A squall at sea; they came up fast. Horizons only four kilometers away didn’t help matters; and the winds on Mars had never slowed down much, in all the years of thickening. Underfoot the boat shuddered as it smashed through some invisible fragments of ice. Brash ice now, it appeared, or the broken pancake ice of a sea surface that had been about to freeze over in the night; difficult to spot in all the flying foam. Occasionally he felt the impact of a larger chunk, bergy bergs as sailors called them. These had come through the Chryse Strait on a current from the north; now they were being pushed against the lee shore of the southern side of the Sinai Peninsula. As the boat was too, for that matter.
They were forced to cover the cockpit with its clear shell, rolling up out of the decking and over to the other side. Under its waterproof cover they were immediately warmer, which was a comfort. It was going to be a true howler, Kasei Vallis serving as a conduit for an extremely powerful blast of air; the AI listed wind speeds at Santorini Island fluctuating between 180 and 220 kilometers an hour, winds which would not diminish much in speed as they crossed the gulf. Certainly it was still a very strong wind, 160 kilometers an hour at the masthead; the surface of the water was disintegrating now, crests flattened by gusts, torn apart. The ship was shutting down in response to all that, mast retracting, cockpit covered, hatches battening; then the sea anchor went out, a tube of material like a wind sock, dragging underwater upwind of them, slowing their drift to leeward, and mitigating the jarring impacts against small icebergs that were becoming more frequent as they all clustered against the lee shore. Now with the sea anchor in place, it was the brash ice and bergy bergs that were floating downwind faster than they were, and knocking against the windward hull, even as the leeward hull still slammed against a thickening ice mass. Both hulls were mostly underwater; in effect the boat was becoming a kind of submarine, lying at the surface and just under it. The strength of the materials of the boat could sustain any shock that even a howler and a lee shore of icebergs could deliver; indeed they could sustain forces several magnitudes stronger. But the weak point, as Sax reflected as he was thrown hard against his seat belt and shoulder harness, holding grimly to the tiller and his seatback, was their bodies. The catamaran lifted on a swell, dropped with a sickening swoop, crashed to a halt against a big berg; and he slammed breathlessly into the restraints. It seemed they might be in danger of being shaken to death, an unpleasant way to go, as he was beginning to understand. Internal organs damaged by seat belts; but if they freed themselves they would be flung around the cockpit, into each other or into something sharp, until something broke or burst. No. It was not a tenable situation. Possibly the restraints he had seen on his bed’s frame would be gentler, but the decelerations when the boat struck the ice mass were so abrupt that he doubted being horizontal would help much.
“I’m going to see if the AI can get us into Arigato Bay,” he shouted in Ann’s ear. She nodded that she had heard. He shouted the instruction right into the AI’s pickup, and the computer heard and understood, which was good, as it would have been hard to type accurately with the boat soaring and plunging and shuddering as it slammed into the ice. In all that jarring it was not possible to feel the boat’s engine, which had been running all along, but a slight change in their angle to the groundswell convinced him that it was pushing harder as the AI tried to get them farther west.
Down near the point of the Sinai Peninsula, on the southern side, a large inundated crater called Arigato made a round bay. The entrance of the bay was about sixty degrees of the circle of the crater, facing southwest. The wind and waves were both also from the southwest; so the mouth of the bay, quite shallow, as it was a low part of the old crater rim, was bound to be broken water, a difficult crossing no doubt. But once inside the bay the groundswell would be cut off by that same rim, and both waves and wind much reduced, especially when they got behind the western cape of the bay. There they would wait out the howler, and be on their way again when it was done. In theory it was an excellent plan, although Sax worried about conditions in the mouth of the bay; the chart showed it was only ten meters deep, which was certain to cause the groundswells to break. On the other hand, in a boat that became a kind of submarine (and yet drawing less than two meters of water for all that) negotiating broken surf might not be much of a problem ; just go with it. The AI appeared to consider his instructions within the realm of the possible. And indeed the boat had pulled in the sea anchor, and with its powerful little engines was making its way across the wind and waves toward the bay, which was not visible; nothing of the lee shore could be seen through the dirty air.
So they held to the cockpit railings and waited out the reach, speechless; there was little to say, and the booming howl of the howler made it difficult to communicate. Sax’s hands and arms got very tired from holding on, but there was no help for that except to abandon the cockpit and go below and strap himself into his bed, which he did not want to do. Despite the discomfort, and the nagging worry about the bay entrance, it was an extraordinary experience to watch the wind pulverize the surface of the water the way it was.
A short while later (though the AI indicated it had been seventy-two minutes), he caught sight of land, a dark ridge over the whitecaps to the lee side of them. Seeing it meant they were probably too close to it, but there ahead it disappeared, and reappeared farther west: the entrance to Arigato Bay. The tiller shifted against his knee, and he noted a change in the boat’s direction. For the first time he could hear the hum of the little engines at the sterns of the two hulls. The jarring against the ice got rougher, and they had to hold on tight. Now the groundswells were getting taller, their crests torn off, but the bulk of every wave remaining, its face surging up as it encountered the sea bottom. And now he could see in the foam rolling over the water ice chunks, and larger bergy bits— clear, blue, jade, aquamarine— pitted, rough, glassy. A great deal of ice must have been driven against the lee shore ahead of them. If the bay mouth was choked with ice, and waves were breaking over the bar nevertheless, it would be a nasty passage indeed. And yet that looked like what the situation would be. He shouted a question or two at the AI, but its replies were unsatisfactory. It seemed to be saying that the boat could sustain any shocks the situation could inflict, but that the engines could not drive it through pack ice. And in fact the ice was thickening rapidly; they seemed in the process of being enveloped by a loose mass of bergy bits, driven onshore by the wind from all over the gulf. Their grinding and knocking was now a big component of the overwhelming noise of the storm. Indeed it looked like it would now be difficult to motor out of the situation, straight offshore into the wind and waves and out to sea. Not that he really wanted to be out there, tossed up and down on waves that were growing ever larger and more unruly; capsizing would be a very real possibility; but because of the unexpected density of ice inshore, it was beginning to look like getting offshore had been their better option. Now closed to them. They were in for a hard pummeling.
Ann was looking uncomfortable in her restraints, holding to the cockpit rail for dear life, a sight that gave part of Sax’s mind satisfaction: she showed no inclination to let go, none at all. In fact she leaned over so that she could shout in his ear, and he turned his head to listen.
“We can’t stay here!” she shouted. “When we tire— the impacts are going to tear us up— ah!— like dolls!”
“We can strap ourselves to our beds,” Sax shouted.
She frowned doubtfully. And it was true that those restraints might not be any better. He had never tried them out; and there was the problem of getting secured in them by oneself to consider. Amazing how loud the wind was— shrieking wind, roaring water, thunking ice. The waves were growing larger and larger; when the boat rose on their faces, it took them ten or twelve heart-stopping seconds to shoot to the crests, and now when they got up there they saw chunks of ice being thrown clear of the waves, thrown off with the flying foam to crash down into their fellows below, and sometimes into the
boat’s hulls and decking, and even the clear thin cockpit shell, with a force they could feel all through their bodies.
Sax leaned over to shout again in Ann’s ear. “I believe this is one of those situations in which we are meant to use the lifeboat function!”
“. . . lifeboat?” Ann said.
Sax nodded. “The boat is its own lifeboat!” he shouted. “It flies!”
“What do you mean?”
“It flies!”
“You’re kidding!”
“No! It becomes a— a blimp!” He leaned over and put his mouth right to her ear. “The hulls and the keels and the bottom of the cockpit empty their ballast. They fill with helium from tanks in the bow. And balloons deploy. They told me about it back in Da Vinci, but I’ve never seen it! I didn’t think we’d be using it!” The boat could also become a submarine, they had said in Da Vinci, quite pleased with themselves at the new craft’s versatility. But the ice packing against the lee shore made that option unavailable to them, something that Sax did not regret; for no particular reason, the idea of going down in the boat didn’t appeal to him.
Ann pulled back to look at him, amazed at this news. “Do you know how to fly it!” she shouted.
“No!”
Presumably the AI would take care of that. If they could get it into the air. Just a matter of finding the emergency release, of flicking the right toggles. He pointed at the control panel to mime this thought, then leaned forward to shout in her ear; her head swung in and banged his nose and mouth hard, and then he was blinking with bright pain, the blood running out of his nose like water from a faucet. Impact, just like the two planetesimals, he grinned and split his lip even wider, a painful mistake. He licked and licked, tasting his blood. “I love you!” he shouted. She didn’t hear him.
“How do we launch it?” Ann cried.
He indicated the control panel again, there beside the AI, the emergency board under a protective bar.
If they chose to try an escape by air, however, it would bring about a dangerous moment. Once they were moving at the wind’s speed, of course, there would be very little force brought to bear on the boat, they would simply blimp along. But at the moment of liftoff, while they were still nearly stationary, the howler would tear hard at them. They would tumble, probably, and this might disable the balloons enough to cast the boat back into the ice-choked breakers, or onto the lee shore. He could see Ann thinking this through herself. Still— whatever happened, it was likely to be preferable to the bone-jarring impacts that continued to rack them. It would be a temporary thing, one way or the other.
Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was a bloody mess. “Worth a try!” she shouted.
So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and with a final look at Ann— their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could not articulate, but which warmed him— he put his fingers on the switches. Hopefully the altitude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished he had spent more time flying.
As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a nearly weightless moment at the top, just before the fall down into the next icy trough. In one of these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat fell down the waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar— then bounced right up and away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so that they were hanging in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next wave would capsize them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging away over ice and water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head over heels in their restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat righted itself, and began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to side, front to back— oops then all the way over again, topsy-turvy— then righted, and swinging again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on— his shoulder harness came free and his shoulder slammed against Ann’s, even though he had been pressed against her. The tiller was bashing his knee. He held on to it. Another crash together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched her, and after that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other’s shoulders, in danger at every slam of breaking each other’s bones. They looked at each other for a second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from some cut or other, or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked impassive. Up they shot into the sky.
His collarbone hurt, where Ann’s forehead or elbow had struck it. But they were flying, up and up in an awkward embrace. And as the boat was accelerated to something nearer the wind’s speed, the turbulence lessened greatly. The balloons seemed to be connected by rigging to the top of the mast. Then just when Sax was beginning to hope for some kind of zeppelinlike stability, even to expect it, the boat shot straight up and began its horrible tumbling again. Updraft no doubt. They were probably over land by now, and it was all too possible they were being sucked up into a thunderhead, like a hail ball. On Mars there were thunderheads ten kilometers tall, often powered by howlers from far to the south, and balls of hail flew up and down in these thunderheads for a long time. Sometimes hail the size of cannonballs had come crashing down, devastating crops and even killing people. And if they were pulled up too high they might die of altitude, like those early balloonists in France, was in the Montgolfiers themselves it had happened to? Sax couldn’t remember. Up and up, tearing through wind and red haze, no chance to see very far—
BOOM! He jumped and hurt himself against his seat belt, came down hard. Thunder. Thunder banging around them, at what had to be well over 130 decibels. Ann seemed limp against him, and he shifted sideways, reached up awkwardly and twisted her ear, trying to turn her head so he could see her face. “Hey!” she cried, though it sounded to him like a whisper in the roar of the wind. “Sorry,” he said, though he was sure she couldn’t hear him. It was too loud to talk. They were spinning again, but without much centrifugal force. The boat was shrieking as the wind pushed it up; then they dove, and his eardrums hurt to bursting, he wiggled his jaw back and forth, back and forth. Then up again and they popped, painfully. He wondered how high they would go; very possible they would die of thin air. Though maybe the Da Vinci techs had thought to pressurize the cockpit, who knew. It behooved him to try to understand the boat as blimp, or at least master the altitude adjustment system. Not that there was much to be done against the force of such updrafts and downdrafts. Sudden rattle of hail against the cockpit shell. There were small toggles on the emergency panel; in a moment of less violent tumbling he was able to put his face down near the bar and read the display terminal embedded in it. Altitude . . . not obvious. He tried to calculate how high the boat would go before its weight caused it to level off. Hard when he wasn’t actually sure of the boat’s weight, or the amount of helium deployed.
Then some kind of turbulence in the storm tossed them again. Up, down, up; then down, for many seconds in a row. Sax’s stomach was in his throat, or so it felt. His collarbone was an agony. Nose running or bleeding continuously. Then up. Gasping for air, too. He wondered again how high they were, and whether they were still ascending; but there was nothing to be seen outside the shell of the cockpit, nothing but dust and cloud. He seemed in no danger of fainting. Ann was motionless beside him, and he wanted to tug her ear again to see if she was conscious, but couldn’t move his arm. He elbowed her side. She elbowed back; if he had elbowed her as hard as that, he would have to remember to go lighter next time. He tried a very gentle elbowing, and felt a less violent prod in return. Perhaps they could resort to Morse code, he had learned it as a boy for no reason at all, and now in his reborn memory he could hear it all, every dit and dot. But perhaps Ann had not learned it, and this was no time for lessons.
The violent ride went on for so long he couldn’t estimate it: an hour? Once the noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other, which they did just because it could be done; there actually wasn’t much to say.
“We’re in a thunderhead!”
>
“Yes!”
Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they were descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom of the cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes— the surface of the planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent. He and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very first time.
Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud’s bottom, in falling hail and rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud. He pushed down a likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A pair of small toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise them up. Altitude adjustors. He pushed them both gently down.
They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below. In fact they appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the Cydonia Mensa, on the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.
But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were east of Cydonia, out over the flat plains of Arabia. Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over the North Sea, which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had been. Below lay a patchwork of fields, orchards— irrigation canals and curving streams, lined by trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there was water all over the surface of the land, in ponds, in canals, in little craters, and covering the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses clustered in little villages, only outbuildings in the fields— barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet countryside, quite flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly. Ann’s hands were a bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.
He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would be important. He pushed down the adjustors hard.
Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over a line of trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was inundated, brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an orchard, and a water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving horizontally quite fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the field. He shoved the adjustors full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down like diving dolphins, and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right up at them, brown water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides, and they were being dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right into a line of young trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of kids and a man were running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O’s in their faces.