"Kim Stanley Robinson - Mars 03 - Blue Mars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

"-and a little south! But how will you orient yourself?"

Sax considered it. Mars's lack of a magnetic field had never struck him as such a problem before, but there it was. He could assume the wind was directly out of the west, but that was just an assumption. "Can you check the nearest weather stations and tell me what direction the wind is coming from?" he said.

"Sure, but it won't be much good for local variations! Here, just a second, I'm getting some help here from the others."

A few long icy moments passed.

"The wind is coming from west northwest, 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 meters; 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.