and made his way back in the direction of the temporary labs.
5
“Amazing,” Ekberg said, her words smoking the air. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a sky such a clear, intense blue.”
They were making their way up the glacial valley in brilliant sunlight. Despite fretful allusions to the pressing nature of his work, Faraday had elected to come along, and he puffed and wheezed as they climbed. He’d been making this climb at least once a day for a month: the fact he still labored at it betrayed all his sedentary years spent in a laboratory. Ekberg, on the other hand, strode forward with the effortlessness of a committed runner. Her eyes darted everywhere, missing nothing. Now and then she would murmur something into a digital recorder. She was wearing Penny Barbour’s spare parka over her leather jacket.
“I know what you mean,” Marshall replied. “I just wish there was more of it.”
“Sorry?”
“The days are growing shorter, fast. We’ve got two, maybe three weeks of viable daylight left. After that, it’ll be white night around here, twenty hours a day. And we’ll be gone.”
“No wonder you’re in a hurry. In any case, Allan’s going to have a field day with that sky.”
“Allan?”
“Allan Fortnum, our DP. Director of photography.” She glanced ahead at the glacier, deep blue framing the sharp azure of the sky. “How did Mount Fear get its name?”
“After Wilberforce Fear, the explorer who discovered it.”
“Did that make him famous?”
“Actually, it killed him. He died of exposure at the base of the caldera.”
“Oh.” And Ekberg murmured something into the recorder. “Caldera. So it’s a volcano?”
“Extinct volcano. It’s quite a bizarre thing, really-the only geologic feature in a thousand square miles of permafrost. People are still arguing about how it formed.”
“Dr. Sully said it was dangerous. What did he mean by that?”
“ Mount Fear is really just a dead cone of prehistoric lava. Weather, and the glacier, have worn it down, made it fragile.” He pointed at the knife-edged ridges of the valley, then at one of the large caves that riddled the base of the mountain. “Lava tubes like that are created when a crust forms over an active magma stream. Over the years they become very brittle and can easily collapse. As a result, the mountain’s like a vast house of cards. We made the discovery in the back of one of those tubes.”
“And the polar bears he mentioned?”
“Cute to look at, but extremely man-aggressive, especially these days, what with habitat shrinkage. When your people get here, make sure they don’t stray beyond the fenced apron unless they’re armed. There’s a store of high-powered rifles at the base.”
They climbed a minute before Ekberg broke the silence again. “You’re a paleoecologist, right?”
“A Quaternary paleoecologist, yes.”
“And what, exactly, are you doing here?”
“Paleoecologists like me reconstruct vanished ecosystems from fossils and other ancient evidence. We try to determine what kinds of creatures roamed the earth, what they ate, how they lived and died. I’m determining what kind of an ecosystem existed here before the advance of the glacier.”
“And now that the glacier’s retreating, the evidence-the samples-are coming to light again.”
“Exactly.”
She looked at Marshall with penetrating, inquisitive eyes. “What kind of samples?”
“Plant traces. Layered mud. Some macro-organic remains like wood.”
“Mud and wood,” Ekberg said.
Marshall laughed. “Not sexy enough for Terra Prime, is it?”
She laughed in return. “What can you do with those?”
“Well, wood and other organics can be radiocarbon-dated to determine how long ago the glacier buried them. Mud samples are processed for pollen, which in turn indicates what kind of plants and trees were dominant prior to the glaciation. See, modern ecologists are stuck analyzing the world as it exists today, which has been