Thus the scene where Edmond Beynac died.
“Go up onto the peak,” he ordered Nkuhlu and Oliveira. “Along the way, take pictures and gamma readings as usual. What I want you to bring down in your packs is some pieces of the top — exact locations laser-gridded, do not forget this time, by damn! Yes, and a core, a meter or two deep. Plus a seismic sounding. I need to know the inside of this thing. Just how in bloody hell did it happen?”
He respected the men, therefore he did not addwhat was obvious, that he had given them a difficult, perhaps dangerous assignment. Himself, he went with Ilitu into the badlands on the farther side of the scar. There he had found another enigma to investigate, strata where theory said no strata should be.
The ascent by Nkuhlu and Oliveira turned into a small epic of the kind that goes as undertones through every heroic age. Gravity was low but gear was massive and the faces to climb precipitous. An hour might be spent in peering at the next stage before attempting it. At that, thrice one man or the other would have fallen to his death, had he not slammed short on a line attached to his well-anchored partner. Life support labored, spacesuits grew hot, breath harsh, mouths dry; rest was measured in minutes on a ledge, doles of water sucked from a tube, rations and stimulants pushed through a chowlock—until at last, shaky-kneed on the summit, the pair looked down at desolation and out into immensity.
Thereupon the real work began. Never before had they wrestled with such stuff as this. It was not rock, it was metal; it was not uniform but multiply and intricately alloyed, a tangle of layers, encysted lumps, and vacuoles. When an ion torch cut free a sample, white-hot gobbets might spit back. When a sonic pulse went downward, the whole footing might tremble.
What caused the disaster was a shaped minicharge. It should simply have split an anomalous plumbic vein, to produce recoverable specimens. Instead, the explosion found a resonance. Weaknesses unstressed for billions of years gave way. The eagle’s beak broke apart. A dozen huge, a hundred lesser chunks fell.
Beynac and Ilitu had emerged back on the plain, out of a crevice where their headlamp lights touched on mysteries. They were bound diagonally across, toward the dome shelter at the far corner and the gig that should bear them again to their ship. The walls around them had screened out radio. Else Beynac would have heard his helpers, vocally recording each thing they did. He might have warned them. Or he too might not have guessed.
He and his companion were well into the open when the overhang sundered. Tiny at their distance, the rocks went slowly at first. They accelerated, though, worse than a meter per second for every second that passed. They hit bottom at over two hundred kilometers per hour. In most places they would have bounced to a quick stop. Here the ground was smooth and hard. Friction, never much in low gravity, was almost nil. Moreover, the plain was not truly level. The increase of weight toward the asteroi-dal center of mass gave it a slight but real downslope.
Oliveira and Nkuhlu went on their bellies and gripped anything they could while the peak shook beneath them. Dust, cast high when the stones landed, briefly obscured heaven. It arced down. Rising to their feet, they saw boulders and gravel fan outward across the iron of the plain, a sleetstorm aimed for the two figures at its middle.
Now they heard a radio cry. “Nom de Dieu! A bos, Ilitu! Drop you, drop, God damn!” No man could dash clear of what was coming. The geologists flung themselves prone. Still they saw the rocks leap, bound, roll toward them. They felt those soundless impacts as drumbeats up through suits, flesh, bones. Sparks flew, momentary stars below the stars. There was time to think, remember, even speak.
Ilitu, Lunarian, hissed defiance. Beynac called, steady-toned, “If I do not survive, tell my Dagny I loved her.” Otherwise he ignored the frantic voices from spire and ship. But when the storm reached him, he transmitted, surely unawares, “O Maman, Maman— “