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them,” Marisea added. “They sit on the bridge of your nose and have a couple of hooks that go behind your ears. There are also sunglasses with dark lenses to make the bright sun easier to take. I have a pair of those with me.”
    “We have several pairs on board,” Park told them. “The windows on this buggy are polarized so we don’t need them, but if you find the sun too bright outside, let me know. Iris, I think we ought to land and take samples on both sides of this valley.”
    “We should also set seismometers on both sides too,” Iris replied and she started looking for a landing site. “This must be a fairly active area even for these mountains.”
    “Good point,” Park agreed. “In fact, I think we should set most of the seismometers along this boundary and then maybe place the rest to the east of here.”
    They spent the next few days traveling over a thousand miles along the Africa-America border, setting up not only the seismometers, but the other monitoring equipment. Merely placing them was easy enough, but it took some time with each one to activate it and connect it to the   communications satellite so reports would filter directly back to Van Winkle Town.
    “Whew!” Dannet laughed on the second evening after finding the boundary. “You call this a vacation? Next time let me pick the place, will you? We have some very nice beaches on Dennsee with people to serve fruity drinks while we just soak up the sun.”
    “I’d have been glad to visit this time,” Park chuckled. “Well, maybe by next year we can. But you have to see, for me this is a vacation. Yes, we’re working hard, but it’s the first time in months I’ve been able to get out here and just explore the world. We’re in completely unknown territory here. There are no recorded visits of this area so if we aren’t the first people to come here since the continents crashed together, we might as well be.”
    “As a boy I always wanted to be an explorer,” Dannet admitted, “but I never realized it required so much physical labor.”
    “It’s never easy,” Park told him. “It’s not enough to be the first to go somewhere. You have to bring back the knowledge of what you learned. That’s why Iris is making those charts, why Marisea and Sartena are taking as many photos as they can and why we’re all collecting rock samples. Just be thankful we’re not taking plant and animal samples as well this trip. That will have to wait for the next expedition.”
    “So what are the rocks telling us?” Dannet asked. “They all just look like rocks to me.”
    “Not to a trained geologist, though,” Park replied, “which I’m not, but I did have a fair number of classes on the subject. Well, we’re finding mostly metamorphic rocks on both sides of the border, right?”
    “What are metamorphic rocks?” Dannet asked.
    “You’re kidding me, right?” Park asked. Dannet shook his head. “Well there are three main categories of rock. There are sedimentary rocks, those that were formed in layers of material to settle out of the air or water either in suspension or solution. Basically, the components just formed layers, such as silt at the end of a river, and those layers eventually became lithified. They include limestone, shale, sandstone and so forth.
    “Then there are igneous rocks,” Park continued. “They were formed by having melted and then cooled off. There are volcanic rocks, like basalt or obsidian, that have cooled fairly quickly at or near the surface and there are plutonic rocks that cooled off much more slowly beneath the surface, allowing large crystals to form of the minerals within. These would be your granites and diorites, andesites and so forth.
    “And finally there are the metamorphic rocks,” Park went on. “They are formed when another sort of rock is subjected to heat and pressure. So the original rock could be sedimentary, igneous or even an older form of metamorphic rock. To the east of here we are