He picked a spot, reasonably level, and set up the calibrating gnomon. He walked around the gnomon, carefully photographing it from every side. Next he worked the mechanical tests. He pressed a spring-loaded metal plate against the soil, and thrust a cylindrical probe into the ground. Then he put a lump of aggregate into a crusher, a handheld nutcracker affair. He called out readings to Natalie York as he worked.

When he’d fully documented his site he took samples from the surface. He picked up loose material with tongs, rakes, and scoops, and tried breaking a piece off a larger rock with a hammer.

Actually, the landscape baffled Stone. He’d been taking a geology field trip each month for the last year, and he’d gotten familiar with the subject to some extent. But he’d never seen an area like this.

Most EVA training was taking place out in the high deserts in the western USA. At one site, in Nevada, half a square mile of desert had been faked up to simulate the Martian surface as observed by the Soviets, with fine sand raked in, large boulders set deliberately on the surface. There was even a fake MEM descent stage set up there, a mock-up of wood and paint. The MEM had a compartment for a full-scale Mars Rover, which you could pull down and unfold, just like the real thing. That was a sim exercise Stone could appreciate: bouncing across a fake, but recognizably Martian desert, in a four-wheel-drive Rover…

But he really did not know what the hell was going on today. How was this piece of shit in Washington State, across which they were dragging this fucking Apollo-class golf cart, supposed to relate to whatever the hell was waiting for them on Mars?

After maybe half an hour, he’d piled the MET with carefully selected — and uniformly worthless — samples of Washington State. “Okay, Natalie, I figure I’m done here.”

“Well done, Phil. We’ll make a rock hound out of you yet. But I still haven’t heard much about the morphology of your site.”

He growled, and wiped sweat from his brow with a dusty hand. “Give me a break.”

“Come on now, Phil. Taking samples isn’t enough — you ought to know that by now — what’s crucial for the geologists is the context. Tell me what you see.”

Stone began to walk forward again. His pack chafed at his shoulders, but looking around more systematically, he began to see some pattern, some logic underlying the landscape formations; and as he did so, he began to forget his discomfort.

“I see a mix of landscape here. I see what looks like bare bedrock, and sedimentary stuff that’s been scoured out, and depositional material. As if left behind by running water.”

“Good.”