The two men were leaning over the empty seats in the cockpit of the rover. Jamie and the cosmonaut Mironov were outside, placing geology/meteorology beacons on the rock-strewn ground.
“Toshima?” asked Patel, feeling slightly puzzled.
Naguib smiled. “It would remind him of Fujiyama, don’t you think?”
“Oh. Yes, perhaps. Although this volcano is very much larger. And there is no snow at its top. And the slope is quite different.”
“Different gravity field,” Naguib said, as if that explained everything.
“Yes. Of course.”
After a full day’s travel, a night’s stop out in the open plain, and a morning of jouncing over the roughening terrain, the rover was still more than a hundred kilometers from the base of Pavonis Mons. It was too big to be seen in its entirety close up. Only from this distance could they view the entire structure.
Like the volcanoes that formed the Hawaiian Islands, the giants of the Tharsis region are shield volcanoes, lofty cones surrounded by wide bases of solidified lava. Pavonis Mons was the central of three such volcanoes, and the closest to the explorers’ domed base. The two others sat far over the curving horizon. Farther still beyond them was the most massive-and tallest-volcano in the entire solar system: Olympus Mons.
Pavonis Mons is a middleweight in comparison to mighty Mount Olympus. Pavonis’s base is scarcely four hundred kilometers across, about the width of Ohio. Its peak is hardly ten miles above the uplifted plain on which the rover sat. At its top is a crater, a caldera, barely wide enough to swallow Delhi or Calcutta.
For all its size, though, its slope looked deceptively gentle. Not like the steep rugged peaks of the Himalayas; Pavonis Mons’s flanks rose at a five-degree angle. Patel thought a man might walk to the summit easily, given a few days, and peer down into that yawning caldera. Was it truly dead? Or would he see fumaroles venting steam or wisps of other gases, preparing for the next eruption? The sky looked clear, cloudless. But what would he find if he could get to the top?
Patel shook his head, almost in tears, and said to Naguib, “To think that we will have only three days to spend there. Three little days! It would take months merely to make a preliminary survey.”
This excursion to Pavonis Mons had been the first casualty of Jamie’s insistence on returning to the Grand Canyon. The original mission schedule had called for a week’s stay at Pavonis. That had been cut to three days.
Naguib gave him a fatherly pat on the back. “Even three years would not be enough. A man could spend his entire life studying this beast.”
“It isn’t fair!” Patel burst out, banging a fist on the back of the empty pilot’s seat. “The entire reason for my coming to Mars was to study the Tharsis shields and now this… this… upstart…”
“Calm yourself, my friend,” said Naguib. “Calm yourself. Accept what cannot be changed.”
Patel pulled away and walked down the rover module as far as the airlock hatch. Then he turned back toward the Egyptian. The two men stood silently, facing each other along the narrow length of the module: the slim, liquid-eyed Hindu, his dark face shining as if sheened in sweat; the older, stockier geophysicist, graying at the temples, lines etched at the corners of his eyes and mouth.
“The next thing you will tell me is that this is the will of Allah,” said Patel.
“I am an atheist,” Naguib replied, smiling gently. “But I realize that our Navaho friend has prevailed with the mission directors, and the Americans have seized control of the mission plan. There is nothing we can do about it.”
They heard the clumping of the two other men entering the airlock. Patel’s slim hands clenched into fists, and for a moment Naguib thought that he would gladly murder Waterman.
While the three geological scientists were off on their excursion, the three biological scientists spent their spare time planning the coming trip to Tithonium Chasma.
They sat at the galley table, strewn with maps and photographs taken from the orbiting spacecraft. They had all watched Jamie’s videotapes until they knew them by heart.