

Youd have to carry all your oxygen.

Maybe. Or I could use one of these. He picked up some of his life-support gadgets, a small ice-collector box, an electrolysis kit for cracking water into oxygen and hydrogen. Its a trade-off, actually. The kits are lighter than oxygen bottles would be, but using them daily would slow me down. I know its a stunt, Myra. But its one hell of a stunt, isnt it? And nobodys tried it before. Who better but me?

Youve got some mission designing to do, then.

Yes. I could figure it all out during the winter. Then when the summer comes, I could pick some period