‘But encouraging in another sense,’ Jitendra went on, ‘as it confirms what we suspected all along: any tracks Eunice put down there in 2059 won’t have been disturbed in the meantime.’ He beamed, deliciously pleased at his own cleverness. ‘Well, they have been and they haven’t.’
He shoved aside the condiments, pushed the coloured gems into a huddle and voked a rectangular image onto the table. It was filled with the silver-grey, gritty, deep-shadowed terrain of the high-latitude Lunar landscape. Cross-haired and annotated with coordinates, the image must have been shot from some high-flying satellite.
‘Close-up of the interior of Pythagoras crater, time-stamped about eight weeks ago,’ Jitendra said. ‘Recent enough for our purposes.’
‘Have you found the crash point?’ Sunday asked.
‘That and more.’ He laced fingers and cracked knuckles. ‘Let me zoom in for you.’
Gleb said, ‘The crash point of what?’
‘Eunice landed – or crashed – in this crater one hundred and three years ago,’ Sunday told him. ‘It’s looking as if she’s left us something related to that incident.’
The rectangle stayed the same size, but now the image had enlarged to reveal the whitish, many-armed star – not exactly a crater, more a frozen splash – where something had splatted onto the Lunar surface. The star was elongated and asymmetric, as if the impacting object had skipped in obliquely. There was even a smaller blemish to one side of it, as if the object had bounced once before coming to rest.
‘It looks bad, but we know it was a survivable impact,’ Jitendra said.
‘No trace of a ship, though,’ Geoffrey said, reluctantly succumbing to curiosity. ‘You sure it’s the right place?’
‘Nowhere else fits. The ship isn’t there because it was recovered by that Indian salvage crew.’ Jitendra made the image zoom in again, jabbing his finger at the tabletop. ‘They had their own ship – here’s where they kicked up soil on landing, and here are their foot- and rover prints, scribbled all over Eunice’s crater, fresh now as when they were made. That’s all, though. No one’s been back to that landing site in a century.’
‘What about Eunice’s long walk out?’ Sunday asked.
‘We can follow her all the way out of the crater. Hers are the only footprints anywhere else in Pythagoras.’
The view lurched to the right, tracking east. Sunday made out the prints, following an arrow-straight line with only occasional detours to avoid obstacles. It was a long, monotonous message in Morse code: stretches of hyphens, where she had been hop-skipping, interspersed with sequences of dots where she had slowed her progress to a walk. When Jitendra zoomed out again, reducing the prints to the faintest of scratches across the image, she understood how far Eunice had been forced to travel.
A tiny human presence, a bag of air and warmth lost in the barren immensity of the Lunar landscape, like a bug crossing a runway.
‘We can follow these prints all the way to the wall and over and out, to where she met the Chinese rescue party,’ Jitendra said. ‘You can still see the hairpin where they turned the rover around and drove back home, with Eunice aboard. It all checks out.’
Sunday exhaled. ‘OK. So her story checks out. Is that all you’ve got?’
‘There is something
‘Oh yes,’ Chama said.
North of the prints – maybe a hundred metres – lay an area of blasted soil where a ship had touched down. Sunday could see clearly the cruciform pattern of depressions made by its landing legs.
There were footprints as well – two rows, running from the ship to the original line of footprints and back again. It didn’t take a forensics expert to note that the spacing of the prints was similar, maybe identical, to Eunice’s walking pattern.
Where the prints intersected the original line, there was a region of scuffed soil. For about five metres, Eunice’s original prints had been erased again.
‘She went back,’ Sunday said. ‘Grief. She actually went back.’
Jitendra nodded. ‘That’s what it looks like.
‘Looks as if she dug up the ground,’ Gleb said. ‘Either to recover something she buried there the last time, or to bury something new. Can you dig back and find older imagery?’
‘Gleb’s right,’ Sunday said. ‘If we can find a view taken after she was rescued but before the fresh prints came in, it’ll help us narrow things down.’
‘I’m searching,’ Jitendra said. ‘But I’m also being careful. Don’t want to leave my grubby fingerprints all over an image trawl.’
‘No one else is following this trail,’ Geoffrey said. ‘Or at least they weren’t, until my sister started talking about it to anyone who’d listen.’
‘What we really need to do is get out there, see what’s under that soil,’ Sunday said.
‘Might be a bit problematic,’ Jitendra said. ‘Pythagoras is under Chinese Lunar Administration now. You don’t mess with the Ghost Wall.’
‘Good job we won’t be doing that, then,’ Geoffrey said.
‘Aren’t you even remotely curious?’ Sunday asked.
‘It’s all supposition, based on a few smudges.’
