She put the big tractor into gear and pulled out, unnecessarily roughly, it seemed to me.
Of course, it could have been the bar.
The next day we hit the rough country. Rough for Mars, that is. Just a lot of low, rolling hills, running at odd angles to each other, with an occasional small outcropping of rust-red, eroded rock to make things interesting. We'd known it was there; it was clearly visible through the thousand-incher on Goddard. An ex-mountain range, they'd told us; not enough of it left to give us any trouble.
They couldn't see the rocks, and they didn't know we wouldn't be traveling according to the book.
It was obvious to both of us that riding the brakes on the 'dozer was the rougher job, and called for the quickest reflexes, which I had. Also, Helene had a hair-fine control over her voice, which I didn't have. Long before we hit the hills, I knew exactly how much braking she wanted from the way she asked for it. We couldn't have coordinated better if we'd been married for years.
In spite of that, it was amazing how little ground we could manage to cover in fifteen hours, and how little sleep we could get in the other nine and a half.
Helene stuck to the "valleys" as much as she could, which saved the equipment, but not the time. She couldn't avoid all the hills. Every so often, we'd run into a long, gradual rise, which terminated in a sharp drop-off. The tractor wasn't safe at an angle of over forty degrees. It took anywhere from half a day to a day and a half for the 'dozer to chew out a slot that the tractor could get down.
That was hard enough on us, but having to talk so much made it even worse. We were usually all but at each other's throats by the time the day's run was over. I usually spent three or four hours writhing in my bunk before I finally dozed off. I very seldom heard Helene twisting about in the bunk above me.