Sax, having landed mostly on Phyllis, sat up unhurt. Alarming sucking sounds came over the intercom from Phyllis, but it soon became clear that she had only had the wind knocked out of her. When she controlled her gasping she tested her limbs gingerly, and declared she was okay. Sax admired her toughness.
There was a rip in the fabric over his right knee; but otherwise he was fine. He took some suit tape from his thigh pocket and taped the rip; the knee still bent without pain, so he forgot about it and stood.
The hole that they had punched through the snow above them was about two meters over his outstretched hand. They were in an elongated bubble, the lower half of a crevasse that had a kind of hourglass shape. The downstream wall of their little bubble was ice, the upstream wall ice-coated rock. The rough circle of visible sky overhead was an opaque peach color, and the bluish ice wall of the crevasse gleamed with reflections of the dusty sunlight, so that the net effect was somewhat opalescent, and quite picturesque. But they were stuck.
“Our beeper signal will be cut off, and then they’ll come looking,” Sax said to Phyllis as she stood up beside him.
“Yes,” Phyllis said. “But will they find us?”
Sax shrugged. “The beeper leaves a directional record.”
“But the wind! Visibility may go right down to nothing!”
“We’ll have to hope they can deal with it.”
The crevasse extended to the east like a narrow low hallway. Sax ducked under a low point, and shone his headlamp down the space between ice and rock; it extended for as far as he could see, in the direction of the east side of the glacier. It seemed possible that it might reach all the way to one of the many small caves on the glacier’s lateral edge, so after sharing the thought with Phyllis he set off to explore the crevasse, leaving her in position to be sure that any searchers who found the hole would also find someone at the bottom of it.
Outside the glary cone of his headlamp’s beam, the ice was an intense cobalt blue, an effect caused by the same Rayleigh scattering that blued the color of the sky. There was a fair amount of light even with his headlamp off, which suggested that the ice overhead was not very thick. Probably the same approximate thickness as the height of their fall, now that he thought of it.
Phyllis’s voice in his ear asked if he was all right.
“I’m fine,” he said. “I think this space might have been caused by the glacier running over a transverse escarpment. So it very well might run all the way out.”
But it didn’t. A hundred meters farther on, the ice on the left closed in and met the ice over the rockface to the right, and that was it: dead end.
On the way back he walked more slowly, stopping to inspect cracks in the ice, and bits of rock underfoot that had perhaps been plucked from the escarpment. In one fissure the cobalt of the ice turned blue-green, and reaching into it with a gloved finger, he pulled out a long dark green mass, frozen on the surface but soft underneath. It was a long dentritic mass of blue-green algae.
“Wow,” he said, and plucked a few frozen strands away, then shoved the rest back into their home crack. He had read that algae were burrowing down into the rock and ice of the planet, and bacteria were going even deeper; but actually to find some buried down here, so far from the sun, was enough to make one marvel. He turned off his headlamp again, and the luminous cobalt blue of the glacial light glowed around him, dim and rich. So dark, so cold, how did any living thing do it?
“Stephen?”
“I’m coming. Look,” he said to Phyllis when he returned to her side, “it’s blue-green algae, all the way down here.”
He held it out for her to look at, but she only gave it the briefest glance. He sat down and got out a sample bag from his thigh pocket, and put a small strand of algae inside, then stared at it through his 20yen; magnifying lenses. The lenses were not powerful enough to show him all he wanted to see, but they did reveal the long strands of dentritic green, looking slimy as they thawed out. His lectern had catalogs with photos at similar magnifications, but he couldn’t find the species that resembled this one in every detail. “It could be nondescript,” he said. “Wouldn’t that be something. It really makes you wonder if the mutation rate out here is higher than the standard rates. We should work up experiments to determine that.”
Phyllis did not reply.
Sax kept his thoughts to himself as he continued to search through the catalogs. He was still at it when they heard scratchy squeals and hisses over their radio, and Phyllis began calling out over the common band. Soon they could hear voices on the intercom, and not long after that, a round helmet filled the hole overhead. “We’re here!” Phyllis cried.