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effect, at least where it was most needed.
The Saturn group of educated nonspecialists was presumably better qualified
than most to judge whether a silly conclusion was due to faulty math or to
faulty assumptions, but its members still had the normal human difficulty
believing anything which would make for personal inconvenience. They also had
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the normal human skill at finding excuses for the attitude, even under
semimilitary discipline.
Status had won the vote, however, and there was no point standing there
brooding. After all, resting wouldn't really help Maria's fatigue, which was
not caused by work, and delay would only lengthen the time being
used wasted? on this construction. She moved back toward the tunnel mouth.
In front of her as she faced east was a vertical cliff some fifteen meters
high. To the south its top descended gradually, merging with the crater floor
about half a kilometer away and about equally far from the impact crater's
central lake. South of this point lay the area where the jets had been
landing.
Northward, past the quarry where the test bars had been cut, the scarp seemed
to grow higher, but how far this continued only Status knew so far.
This human ignorance was embarrassing to Maria. She had been responsible for
the original mapping from orbit. A fault like this, which presumably postdated
the crater itself, should have been noticed by herself, not just recorded, if
it had been, by a machine. As it was, not even the pilots landing in the
crater had seen it. Arthur Goodall had not reported it. Only after the
decision to move down, when the ringwall and its floor had been mapped more
carefully even than
Goodall had done, had it shown, and even then no one had bothered to trace it
farther north than the quarry site.
Of course, pilot attention would have been taken up by other matters like
landing, but still .. .
No one believed yet that it could have formed in the last few weeks. Possibly
no one wanted to believe it. Maria could easily imagine how Arthur, who had
searched so long for his ideal experiment site, would have reacted to the
idea.
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Most of the cliff top showed the light rusty brown edge of the smog deposit
that, mixed with varying amounts of ice dust, covered so much of Titan. The
ground at its foot, however, was bare ice. It must have taken time for some
weathering agent to wash away the dark sediment on the west side of the fault,
and something more mysterious to do so without also clearing the high side. A
few crusty deposits like candle drippings, perhaps dissolved from the top of
the cliff by rain and precipitated again at the foot by evaporation, were all
that marred the level surface near tunnel mouth and quarry.
Even these should have taken a respectable time to form. Titan's surface was
clearly being reworked by erosion and tectonics, but there seemed no reason
yet to suppose that this was happening any faster than on Earth. If anything,
the absence of liquid water suggested the contrary.
Maria would have liked to see what the fault had done to the north rim of the
crater, but she firmly rejected the temptation to go and look. There should,
after all, be a nicely detailed answer already in the unexamined data above,
but this was not the time for talk. Status might
"know" in a sense; but the processor was neither omniscient nor imaginative.
It would come up with correlations it had been told, explicitly or sometimes
even implicitly, to seek, but never with theories.
It could only criticize these.
On the other hand, if Maria herself seemed likely to be too far from the
landing site when the jet came back, so that she might not reach orbit while
her suit supplies lasted, the computer would foresee that and firmly recommend
return before she got anywhere near the rim. Suits could not yet be recharged
on the surface, and Status was specifically responsible for all aspects of
human safety.
None of this was conscious thought for Maria at the moment, just background
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knowledge. Status information, in fact.
Just north of one of the small, presumably alluvial tar "fans" was the
entrance to the tunnel she was digging. It was about two meters high, with a
five-centimeter sill of piled ice sand across the bottom, and about as wide,
since equipment as well as suited people would have to get in. It was dug in
the clear, nearly pure low-pressure ice ice I which formed the lower
two-thirds of the cliff under the sediment layers. The latter was thinner than
average here; one might use that to date the impact which had formed this
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