Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

factor would
create a temperature equivalent of about 250 K. Was that right? That was very
cold indeed to be out without a helmet. And in fact his hands were going numb.
His feet as well. And his face was already without feeling, like a thick mask
at the front of his head. He was shivering, and his blinks tended to stick
together; his tears were freezing. He needed to get back to his car.
    He plodded over the rockscape, amazed at the power of the wind to
intensify cold. He had not experienced wind-chill like this since childhood, if
then, and had forgotten how frigid one became. Staggering in the blasts, he
climbed onto a low swell of the ancient lava and looked upslope. There was his
rover—big, vivid green, gleaming like a spaceship—about two kilometers up the
slope. A very welcome sight.
    But now snow began to fly horizontally past him, giving a dramatic
demonstration of the wind’s great speed. Little granular pellets clicked
against his goggles. He took off toward the rover, keeping his head down and
watching the snow swirl over the rocks. There was so much snow in the air that
he thought his goggles were fogging up, but after a painfully cold operation to
wipe the insides, it became clear that the condensation was actually out in the
air. Fine snow, mist, dust, it was hard to tell.
    He plodded on. The next time he looked up, the air was so thick
with snow that he couldn’t see all the way to the rover. Nothing to do but
press on. It was lucky the suit was well insulated and sewn through with
heating elements, because even with the heat on at its highest power, the cold
was cutting against his left side as if he were naked to the blast. Visibility
extended now something like twenty meters, shifting rapidly depending on how
much snow was passing by at the moment; he was in an amorphously expanding and
contracting bubble of whiteness, which itself was shot through with flying
snow, and what appeared to be a kind of frozen fog or mist. It seemed likely he
was in the storm cloud itself. His legs were stiff. He wrapped his arms around
his torso, his gloved hands trapped in his armpits. There was no obvious way of
telling if he was still walking in the right direction. It seemed like he was
on the same course he had been when visibility had collapsed, but it also
seemed like he had gone a long way toward the rover.
    There were no compasses on Mars; there were, however, APS systems
in his wristpad and back in the car. He could call up a detailed map on his wristpad
and then locate himself and his car on it; then walk for a while and track his
positions; then make his way directly toward the car. That seemed like a great
deal of work—which brought it to him that his thinking, like his body, was
being affected by the cold. It wasn’t that much work, after all..
    So he crouched down in the lee of a boulder and tried the method.
The theory behind it was obviously sound, but the instrumentation left
something to be desired; the wristpad’s screen was only five centimeters
across, so small that he couldn’t see the dots on it at all well. Finally he
spotted them, walked awhile, and took another fix. But unfortunately his
results indicated that he should be hiking at about a right angle to the
direction he had been going.
    This was unnerving to the point of paralysis. His body insisted
that it had been going the right way; his mind (part of it, anyway) was pretty
certain that it was better to trust the results on the wristpad, and assume
that he had gotten off course somewhere. But it didn’t feel that way; the
ground was still at a slope that supported the feeling in his body. The
contradiction was so intense that he suffered a wave of nausea, the internal
torque twisting him until it actually hurt to stand, as if every cell in his
body was twisting to the side against the pressure of what the wristpad was
telling him—the physiological effects of a purely cognitive dissonance, it was
amazing. It almost made one believe in