She grimaced. “But not as much as your psychodrama has, right?”
“Hey, you must think I’m obsessed with the game. I’m not. It’s fun and-oh, maybe `fun’ is too weak a word-but anyhow, it’s just little bunches of people getting together fairly regularly to play. Like my fencing, or a chess club, or, or anything.” .
She squared her shoulders. “Well, then,” she asked, “will you cancel the date you’ve made and spend your holiday with me?”
“I, uh, I can’t do that. Not at this stage. Kendrick isn’t off on the periphery of current events. He’s closely involved with everybody else. If I didn’t show, it’d spoil things for the rest.”
Her glance steadied upon him. “Very well. A promise is a promise, or so I imagined. But afterward-Don’t be afraid. I’m not trying to trap you. That would be no good, would it? However, if I maintain this liaison of ours, will you phase yourself out of your game?”
“I can’t-” Anger seized him. “No, God damn it!” he roared.
“Then goodbye, Colin,” she said, and departed. He stared for minutes at the door she had shut behind her.
Unlike the large Titan and Saturn-vicinity explorers, landers on the airless moons were simply modified Luna-to-space shuttles, reliable, but with limited capabilities. When the blocky shape had dropped below the horizon, Garcilaso said
into his radio, “We’ve lost sight of the boat, Mark. I must say it improves the view.” One of the relay micro satellites which had been sown in orbit passed his words on.
“Better start blazing your trail, then,” Danzig reminded.
“My, my, you are a fussbudget, aren’t you?” Nevertheless, Garcilaso unholstered the squirt gun at his hip and splashed a vividly fluorescent circle of paint on the ground. He would do it at eyeball intervals until his party reached the glacier. Except where dust lay thick over the regolith, footprints were faint under the feeble gravity, and absent when a walker crossed continuous rock.
Walker? No, leaper. The three bounded exultant, little hindered by spacesuits, life-support units, tool and ration packs. The naked land fled from their haste, and ever higher, ever clearer and more glorious to see, loomed the ice ahead of them.
There was no describing it, not really. You could speak of lower slopes and palisades above, to a mean height of perhaps a hundred meters, with spires towering farther still. You could speak of gracefully curved tiers going up those braes, of lacy parapets and fluted crags and arched openings to caves filled with wonders, of mysterious blues in the depths and greens where light streamed through translucencies, of gem-sparkle across whiteness where radiance and shadow wove mandalas-and none of it would convey anything more than Scobie’s earlier, altogether inadequate comparison to the Grand Canyon.
“Stop,” he said for the dozenth time. “I want to take a few pictures.”
“Will anybody understand them who hasn’t been here?” whispered Broberg.
“Probably not,” said Garcilaso in the same hushed tone. “Maybe no one but us ever will.”
“What do you mean by that?” demanded Danzig’s voice.
“Never mind,” snapped Scobie.
“T think I know,” the chemist said. “Yes, it is a great piece
of scenery, but you’re letting it hypnotize you.”
“If you don’t cut out that drivel,” Scobie warned, “we’ll cut you out of the circuit. Damn it, we’ve got work to do. Get off our backs.”
Danzig gusted a sigh. “Sorry. Uh, are you finding any clues to the nature of that-that thing?”
Scobie focused his camera. “Well,” he said, partly mollified, “the different shades and textures, and no doubt the different shapes, seem to confirm what the reflection spectra from the flyby suggested. The composition is a mixture, or a jumble; or both, of several materials, and varies from place to place. Water ice is obvious, but I feel sure of carbon dioxide too, and I’d bet on ammonia, methane, and presumably lesser amounts of other stuff.”
“Methane? Could that stay solid at ambient temperatures, in a vacuum?”
“We’ll have to find out for sure. However, I’d guess that most of the time it’s cold enough, at least for methane strata that occur down inside where there’s pressure on them.”
Within the vitryl globe of her helmet, Broberg’s features showed delight. “Wait!” she cried. “I have an idea-about what happened to the probe that landed.” She drew a breath. “It came down almost at the foot of the glacier, you recall Our view of the site from space seemed to indicate that an avalanche buried it, but we couldn’t understand how that might have been triggered. Well, suppose a methane layer at exactly the wrong location melted. Heat radiation from the jets may have warmed it, and later the radar beam used to map contours added the last few degrees necessary. The stratum flowed, and down came everything that had rested on top of it.”