I didn't hit for open space, knowing that Captain Giles would have a radar spotting-net out for me. Instead I swung the _Annabelle_ eastward and whizzed over Syrtis Major toward the abandoned oxygen-reduction plant where I had hidden Cora, my other smiley. I needed a hideout while I figured out a campaign to clear myself, and there was a flimsy old warehouse at the oxy-plant that would screen the _Annabelle_ nicely.
I scouted the desert carefully before drifting in for landing, and saw nothing but a great desolate ocean of gritty red sand. Back in the days when Earth was just beginning to cool off that desert might have been a landscape of sorts, but aeons of oxidation had changed all that. It was nothing now but a waste of powdered iron rust, sifted fine by a million winds and patterned by the feet of jackals.
The old reduction plant huddled in a wide, shallow depression made in years past by the scooping and hauling of sand to the converters. It reminded me of the ghost towns I had read of as a kid, before telemovies and stereo-spools replaced the old historical novels carried over from the twentieth century. It was never haunted by Indians and buffalo, but it had seen its share of jackals and sand snakes, and the wild, little, brown baboon-faced Marties of the deserts had smashed all its windows when the Earthies moved on.
Not many reduction plants were needed on Mars any more. The first homos to come had to wear atmosphere masks--a first-water paradox, because the rusty red deserts were full of good oxygen locked up in simple ferrous oxide form--but they soon changed that. When enough of them had come they set up atom-powered reduction plants by the hundreds, breaking the red sand back to its primal elements of iron and oxygen.
They used the iron in their first cities and they let the oxygen go free. Before the Big Jump there used to be arguments, I've heard, to the effect that Earthies could never live permanently on Mars because the air was too thin and oxygen-poor. But unlocking oxygen from the sand solved half the problem, and the other half never existed.
In the .38 gravity of Mars, any physical action requires only a fraction more than one-third as much effort as it would require on Earth. And only one-third as much oxygen is needed to sustain that effort.