John found it disturbing. It made it difficult for him to concentrate, and he needed to keep a close eye not only on the read-out of his Geiger counter but also on the massive form of his companion. Richard’s every movement seemed to be informed with care and concentration, but John could not forget that his old friend still did not really know who either of them was. It was like walking along a dangerous roadside with a young child: he could never quite be positive that Richard would behave in a sensible, adult manner. Each time he glanced down or looked away, John feared that Richard might have done something stupid in the instant he was out of observation. Quite simply, he was beginning to regret bringing his friend with him at all; he should have followed the advice he knew Asha would have given him and left Richard safely in bed on Titan.
As the sides of the gully they were following got steeper, so the depth of the sand-clotted runoff through which they were wading deepened and John’s glum thoughts were lightened by a glimmer of relief that he had insisted that they all wear full foul-weather gear and high boots. Richard, slightly ahead, sloshed on like a fluorescent yellow giant, in a world of his own. A turbaned giant — perhaps a genie — with his head bound in a simple bandage. Both men had hoods folded back on their shoulders. It was cold here, but not so cold that they needed their hoods up. John waved his Geiger counter from side to side, glancing down to see the needle staying solidly in the safe green. The constant visual checks were necessary because of the noise; the machine would have had to register a nuclear holocaust before the auditory signal managed to cut through the ceaseless, thunderous, hissing sloshing babble washing around them.
Such was the power of the sound that John did not at first hear the buzzing of his walkie-talkie. Richard did, however. The way in which the two-way radios functioned had been explained to him on the flight over here. ‘Someone wants to talk to you,’ he bellowed, gesturing.
John jerked the machine up to his ear. ‘Higgins,’ he yelled.
‘Tom Snell here. We’ve got a reading.’
The chill against which John was so carefully protected suddenly seemed to be inside him. In a column between his heart and his bladder, he froze solid. ‘They’ve got a reading,’ he yelled at Richard and was unaccountably relieved when his friend nodded wisely as though he understood the implications of that simple statement. ‘Tell me about it,’ he ordered Tom Snell.
‘Easier said than done, I’m afraid,’ came the distant voice of the engineer. ‘We’re on a broad reach of open country. Pancake flat as far as the eye can see. And we have a reading with nothing to show for it.’
‘You can’t see anything at all?’
‘Ice covered with sand. It’s not even rolling. I can see both my other teams on either hand and then the hills you’re in on the far eastern horizon. But it’s like Blackpool beach here for God knows how many square kilometres. Except that there’s no pier and no tower; nothing at all, in fact.’
Richard had come back to stand beside John, crouching slightly so that he could hear what was being said.
‘It’s under them,’ he suddenly announced. ‘If there’s nothing to see nearby on the surface then it’s buried in the ice under their feet.’
John found himself nodding in silent agreement. ‘Did you hear that, Tom?’
‘Yes. It’s what we figured too. The only logical explanation. Was that Captain Mariner?’
‘Yes, it was. How strong is the reading?’
‘Nice to hear him firing on all cylinders again. The reading isn’t all that strong here. Well under danger level…’
‘But they don’t know how deep it’s buried,’ murmured Richard.
‘… but we don’t know how deep the thing’s buried. You think we should dig?’
‘Negative. Certainly not. Mark it on your map. Make some kind of notation as to shape and size of the signal; it might be important.’
‘Yes, we hadn’t thought of that. We’d rather assumed it was going to be one point of emission, but you’re right. We’ll set to what?’
‘Nought point five millisieverts,’ said John.
‘OK. We’ll set to nought point five and trace the shape of the signal at that.’
‘If it is one point of emission, they’ll just get a circle,’ murmured Richard.
John nodded again. “That’s it, Tom,’ he said. ‘I’ll warn Colin Ross. You keep in touch with me.’
‘Will do. Over and out.’
John lowered the walkie-talkie from his ear and looked speculatively up at Richard. ‘You seem to have a good grasp of this.’ There was almost accusation in his tone. ‘Are things coming back to you?’
‘Nothing you didn’t explain in the helicopter,’ answered Richard. ‘Nothing at all before I woke up in the sickbay.’ For the first time, he sounded worried about his loss of memory. ‘It will all come back, won’t it?’
‘Sure to. Soon.’
Their eyes met and John tried to force all the sincerity at his disposal into his. In spite of Richard’s brightness and his impressive grasp of the rudiments of radioactivity, John still felt that he had probably overstepped the mark by bringing him along. Whether or not Richard read this in his eyes, the tall man puffed out his cheeks and turned away. Then he was sloshing on up the dirty valley floor and John was following just behind him, looking down and dialling in Colin Ross’s wavelength.
And so the day wore on. Morning became noon and afternoon. John realised that in spite of all the meticulously organised preparations, he had omitted to bring any food. He also regretted the decision not to bring skis or ski poles — both of which were available — because they were no use on sand. They would have been very useful on the slopes of soft ice which were so rapidly washing themselves clean, however, and as the afternoon wore on, John’s legs began to regret that particular decision, poignantly. The apparent weakness of the walkie-talkies bothered him too; as the slopes above the valley sides gathered around them, so the range of his radio seemed to diminish. The outer teams faltered into incomprehensibility and soon only Colin and Steve Bollom were clearly audible; the military contingent was out of contact altogether, which, under the circumstances, was increasingly worrying.
The head of the valley they had been in when Tom Snell first reported his discovery sloped up to a watershed and then gave on to a high saddle which in turn fell away into another valley. It plunged southward between two parallel ranges of low hills, one running to the east of them and another to the west. High on the saddle, at the very point of the watershed, they paused. Here they had something of a vista to north and to south. Looking back along the track they had followed, they could see how much of the valley was now uncovered. A slow river of sludge, up which they had just waded, seemed to be running sluggishly away onto the outthrust of the plain upon which the helicopter had originally dropped them. Ahead of them, a precipitous valley seemed equally deep in filth, equally beautifully framed. The brightness reflecting off the clean ice slopes seemed to multiply itself from gallery to gallery, emphasising the dull depths of the slowly-moving sand sludge.
The brightness of the slopes was by no means a pure white, however; it was variously champagne, straw and gold. The light of the afternoon sun was still filtered through streams of sand which were being whipped northwards by the high wind. High in terms of speed if not of altitude; the steady thrust of the harmattan was still in excess of sixty knots but the lower edge of the sand was little more than two hundred metres above their heads, and it still gave the impression of being a feverishly active gallery of rock, as though they were moving through some strange kind of lucent cave whose walls glowed with phantom light mysteriously forbidden to the roof and floor.