“Huge sediments laid down rapidly—thousands of meters thick in some places. Not slow over millions of years,” Rudi answered.
“Uniformitarian chronology is dead,” another voice commented. It sounded like Dennis Curry.
“If oceanic deposits were due to slow, uniform accumulations, they would get steadily thicker with increasing distance from the ridges as the sea floors spread.” Rudi again. “In fact that’s what some textbooks originally claimed before the facts were in, because they were so sure it would be true. But when they got around to actually doing the drillings, they found the opposite. The thickest deposits were at the ridges and along the edges of continental shelves. Practically nothing on the sea floors far from the ridges, where it should have been.”
“But just the places where planetwide flood surges would be slowed by obstructions and shed their sedimentary loads,” Kieran completed aloud. It made sense to him—but then, he wasn’t an academic indoctrinated with assumptions that were incompatible with the notion.
“Exactly,” Hamil replied. “You have many interests for a busy doctor. Where did you graduate med school, out of curiosity?”
“We have to talk about that, Hamil,” Trevany interjected hastily.
Before them, a pinnacle of rock leaning away from the main massif rose thirty or forty feet above their heads, its sides weathered into horizontal grooves and ribs that revealed the strata it had formed from. The trail ended at a leveled terrace skirting the fissure separating the pinnacle from the face, where an assortment of canisters, boxes, and other pieces of equipment lay scattered around. What they had seen of the pinnacle turned out to be only the top part, Kieran saw as they spread out along the edge. The fissure plummeted downward as a narrowing wedge of space that was quickly lost in shadow relieved only by the yellow glows of artificial lighting lower down that told nothing of their depth. Kieran estimated that the lights had to be somewhere near the level of the valley floor below the mesa, although inaccessible from there directly.
A concrete platform set into the lip of the drop carried a motorized hoist mechanism and winding drum with a projecting girder structure and guide wheels, over which a cable descended alongside two vertical rails attached to the rock. A track of lighter colored dust among the rocks extended from the hoist platform to the far side of the terrace, probably indicating where rubble brought up from below had been carried to the edge and dumped.
Hamil was talking inside his helmet, presumably on another channel. Then his voice came through, cautioning: “Stand clear of the machinery, everyone.” Moments later, the hoist began running. Hamil extended an arm to indicate the fissure below. “Zorken started one of their slant bores from the bottom as a shortcut for getting samples from deep under the plateau. The excavations that they opened up down there attracted our interest too. When we got to poking around on our own, we started to uncover things like pieces of what looked like paving, and stones that couldn’t have been shaped naturally. That was when Walter decided to come out from Earth and join us.”
“I’d been following what was going on. Juanita and I are old colleagues,” Trevany commented. “I’d already been talking with Katrina’s college about getting them to sponsor some field work. Rudi contacted me to say he wanted to come along too. He had the background for this kind of work.”
“And Gottfried,” Rudi said.
“Oh, yes. Of course there’s him.”
“Who’s Gottfried?” Kieran asked.
“He’s a small, tracked, remote-controlled robot that I had made for field work out in the Middle East,” Rudi replied. “Ideal for exploring things like narrow shafts and awkward places. There is an autonomous mode of operation too—good for mapping areas of terrain or exploring larger spaces. You might see him. He’s down where we’re going.”
The elevator appeared from below in the form of a railed metal platform six feet or so square with the hoist cable attached to the side running on the guide rails. Two men were riding it, clad in double-skinned heavy-duty suits streaked with orange and brown dust. As the elevator stopped level with the concrete edge, one of them opened the inner section of guardrail like a gate, and together they manhandled off a rubber-tired tip wagon filled with sand and rubble. One had a wizened face with a straggly gray mustache; the other was black.