The Georgian laughed and swatted himself lightly on the earflaps of his cap. Penance paid, he followed Katerina back toward the tent.
The noise was so loud, it did not let Frank Marquard think. A few days before, he had looked down into Jotun Canyon, observed the flood, taken some pictures, and gone back to Athena conscious of nothing more than a job well done. Now he was a half a mile from the edge of the canyon, but the roar and boom coming up out of it were enough to stun. And the flood was just beginning.
He lifted the flaps of his cap and stuck in earplugs. They helped, but only somewhat. As at a rock concert, he still felt the noise through his feet, through his skin, and through his soft palate when he opened his mouth to breathe.
And with the earplugs in place, he could not talk to Enoph.
He took them out and tried to yell above drumroll and thunder.
“How you stand noise?”
The Minervan spoke through the din rather than over it, not raising his voice but talking more slowly so each word came out distinctly. “It happens every year,” he said. “We can get used to it or we can go mad. Getting used to it is easier.”
“I suppose so.” Frank tried speaking as Enoph had and found to his surprise that it worked. He had heard stories of men talking in normal tones under factory racket but had never believed them. Now he did.
The vibration of the ground grew more severe as he got closer and closer to the edge of the canyon, until it was like walking during a moderate earthquake. Being a Los Angeles native, Frank had done that more times than he cared to remember. Here, though, the shaking went on and on. He consoled himself by thinking that anything that could have shaken loose would have done so millions of years before. That reassured the rational part of him; the rest still wanted to find a doorway to stand in.
He crawled the last few feet to the edge of the canyon, not wanting to be pitched over it if a slab of ice or a boulder happened to smash into the side especially hard. As he looked down, though, awe cast away fear.
The mist above the waters was thick and sparkling, like a sundappled fogbank viewed from above. That was exactly what it was, Frank realized. It would have concealed a great deal on Earth but it could not hide the Minervan floods.
Water thundered, roared, bellowed, cast itself upward off obstacles or off itself, and flung iceberg fragments and great stones into the air with mindless abandon. Frank squeezed off several pictures, knowing none of them could convey the sheer scale of what he was seeing. It was like watching gray whales mate in deep water. He had done that once, off the California coast.
He stuck an infrared filter on his lens. After that, the color values on his shots went south, but they did a better job of piercing the mist to show the watery fury that rampaged beneath.
“It grows steadier later in the season,” Enoph said. “More of the gorge is filled, and a more regular flow replaces this first rush of water.”
Marquard nodded; that was as computer models had predicted. The models had even warned of the mist above the water. What they had not done, could not do, was prepare him for the wonder the spectacle brought.
“Flood ever rise to top of canyon, spill out?” he asked. The computer had said that might happen, if everything went exactly right-exactly wrong, he supposed, from the Minervans’ point of view.
V
Enoph turned blue with fear at the very idea. “You humans have terrible thoughts! What would be left of a domain?” Not much, Frank thought, not when the main local building stone was ice. For Enoph’s sake, he was glad the simulation had been on the extravagant side.
The geologist took two more pictures, which finished off the roll. He decided against reloading; better to wait a couple of days and come back. That would tell him something about how fast the water was rising in the canyon.
He walked back toward Athena. He wanted to feed the roll into the developer now, so that he could see how it came out. When he got back to the ship, he found one roll processing and another in the lN bin with a Postit note from Sarah attached:
“Bump yours ahead of this and you die!” Knowing Sarah, she meant it. Frank sighed and stuck his film behind the other waiting roll.
He heard his wife’s voice from the front cabin. No one else seemed to be aboard. Even Emmett and Louise, who hardly ever went away, were off doing something or other with Reatur; he had seen them by the castle. Frank grinned to himself. Such chances were not to be wasted. He walked forward, whistling to let Pat know he was coming.
She turned around in her seat, waved so he could tell she saw him, then went back to speaking Russian. “I had hoped the creature lived on your side of the canyon, too, Shota Mikheilovich, or had relatives there, but if not, not. Athena out.”
Rustaveli also signed off. With a discontented grunt, Pat complained to her husband. “He doesn’t have any idea about what’s related to what. He’s just thinking in terms of this species or that, not genera or families or orders. He’ll end up hauling all his data home so the bigwigs in Moscow can try to make sense of it. Why’d he bother to come?”
“He doesn’t have the computers we do,” Frank answered.
He scratched his head, trying to remember what she had toldhim a couple of days before. Succeeding made him smile. “If he’d found that little burrowing thing, he’d never have guessed it was related to the one the Minervans call a runnerpest. They don’t look anything alike.”
Pat smiled, too. “Oh, you were listening after all. You’re right. That burrower is so adapted to underground life that without computer extrapolation of what its ancestors used to look like there’d be no telling which order it belonged to.”
“Mmhmm.” Frank paused a moment. “Quiet in here.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Pat’s gaze swung back to him. “Is that a hint?”
“More than a hint, you might say. Call it an invitation.”
Something passed over Pat’s face and was gone before Frank was sure he had seen it. Then her eyes went to the floppy she had been using while she talked with her Russian opposite number. Finally, though, she shrugged and said, “Why not?” Not the most enthusiastic response in the world, Frank thought, but it would do. He slipped his arm around her waist as she got up. They walked back to their cubicle.
Afterward, he leaned up on his elbow in the narrow bottom bunk. Pat lay beside him, not moving, not talking, looking up at the foam rubber mattress pad over their heads. “All right?” he asked, more hesitantly than he had expected.
“I guess I’m just tired,” she said, shrugging again. Bare as she was, that should have been enchanting. Somehow it was not. Shell said that more than once lately, times when she’d been less responsive than he had hoped. And she still did not look at him.
He thought for a while. Over the years, he had grown used to pleasing Pat and pleasing himself thereby. He took things as he found them, but this failure was something he would sooner not find again. “Anything I can do to help?” he said hesitantly.
Now her eyes turned his way. “This is the first time you’ve offered that,” she said. Curiosity mingled with-accusation in her voice.
“Didn’t think I needed to before.”
“Hmm.” She was studying him as dispassionately as if he were one of her specimens. “Well, maybe.” Her tone was judicious, too.
“Is that ‘well maybe I didn’t think so’ or ‘well maybe I can’?”
He pantomimed the confusion he was feeling.
She laughed. Now the jiggles that produced excited Frank. He could not have said why, unless it was relief at no longer being studied like a runnerpest. “Well, maybe”-she paused wickedly-“a little of both.” Her hand took his and guided it.