The sun rose, throwing their shadows over the gravel slope. Suddenly the dryad’s little flowers were picked out by the light, the ivory petals cupping gold stamens. “Dry-ad,” Sax croaked. Their headlamp beams were now invisible, and the flowers blazed with daylight color. Nirgal heard a sound over the intercom and looked into Sax’s helmet, and saw that the old man was crying, the tears streaming down his cheeks.

4

Nirgal pored over maps and photos of the region. “I have an idea,” he said to Coyote. And that night they drove to Nicholson Crater, four hundred kilometers to the west. The falling cable had to have landed across this large crater, at least on its first pass, and it seemed to Nirgal that there might be some kind of break or gap near the rim.

Sure enough, when they rolled up the low flat-topped hill that was the crater’s north apron, they came to the eroded rim and saw the weird vision of a black line, crossing the middle of the crater some forty kilometers away, looking like an artifact of some long-forgotten race of giants. “Big Man’s . . .” Coyote began.

“Hair strand,” Spencer suggested.

“Or black dental floss,” Art said.

The inner wall of the crater was much steeper than the outer apron, but there were a number of rim passes to choose from, and they drove without trouble down the stabilized slope of an ancient landslide, then crossed the crater floor, following the curve of the western inner wall. As they approached the cable, they saw that it emerged from a depression it had crushed in the rim, and drooped gracefully to the crater floor, like the suspension cable of a buried bridge.

They drove slowly under it. Where it left the rim, it was nearly seventy meters off the crater floor, and it didn’t touch down until it was over a kilometer out. They pointed the boulder car’s cameras up, and watched the view on the screen curiously; but the black cylinder was featureless against the stars, and they could only speculate about what the burn of the descent had done to the carbon.

“That’s nifty,” Coyote remarked as they drove up a smooth slope of eolian deposit, over another rim pass and out of the crater. “Now let’s hope there’s a way over the next pass.”

From the southern flank of Nicholson they could see south for many kilometers, and midway to the horizon was the black line of the cable’s second time around. This section had impacted many times harder than the first pass, and two swaths of ejecta paralleled the cable like henge mounds. It appeared that the cable just barely stuck out of the trench it had smashed into the plain.