The autonomous capabilities of the Rollagon at these speeds were completely unexpected and nothing short of amazing. He had never experienced anything even remotely close to it and had in fact expected it to reduce their speed to a crawl. Doubtless it took a lot of processing power to achieve this level of autonomy and Sam was surprised that anyone, especially their dollar-wise Sponsors, would have funded this particular capability. After all, it could reasonably have been assumed that the Colonists would be capable of driving well enough to avoid killing themselves.
He watched the work of the AI for a while longer, then took over driving. A problem soon became apparent. In this region of Chryse at anything but crawling speeds the dust thrown up by the wheels coated everything, including the forward windows. Within a few hours, sufficient fines had been deposited that he could not see well enough to drive. He stopped and pondered what to do.
He was about to suit up to go out and clean the window when it occurred to him that the designers must have foreseen this. He reviewed the Operator's Manual. On a top-level page he found a long list of functions that could be set to the care and keeping of the AI.
None of the prior users of this Rollagon had changed the operating mode from default. Life support, power, and communications systems were still in the charge of the AI. Sam looked at those that were left to the operator: steering, braking, and shifting (oops, shifting hadn't occurred to him), but could find nothing about cleaning the windows. As perplexed humans had for decades, as a last resort, he turned to the Help Menu.
He typed in "cleaning the windscreen" and was rewarded with a page of text, with hyperlinks concerning maintenance of the exterior. In a few moments he had turned over "care of the vehicle exterior" to the AI. Continuing, he looked for "care of vehicle interior" and was brought to another page.
Details were sparse, but Sam set that function to the care and keeping of the AI, too. In a few seconds he was startled to see a rotating brush move across the top of the forward bubble, leaving the swept area free of dust. In a few moments, as the bubble was cleared, he could see that the brush was attached to one of the Rollagon's articulated arms. The front completed, the arm moved to clear the side windows, then the remainder of the Rollagon's exterior.
Relieved, he started off again and soon gave control back to the AI. The window cleaning operation was completed several more times that day with no further intervention on his part required.
In the rear view he could see clouds of dust raised by his passing that settled quickly in the thin air. The wheels left a shallow imprint of disturbed regolith—dark Mars.
After about twenty minutes the Rollagon turned away from the programmed course and headed for a gentle rise. When it reached the top it stopped. From the rear of the Science Module a manipulator arm moved to select an auger. It touched the surface tentatively in a number of locations and then, having found one that met some mysterious set of parameters, began to slowly rotate. The soil it brought up was dark, almost blood red.
Sam could feel the Rollagon vibrate as the auger churned its way into the ground. When it had bored to the limit, the arm detached and selected an extension from a storage rack. In moments it was churning again. The material changed colour, lighter now—a pale yellow. At the limits of that extension it was withdrawn and replaced in the rack. The arm then removed the auger.
A beep drew Sam's attention. On the command display, the message read, Do you wish to examine the material from this boring? Sam waved a 'no' hand. There would be nothing new here. If there had been, he would have been advised by the AIs. This was not a research expedition.
Immediately, the arm swung and withdrew a comms relay stick from its storage rack and dropped it into the hole. The AI had been told to automatically select locations along the desired course to maximize the distance between relays. Another querying beep followed: Do you wish to verify the quality of communications?
This time Sam waved a 'yes.' On the HUD there appeared three lines: Voice, Video, and Telemetry. All were green, all were at max quality. He had full comms with the Station. On a flat Mars, a relay would be needed about every ten kilometers. By intelligently selecting the locations, this range could be greatly extended. It had taken two minutes. The Rollagon resumed its original course.
This procedure was repeated several more times during the day. Only once did the auger encounter any difficulty and have to re-select another location. The AI did not again ask his advice.
He continued up into the foothills of Tempe Terra. In pictures taken from low orbit the geology looked intriguing. It was full of ancient riverbeds, myriad small craters and low scarf-like cliffs. On the surface though everything tended to look essentially the same: sand, dust, dunes and rocks.
He was itching to get over to the Valles Marineris and to the other canyon systems, for it was there that big Mars could truly be seen. However, the quest for ice led to the lowlands of Utopia, and that seemingly endless task made mere sightseeing trips unlikely for quite some time.
He wondered why they continued the search for water. Mars had long been known to possess extensive icefields, many within easy reach just below the surface, and the C units were already mining the large deposits in Chryse and Tempe. On the one hand it seemed a dubious cause, but on the other it was at least a convenient excuse for travel. He had repressed the urge to question the wisdom of the quest, afraid that by questioning it he would bring about its end.
In travel he found instant escape from the cramped confines of the MHM, and he was slowly coming to realize that he was not so far removed from those who were content to let the AIs carry the burden of their labour while they occupied themselves at other, more important things. To explore Mars was his great passion, and he was increasingly becoming willing to risk censure to indulge himself.
At day's end he parked for the night at a spot that was nowhere—at least nowhere important. The onset of night under this empty sky brought home to him again in a much more profound way that he was on Mars. At times he still could not quite believe it.
As a child, through the works of Bradbury, Clarke, and the others, the Red Planet had captured his imagination and his heart. That modern research and the present reality had rendered their early stories specious bothered him not a bit. Even now, as a Colonist living the life they had imagined on a world they could not, he read and re-read their stories and little else. He felt as if he had been here before.
Among the meagre possessions he had brought from Earth was a well-worn and yellowed paperback copy (yes paper—for God's sake!) of Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles." One hundred and seventy six grams, seventeen point six percent of a precious one-kilogram allotment.
In a moment of daring he challenged himself to go for a walk. He suited with more than his usual attention to detail and exited, walking slowly away from the Rollagon. The vehicle's illumination cast his shadow far ahead, his legs grotesquely extended.
He called out for the AI to turn out the lights, and after his eyes had adjusted, he began to walk further away, proceeding unsteadily on the uncertain surface, feeling the regolith crunch beneath his feet and hearing it through his suit.
Black it was, licorice black in fact, except for the unwavering stars that filled the overhead sky. The Milky Way stretched from there to there; he traced it with an upheld glove. 'The acid beauty of the stars, etched forever,' one of them had written, someone who had never seen it as he was seeing it, but who had possessed the desire and vision to imagine it.
It was strange, he thought, how even this far from Earth the night sky was the same. Except that there was no Mars, no aurora, and no Moon. Actually, he recalled, as he walked slowly into the darkness, you could see a bit more of the sky on Mars—the smaller planet's surface fell away more rapidly than on Earth. But not much, at least not enough to make an obvious difference to a red planet pedestrian.
He turned off his radio and silenced the hiss of the open channel. He held his breath and heard the blood surging
through his ears and nothing else, no wind in the grass, no chirping of crickets, no slam of distant doors, no lapping of waves. Even with eyes fully adjusted to the dark he could see nothing, not even enough to discern the horizon. He felt a chill run up his back, spread to his face and arms, and then quickly to his entire body.
For a few seconds he buzzed electrically as if charged by high voltage tension. He was really and truly spooked. Except for his feet pressing against the regolith below and the gentle pressure of his suit against his flesh, he was without reference, truly alone, adrift in space.
Shaking himself physically and then mentally he suppressed the rising panic that threatened to force him to his knees. He called for the AI to turn on the lights, and when it did not, he felt panic return. Chinning the radio on, he called again and was abruptly blinded by a blaze of light that only added to his disorientation. At some point in his brief wandering he had turned towards the Rollagon. Head down, eyes fixed on the ground in front, with heart rate slowing, he returned to the vehicle. How interesting.
The next day he continued northwards, carefully skirting the larger craters that littered the surface.
Previous studies of this area indicated that permafrost was between 5 and 25 meters of the surface. The GPR was showing a discontinuity at 7 meters. Sam had the Rollagon halt and drill an exploratory hole. He watched from inside as the drill spun its way into the surface.
On the second pipe extension, the ice appeared as flecks of silver in the dark tailings. The numbers came up on the screen: less than 25%. Almost frost. This was not the mother lode. They pulled up the pipe and moved on.
They tried a dozen more spots until in the fading light he'd had enough for one day and called a halt. The geodata summary showed that this area had been the site of volcanism, but there was no sign of anything of that nature from his vantage point. It was, instead, dust, dust, and more dust.
After another day of travel he turned south. At mid-day, he came upon the tracks of what could only be one of the Station's many small autonomous rovers. Turning to follow, he soon came upon a B-type in the process of sampling the sub-surface with a smaller version of the Rollagon's GPR.
Sam queried the AI about the purpose and status of this unit. It had been sent out three months ago to search for underground cavities, for lava tubes in fact, which might be suitable for underground habitation. They recharged its power pack, and according to the Rollagon AI, replenished its consumables. They left it to its work and commenced their return to the Station.
The scenery was monotonous, a reddish dusty plain generously littered with ejecta ranging from stones to boulders, with gentle rises that disappeared when climbed, that led to other distant rises that became equally indistinguishable when they too were met.
Patches of the underlying strata could be seen poking through the surface, and periodically a crater too small to be named and too large to have been eradicated by the wind and sand appeared before him. When accompanied by prominent wind shadows they were clearly visible in low-resolution sat images, but such was the extent of infilling and erosion that from the surface it was difficult to determine where they started and where the plain left off. These types of things: plains, craters, ejecta, and outcrops had been thoroughly explored by the early semi-autonomous rovers, poked over by curious humans and finally, turned inside out by the Station's AIs.
Early in his travels he had made it a practice to stop and investigate anything interesting. Initially there had been the novelty, and then there had been the potential that something new might be revealed to him through closer examination. After a dozen or so of these brief walkabouts he had found the rewards insufficient to make the effort of suiting and decontamination worthwhile, and more significant, he had found that the view from the command bubble and the images and reduced data obtained from the Rollagon's sensors made it unnecessary, but for a time—a brief time—he had been unable resist seeing it all from the human point-of-view.
In the middle of this reverie the AI popped a message up onto the bubble.
"Congratulations! You have now travelled further on the surface of Mars than has any other human."
Sam stared at the words superimposed over the Martian landscape. Considering his current mindset he could not have been more embarrassed had they been accompanied by a drum roll and clash of cymbals. Here he was, in the comfort of a mobile home, griping about the view, and without breaking a sweat, all the while and unbeknownst, setting a record for Martian travel!
What extraordinary deprivations others had suffered for their opportunity to examine this patch of dirt, this land that he had just again dismissed as boring and unworthy of his time. How many lives had been lost, how many lives ruined? He knew. He had read. He had listened to them tell their own stories. How much money had been spent (and was still being spent) that might have been used to alleviate the suffering of the poor and displaced, to eradicate disease, to mitigate the effects of climate change—the list of things that could have been done was endless. Space travel, once the supreme expression of the national id, had progressed to mere entertainment (and third rate entertainment at that), to become so routine as to be incapable of public attention except when disaster struck. The Race to Mars, a re-kindled demonstration of national superiority that had once again pitted the world's major powers against each other, had captured the world's attention for a brief ten years. Yet the cost in terms of lives and resources was immense and....what had they to show for it but....
The thought failed. The words were stale and flat, like day old soda—cream soda, in fact—and he realised that he had been speaking aloud, something he was prone to. He had been pontificating, in fact. He blushed.
He summed up. "It's our way, it seems, our human way to seize the brightest bauble, so to speak," as Newton had said, "while all around lies the path to the beach...."
The thought petered out before he could save it. Around and around the words went. He blushed again. He let it drop.
When he resumed travel the next day he doggedly persisted in manually steering throughout the day, despite soon becoming quite bored with it. His distance travelled that day was one hundred and seventy-seven kilometers, all added to his record breaking achievement. The AI, perhaps somehow sensing the awkwardness of the day before, did not mention it again. In the failing light at the end of another day he stopped next to a small crater named Sodo.
Seen from within the bubble with all of the interior lights off, the night sky was unbroken by any rise. The pin prick stars, unblinking, filled the blackness. There was leaden Saturn, low in the east. No Earth could be seen.
He was hundreds of kilometers from the Station and had full voice, video and data comms, and had he wanted, needed, or desired, he could have spoken with anyone on Mars and, in time, Earth. He knew where he was to within ten centimeters. If an orbiting satellite had been positioned properly, he could have peeked in a window and imaged himself waving. Outside in the whisper-thin atmosphere it was minus 75 degrees Celsius. He was warm and dry.
He looked out the window from the command seat into the darkness. In the glass, he saw his image distorted, small and insignificant, superimposed upon the black.
A ripple of emotion washed over him and for a series of very uncomfortable moments he wished he were somewhere else. He had been alone before, and often, in some pretty far off and strange places, but this was different—this was primal fear. Something inside was crying out for shelter overhead and for someone at his back. This was the fear that had caused man to risk life and limb to drive the bears from the caves, and to light fires and to keep them lit.
The moment soon passed, but that night he slept fitfully, waking at the slightest noise or motion of the Rollagon. Still, he awoke the next morning quite refreshed and during a hearty breakfast of eggs and soy strips set the fears of the previous evening aside. He turned southwest towards Xanthe. Soon though, bored again with driving, he released his grip on the controls.
The
AI kept a straight course, deviating around large boulders and skirting the edge of a steep-sided crater, adjusting speed to suit the terrain. Grudgingly Sam conceded that there was little to distinguish his own driving from that of the AI, not this time or ever. Several times it slowed to a stop and asked for instructions.
The first time was on the gentle rise that was the edge of a shallow crater. No explanation was offered, so after a second look ahead and a quick review of the map, Sam poked the air in front of the button that told the AI to proceed.
As the AI proceeded over the lip the sudden drop nearly pitched him into the window. Live and learn, he thought, but he fumed at the sight of a large 'Sorry!' projected upon the glass.
'Warn me next time, rather than apologize after the fact', he quickly typed.
'By your command,' was the instantaneous response.
"Very funny, asshole," he said to the air.
The second time the AI simply slowed, stopped, and then re-started without consulting him.
Such was the steadiness of the AI's pace that he dozed off while seated in the command chair. However, while in the galley preparing his lunch at noon, he found that, unless he looked out the forward window, the motion across made him ill. He returned to the command chair and considered retaking the controls. No, he thought, he had been foolish to resist. With a characteristic shrug he gave in, opened the med kit and took an anti-nausea pill. That was that, too.
He experimented with the voice commands on the return trip. The default voice was emotionless, but not without emphasis, and he was not certain, but he thought he could detect a dry sense of humour. There were no syntax errors, fortunately. Such a thing he would have perceived as a confidence-eroding sign of shabby programming. The other voices he found disturbing. There was too much realism in them. He tried them all and then decided to stick with the default.