It was still quite a hike from the stop, all the more so for someone carrying a suitcase. A predawn fog hugged the ground, spectral white in the half-light. Diesel trucks, announced by silvered columns of exhaust, tore along the asphalt highway with their tires humming, their taillights flashing bright red as they rounded the bend. Pirx shifted his suitcase to the other hand and gazed skyward. A low-lying fog, he thought, seeing stars overhead. Routinely he scouted the sky for the Mars reference star. Just then the gray dawn quivered and the fog was shot through with a searing green. Instinctively he lowered his jaw. There was a low rumble, a hot blast. Ground tremors. Seconds later a green sun rose above the land. The snow glared sinisterly all the way to the horizon, the shadows of the road posts skipped on ahead, and those things not already tinted a brilliant green were suffused with ember-red. Pirx set his suitcase down and, rubbing his hands, watched as one of the spiring minarets—eerily luminous, towering above the basin’s hilly skyline as though obeying some strange architectural whim—wrenched itself loose from Earth and began its majestic ascent atop a pinnacle of fire. The thunderous roar soon became something palpable, filling the atmosphere; through his fingers he saw in the distance a cluster of towers, buildings, and reservoirs bathed in a brilliant aureole. The windows of the control tower were ablaze, much as if a fire were raging inside; contours buckled and broke in the incandescent air as the instigator of this spectacle vanished into the heavens with a triumphant roar, leaving behind an enormous black ring of smoking earth. Before long a thick, warm shower of condensation descended from the star-studded sky.

Pirx picked up his bag and trudged on. It was as if the blast-off had breached the night; daylight came with a rush now, brightening everything around him: the melting snow lying in the ditches, the valley floor emerging from its misty cover.