The mission commander glanced down at the sheet paper in his hand. He was also holding, Irv saw, a map Minerva compiled from Mariner and Viking photos. “Interesting,” was all he said.

Louise would not let him get by with that. “Come on, Era. Out with it,” she told him. “Suspense isn’t funny.”

“All right,” he said, a little sheepishly. He held up the map.

“We’ve all known since ‘T6 where Viking landed, haven’t we? Here.” He pointed.

“Not far west of the Jotun Canyon, sure,” Irv said. Everyone else nodded.

“Not sure. They’ve just done a pile of new computer work on the Viking data, and it turns out the lander actually came down here, about fifty miles east of where they thought. We’ll have to adjust our landing site to conform to the new data. Louise, honey, it’ll mean more time on the computer for you- sorry.”

“I expect I’ll manage,” she said, which for a minute or so was the only break in the silence that followed her husband’s announcement.

“How very-convenient,” Sarah Levitt said at last. “Now we know, and the Russians don’t.” Both missions had intended to land as close to the Viking touchdown point as possible; only there could they be sure they would find intelligent life.

“There might be anything on the other side of that canyon,” Irv said. Pat Marquard nodded vigorously. He knew they were thinking along the same lines. Minerva’s big canyons were wider and deeper than anything Earth knew; each spring they carried meltwater from the south polar cap to the seas and lakes of the southern tropics-though on Minerva the word “tropics” had a strictly geographic meaning. The great gorges had to be formidable barriers to both ideas and genes.

“I reckon the Russians will tell us, same as we’ll tell them what we come across on our side,” Emmett Bragg said. His drawl had gotten thicker. That happened, Irv had noticed, when Bragg did not want to come out with everything that was on his mind.