Free Aurora by David A. Hardy Page B

But he denied it. More likely Mission Control had been the source of the leak.
    It didn’t really matter, Aurora pointed out. They couldn’t have kept the news to themselves for long, anyway. As it turned out, the media’s attention worked in their favor, since this human-interest story produced far higher viewing figures on the home planet than had the report of a short-lived steam vent or any of their other geological or meteorological discoveries—important though those were to the scientific community.
    Even so, she wished the spotlight had not been drawn to her.
    Or did she? Was there, deep down, a secret wish for her strange story to become known, so that she could stop masquerading—and perhaps some sort of explanation might come to light? It was in the lap of the gods now.
    At last the dust settled and life at the base got back to normal. Although, actually, as far as Mars was concerned, the dust did not settle. As was common at this season, a planet-wide dust storm arose, and for a while operations outside the Hut and the Lander became difficult—sometimes impossible. As Spring had come to the southern hemisphere, the dust storm had started in the great 1,800-km basin of Hellas Planitia (what an asteroid impact that must have been!), right around the other side of the planet. Soon the whole of the little world was shrouded in an ochre haze. Only Hayashi Minako, the meteorologist, was daring to go outside. Wearing a special environment suit, she was setting up equipment to record the wind speeds, density of dust and other data. Since she was outside anyway, she also tended the electrolysis apparatus, set up nearby to extract oxygen and hydrogen from water ice—one of the reasons for choosing this site. The oxygen was used for life support, the hydrogen would be needed later, and both could be recombined in a compact fuel cell to provide power when the solar cells were inactive.
    The rest of the team—including Aurora, whose arm was now almost normal, apart from its baby-pink coloring—twiddled their thumbs impatiently. They were awaiting the opportunity to send out an expedition, using both rovers, into the tributaries of the Noctis Labyrinthus—a vast network of canyons and crevasses which lay to their east, and which was connected eventually to the mighty Valles Marineris, the 4,800-km-long seismic rift in which America’s Grand Canyon would have been utterly dwarfed and lost.
    Noctis Labyrinthus, the Labyrinth of Night! Aurora shivered with anticipation. Both the artist and scientist in her yearned to go there. As they had passed over it in orbit, awaiting instructions to land, she had gazed at it through the telescope to see clouds of fog form in the steep valleys as the early-morning sunlight struck east-facing slopes and vaporized ice which had formed there during the night.
    Bryan Beaumont had a penchant for rock music of the Sixties and Seventies, and among the private possessions he’d been permitted to take on board with him had brought, instead of the modern sound-cards, old-fashioned compact discs of what had once been LP records. To pass the time, even while he worked in his cubicle to catch up on collating lava and ash samples, he played music by some of what had once been known as “progressive” groups, such as Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Grateful Dead, UFO....
    In keeping with his taste in music, Beaumont’s appearance was boyish. His thick, reddish hair almost always looked uncombed, as he was forever pushing it back out of his eyes. His manner was exuberant, and he became almost excessively enthusiastic about anything which took his interest. Unfortunately those interests tended to stray into areas usually thought of as pseudoscientific, sometimes earning him the censure of his colleagues. There was no doubting his high intelligence, nonetheless—which was perhaps why they tolerated his excesses. As the mission progressed, Aurora realized