I agreed as I didn’t mean to go far in any case. I didn’t much care whether we found lichen or not; I wasn’t feeling well. But I kept that fact to myself; I wasn’t going to be done out of my one and only chance to see some of the country.
We didn’t find any more lichen. We did find the crystals.
We were trudging along, me as happy as a kid let out of school despite an ache in my side and Hank taking useless photographs of odd rocks and lava flows. Hank had been saying that he thought he would sell out his place and homestead here in Happy Valley. He said, “You know, Bill, they are going to need a few real Ganymede farmers here to give the greenhorns the straight dope. And who knows more about Ganymede-style farming than I do?”
“Almost everybody,” I assured him.
He ignored it. “This place has really got it,” he went on, gazing around at a stretch of country that looked like Armageddon after a hard battle. “Much better than around Leda.”
I admitted that it had possibilities. “But I don’t think it’s for me,” I went on. “I don’t think I’d care to settle anywhere where you can’t see Jupiter.”
“Nonsense!” he answered. “Did you come here to stare at the sights or to make a farm?”
“That’s a moot point,” I admitted. “Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes the other. Sometimes I don’t have the foggiest idea.”
He wasn’t listening. “See that slot up there?”
“Sure. What about it?”
“If we crossed that little glacier, we could get up to it.”
“Why?”
“I think it leads into another valley—which might be even better. Nobody has been up there. I know—I was in the topo gang.”
“I’ve been trying to help you forget that,” I told him. “But why look at all? There must be a hundred thousand valleys on Ganymede that nobody has looked at. Are you in the real estate business?” It didn’t appeal to me. There is something that gets you about virgin soil on Ganymede; I wanted to stay in sight of camp. It was quiet as a library—quieter. On Earth there is always some sound, even in the desert. After a while the stillness and the bare rocks and the ice and the craters get on my nerves.
“Come on! Don’t be a sissyl” he answered, and started climbing.
The slot did not lead to another valley; it led into a sort of corridor in the hills. One wall was curiously flat, as if it had been built that way on purpose. We went along it a way, and I was ready to turn back and had stopped to call to Hank, who had climbed the loose rock on the other side to get a picture. As I turned, my eye caught some color and I moved up to see what it was. It was the crystals.
I stared at them and they seemed to stare back. I called, “Hey! Hank! Come here on the bounce!”
“What’s up?”
“Come here! Here’s something worth taking a picture of.”
He scrambled down and joined me. After a bit he let out his breath and whispered, “Well, I’ll be fried on Friday!”
Hank got busy with his camera. I never saw such crystals, not even stalactites in caves. They were six-sided, except a few that were three-sided and some that were twelve-sided. They came anywhere from little squatty fellows no bigger than a button mushroom up to tall, slender stalks, knee high. Later on and further up we found some chest high.
They were not simple prisms; they branched and budded. But the thing that got you was the colors.
They were all colors and they changed color as you looked at them. We finally decided that they didn’t have any color at all; it was just refraction of light. At least Hank thought so.
He shot a full cartridge of pictures then said, “Come on. Let’s see where they come from.”
I didn’t want to. I was shaky from the climb and my right side was giving me fits every step I took. I guess I was dizzy, too; when I looked at the crystals they seemed to writhe around and I would have to blink my eyes to steady them.