The sun .burst into sight. Farther stars vanished around it. Westward they still gemmed a majestic darkness, for the solar radiance was wan where no heiphts reflected it. This country was not altogether a plain of dull-colored rock, though. In places it sheened amidst the shadows that puddled in its roughness. Here and there the shadows reached long from formations whose laciness came aglitter and aglisten.
The anomalous region bordered rather sharply on the sort of terrain common on the lowlano’s of this world-1—coarse regolith, like shingje, virtually dust-free. A field van rolled to the marge and stopped. Two spacesuited forms climbed out. A robot followed, four-legged, four-armed, thickly instrumented, burdened with .gear. For a minute they stood looking across the strangeness ahead of them.
Then: “Come!” rapped Kaino, and started forth afoot.
“Is this wise?” wondered Ilitu. “Send the robot first.”
“We’ve no hours to squander on probing and sounding. Would you see what we’re here to see? Get aflight!”
After an instant’s hesitation, the geologist obeyed. The machine lumbered behind. While Kaino was furious at Brandir’s decision, his haste also had an element of reason. He had insisted on del curing, and Ilitu backed him, in order that he might be sure of visiting Iron Heath before he arrived at camp and took a fiitsled up to Beynac. Otherwise he, at least, probably never would, given everything else there was to do in the limited time remaining for it and the unlikeliness of another expedition here soon. The roundabout route overland stretched both food and fuel cells thin; the men were on half rations, which doubled his impatience. They could not dawdle. After they had long been cramped in their vehicle, freedom to move brought exuberance as abrupt as the sunrise. “Hai-ah!” Kaino shouted. Forward he went in panther leaps. His spacesuit, state of the art, flexed around him, almost a second skin. Powerpack and life support scarcely weighted him. The dense globe pulled with a force 86 percent that of home, ample for Lunarian health and childbirth, liberating in its lightness. Landscape rivered from the near horizon to flow away beneath his feet. Breath sang in his nostrils, alive with a pungency of sweat.
He halted at the nearest formation. Ilitu joined him. They gazed. The robot trailed forlornly in their direction. It was built and programmed for a certain class of scientific tasks; at everything else, if it was capable at all, it was weak, slow, and stupid.
“What is this?” Kaino whispered.
From space, the travelers had simply become aware of curious protrusions on an unfamilar sort of territory. They could not untangle the shapes. Seen close up, the thing was sheerly weird.
An Earthdweller would have thought of coral. Lunarians knew that marvel only in books and screens. An intricate filigree rose from the ground, thin, its topmost spires some 1 SO centimeters high, its width variable with a maximum of about 100. Variable too was the brightness of strands, nodules, and rosettes; but many gleamed in the hard eastern light.
Ilitu walked around it, leaned close, touched, peered, hunkered, rose, took a magnifying glass from his tool pouch and went over the irregularities bit by bit. When the robot reached him, he ignored it. The sun climbed higher, breakneck fast to a Lunarian. More stars disappeared.
Kaino began to shift about and hum a tune to himself.
“A ferrous alloy, J think,” Ilitu said at length. “You observe whole metallic sheets strewn across the regolith. I deem they’re overlays, not the inner iron bared, although we must verify that. I would guess that thisand its fellows are spatter formations. An upheaval flung molten drops and gobbets about. When they came down in a group, they welded together as they solidified, which they would have done very quickly.”
Kaino went alert. “A meteoroid strike? We’ve no sign of a crater.”
“It may have happened when the planetoid was forming out of fragments, itself hot and plastic … Hai, that suggests the original, catastrophic collision occurred near Jupiter, because I should think a strong magnetic field was present to urge so many gouts along converging arcs. And that suggests enormously about the origin of this body and its orbit … about the early history of the asteroid belt, the entire Solar System—“ Ilitu beat fist in palm, over and over. He stared outward at the fading stars.