Hidden Variables (44 page)

"I'm sure most of them didn't." I was skimming us along into a dry ravine, where we could make better speed. It was going slower than I had hoped. "Look at the plants that you'll see in a few minutes in the valley bottoms. Most of them are primitive forms, nothing like as complex as you'd expect on a planet this old. And mere are a lot less species than you find on Egg. It must have been touch and go here. Egg was lucky, it had more water and it's less dense."

"You think it was simple adaptation of existing forms?"

"What else could it be?" I skirted us around a smoking patch of black rock. We could probably have gone over it without damage, but the underside of the hover-car was its most vulnerable part.

"Talk to the biologists when we get back to Egg," I went on. (If we got back?) "The forms that were already here and adapted to summer inactivity and deep rooting took that trend further. You won't see any animals at all at midsummer—they've found their hideaways. Quake has no viviparous forms, and all the eggs are tucked away ten meters down. Some of those will survive almost any violence on the surface."

While we were talking, the face of the land around us had been changing, slowly becoming flatter and less dried-out. There was only one body of water of decent size within two hundred kilometers of the foot of the umbilical, and we were getting close to it. Even in the worst earthquakes, I had never known it to dry up. I had come here on each of my summer visits to Quake. The first time had been pure exploration. On my second trip, Amy had wanted to see everything, but I had carefully chosen areas that I already knew, where the dangers would be reduced. I was sure that she would behave in her usual way, dancing on ahead of me and revelling in every new sight. I couldn't control her, had never been able to. Now we were tracing back over the same familiar ground, heading for the side of the lake. As we curved around a deep caldera, I halted our craft completely and let us settle to the ground. I remembered this spot from my previous visits—it had been inactive for at least five years, and that was unusual for Quake.

I opened the door. The heat sprang in at us, as though it had been waiting outside for its chance. We were still many hours from midsummer, and more than that from maximum temperatures. I breathed shallowly, reluctant to impose that sulphurous hotblast on my unprepared lungs.

"See those, Councilman?" I pointed down the steep caldera side. "At the bottom there. This is one place that Eta-Cass never shines. You might expect it to, at noon, but that's when Egg eclipses it. Those places, the bottoms of the steep craters—that's the coolest place on Quake in midsummer. If anyone wants to survive summertide here, that's where they ought to go."

Rebka peered gingerly down the steep slope. "So you think that's where we'll find the Carmel sisters?"

"Not in this particular one—in one nearer to the lake. We have time to look at maybe three of them before we have to turn back. But it's still our best bet. We have to keep moving and hope that Quake doesn't decide to fill the bottom of the one we want with molten lava."

Now it was Rebka's turn to look anxiously at his watch. He nodded. "We ought to be able to look at more than three, we've done well."

"Less well than you might think. I expect we'll be slower going back. Quake will be a lot livelier then." I slid the door shut, turned the air-cooler to its maximum setting, and started the lift and forward motors. As we moved closer to the lake, Rebka studied again the images that we had made from the umbilical. They were high-resolution, and he was looking for any signs of unusual activity in the craters by the lake.

"See anything on those?"

He shook his head. "I'm not used to looking at pictures of Quake. You'd do a better job."

"I think it's better if I stick with the driving. Time is the most important element of all now. Are any of the craters more heavily vegetated than the rest?"

He puzzled over them for a couple more minutes. Outside, it was again growing dark, but we had to press on through the night—not too difficult, thanks to the steady light from Eta-Cass B.

"I think three of them have more growths in the bottom than the others," he said at last.

I shrugged. "That saves any tough decision-making. Mark them up, and pass them over. I'll try and pick us the best path to them."

There was no point in trying to be too fancy. As Quake became more turbulent, we would have to make course changes to accommodate that. With old memories running on ahead of me, I set our speed as fast as I dared and threw the hover-car on and on, across the lava-lit, smoke-veiled landscape. Black and orange-red, heaving and moving like a wounded animal—Quake summer, the season for nightmare.

I was glad to be back.

* * *

The Winch controllers had promised me an extra four hours. That was my margin for error, as much as they dared grant us without risking huge damage to the umbilical. Rebka had no idea how much that four-hour dispensation would cost in possible recriminations if things went wrong. I did, and I was horrified at how much the controllers were willing to put on the line for my benefit—I knew it wasn't for Rebka or the Carmel twins, they were strangers. If we got back in one piece, I owed the group of engineers a debt that I would have trouble ever repaying. How much is four hours worth? At midsummer maximum, the price was too high to calculate.

We were approaching the first of our selected craters, moving in on it to the irregular accompaniment of distant thunder. Part weather, part volcanic eruption. As Quake trembled, atmospheric storms grew in intensity.

Our timing was bad. Quake's three-hour night was rushing in on us, and there was no way that Eta-Cass B could shine into the depths of the crater. I handed the controls of the hover-car over to Rebka, and took a last look at the dark pit-depth in front of us before I opened the door.

"Hold us steady right here. Don't move, unless you have to because you see a lava-flow getting too near. Sound the siren if that happens—I don't want to come back up and find molten rock coming down to meet me."

The air outside was stifling. I guessed that it had heated up another five degrees since we had last opened the door. It took me only a few seconds to walk over to the lip of the crater and begin the slither down its steep sides. In that short time I felt perspiration start out onto my face and arms. It took me another couple of minutes to stumble and scrape my way to the bottom, to the place where the head-high purple ferns marked the area shielded from the direct sun. The flashlight that I carried was not much use. It allowed me to avoid the worst stumbles, but I still had a number of semi-falls on the way down.

After a few minutes of thrashing around in the crater bottom, I was confident that it held nothing but plant life. No one could have forced their way into the ferns without leaving a trail of broken stems behind them.

I turned and began to scramble my way back up the steep sides, noting that the bottom of the ferns had managed to slash through my pants and leave lines of itchy cuts all over my lower calves. I could feel a strong reaction there, a quick swelling caused by the irritant sap. By the time I reached the car the pain and itching were all I could stand.

"Nothing?" said Rebka, as I swung open the door. It was a rhetorical question. I dropped into my seat and waved at him to get us moving again. While I sprayed my legs with a coagulant and anesthetic, Rebka started us cautiously on our way to the second crater. As soon as I was in reasonable shape I went over and took the controls.

"We have to go faster. I took too long down in that crater." I risked opening the throttle one more notch, remembering that the path towards the lake side held no major rock outcrops that might cripple the hover-car. "Good thing it's getting light again. We'll find the next one easier with the sun shining. I lost time in the bottom of that one splashing in a sort of messy bog. If I could have seen it from above I'd have known ahead of time that we wouldn't find them in that."

After a couple of minutes I had to decrease speed again. Rocks or no rocks, there was no way that I could hold our pace. Quake was feeling the full power of the solar forces. The ground that we moved over was in constant motion, an uneasy, irregular stirring. I increased the pressure of the under-blowers, to move us fifty centimeters higher from the ground, and ran us along as fast as I dared.

Before I went down into the next crater I borrowed Rebka's knee-high boots. They were two sizes too small, but I could stand a couple of blisters and cramped toes better than lacerated calves. Dawn had arrived as we drove. The sun had risen through a red, smoky screen that made everything in the air of Quake diffuse and incredibly beautiful. Dust in the upper atmosphere offered some shielding from the solar rays—not much, but anything was welcome.

This time it took me only a minute to determine that no one was in the crater. All I had to do was make a quick circuit of the stand of vegetation at the bottom, and confirm that its perimeter was undisturbed. On the way around it I saw a small shape fleeing in front of me. Some native animal had lost the battle with the planet. Something must have gone wrong with its time sense, and now it was too late to estivate. There was a tiny chance that it could survive summertide by crouching deep in the vegetation. I wished it luck as I scrambled back to the car, using my hands to help me in the ascent. The crater walls were perceptibly hotter than the air. That didn't look good for the little animal.

A few more hours, and this pit would probably see a lava breakthrough. The plants and animals would be buried beneath the molten flow. Ten years from now, wind-borne seeds would begin the recolonization, rooting in the mineral-rich surface of hardened lava. Twenty years, and the animals would return.

It occurred to me that we could adapt to life on Quake, if we really wanted to. All it needed was a change in attitude. We would have to accept a more rapid breeding rate, and the idea that we would lose one-fifth of the population each year. Maybe we had just become too soft. Random, violent death had gone from our lives—look at Rebka's reaction to the possible death of the Carmel sisters. We had no plagues, famines, or natural disasters to thin our ranks—unless we chose to seek them out in places like Quake.

Rebka was looking anxiously at his watch when I finally got back to the car. I dropped into my seat and sat, head down, for a full minute while he again got us moving on our way.

"We're going too slowly," he said. "We'll never do it in time. Four more hours, and we have to turn back."

His face was pinched with tension. I at least had the chance to work some of mine off, scrambling around the crater bottoms and burning up the adrenalin.

"One more crater," I said, as soon as I had enough breath to speak. "The next one is closest to the lake. I give it a better chance than the other two we've done."

After the outside heat the inside of the car felt freezing. I gulped down fruit juice and a stimulant and took over the controls again. Now I drove with one eye on the sun—I wanted to reach the final crater in full daylight. Eta-Cass A seemed to be racing across the sky, a reddened, dust-dimmed blur that occasionally broke through to send bright spears of yellow light onto the heaving surface of Quake. I was racing against the sun, and I was losing. Noon eclipse came when we were little more than halfway there.

Close as we were to perihelion, I knew that the outside temperature was still far from its peak. Fractures on the surface of Quake were still releasing the inner fires, at the same time as Eta-Cass A poured in more solar flux.

We came to the third crater as night was again falling. The orange glow around the horizon was continuous now, reflecting from the high dust clouds. As I climbed out of the car there was a violent burst of crimson light directly in front of me, not more than a kilometer from the other side of the crater. As the lava burst from the volcano summit, I saw Amy.

She was watching the eruption, clapping her hands as the crimson was replaced by the glow of white-hot lava. The stream crested the cone and began a quick march towards us, sputtering and sparking where it touched the cooler earth.

I turned and looked closely at her face. There was no fear there, only the rapt enhancement of a child at a fireworks display. The caution had to come from me—there was no place for it in her view of the world.

I tugged at her sleeve. "All right, that's the high spot of the show. We have to start back to the Stalk. It's a five-hour journey, and by the time we get there they'll be thinking about loosening the tether and moving it up."

She turned to me. I knew that pout very well. "Not yet. Let's watch until the lava gets to the water."

"No. I'm not taking more risks. We have to get out of here. I'm beginning to boil."

I was, too, despite the air curtain that kept a sheath of cool air blowing about us. My heat came from inside, the burning of my own worry.

"In a minute." Amy turned all the way around, looking over the whole horizon. There was, thank God, no new eruption emerging near the lake. "All right, then. Marco, you've got to learn how to have fun. All the time we've been here, you've been sitting there like a block of stone." She took my hand and pulled me closer. "You have to let yourself go and get into things."

I felt relief as we began to walk back to the car. We still had plenty of time. From the lake side, we went back to the high point where we had first parked to overlook the arrival of summertide. I had wanted to stay there, but somehow we had found ourselves outside, halfway to the lake. I didn't want to be too near when the lava met the water behind us.

And now I was again at the same lake—my fourth visit during Quake's summer. This time, I was hurrying into the shaded depths of an old crater, closer to midsummer maximum than ever before. Quake's brief twilight was over and the pit below me was black and unfathomable. I shone my light close to the ground in front of me and half slipped, half fell down the steep slope.

At the bottom there was no sign of the lava glow, but I could still hear and feel the broken percussion of seismic movement. When I put my hand to it, the ground was at blood heat. This crater too was probably due for drastic change.