“If Father could have known!” broke from Kaino.
“Yes. I remember. He would have jubilated.” Ilitu’s softness went thoughtful again. “This is but a preliminary, crude hypothesis of mine. It could be wrong. Already I wonder if this unique planetoid may not have had, in the past, a kind of vulcanism special to itself. It does possess a significant magnetic field of its own, you recall, and the formation here has several resemblances to the Pele’s Hair phenomenon on Earth.”
“Eyach, we can take a few hours,” Kaino said. “Gather more data.”
Ilitu raised his upper lip off the front teeth. His parents would have grinned differently. “I will.”
He took out a reader, keyed a map onto the screen, and studied it. His eyes darted about, correlating what he saw with the cartography done in orbit. Iron growths were scattered across the plain. About two kilometers hence, close to the southern horizon, a metallic band glistered from edge to edge of vision, some three meters wide. On the far side of it reared a whole row of coraldids, up to five meters tall.
“We’ll go yonder,” he said, pointing.
Kaino laughed. “I awaited no less. Ho-hah!” They set forth, as swiftly as before. In a few minutes Kaino veered. “Where go you?” asked Ilitu without changing course.
“That bush there.” It was small but full of sparkles.
“I’ll study the major objects first. If time remains and you’ve found this one interesting, I’ll come back to it.” Ilitu continued.
Kaino squatted down by the pseudo-shrub. Particles embedded in the darker iron caught sunlight and shone like glass. Maybe that was what they were, he decided after examination: fused silica entrained in the drops that had made the thing. Or they could be another mineral, such as a pyrite. He was no expert. Clearly, though, the geologist’s intuition had been right. Here was nothing notable, merely beautiful. Kaino straightened and started off to rejoin his comrade.
Ilitu had just reached the metallic strip in front of his destination. A leap brought him onto it.
It split asunder. He fell from sight.
“Yaaaa!” screamed Kaino. He went into full low-gravity speed. Barely did he check himself at the border of the ribbon.
Ribbon indeed, he saw. This part of it, if not all, was no deposit sprayed across the rocks. It was, or had been, a cover for a pit—a cavern, a crevasse, or whatever—one of the emptinesses that seismic sounding had shown riddled the planetoid, as Ilitu predicted.
It must have been a freak, a sheet of moltenness thrown sidewise rather than downward in those moments of rage when Iron Heath took form. Low weight let it solidify before it dropped into the hole—unless the hole had appeared simultaneously, the ground rent by forces running wild—The layer was thin, and the cosmic rays of four billion years, spalling, transmuting, must have weakened it further—
Kaino went on his belly, crept forward, stuck his helmet over the gap. He failed to notice how the shingle slithered underneath him. Blackness welledbelow. “Ilitu,” he called. “Ilitu, do you receive me? Can you hear me?”
Silence hummed in his earplugs.
He got a flashlight from his kit and shone it downward. Light returned dim, diffused off a huddled whiteness. Kaino played the beam to and fro. Yes, a spacesuit. Still no response. It was hard to gauge the distance when murk swallowed visual cues. He passed his ray slowly upward. The little pool of undiffused illumination wavered among shadows. An inexperienced man would have been nightmarishly bewildered.
Kaino, intimate with the Moon and certain asteroids, interpreted what he saw. He couldn’t tell how long the fissure was, nor did he care, but it was about 175 centimeters broad here at the top and narrowed bottomwards. Ilitu lay forty or fifty meters below him. A nasty fall, possibly lethal, even in this gravity; but friction with the rough walls might have slowed it. There seemed to be depths beyond the motionless form. Ilitu might be caught on a ledge.
So.
Kaino got his feet and aimed his transmission aloft. The ship was not there at the moment, but her crew had distributed relays in the same orbit. “Code Zero,” he intoned. Absolute emergency. “Kaino on Code Zero.”