Earth

The bird passed out of sight. Logan readjusted the goggles and resumed climbing.

Soon he encountered tricky territory. Shards of stone had broken from an undermined outcrop, leaving a treacherous scree in his path. Logan’s nostrils flared as he stepped off carefully, arms outstretched for balance. Then he hopped again, a little quicker.

This kind of ground was ideal, of course. Not particularly dangerous — he and Claire carried tracking beepers anyway, and Forest Service ’copters were less than thirty minutes away — but enough so to be thrilling. Logan leaped from boulder to tottering boulder. It lent an added spice of adrenaline to the exhilaration of just being out here in the open, far from the teeming cities or his growling bulldozers, without a care in the world beyond the crucial decision of where he was going to plant his feet next.

At last he landed, surefooted and elated, on another patch of easy slant — no more vertical than horizontal. Logan paused again to catch his breath.

He and Claire had seen many other hikers on their way here, of course. You needed reservations years in advance to get a camping permit. Ironically though, right now the two of them were completely alone in this particular area. While tourists thronged the easy nature trails and aficionados went for hard ascents, intermediate terrain like this often went unvisited for days at a stretch.

Squinting to blur vision a bit, Logan could almost smear out signs of recent human passage… those eroded spots where footprints had worn the stone in ways wind or water never could, or bits of paper or foil too small to qualify for antilitter fines. It was so quiet — no drone of aircraft engines at the moment, no voices — that one might even imagine one was treading ground no other person had explored in all of time.

It was a pleasant fantasy.

Logan sca

A giggle made him start. “I’m right above you, dummy!”

Sure enough, there she was. Not five meters uphill, perched on a fifty-degree slope. She must have lain in wait, quiet and unmoving, for at least ten minutes as he approached.

“I never should have let Kala M’Lenko teach you stalking,” he muttered.

She tossed her hair, red tinged from the sun. Her skin was copper colored too, saying to hell with the palefaced fashion of the day. Where a normal sixteen-year-old would have worn the latest style in sun hats, she sported a sweat-band visor and streaks of white onc-ex cream.

“But you said a girl today oughta have survival skills.”

“Thems, you have in plenty. Too plenty, maybe,” Logan answered in pidgin Simglish. But he gri

Actually, he was pleased with her attitude. As she led him up a path too narrow for footprints, Logan found himself recalling a time some years ago when he had challenged her to “find a rock” in Kansas.

They had been visiting his parents, before the divorce, but long after the Big Drought had forced plains farmers to switch from their beloved corn to sorghum and amaranth. Claire loved the Eng spread, even though the agricooperative it was a part of scarcely resembled the Ma and Pa farms still vivid in story books. At least it was more real than the lavish estate where Daisy had grown up, where Claire hated visiting because her aristo cousins so often cast her in the role of their amusing hick relation, who didn’t even know enough to care that she was poor.

“If you can find a rock, I’ll give you ten dollars,” he had told his daughter on that day, thinking it a simple way to keep her amused during the sluggish stretch until di

It didn’t take Claire long to realize plowed fields weren’t good places to find stones. So she moved to the verges, where windbreak trees swayed in a bone-dry sirocco. During all that lazy afternoon she kept ru

She brought him hard clumps that proved, under a magnifying glass, to be only hardened dirt. She retrieved agglomerates of clay and chunks of broken cement. Every sample turned into a revelation, a glimpse into the past. Each time she would hurry off again, only to return a few minutes later, breathless with the next sample to be dissected.

Finally, when Logan’s mother called them in for supper, he broke the news to Claire. “There are no stones in Kansas, ” he had said. “Or at least not in this part of the state. Even after all the terrible erosion, there’s still hardly anywhere you can find bedrock. It’s all a great plain built up over thousands of years, out of dust and tiny bits blown down from the Rockies.

“There’s just no natural way for a stone to get here, honey.”

For an instant he had wondered if he’d taken a father’s license too far, teasing the child that way. But his daughter only looked at him and then pronounced, “Well, it was fun anyway. I guess I learned a lot.”

At the time Logan wondered at how easily she had accepted defeat. It was only three days later, as they prepared to depart for home, that she said to him, “Hold out your hand,” and placed in his palm a heavy, oblong shape, crusty, with a blackened, seared quality to it. Logan remembered blinking in surprise, hefting the stone. He took out his magnifier and then borrowed his father’s hammer to chip a corner.

No doubt about it. Claire had found a meteorite.

“There is a way for a stone to get here, isn’t there?” she had said. Silently, Logan pulled out coins and paid up.

Now, on this Wyoming slope, a much bigger Claire patted the slanting cliff where a sudden change in color could be seen, from mocha to a sort of toffee cream. She pointed to faint outlines, naming fossil creatures whose skeletons were set in stone when this had been the bottom of a great sea, millions of centuries ago. Logan’s own trip into memory was relatively minor in comparison, a mere eight years. But eight years which had changed that precocious little girl.

She won’t have to be picky to choose a man, he thought. She’ll scare off all but the few who can keep up with her.

“… and none of them appear above this line. They all died out right here!” She stroked the line again. “This has to be the Permian-Triassic boundary.”

He nodded. “Fair enough. Shall I take your picture next to it?”

Claire protested. “But we have to take a scraping! I want to take home—”

“Scraping second. Photo first. Humor Papa.”

Claire let out an exasperated sigh. But then, he thought, It’s a dad’s job to make light of things. To be hard to impress.

He touched the controls at the rims of his goggles. “Now smile,” he said.

“Oh all right. But wait a minute!”

She grabbed a flat electrobrush from her back pocket, flicked the switch to charge it, and began swiping at her tangled locks. Finally, she swept off her own goggles and ignored the ferocious sun to smile for the camera.

Logan gri

It had been a good day. But returning to camp, dusty and with the grit of ages between his teeth, Logan looked forward to a quiet evening meal and collapsing in his sleeping bag. His pack, containing the full five kilos of rock samples allowed by Claire’s collector’s permit, he dropped with relief by the licensed fire ring.