The dominant red tones came from dust suspended in the air. There was about ten times as much dust, she knew, as over Los Angeles on a smoggy day. And no rain, ever, to wash it out.

She walked away from Challenger then, working her way over into the sunlight, moving along the shadow of Challenger, toward the west. The MEM’s shadow was a long, sharp-edged cone on the rocky surface before her.

She passed beyond the edge of the shadow and into the light.

She turned. Sunlight shone into her face, casting reflections from the surfaces of her faceplate.

Sunrise on Mars: the sky here was different, the way the light was scattered by the dust…

The sun, rising above the silhouetted shoulders of Challenger, was surrounded by an elliptical patch of yellow light, suspended in a brown sky. It looked unreal.

The sun was small, feeble, only two-thirds of its size as seen from Earth.

She shivered, involuntarily, although she knew that her suit temperature couldn’t have varied; the shrunken sun, the lightless sky, made Mars seem a cold, remote place.

She turned around, letting her camera pan across the landscape. The Martian dust felt a little slippery under her boots.

She stepped farther away from Challenger, her line of footprints extending on into the virgin regolith. She felt as if the long, thin line of communications attaching her to Challenger and her home planet was growing more attenuated, perhaps fraying, leaving her stranded on this high, cool plain.

The land wasn’t completely flat, she saw now, as the light continued to increase; there was a subtle mottling in the shading. And she made out what looked like low sand dunes, off to the west. But the dunes were more irregular than terrestrial sand dunes, because, she guessed, of the small size of the surface particles; the dunes were actually more like drifts in the dust.

Away to the west, she saw a line, a soft shadow in the sand. It looked like a shallow ridge, facing away from her.

She walked forward, farther from the MEM.

After perhaps fifty yards she came to the ridge. It turned out to be the lip of a small crater, quite sharply defined, a few dozen yards across, embedded in the floor. But the crater walls were worn, and there was a teardrop-shaped mound behind it.

That mound had to be an erosional remnant, streamlined like the remnants found in terrestrial braided streams. And she thought she could see stratification in the sides of the remnant. It was just like the scablands, after all.

She began to step down into the crater, clumsily; her legs were stiff, and dust swirled up around her, sticking to her legs and her HUT.

Her faceplate was misted up, her breath rapid. She leaned forward.