Forty miles per hour would be a stiff gale on Earth, Jamie knew. But in the thin air of Mars there was no strength in the wind, not even enough to scour the last layer of sand off the rocks.
Jamie put his hands on his knees and let the suit’s fans cool him down for a while. His visor was starting to fog over from his exertion. He waited, scanning the barren rocky waste that stretched all around him. Dead rock, as rough and bare as the worst badlands he had ever seen in New Mexico. Blasted and pitted by meteor craters, some as big as a football field, most nothing more than the dent a hammer might make on the hood of a car. There were cracks in the solidified lava, vents and fissures that twisted from one crater pit to another. The ground rose almost imperceptibly toward the volcano’s high caldera, so far away that it was well over the horizon.
Strangely, not so many rocks were scattered around. The molten basalt must have pushed them downslope. Jamie pictured the black rocky field on which he stood as it must once have been: a broad surging stream of red-hot lava spewing from those vents to flow sluggishly down toward the plain, melting or bulldozing the rocks in its path.
Heat must be coming up from the interior along this fault line, Jamie reasoned. Molten magma flowing time and time again, building these big cones, spilling out to form the shields. Then what about Olympus Mons, some fifteen hundred kilometers to the northwest? It’s not sitting on a fault, not that we can see. But it’s probably younger than these three beauties. Could there be a hot spot down below that built Pavonis and its two companions, then migrated northwest to build Olympus?
Jamie realized his back ached from stooping awkwardly in the cumbersome suit. He straightened up, wondering, Does Mars have plate tectonics, like Earth? Wouldn’t think so, the planet’s so small that its core can’t possibly have enough heat energy to move whole continents of mantle rock. But there was enough heat energy to build these volcanoes. Where did it come from? Is it still flowing?
He looked upslope, his eye following the rugged, dark landscape as it climbed into the pink sky. When’s the last time you burped, Pavonis, my friend? Have you gone completely cold, or will you spread lava across this ground again one day?
Suddenly a flicker of motion in the corner of his eye startled him. It was gone by the time he turned his face toward it. A shadow flitting across the ground? Like a bird flying overhead…?
Jamie looked upward and saw the silvery speck of the soarplane glinting in the sunlight high above. His heart was pounding from the sudden rush of adrenaline. It made him feel foolish. No Martian hawks circling up there; just Pete Connors trying to photo-map Pavonis’s caldera. Hope it makes Patel happy.
“Voice check.” Mironov’s boyish tenor in his earphones startled Jamie. He looked around and saw that his shadow stretched long across the ground. The sun was getting close to the horizon.
“Patel here.”
The rover was parked a hundred meters or so down the slope, between a meteor crater twice its size and a zigzag fissure that might once have been a lava vent. You were right, Rava, Jamie said silently. These volcanoes have so much to tell us, and we won’t be here long enough to even begin to understand their story.
“Waterman okay,” Jamie said. The voice checks were standard safety procedure when the scientists were out of visual range of the astronaut or cosmonaut in charge of the team. In this rough ground, Mironov could not possibly keep all three of his wandering teammates in sight.
There was a long silence.
“Naguib?” Mironov’s voice sounded sharp in Jamie’s earphones. “Dr. al-Naguib, voice check please.”
No answer.
“Dr. al-Naguib?”
“He was over by the fissure there.” Patel pointed further upslope. “Perhaps the terrain is blocking his radio transmission.”
Jamie heard low guttural muttering, Mironov cursing in Russian. Following the outstretched arm of Patel’s yellow suit, Jamie called into his helmet microphone, “Let’s take a look, Rava. Maybe he’s in trouble.”