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It was getting toward the end of the long northern spring, and they still had no good supply of water, so Ann proposed to make an expedition to the cap and set up a robot distillery, along the way establishing a route that rovers could follow on automatic pilot.  "Come with us," she said to Nadia.  "You haven't seen anything of the planet yet, just the stretch between here and Chernobyl, and that's nothing.  You missed Hebes and Ganges, and you're not doing anything new here.  Really, Nadia, I can't believe what a grub you've been.  I mean why did you come to Mars, after all?"

"Why?"

"Yes, why?  I mean there's two kinds of activities here, there's the exploration of Mars and then there's the life support for that exploration.  And here you've been completely immersed in the life support, without paying the slightest attention to the reason we came in the first place!"

"Well, it's what I like to do," Nadia said uneasily.

"Fine, but try to keep some perspective on it!   What the hell, you could have stayed back on Earth and been a plumber!  You didn't have to come all this way to drive a goddamn bulldozer!  Just how long are you going to go on grubbing away here, installing toilets, programming tractors?"

"All right, all right," Nadia said, thinking of Maya and all the rest.  The square of vaults was almost finished, anyway.  "I could use a vacation."

They took off in three big long-range rovers:  Nadia and five of the geologists, Ann, Simon Frazier, George Berkovic, Phyllis Boyle, and Edvard Perrin.   George and Edvard were friends of Phyllis's from their NASA days, and they supported her in advocating "applied geological studies," meaning prospecting for rare metals; Simon on the other hand was a quiet ally of Ann's, committed to pure research and a hands-off attitude.   Nadia knew all this even though she had spent very little time alone with any of these people, except for Ann.  But talk was talk; she could have named all the allegiances of everyone at base if she had to.

The expedition rovers were each composed of two four-wheeled modules, coupled by a flexible frame; they looked a bit like giant ants.  They had been built by Rolls Royce and a multinational aerospace consortium, and had a beautiful sea green finish.  The forward modules contained the living quarters and had tinted windows on all four sides; the aft modules contained the fuel tanks, and sported a number of black rotating solar panels.  The eight wire mesh wheels were 2.5 meters high, and very broad.