She broke off abruptly, realizing she might be treading onto delicate ground.
Joe wouldn't be coming with them, naturally, with his leg broken. He and Bruce and Rich would stay behind in the camp and finish setting it up, while the other three started scouting for Target 37.
Helen had decided to leave Bruce and Rich behind also, because neither of them had any skills that would be of particular use in this initial scouting expedition. A.J. was coming along for his sensor expertise, which would almost certainly be needed to find ruins that were sixty-five-million years old. Helen, of course, was the only one except Joe with real experience at this work. Finally, she'd chosen Madeline because three would be safer, and Helen had a great deal of confidence in the security official's general competence.
So there was really no reason for Joe to be up this early. Helen assumed that Madeline had woken him up when she arose. Which wouldn't have been hard to do, since she'd been sleeping with him.
Madeline Fathom had apparently decided that their safe arrival here was an omen, or a signal—or whatever it was that mattered to her Inner Self, which Helen still found somewhat mysterious. As soon as they'd started erecting the bubbles, she'd quietly and matter-of-factly explained that she and Joe would share one, so they only needed to put up four instead of five for living quarters.
The look on Joe's face when she'd made that announcement had been . . . priceless. It was blindingly obvious that it had come as a surprise to him, too.
The look on his face this morning, on the other hand, was that subtle, hard-to-define-but-unmistakable expression that characterized civilized men trying to suppress their cruder impulses. A combination of smugness and exultation kept under tight restraint, so that the barbarian within didn't start leaping about the landscape and shouting "Boy, did I score last night!"
But he also looked inexpressibly happy, so Helen forgave him his male sins. When all was said and done, she approved of Joe Buckley. Very highly.
"It's not my fault," Madeline said, smiling that million-dollar smile. "He insisted I wake him up before we left. I felt bad about it, since I didn't let him sleep much in the first place. Broken leg be damned, he got no mercy from me last night."
Okay, then. Not delicate ground.
Putting on his helmet, A.J. glanced over at Joe in admiration. One of the things he'd always liked the most about his friend was his very solid ego. It just didn't seem to faze Joe at all that he'd gotten himself a woman who could probably outdo him in almost anything except engineering and cooking—and maybe not the cooking. At this point, A.J. wouldn't really be surprised to discover that Madeline Fathom was a Cordon Bleu graduate, on top of everything else. She seemed to pull out new skills the way a magician pulled rabbits out of a hat.
"A.J.?"
He suddenly became aware that Helen was speaking to him. "Huh?"
"I said, are you ready? What's up?"
"Just thinking, taking up too many processing cycles to detect your inquiry. Sorry, yes, I'm set. Got it all ready."
The three of them stepped into Thoat's airlock and cycled out onto the Martian soil. A.J. took a deep breath, as though he were stepping outside a mountain cabin and breathing in the air. The magnificent view called for some such gesture.
The orbital pictures had shown the area of Target 37 as being near, or even right below, a whitish chevron-shaped marking next to a small gully or canyon on the floor of the Melas Chasma area. Such images are deceptive, however. A.J. was struck again by just how deceptive they were as he glanced to his right.
There, about a quarter of a kilometer distant, was the edge of the so-called gully.
The term was a little ridiculous, he thought. The sheer scale of Valles Marineris warranted calling it a gully, perhaps, but on Earth it would be a canyon in its own right. More than three kilometers across at its widest, it ran a curved, slightly zigzag course for more than thirty klicks before petering out. Even here, where it narrowed drastically, it was several hundred meters wide and hundreds deep, red-pink-gray rock walls plunging down into a shadowed crease in the immensity of Mariner's Valley.
As they had been the first humans to reach the gully, they felt they had the right to name it. And since they'd done so through the services of the huge rover, they'd unanimously decided to name it "Thoat Canyon." Barring any official objections later, of course; but, under the circumstances, that was hardly likely.
The lighter soil, not so clearly whitish up close, had strong concentrations of salts in it. For reasons that were unclear to A.J., that news had been very exciting to the areologists on Nike and presumably on Earth. Small rises and cliffs surrounded the area to the north, where A.J. was facing, and to the left. Thoat had needed to round the southern part of its eponymous canyon and drive northwest to reach their current position, and he could see their tracks still visible in the sands to the south. The wind would undoubtedly erase them eventually, but for the moment he suspected that most of their course across Mars could be traced from orbit with a good enough telescope.