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not more than a mile in front. Nancy stopped, not because of the rain but to
take a final look around; and it was then that they both noticed something
else.
In the first place, the raindrops were not falling straight; they were
drifting horizontally as they descended, drifting in the same direction as the
two were traveling. That was reasonable when one stopped to think;
they had known about convection and advection currents almost as long as they
could remember. It was the speed that was remarkable; the drops were heading
toward the fire at a good two miles an hour. The air current that impelled
them could actually be felt
 and that was a major hurricane, for Tenebra. If the thing ahead was a fire,
it was a bigger fire than Fagin's pupils had ever lighted or ever seen.
"If Swift lighted that, he must have touched off a whole map section,"
remarked John.
Nancy turned to him abruptly. "Johnny! Remember what happened last night, when
Nick got the Teacher away from the caves? He did light fires over a good part
Radiation; Evaporation; Advection
123
of a section! Do you suppose they could still be burning, and have spread like
this?"
"I don't know." John stood still and thought for a moment or two. Then he
referred to the map, easily legi-
ble in the brilliant light. "I don't see how it could be," he said at length.
"We're a lot closer to the caves than we were this morning, but not that
close. Besides, the clear rain late at night should have put any fire out if
there was no one to tend it."
"But if it were big enough, maybe it would stir up the air so there was always
enough oxygen for it feel this wind on our backs. Have you ever known anything
like it?"
"No. Maybe you're right. We can go on and see, though; I still think it's more
likely to be Swift. Are you still going to try that idea of yours?"
"Of course. It's all the better, with the wind carrying the drops as fast as
this."
"I hope you're as right as you are reasonable." The two went on, somewhat more
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slowly since it was necessary to follow a rather tortuous path to keep their
goal in sight among the drops. These were now reaching the surface in great
numbers and remaining liquid, except for those parts most closely exposed to
the body heat of the two travelers. It took a little longer than might have
been expected, therefore, to get within two hundred yards of the rocks ahead,
which from the absence of anything but light beyond them appeared to mark the
top of the bill. At this point, Nancy decided that stealth was in order; so
she brought the scary part of her plan into operation.
Finding an exceptionally large and still cloudy rain drop drifting downward at
no great distance, she deliberately placed herself so as to be enveloped by it
as it landed. Naturally, the bottom portion of the fifty-foot spheroid was
obliterated at once by her body heat; but further descent of the drop finally
hid her from view. The great, foggy blot of liquid began to follow the general
pat-
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CLOSE TO CRITICAL
tern of activity of the others, moving slowly toward the light; and Nancy did
her best to follow. This was not as easy as it might have been, even though
the gas around her was perfectly breathable, since with no view of her
surroundings it was nearly impossible to judge the rate of drift of the
raindrop. The wind was some help, but not enough, and several times John could
see her outline as she came too close to the edge of the volume of fog. He
stayed where he was, not considering it cowardly to see how the experiment
turned out before he tried it himself.
In one sense, the trial was a perfect success; that is, Nancy remained
conscious as long as the drop lasted.
In another, however, there was something lacking. This lay in the failure of
the drop to last long enough.
Suffering the assault of heat radiation both from Nancy within and the fire
ahead, the thing abruptly faded out in a final surge of turbulence, leaving
her in full view.
This turned out to be less of a catastrophe than it might have been. For three
or four seconds after the
vanishing of her concealment Nancy stood perfectly still; then she called out,
making no effort to direct her voice away from the light ahead, "Johnny! Here,
quick!"
Her companion leaped forward, taking a little but not much less care to dodge
raindrops, and came to a halt at her side.
She had stopped perhaps five yards from the edge of a nearly vertical-sided
pit, fully two miles across.
Her first few seconds of silence had been spent in telling herself how lucky
she was that her shelter had not lasted a few seconds longer; then the blast
of radiant heat coming from the floor of the crater, a scant hundred feet
below, forced her to admit the matter was hardly one of luck. It could be seen
from this vantage point that no raindrops at all approached the area except
those which drifted up the slope of the hill from outside. The floor glowed
visibly all over, and numerous patches were of almost dazzling bril-
liance. These last looked suspiciously like liquid, though
Radiation; Evaporation; Advection
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125
the liquid possessed a remarkably sharp and well-defined surface.
Raeker, or even Easy, would have recognized a volcano at once; but the
phenomenon was completely outside the experience and education of Fagin's
pupils. Raeker had noted, in passing, Nick's earlier reference to the conical
shape of the high hill he had reported; the geologists had also paid some
attention to it, and even placed it on the list of things to be investigated
more fully; but that was as far as matters had gone. Nick had said nothing to
suggest that the thing was active or rather, nothing the men had recognized as
such evidence; he had mentioned wind. As a matter of fact, it had not been
nearly so violent when he had passed, some three terrestrial months before.
Only its size and shape had been worthy of note.
"You know," John remarked after some minutes of silence, "this would be a
wonderful place for a village.
We wouldn't need to keep fires going."
"How about food?" countered Nancy. "The plants growing on this dark rock are
different from the ones we're used to; maybe the cattle wouldn't eat them."
"That would be easy enough to find out "
"Anyway, that's not the assignment just now. This light obviously isn't what
we're looking for, though I
admit it's interesting. We'd better get on with the job."
"It's raining," John pointed out, "and there was no suggestion that we should
search through the night as well as by day. This would seem a perfect place to
sleep, at least."
"That's true enough " Nancy's agreement was interrupted suddenly. Some three
hundred yards to their left, a segment of the pit's edge about fifty yards
long and ten or fifteen deep cracked loose with a deafening roar and plunged
downward. In that gravity even Tenebra's atmosphere was an ineffective brake,
and a good ten or fifteen thousand tons of well-cemented volcanic detritus
made its way effortlessly through the red-hot crust of nearly
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CLOSE TO CRITICAL
solid lava at the foot of the ledge. The results left no doubt about the
liquid state of the hotter material or would have left none had the two
explorers still been watching. They weren't; they were on their way downhill
in the direction from which they had come before the mass of rock was
completely detached.
Even as he ran, John had time to feel lucky that the incident had waited to
happen until Nancy had agreed with him about what a good camping spot the
place was. Needless to say, he did not mention this aloud.
Even John was not bothering to dodge raindrops at the moment, much less talk
on irrelevant subjects.
They covered nearly a mile down the slope before stopping. The light was still
quite ample to permit read-
ing the maps, and it took only a few minutes to convince them both that this
was indeed the tall, conical hill which Nick had reported. With this settled,
however, neither could quite decide what to do about it. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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