Aurora by David A. Hardy Read Free Book Online

and sat up. It seemed to Lefty that something had gone from her face. As she changed into her street clothes and walked to the door her expression was blank, reminding him of the first time he had seen her.
    Little girl lost.
    â€œWhere do you think you’re going?” he asked.
    â€œBack up to Inverness, perhaps. I think maybe I’ll study for a while; try to get into university. I’m wasting my time here.”
    â€œWasting your time? But what about the band! We’re gonna make it big, can’t you dig that? You can’t just walk out on the rock scene now, just like that.”
    â€œRock?” she said. A faraway look flickered in her eyes and then was gone. “Oh, yes, rock,” she’d said coldly as she’d closed the door behind her. “That’s all that matters, isn’t it?
    â€œRock....”

ACT THREE

ARSIA MONS
    Rock. Rock and more rock. Black rock, ochre rock, amber rock. Nothing but rock everywhere you looked. Anne Pryor chipped at the flank of Arsia Mons with her geologist’s hammer and carefully placed the latest fragment in her sample case. She spoke the identifying data into her helmet mike, tonguing on the recorder; writing was difficult wearing the gloves of the Mars environment suit. That said, the flexible and almost skin-tight Mars suit was a big improvement on the bulky Apollo suits. For a while it had looked as though the type of “hard suit” produced by ILC Dover with Hamilton Sundstrand, as used on the International Space Station, would be pressed into service here too. But, although in space legs are almost superfluous, here on the surface of Mars mobility and freedom of movement were paramount.
    The colors around here, she mused for the umpteenth time, were surprisingly drab. Despite her training, she had still expected rich reds, oranges and yellows—the colors that appeared in just about all the photographs and space art she had seen. But the reality—at least in this locality—was mainly pale brown, with variations into buff, yellow and tan. The scenery in the central area of Iceland, where she had spent some weeks on a field trip, had been very similar. And almost as cold....
    That was an exaggeration, she acknowledged wryly. Tharsis was cold , even for Mars.
    That was one of the reasons why the area had been chosen for the expedition. The strange parallel ridges on the lee side of Arsia Mons, looking curiously like ploughed fields, had turned out to be a recessional moraine; that is, dirt and rubble left behind by a glacier. It had been known for many years that clouds often blew over the volcano; these precipitated as storms of ice crystals. And the ice stayed where it fell on these high slopes. It had been building up for a long time.... She had seen similar layered glaciers in Iceland, too; those had been caused by the ash from repeated eruptions. One of her tasks here was to see if these layers on Arsia Mons could have the same cause.
    Apart from that, Arsia Mons was the southernmost of a set of triplets, three shield volcanoes of very similar size, the other two being Pavonis and Ascraeus. To the northwest stood the far mightier Olympus Mons, which towered above the plain to a height ten times that of Earth’s Mount Everest. Olympus Mons was too big, really, for it was impossible to take it all in, except from out in space. Earth’s largest shield volcano—Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawaii—provided a similar visual effect, dominating the landscape only as a long, low hill. But the volume of Olympus Mons was over fifty times than even that of Mauna Loa. There was evidence that there could have been thermal activity in this area, millions or possibly just thousands of years ago. Ever since the highly controversial discovery in the mid-1990s of “fossil life” in a Martian rock—ALH 84001—found in the Antarctic and the Pathfinder and other unmanned missions that had followed,