Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [122]
But it turned out there were only two people in the trailers by the strip, and neither of them had watched him land. They were inside watching TV news from Earth. They looked up when he came in the inner lock door, and jumped to their feet to greet him. Ann was up one of the mountain canyons with a team, they told him, probably no more than two hours’ drive away. John ate lunch with them, two Brit women with North accents, very tough and charming. Then he took a rover and followed the tracks up a cleft into the Charitum. An hour’s twisting climb up a flat-bottomed arroyo brought him to a mobile trailer, with three rovers parked outside it. Together they gave it the look of a dessicated café in the Mojave.
The trailer was unoccupied. Footprints led away from the camp in many directions. After thinking it over Boone climbed a knoll west of camp, and sat down on its peak. He lay on the rock and slept until the cold penetrated his walker. Then he sat up and tongued a capsule of omegendorph, and watched the black shadows of the hills creep east. He thought about what had happened at Senzeni Na, running through his memories of the hours before and after the accident, the looks on people’s faces, what they had said. The image of the falling truck gave his pulse a little surge.
Copper figures appeared in a cleft between hills to the west. He stood and descended the knoll, and met them down at the trailer.
“What are you doing here?” Ann said over the first hundred’s band.
“I want to talk.”
She grunted and switched off.
The trailer would have been a bit crowded even without him. They sat in the main room knee-to-knee, while Simon Frazier heated spaghetti sauce and boiled water for pasta in the little kitchen nook. The trailer’s sole window faced east, and as they ate they watched the shadow of the mountains stretch out over the floor of the great basin. John had brought along a half-liter bottle of Utopian cognac, and he broke it out after dinner to moans of approval. As the areologists sipped he cleaned the dishes (“I want to”) and asked how their investigation was going. They were looking for evidence of ancient glacial episodes, which if found would support a model of the planet’s early history that included oceans filling the low spots.
But Ann, John thought as he listened to them; would she want to find evidence of an oceanic past? It was a model that tended to lend moral support to the terraforming project, implying as it did that they were only restoring an earlier state of things. So probably she would not want to find any such evidence. Would that disinclination bias her work? Well, sure. If not consciously, then deeper. Consciousness was just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core, after all. Detectives had to remember that.
But everyone in the trailer seemed to agree that they weren’t finding any evidence for glaciation, and they were all good areologists. There were high basins that resembled cirques, and high valleys with the classic U-shape of glacial valleys, and some dome-and-wall configurations that might have been the result of glacial plucking. All these features had been seen in satellite photos, along with one or two bright flashes that some people had thought might be reflections from glacial polish. But on the ground none of it was holding up. They had found no glacial polish, even in the most wind-protected sections of the U-shaped valleys; no moraines, lateral or butt; no signs of plucking, or of transition lines where nanatuks would have stuck out of even the highest levels of ancient ice. Nothing. It was another case of what they called sky areology, which had a history going back to the early satellite photos, and even to the telescopes. The canals had been sky areology, and many more bad hypotheses had been formulated in the same way, hypotheses that were only now being tested with