He moved past Stryker through the port, leaving Farrell to stare blankly after him.
"This is a non-rotating world," Farrell said. "How the devil can it get dark, Lee?"
Stryker chuckled. "I wondered if you'd see that. It can't, except when the planet's axial tilt rolls this latitude into its winter season and sends the sun south of the crater rim. It probably gets dark as pitch here in the valley, since the fog would trap even diffused light." To the patiently waiting mechanical, he said, "The ship is yours, Xav. Call us if anything turns up."
Farrell followed him reluctantly outside into a miasmic desolation more depressing than he could have imagined.
A stunted jungle of thorny brambles and tough, waist-high grasses hampered their passage at first, ripping at coveralls and tangling the feet until they had beaten their way through it to lower ground. There they found a dreary expanse of bogland where scummy pools of stagnant water and festering slime heaved sluggishly with oily bubbles of marsh gas that burst audibly in the hanging silence. The liverish blaze of Falakian sun bore down mercilessly from the crater's rim.
They moved on to skirt a small lead-colored lake in the center of the valley, a stagnant seepage-basin half obscured by floating scum. Its steaming mudflats were littered with rotting yellowed bones and supported the first life they had seen, an unpleasant scurrying of small multipedal crustaceans and water-lizards.
"There can't be any survivors here," Farrell said, appalled by the thought of his kind perpetuating itself in a place like this. "God, think what the mortality rate would be! They'd die like flies."
"There are bound to be a few," Stryker stated, "even after a hundred years of slavery and another hundred of abandonment. The human animal, Arthur, is the most fantastically adaptable—"
He broke off short when they rounded a clump of reeds and stumbled upon their first Falakian proof of that fantastic adaptability.