How long he walked or how far he did not know. High overhead white wisps of clouds like tattered veils raced through a black sky, blown on the winds of the coming storm to disappear beyond the rim of the horizon. He heard the howl of the wind as it roared through the emptiness above. He wanted to run, to see where the fragile white clouds went. But as he stirred himself, a heaviness sapped his strength. His legs would not obey. He leaned into it, felt himself pushed back as by a great hand, and realized it was the wind. Each step dragged more slowly than the last. He looked around him and saw red sand beginning to run in hissing snakes around him, blown on the gusting wind.
He crawled to the top of a nearby dune and toppled over the other side into the wind shadow. He felt himself sliding down and down. He struggled to rise to his feet as the dry red sand sucked at his limbs. The sand rattled down on him from the crest of the dune as the wind whipped it into a stinging fury. He sank back, too cold and tired to move. The sand pelted down on him in a steady rain, burying him beneath a fine red blanket.
He screamed and his voice rang hollow in his ears. He looked and saw that he was trapped in a great glass bubble-the bubble of his helmet, now beginning to frost over on the inside from the warmth of his breath.
The sand seemed to fall out of the black sky, burying him alive. He felt the gritty sting as it pelted against his surface suit. He heard faintly the dry, bristling hiss as it struck his helmet.
He screamed again and heard the awesome ring of silence and knew that his cries could not be heard beyond his helmet. His teeth chattered with the cold which dragged him down into a lazy stupor. He was drifting to sleep. Sleep, his last great enemy, had conquered him. …
SPENCE CAME TO SLOWLY, by degrees, his senses slug gish as if he had been drugged. A bright light filled his eyes so that he squinted to keep it out. When it did not go away he opened his eyes and looked around.
At first it did not occur to him where he was or in what condition. He heard his own even breathing filling his ears with a steady rhythm, and knew he wore his surface suit and helmet. But his body was stiff and frozen into a fixed position. He tried to raise one arm and found that it came free with difficulty. He raised the other arm and pushed himself gradually into a sitting position.
With a jolt he realized where he was: Mars! He had wandered out onto the surface alone. His dream had been real! His stumbling trek across the Martian landscape was no nightmare; it had happened. What is more he remembered it, though he remembered it as a dream.
Before that, however, only blankness and unknowing: another blackout.
Spence rose to his feet, scooping sand away from him. He crawled to the top of the dune and looked out over the red desert, fighting down the panic he felt rising within him. Nothing could be seen of the installation, not a glimmer in any direction.
The winds had calmed, but away toward the south-at least he considered it a southerly direction-the sky bore a distinct brownish-red smudge as if a prairie fire burned out of control just beyond the horizon. Overhead the sky was tinged with a pinkish cast which meant it was approaching noon, or just passing it.
Here was a problem. Clearly he could not sit by and wait for a search party to find him, and he could not walk in every direction at once. He glanced at his suit's chronometer on his right forearm and set it on elapsed time mode, figuring that at best he had only seven hours before the temperature dropped and he began to freeze.
He decided to start walking toward the mountain peak he saw rising into the clear air, so close it looked as if he could touch it with an outstretched hand. He remembered the holomap and the fact that Olympus Mons, the tallest peak on Mars, stood some thirty kilometers distant from the installation. If he could reach it there was a chance he could see the installation from its slopes. It would be a race, for it meant traveling fifty or sixty kilometers in seven hours-eight hours at the most. To even have a chance at making it back to the base in time he would have to travel at a pace of seven or eight kilometers an hour.
Without wasting another second, he turned himself toward the mountain and began marching off in long, ground-eating strides.
He walked for hours, it seemed to him, and the great flattened cone of Olympus Mons did not seem perceptively changed. Periodically he had stopped to look around him lest he miss some sign of a search party, or some indication that he might be moving nearer to his goal.
On one of these reconnoitering stops he became aware of the fact that the brown smudge on the horizon to the south had grown considerably. It nearly filled the southern quadrant, towering several kilometers into the sky by his best estimation. As he stood gauging the size of the disturbance he felt the horror of realization creep over him-the Simoom! The storm was sweeping in on wings of awesome fury, racing toward him.
Spence began to trot in an awkward, bouncing gait, doubling his pace. He had to reach the mountain before the Simoom struck. It was his only chance. …
THE FIRST GUSTS of wind pummeled Spence like angry fists. Around his legs the sand sang away like steam escaping from a pipe. The force of the coming storm impelled him on, lifting his steps and blowing him forward. He lurched ahead drunkenly, exhausted, sweating inside his surface suit. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth in thirst. He stared at the dull brown overcast which crept over the sky like a discolored shade. The sun burned through with a throbbing white glare as he dragged himself on.
He walked mechanically now, not attending to his steps, not caring whether he reached the mountain or not. He despaired of ever seeing the installation through the thick clouds of red dust whipped up by the Simoom's winds. Spence walked now to keep from thinking of the grisly end waiting for him just a few hours away.
On and on he walked and the wind howled around him, filling the sky with dust and blotting out the land. Tiny projectilesgrit, sand, and shards of rock-threw themselves into him, slicing at him. He could feel their sting through his surface suit and knew that it was only a matter of time before the steady blast tore the suit away from his body, stripped it off like a second skin to leave him naked in a deadly rain.
Packer's grim forecast echoed in his ears: "You'd be erased in seconds." Spence rehearsed the torturous details of such a death: flesh stripped molecule by molecule from his bones and then the bones themselves battered to pieces and scattered still warm over the surface of the planet to be ground into powder.
The scene held a grisly fascination for him, though he knew that it would likely be his own fate. It was that or death by freezing. Those were his choices.
The sun was lowering in the sky and already the wind whistling around him held a chill. Soon the temperature would plummet and he would stop moving as his body heat evaporated. This at least seemed preferable to the other death.
He stumbled blindly now. The dust obscured everything beyond the plastic perimeter of his visor. The rattle of tiny missiles filled his helmet like the crackle of static and his thoughts turned toward those who would mourn his death: his father would take it hard, of course; and his sister. Adjani would feel badly, but it was difficult for Spence to imagine the brown genius actually grieving over him.
Ari, of all he could name, alone embodied the sole regret of his heart. She alone he cared for. And he would never see her again-never see those bright blue eyes, never see her golden hair shining in the sunlight, or feel the cool touch of her long fingers as she brushed his face-the awful certainty of their separation saddened and frightened him more than death itself.
He hoped that in some small way he would leave a void in her life which would never be filled by another, that she would remember him fondly and weep when she heard the sad news of his death itself.