Mars

SOL 3: NOON

Jamie’s first instinct was to blink and rub his eyes, but his gloved hands bumped into the transparent visor of his helmet.

He stared at the rock. It was roughly two feet long, flat-topped and oblong. Its sides looked smooth, not pitted like most of the other rocks. And on one side of it there was a distinct patch of green.

He walked slowly around it, stepping over other small rocks and around the larger ones that were strewn everywhere. There was no green anywhere else. If I’d come up on the other side of it I’d never have noticed the color, he realized.

One rock. With a little area of green on one of its flat sides. One rock out of thousands. One bit of color in a world of rusty reds.

“Waterman, I do not see you,” Vosnesensky called.

“I’ve found something.”

“Come back toward the dome.”

“I’ve found some green,” Jamie said, annoyed.

“What?”

“Green.”

“Where are you?”

“What do you mean? What is it?”

Jamie scanned the area around him. “Can you see the big boulder with the cleft in its top?”

“No. Where…”

“I can!” Joanna’s voice, brimming with excitement. “Just to the west of the second lander. See it?”

“Ah, yes,” said Monique.

“This way,” Joanna called.

Within a minute seven hard-suited figures appeared over the horizon just to the right of the cleft boulder. Jamie waved to them and they waved back.

Then he turned to the rock, his rock. Sinking slowly to his knees in the awkward suit, he leaned as close to it as he dared. He almost expected to see ants or their Martian equivalent busily scurrying around the ground.

What he saw, instead, was nothing but the powdery red sand and the rust-colored rock with a streak of green running down its flattish side. Christ, it looks like a little vein of copper that’s been exposed to the air. But then Jamie remembered that there was precious little oxygen in the Martian air. Enough to turn a vein of copper green? How long had the vein been exposed to the air? Ten thousand years? Ten million?

He leaned back on his haunches, his back to the approaching scientists.

“Where is it?” Joanna asked breathlessly.

“You look as if you’re praying,” said Naguib’s reedy nasal voice. “Has it made a believer of you?”

“Don’t get too worked up,” Jamie told them, looking up as they surrounded him and the rock. “I think it’s just a streak of oxidized copper.”

Patel, in his yellow suit, clumsily got down on all fours to peer closely at the rock. “Yes, I believe that is so.”

Joanna flattened herself beside him. “It might be just the surface coating of a colony that lives inside the rock. Like the microflora in Antarctica, they use the rocks for shelter and absorb moisture from the frost that gathers on the rock’s surfaces.”

“I am afraid that it is nothing more than a patina of copper oxide,” Patel said in his Hindu cadence and British pronunciation.

“We must make certain,” said Monique, as calmly as if she were selecting a wine at a Paris bistro. Cool head, Jamie thought. Warm heart?

“We’ll have to take it inside…”

“Don’t touch it!” Joanna snapped.

“We can’t examine it in any detail out here,” Jamie said. “We’ve got to bring it inside the dome.”

“It is a possible biological sample,” Joanna said with unexpected proprietary fierceness.

It’s copper oxide, thought Jamie.

Struggling to her feet, Joanna said, “I left my bio sampling cases when you called. They can maintain the ambient conditions inside them. If you bring the rock into the dome and it is suddenly thrust into our environment it would kill any native organisms that may be inside it.”

Jamie nodded inside his helmet. She was right. Even though the chances were that the green streak was just a patina of copper oxide, there was no sense screwing up what might be the biggest discovery of all time.

“Please do not touch the rock,” Joanna said. “Perhaps the rest of you could look around this area to see if any other rocks show such color. But do not touch them in any way. Do you all understand?”

Suddenly she was in charge. She wasn’t whispering anymore. The lovely little butterfly had turned into a dragon lady. What had started out as a geology field trip had turned into a biology session, and Jamie was just one of the flunkies. He felt his lips pressing into a tight angry line.

But he knew that she was right, and within her rights. He climbed slowly to his feet inside the cumbersome suit.

“Okay, boss,” he replied with exaggerated deference. “To hear is to obey.”

Joanna did not notice any humor in his crack. She detailed Monique to stand guard over the rock and ordered the other four to scour the area for other green spots. Connors, in his white hard-shell suit, stood to one side like a policeman, observing without participating. Joanna headed back toward the spot where she had left her sample cases, almost skipping across the rocky desert sands.

“Formidable.” Monique’s voice sounded amused.

Jamie asked, “Say, were any of us smart enough to bring a camera with him?”

“I have a camera,” said Toshima.

Jamie said, “Could you take a series of snaps of the rock and the region around it, from every angle—complete three hundred sixty degrees?”

“Most certainly.”

Jamie thought back to hunting trips he had taken with his grandfather Al. They would always snap photos of each other with their catch—deer, rabbit, even the gila monster that Jamie had shot with his twenty—two when he had been no more than ten years old. His mother hated to allow Jamie to go hunting, but his father could not stand up to grandfather Al’s determination. “You can’t keep the boy cooped up in a library all the time,” Al would argue. “He ought to be out in the open.” Then, when they were alone together up in the wooded hills, his grandfather would tell him, “They’re trying to make you a hundred percent white, Jamie. I just want you to keep a little bit of yourself red, like you ought to be.”

Jamie looked back at the rock, small enough to pick up and carry, especially in this light gravity. It’d make a great photo to send back to my grandfather, he thought. Me inside this damned suit with the rock for my trophy.

But he did not pose for Toshima’s camera.

Joanna returned after nearly half an hour with Vosnesensky at her side toting the two hefty silver-coated specimen boxes plus a pair of long slim poles that looked to Jamie like fishing rods. He knew that they were marker poles, with tiny radio beacons at their tips. He grinned to himself: Joanna’s even got the Russian working for her now.

“I wondered if I would ever have to use these,” she was chattering. “I never thought I would need them on the first day of field work!”

The others had found no other spots of green in the hundred meters or so they had examined in all directions around the rock. The soil was crisscrossed now with the prints of their cleated boots, except for a sacrosanct half meter surrounding the rock. No one had dared to come any closer for fear of damaging or destroying some vital evidence.

Vosnesensky stopped and bent slightly forward, hands on hips, as if doing obeisance to the rock. In his bright red suit he looked to Jamie like a fat bell pepper with a hump on its back.

Joanna took charge. “Do not touch the rock. Before we do anything, I will need soil samples from the ground immediately around the rock and then underneath it.”

“I can use the corer,” Jamie said, reaching for the tool at his belt. “It attaches to the pole, so we can get samples from as deep as five meters.”

“Good,” said Joanna.

“That can also tell us if there is permafrost beneath the surface, no?” asked Ilona, sounding excited for the first time since they had landed.

He nodded; then, realizing no one could see the gesture through his tinted visor, he added, “Yes, that’s right.”

Vosnesensky commanded, “Pete, bring the video camera here. We must have a record of this.”

The astronaut said, “Right,” and headed back toward the camera he had left on its tripod.

“My still camera is almost out of film,” Toshima said. “I will take the last few frames now and change rolls.”

“No!” snapped Naguib. “Don’t take the chance of high-energy radiation spoiling the film. Here, take my camera. It has a full roll in it.”

“Thank you,” said Toshima.

Connors lumbered into sight again, dangling the vidcam in one gloved hand. When he was satisfied that both still and video photographers were ready, Vosnesensky ordered, “Proceed.”

But no one moved until Joanna said, “I want four samples, one from each side of the rock, as far down as you can go.” Then she added, “Please.”

Jamie leaned on the pole and the corer bit into the ground. It buzzed through the first few centimeters easily enough but then the going got tough. Jamie pushed hard, breaking into a sweat.

“It’s gotten like hardpan,” he grunted.

“Or permafrost?” Ilona suggested hopefully.

Jamie pulled up the pole and let Patel, his fellow geologist, work the mechanism that neatly dropped the slim column of red dirt from the corer’s sharp teeth into one of Joanna’s sample boxes. Patel worked slowly, carefully, to make certain that the crumbly cylinder did not break apart.

Jamie noted that the column was striated. Different shades of red. Fluvial deposits, he guessed. There must have been an ocean here at one time. Or at least a big lake.

Four samples from the sides of the rock. Jamie had to stop his digging several times to let the fans of his suit clear away the mist that built up inside his visor. Despite his exertions, neither Patel nor any of the others made the slightest move to help him. Instead they peered at the samples and invented instant theories to explain their appearance.

They’re all too entranced with what’s going on to even think of helping, he told himself. Besides, they got an Injun to do the heavy work. Why should they bother with it?

“All right now,” said Joanna, after four samples were resting in the first case. She sank slowly to her knees and bent over the rock.

Jamie got down beside her. “You’ll need help lifting…”

“No!” she snapped. “I can do it myself. This is Mars, after all.”

Jamie flushed with sudden anger and then felt sheepish. She’s right. The damned rock only weighs a few pounds here. And she’s not going to let anybody touch it but herself.

Toshima clicked away and Connors focused the vidcam tightly on the rock as Joanna reached out and grasped it at both ends, keeping clear of the green patch on its side. She tugged the rock up off the ground and placed it inside the other silver sample case as tenderly as a mother laying her newborn infant in its crib.

Jamie stared hard at the ground beneath the rock. Flattened and smoothed by the rock’s weight but otherwise no different from the rest of the soil. What did you expect? he asked himself. A Martian rattlesnake coiled up under it?

“Now if you will please take a core sample from the ground that was beneath the rock,” Joanna said as she sealed the lid of her sample case.

“How deep?”

“As deep as you can go,” she said. “If you please.”

Jamie did it. While they all watched in silence he dug the pole in as far as it could go. Gently, delicately, he pulled the core sample up…

“Look!” shouted Monique Bonnet.

“What?”

“What is it?”

“I thought…” She was almost breathless. “When you pulled out the stick, I thought I saw sunlight glinting off… something.”

“Something?”

“What?”

“Was it water droplets?” Ilona asked.

“Perhaps,” said Monique. “I don’t know. It was gone in the blink of an eye.”

Ilona dropped to her knees so hard that Jamie was afraid she would hurt herself or bang up her suit. She wormed her gloved hand down into the hole that he had dug and pulled it out swiftly. The sleeve of the suit was smeared with reddish dust and crumbling bits of rust-colored dirt.

“Look! Look!”

A half dozen tiny glinting drops of moisture were on her gloved fingers, like dew on the petals of a flower. Before any of them could say a word the droplets disappeared, evaporating into the thin cold Martian air.

“It’s water!”

“It must be water!” Monique said, her voice vibrating with excitement. “Below the ground. Water!”

Naguib was laughing like a schoolboy. “We’ve discovered water! The first water found on an extraterrestrial body! It’s only a few drops, but it’s water! And liquid water at that!”

Jamie stood there leaning on the pole, all his physical tiredness from the digging evaporated just like the droplets from Ilona’s glove. The others were practically capering, waving their arms and almost dancing in their hard suits, they were so thrilled.

All except Joanna, who remained kneeling before the hole that Jamie had dug for her like a worshiper at a strange altar, flanked on either side by her filled and carefully sealed sample cases.

And Jamie, who stood behind her with the pole gripped in both hands, standing like a Navaho warrior with his lance butted on the dusty ground, wondering what his colleagues would do if that green patch actually turned out to be real living Martian organisms.

DOSSIER: