Big Tim was already started up the bank. Nellon sucked in a breath and followed after him.
The climb was a hard and difficult one, and their recent physical jarring caused by the fall made it all the harder. But curiosity pulled them on like a vast magnet. In the exertion they forgot their aches and bruises. Slipping and sliding, clutching for handholds, floundering in loose drifts which filled pockets of hardened crust, they made their way slowly but surely up the bank.
Finally they stood before that strangely mottled patch of red and brown and gold. The mood of awed wonder which gripped them at once heightened and deepened.
"It is metal!" Tim Austin breathed. "But—but, Brad, it's not a vein. It's—"
"It's a door!" Nellon finished hoarsely.
It was a door, a metal door in the snow covered bank of a falls that had, in some long, long ago, solidified to ice. A door to what? Where did it lead? What would be on the other side of it? What could be on the other side of a metal door on a world where it was doubtful that living beings had ever existed at all?
There was a rasp in Nellon's earphones. And then Big Tim Austin's voice followed it.
"Brad—I'm going in. This—why, this is the biggest find of the whole expedition!"
"It might be dangerous," Nellon pointed out, before he could become aware of the wealth of irony which lay behind the words. "We don't know what sort of life—"