So Art did that. The fallen cable out in front of the Beast showed clearly how much harder it had been coming down here than it had back at the start of its fall. Here it was buried to perhaps a third of its diameter, and the cylinder was flattened, and marked by long cracks running along its sides, revealing its structure, which consisted of bundles of bundles of carbon nanotube filament, still one of the strongest substances known to materials science, though apparently the current elevator’s cable material was stronger yet.
The Beast straddled this wreckage, about four times as tall as the cable; the charred black semicylinder disappeared into a hole at the front end of the Beast, from which came a grumbling, low, nearly subsonic vibration. And then, every day at about two in the afternoon, a door at the back of the Beast slid open over the tracks always being excreted from the back end of the Beast, and one of the diamond-capped train cars would roll out, winking in the sunlight, and glide off toward Pavonis. The trains disappeared over the high eastern horizon into the apparent “depression” now between him and Pavonis about ten minutes after emerging from their maker.
After viewing the daily departure, Art would take a drive in the pilot-fish rover, investigating craters and big isolated boulders, and, frankly, looking for Nirgal, or rather waiting for him. After a few days of this, he added the habit of suiting up and taking a walk outside for a few hours every afternoon, strolling beside the cable or the pilot fish, or hiking out into the surrounding countryside.
It was odd-looking terrain, not only because of the even distribution of millions of black rocks, but because the hard blanket of firn had been sculpted into fantastic shapes by the sandblaster winds: ridges, boles, hollows, tear-shaped tailings behind every exposed rock, etc.— sastrugi, these shapes were called. It was fun to walk around among these extravagant aerodynamic extrusions of reddish snow.
Day after day he did this. The Beast ground slowly westward. He found that the windswept bare tops of the rocks were often colored by tiny flakes that were scales of fast lichen, a kind that grew quickly, or at least quickly for lichen. Art picked up a couple of sample rocks, and took them back into the Beast, and read about the lichen curiously. These apparently were engineered cryptoendolithic lichens, meaning they lived in rock, and at this altitude they were living right at the edge of the possible— the article on them said that over ninety-eight percent of their energy was used simply to stay alive, with less than two percent going toward reproduction. And this was a big improvement over the Terran species they had been based on.
More days passed, then weeks; but what could he do? He kept on collecting lichen. One of the cryptoendoliths he found was the first species to survive on the Martian surface, the lectern said, and it had been designed by members of the fabled First Hundred. He broke apart some rocks to have a better look, and found bands of the lichen growing in the rocks’ outer centimeter: first a yellow stripe right at the surface, then a blue stripe under that, then a green one. After that discovery he often stopped on his walks to kneel and put his faceplate to colored rocks sticking up out of the firn, marveling at the crusty scales and their intense pale colors— yellows, olives, khaki greens, forest greens, blacks, grays.
One afternoon he drove the pilot fish far to the north of the Beast, and got out to hike around and collect samples. When he returned, he found that the lock door in the side of the pilot fish would not open. “What the hell?” he said aloud.
It had been so long that he had forgotten that something was supposed to happen. The happening had taken the form of some kind of electronic failure, apparently. Assuming that this was the happening, and not . . . something else. He called in over the intercom, and tried every code he knew on the keypad by the lock door, but nothing had any effect. And since he couldn’t get back in, he couldn’t turn on the emergency systems. And his helmet’s intercom had a very limited range— the horizon, in effect— which down here off Pavonis had shrunk to a Martian closeness, only a few kilometers away in all directions. The Beast was well over the horizon, and though he could probably walk to it, there would be a section of the hike where both Beast and pilot fish would be over the horizon, and himself alone in a suit, with a limited air supply. . . .
Suddenly the landscape with its dirty sastrugi took on an alien, ominous cast, dark even in the bright sunshine. “Well, hell;” Art said, thinking hard. He was out here, after all, to get picked up by the underground. Nirgal had said it was going to look like an accident. Of course this was not necessarily that accident, but whether it was or it wasn’t, panic was not going to help. Best to make the working assumption that it was a real problem, and go from there. He could try walking back to the Beast, or he could try getting into the pilot-fish rover.