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that outfitted Stafford.
Said there was nothing unusual. He took along his usual extra airpacs. They
sayits not enough to last beyond Friday. We already knew that. We talked to
everybody we could find."
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Philippe: "We even separated them. Engaged them in separate conversations. How
do you call it? We grilled them. Third degree. Nothing."
Annie: "Everybody was friendly, of course. But nobody seemed to know anything
specific about his plans. We did the best we could."
Carter: "Okay. Look, Becky, tomorrow I want everything you've got here. All
the images. We'll go over it all with a fine-tooth comb."
"I'll have it all here, but you won't see much."
7
FEBRUARY 46, WEDNESDAY
Dawn over Hellas. Carter, Philippe, and Annie were up early. They met in the
war room. Jet lag still enshrouded them like fog. It was midnight back in Mars
City.
Becky had ordered in coffee and rolls. "I've got the high-res photos from
Monday, and the early photos," she said. "Let me show you." She seemed most at
ease when talking about the new images.
She took them through the long hallway around Hellas Base, to the war room.
This time, Carter noticed a sign on the door that said CARTOGRAPHIC, and there
was evidence that a second word, once mounted below this, had fallen off.
Philippe nosed around in the corners behind equipment, as if looking for
something hidden. "You analyze satellite photos?" he asked Becky.
"When I'm not fetching things for Mr. Stafford, I study cloud formation
patterns and motions."
"Okay," Carter told her. "Let's review the situation. On Saturday the
thirty-fifth, you got photos of the whole Hellespontus region. Let's see
those."
"What are you looking for?" Annie asked.
"I don't know yet. I'm just looking."
"You've only got thirty meters resolution," Becky said. "You're not going to
find anything."
"You already said that, last night."
At the console in front of the screen Becky shrugged with irritation and
punched in some coordinates and file numbers. A mosaic of photos came up in
oranges and ochers, a near-vertical view of old, worn ridges and a field of
secondary impacts caused by debris thrown from some major impact site,
offstage.
Low sunlight slanted in from the left. The mosaic was almost seamless. Here
and there a blank, brickish-tan trapezoid, matched to the color of the
adjacent background, indicated a gap in the coverage.
Carter had a fleeting thought: What if the solution to the whole mystery fell
into one of those bland little holes?
"Hey, craters!" Philippe said. It was supposed to be a joke. Nobody laughed.
"Zoom in and scan," Carter asked. "I just want to get the feel of the place."
Becky fiddled and the image blew up, the montage growing into a single frame,
a random area fifteen kilometers across. There were some windswept hillocks,
rounded by the wind into streamlined forms like
inverted boats set out on a vast beach. Becky leaned back with her head tipped
to one side. The scene slowly slid to the right, like a view from an airplane.
The bowllike hills grew more densely crowded. A
few kilometers farther on, they merged into a desiccated low plateau, which
eventually gave way to featureless desert.
Carter stirred. "Whoa!"
Becky stopped the scan.
Now they were seeing an expanse of open desert with faint dunelike ripples,
loose dust on ancient, hard sediments. The field was peppered with half a
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dozen hundred-meter craters. Among the craters and dunes were amorphous
lighter patches bordered on their right sides by long, dark patches: long
shadows.
The shadows were often triangular, narrow at the contact with the light patch
and fanning out from there.
"Look at that," Carter breathed. "Dust devils."
Philippe: "How do you know? They just look like blobs."
Carter turned to Annie. "Sorry. We have to put up with these greenhorns, you
know what I mean?"
"I was going to ask the same question myself," she said. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]