It was perhaps thirty minutes later when Scarborough rounded a broad shoulder of rock and first saw the notch about a half mile up ahead. He paused for a long moment, suddenly reminded of the time he’d visited the Grand Canyon as a youngster. His parents had given him an assortment of educational materials in advance of that summer trip. Books, videos, travel brochures, the works. He’d digested them until he thought he had learned everything there was to know about the place. But when he actually stood gazing out over the chasm from the South Rim, Scarborough realized that neither words nor pictures could capture how it felt to see it with his own eyes. He recognized the natural landmarks. Shiva Temple. Hale’s Needle. Point Hanover. They looked just as they did in photos, yet were altogether different. This did not seem a contradiction to him. With his eleventh birthday barely past, Alan Scarborough had in a single shot gained a fundamental and lasting appreciation of direct participatory experience . . . as well as an insatiable yearning for it. He’d never since been content observing reality through windows of separation, framed within neatly bordered perspectives, but had always felt the urge to leap outside to where his feet touched the ground. Why else had he eagerly joined the Marines with an ROTC assignment out of college, and on retirement pursued a civilian gig in a land where the Ice Age had missed its final curtain by ten thousand years? Why else?

Scarborough studied the deep V-shaped notch near the valley intersection with rapt fascination. Like the photos and descriptions in those boyhood references, his satellite readouts had offered detailed information about the area’s geographic features. He had come here prepared. But the sheer immensity of the cleft overwhelmed his senses. And stirred his imagination. He again envisioned gargantuan creatures dining on solid rock as they thundered through the ancient pass. What he knew of glacial migrations was momentarily forgotten. Science was Bradley’s and Payton’s game. His was to see their expedition through the valleys and return them to Cold Corners safe and sound, ideally with the salvaged Martian rover in their possession. He could allow himself a brief flight of fancy. And right now it was easy to believe that the notch in the side of the pass had been left by a prehistoric monster of indescribable scale. Not the same trudging forager that might have munched away at the slope behind him like a fat hippopotamus snacking on reeds and brush. This would have been something more akin to a tyrannosaur. A lunging beast of prey that took vicious bites out of the earth’s hide, gulping them down whole, its fangs leaving permanent gouges wherever they sank in.

It looks like a wound, Scarborough thought. A wound that never healed shut.