Judging by the way the ash had drifted, Bunny thought that the wind had been westerly for some time, possibly the entire two and a half days it had taken them to make it this far. Nanook even began to touch down on the mud from time to time, and when the humans walked on it, they felt only a tolerable warmth through the soles of their boots. It certainly wasn’t hot enough to damage the snowshoes, which were proving their worth through the heavier ash deposits.
They were moving steadily to one side of the smoldering cone. Smoke or steam was windborne away from them to the east, so that the air was not so clogged with ash and sulfur stench.
Seen from this safe distance, the volcano didn’t, to Bunny’s way of thinking, look all that dangerous. It was actually not very big.
“It doesn’t have to be big to be dangerous,” Steve said when she voiced her observation. “I’m no expert on vulcanism-Petaybee is not supposed to be labile,” he added in a sourly amused tone, “but, on a world which does have considerable activity, a volcano can rise up one day and disappear the next. After raining ash, lava, rock, or whatever all across a landscape. We’re just lucky this is only an ash-and-mud type. Some rise for the one blowoff and then remain dormant.”
“Is this one dormant now?” Bunny asked, eyeing it nervously.
“We hope,” Steve said with a grin.
“Clodagh?” Bunny persisted.
Clodagh shrugged and plowed on tirelessly. Nanook skirted a vast lake of hardening mud that steamed more than did most of the rivulets and puddles of the stuff.
The volcano was almost out of sight behind them, obscured by the foothills, when Nanook suddenly picked up the pace, from an amble to a working lope. Then, abruptly, he halted at a fast-running stream to lap up the clear water. The others were glad to follow his example.
Clodagh did more than drink: she immersed her face in the stream. She was so long about it that Bunny got worried, but when she finally lifted her dripping head, she wore a broad smile.
“That way,” she said, pointing uphill in a more northerly direction as she wiped her face, leaving dark gray smudges on her forehead and down her cheeks.
Ash clung to all their clothing and rendered their complexions ghostly gray.
“Let me see if I can get a message through, Clodagh,” Steve said, starting to unsling his radio equipment.
“Not now,” she said, shaking her head, and began to follow the stream. Steve shrugged and resettled the radio equipment.
The stream disappeared into a narrow opening at the bottom of the first terrace of the cliff. When Clodagh indicated that they would have to climb, they discarded the snowshoes. Bunny marveled that Clodagh calmly prepared herself to climb, hitching her skirts high enough so that her sturdy legs, clad in woolen pants knitted in a variety of quite lively colors, were visible. She was slow, true enough, but she made certain progress upward. Nanook reached the top of the terrace in three graceful leaps, Dinah scrabbling close behind him. Fortunately they didn’t have all that far to go. On the second terrace, Nanook turned to his right and led them around an escarpment, ducked into a hole in the stone, and disappeared from sight. Only then did Clodagh groan, for she would have to go down on hands and knees to follow the big cat. She did.
Once inside, they could all stand up again. Clodagh paused, leaning against the wall to catch her breath. Bunny thought the pace was telling on the large woman. It was certainly beginning to wear Bunny down a bit, and she was much more used to running about than Clodagh.
“Hey, this is like the other place,” Diego said, looking about him. A curious luminescence gave enough light for them to see.
“Quite a few subterranean networks did appear on the last scan that was made of this planet,” Steve was saying as he examined the rock walls, wiping off a light film, which he rubbed between his fingers. “They weren’t on previous ones, but they do account for the subsidences. Or do they? Most unusual. I wish Frank had been well enough to travel with us. He’s more familiar with such geological anomalies than I am.” He walked on a few more strides before he stopped completely, forcing Diego, walking behind him, to hurriedly step aside. “Or perhaps there was a flaw in the original terraforming that has produced unforeseen long-range crustal defects. A shame that Dr. Fiske was killed on the shuttle crash.”