The scene remained the same, and yet there was a definite change.
"This was taken three days later. If you'll notice, the normal rust-red of the foliage has darkened to a purplish brown in the area around the crash site. Now a Martian paper-tree, even in the mutated form, is quite resistant to U-V, since it evolved under the thin atmosphere of Mars, which gives much less protection from ultraviolet radiation than Earth's does. Nevertheless, those trees have a bad case of sunburn."
"And no heat," said a third man. "Wow."
"Oh, there was some heat, but not anywhere near what you'd expect. The nearer trees were rather dry, as though they'd been baked, but only at the surface, and the temperature probably didn't rise much above one-fifty centigrade."
"How about X rays?" asked still another man. "Anything shorter than a hundred Ångstroms detected?"
"No. If there was any radiation that hard, there was no detector close enough to measure it. We doubt, frankly, whether there was any."
"The 'fire', if you want to call it that, must have stunk up the place pretty badly," said one of the men dryly.
"It did. There were still traces of ozone and various oxides of nitrogen in the air when the fire prevention flyers arrived. The wind carried them away from the ranger, so he didn't get a whiff of them."
"And this—this 'fire'—it destroyed the ship completely?"
"Almost completely. There are some lumps of metal around, but we can't make anything of them yet. Some of them are badly fused, but that damage was probably done before the ship landed. Certainly there was not enough heat generated after the crash to have done that damage." His hand moved over the control panel in the armrest of his chair, and the scene changed.