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excavation.
    “Know-nothing fundamentalists,” he grumbled as he worked. It was impossible to bend far enough inside the hard-shell suit to lay down the doughy strips. Carleton had to get down on his knees. As he worked he crawled along the rough base of the pit like an oversized infant encased inside a robot.
    “I think they see Darwin as a challenge to their beliefs,” Doreen said.
    “I think they don’t think at all,” he groused. “They just follow orders from their know-nothing ministers.”
    “Now be fair,” Doreen countered. “If Darwin’s right and we humans are just another kind of animal, it destroys their belief that we’re special, that we were created by God separate and apart from all the animals.”
    “Yeah, and given dominion over the Earth so we can slaughter all the other animals and chop down all the trees and just generally screw up the environment.”
    “It destroys their belief that God sent his only son to redeem our souls,” Doreen said firmly. “It hits them where it hurts the most.”
    “You don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not about religion. It’s about politics. It’s about power. Their leaders use religion to keep their followers in line. When you’re told you’re doing God’s work you’re willing to do just about anything they tell you to.”
    “But they really believe their religion.”
    “Of course they do. That’s what makes them so ruthless. They think they’re on God’s side.”
    “Doesn’t everybody?”
    He looked up at her, from his kneeling position. “Is that what you believe?”
    “It’s what they believe, Professor.”
    “And you? What about you?”
    She hesitated a long moment before answering, “I’m not certain of what I believe. I know that I don’t have all the answers, that’s for sure.”
    “But you’re a Christian.”
    “A Quaker.”
    Surprised, he blurted, “A Quaker?”
    “Society of Friends,” Doreen said.
    “I never met a Quaker before,” Carleton admitted.
    “There aren’t that many of us. We’ve only got four regulars at Selene.”
    A Quaker, Carleton mused silently. William Penn was a Quaker. Philadelphia was founded by the Quakers. The University of Pennsylvania, too, if I remember right. But the university isn’t run by Quakers anymore. Hasn’t been for a long time.
    He felt the old anger simmering inside him again. Squatting on the floor of the excavation, he craned his neck to see Doreen up on the lip of the pit. A Quaker. Could a Quaker be a Mata Hari? he asked himself. Not very likely, he answered. Or are you just thinking with your testicles again?
    Finally he finished laying out the explosive strips and planting the thumb-sized detonators in them. Carleton laboriously slipped the climbing rig’s harness over the shoulders of his hard suit, then pressed the button on it that activated the winch. Through the thin Martian air the winch’s motor sounded like the faint whine of a mosquito.
    Once he reached the lip of the excavation Doreen came over to help him out of the harness. Then he took her gloved hand and led her fifty paces from the rim of the pit.
    “You’re going to set it off?” she asked.
    “Got to call control, back at the base,” he said, pecking at the suit radio’s keypad on his left wrist. “The geologists want to know when I blast, so they don’t get their seismometer records screwed up.”
    She watched him as he called the base and told the excursion director he was ready to fire the explosives.
    “Hold on while I check with the rock jocks,” the controller’s cheerful young voice came through his helmet earphones.
    Doreen started to ask, “Do they ever stop you from—”
    “Dr. Carleton? You’re cleared to detonate at 11:15 precisely. It’s now 11:06:33.”
    “Eleven-oh-six-thirty-three,” Carleton repeated, his eyes on the digital clock set into the wrist pad. “Check. I’ll blow at 11:15, on the tick.”
    The explosion, when it came, disappointed Doreen. It