"So, a million windmills," Ann said now.  "And that's just the start.  You talked about spreading black dust on the polar caps, didn't you Sax?"

"It would thicken the atmosphere faster than practically any other action we could take."

"So if you get your way," Ann said, "the caps are doomed.  They'll evaporate and then we're going to say, 'I wonder what they were like?' And we won't know."

"Do you have enough supplies, enough time?" John asked.

"We'll drop you supplies, " Arkady said again.

"There's four more months of summer," Ann said.

"You just want to go to the pole!"  Frank said, echoing Phyllis.

"So?" Ann replied.  "You may have come here to play office politics, but I plan to see a bit of this place."

Nadia grimaced; that ended that line of conversation, and Frank would be angry.  Which was never a good idea.  Ann, Ann. . . .

The next day the terran offices weighed in with the opinion that the polar cap ought to be sampled in its aboriginal condition.  No objections from base; though Frank did not get back on the line.  Simon and Nadia cheered:  "North to the Pole!"

Phyllis just shook her head.  "I don't see the point.  George and Edvard and I will stay down here as a back-up, and make sure the ice miner is working right."

# # #

So Ann and Nadia and Simon took rover Three and drove back down Chasma Borealis and around to the west, where one of the glaciers curling away from the cap thinned to a perfect rampway.  The mesh of the rovers' big wheels caught like a snowmobile's driving chain, running well over all the various surfaces of the cap, over patches of exposed granular dust, low hills of hard ice, fields of blinding white CO2 frost, and the usual lace of sublimed water ice.  Shallow valleys swirled outward in a clockwise pattern from the pole; some of these were very broad.  Crossing these they would drive down a bumpy slope that curved away to right and left over both horizons, all of it covered by bright dry ice; this could last for twenty kilometers, until the whole visible world was bright white.  Then before them a rising slope of the more familiar dirty red water ice would appear, striated by contour lines.  As they crossed the bottom of the trough the world would be divided in two, white behind, dirty pink ahead.  Driving up the south-facing slopes, they found the water ice more rotten than elsewhere, but as Ann pointed out, every winter a meter of dry ice sat on the permanent cap to crush the previous summer's rotten filligree, so the potholes were filled on an annual schedule; and the rover's big wheels crunched cleanly along.