LITMIR.BIZ

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Mars environment suit. That said, the flexible and almost skin-tight Mars suit was a big improvement on the bulky Apollo suits. For a while it had looked as though the type of “hard suit” produced by ILC Dover with Hamilton Sundstrand, as used on the International Space Station, would be pressed into service here too. But, although in space legs are almost superfluous, here on the surface of Mars mobility and freedom of movement were paramount.

      The colors around here, she mused for the umpteenth time, were surprisingly drab. Despite her training, she had still expected rich reds, oranges and yellows—the colors that appeared in just about all the photographs and space art she had seen. But the reality—at least in this locality—was mainly pale brown, with variations into buff, yellow and tan. The scenery in the central area of Iceland, where she had spent some weeks on a field trip, had been very similar. And almost as cold....

      That was an exaggeration, she acknowledged wryly. Tharsis was cold, even for Mars.

      That was one of the reasons why the area had been chosen for the expedition. The strange parallel ridges on the lee side of Arsia Mons, looking curiously like ploughed fields, had turned out to be a recessional moraine; that is, dirt and rubble left behind by a glacier. It had been known for many years that clouds often blew over the volcano; these precipitated as storms of ice crystals. And the ice stayed where it fell on these high slopes. It had been building up for a long time.... She had seen similar layered glaciers in Iceland, too; those had been caused by the ash from repeated eruptions. One of her tasks here was to see if these layers on Arsia Mons could have the same cause.

      Apart from that, Arsia Mons was the southernmost of a set of triplets, three shield volcanoes of very similar size, the other two being Pavonis and Ascraeus. To the northwest stood the far mightier Olympus Mons, which towered above the plain to a height ten times that of Earth’s Mount Everest. Olympus Mons was too big, really, for it was impossible to take it all in, except from out in space. Earth’s largest shield volcano—Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawaii—provided a similar visual effect, dominating the landscape only as a long, low hill. But the volume of Olympus Mons was over fifty times than even that of Mauna Loa. There was evidence that there could have been thermal activity in this area, millions or possibly just thousands of years ago. Ever since the highly controversial discovery in the mid-1990s of “fossil life” in a Martian rock—ALH 84001—found in the Antarctic and the Pathfinder and other unmanned missions that had followed, scientists had hoped for The Big One: the unequivocal discovery of life on Mars.

      It might seem hard to believe, but even working on an alien world like Mars could become commonplace after a while. Not boring, precisely, but, even so, as Anne Pryor worked her mind kept drifting back to the events that had led her here.

      * * * *

      After leaving London, Aurora had gone back up to Scotland, as she’d said she probably would. For a while she had stayed with her brother Stephen; but he was now 40, and looked it, with his receding hairline, greying hair and bifocal spectacles, while she still seemed like a teenager. It was bound to cause comment, especially as Steve’s wife, Brenda, was hardly any older than Aurora and yet looked nearly as old as her husband.

      So she didn’t stay there for long; just long enough to recuperate and review her plans for the future. She decided to go back to school and try to make up for all her wasted years.

      With her artistic talents it hadn’t been difficult to doctor her birth certificate; she wanted to avoid questions about the disparity between her real and her apparent age. Looking at her, no one would think to query her new age of seventeen.

      Many times, as the years passed, Aurora did puzzle over her own appearance. (When anyone commented on her youthfulness, she would quip: “Ah, but you should see the portrait in my attic!”) There was nothing she could do about it, and nor could she explain it; so she supposed she should just be grateful.

      And she was never ill. Oh, her body protested when she abused it, as she had done back in the late Sixties, but she had never caught even the usual childhood diseases like mumps, measles or chickenpox, let alone anything more serious. What should she do? Tell a doctor that “I look too young and I’m never ill”? At best she would become a guinea pig for medical research, at worst a freak for the media to parade before a sensation-hungry public. No, best to keep a low profile, and, when necessary, keep moving on....

      Sometimes, though, she did feel very lonely. Was there really nobody else in all the world like her? More: her brief time with the Gas Giants seemed to have left her almost drained of emotion. It was as if she had packed a lifetime of what most people would regard as normal, personal feelings into that short period, but that her near-death experience had then wiped these from her brain.

      As she had once told Lefty, she was clever at scholastic matters as long as she put her mind to them. And this she did. Within a few years she had a crop of O- and A-levels to her credit, and she followed these up by applying for and obtaining a place at Birmingham’s redbrick university, which her enquiries showed to be one of the best for scientific subjects.

      Aurora’s appetite for education was insatiable now, and the more she crammed into her brain the more her ability to learn seemed to expand. But she would stay with one subject for long periods, often sighing with frustration at the amounts of data available, impossible to assimilate in one lifetime. On the other hand she did not let this deter her; if her appearance and her physical and mental abilities were any guide, she could well have a very long lifetime ahead of her in which to absorb it all. She studied chemistry and physics, finally obtaining her doctorate in astrophysics, specializing in asteroids, comets and impact craters.

      She also took a course in computing, and spent many hours in the evenings doing her own private work, much of it on the internet. Linked to computer networks all over the world, she could hack into the files of record offices and create a succession of new identities for herself, at the same time planting a virus program that destroyed all traces of her previous identities and then of itself, as and when it became necessary.

      For another five years Aurora stayed around universities, largely cocooned from the realities of life, doing research and some lecturing. At last she decided that it was once again time to experience the real world. By now she had been forty-eight, but looked perhaps twenty-two. During all this time she had formed no strong personal relationships, though generally she seemed to be well liked. Some men, spurned, put about a rumor that she had lesbian tendencies, but she laughed these off. The plain fact was that she simply was not interested.

      Unable to find a fulfilling job in Britain—or, for a while, any job at all for which she was not “overqualified”—she left for the United States. There she found the climate—cultural, scientific and atmospheric—much more to her liking. She had flirted with NASA but found it lacking, dogged by problems as it had been since the Challenger shuttle tragedy, and moved on to the California Institute of Technology. In the academic atmosphere of CalTech she seemed to be in line for a professorship, only to find that this time her declared and apparent youth worked against her, despite her obviously superior experience and qualifications. She had left in high dudgeon and found a position as a geologist in a California oil company, GeoTek. The job mainly involved using advanced computer techniques and high-definition satellite imagery, but there were enough field trips to keep her interested and satisfied.

      The personnel at GeoTek consisted mainly of bright young men and women, and she fitted in well. For a while. Whether it was real or imagined she couldn’t tell, but after a time she began to feel that her colleagues were looking at her strangely, and so she left. A number of similar positions followed. She worked on an ocean-floor mining project; then for an environmental organization doing research on the hole in the ozone layer over the Antarctic; then there was a spell among the observatories on Mauna Kea on Hawaii....

      Her stay in the Pacific Islands sparked an interest in volcanology, and for some years she visited the Earth’s wildest places, researching plate tectonics and continental drift. She gradually found she preferred these desolate and rugged areas to the more populated areas of Planet Earth.

      She took up painting again, as a hobby, and produced some spectacular canvases of volcanoes, rift valleys and glaciers; accurate yet romantic, some of them were

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