Mars

SOL 8: EVENING

Jamie and Vosnesensky had started as soon as the morning sunlight made the ground around them visible. All the previous day they had taken turns driving the rover at breakneck speed along the broken, rugged badlands country, heading north by east, away from the faulted canyons of Noctis Labyrinthus, away from their base camp. Breakneck speed, for the rover, was not quite forty kilometers per hour—almost the speed limit in a school zone.

Still they were exhausted by the time the sun had finally dropped behind the ragged horizon at their backs and the dark cold shadows of night overtook their vehicle. Two straight days of continuous driving, much of it detours around ridges too steep to climb or crevasses too deep to traverse, had sapped them physically and emotionally. They ate a sparse dinner in moody silence; then Vosnesensky checked in with Dr. Li and the base camp. Everything was going smoothly at the base, and to Jamie’s continuing surprise and delight, Li still did not order them to turn around and return to the domed camp.

“The mission controllers haven’t vetoed our excursion,” he said, leaning back on the bench that would later unfold to be his bunk. Vosnesensky sat across from him, the narrow folding table between them.

“Not yet,” said the cosmonaut, like a man waiting for the ax to fall.

Feeling something between guilt and embarrassment, Jamie said, “I’m sorry I had to go over your head about this.”

Vosnesensky shrugged his heavy shoulders. “It was your right to do so.” He looked into Jamie’s eyes and added, “My responsibility was to stick to the mission plan until higher authority changed the plan. I was only doing my duty. I was not objecting on personal grounds.”

A tendril of relief wormed along Jamie’s spine. “Then you’re not angry?”

“Why should I be? Do you think you scientists have a monopoly on curiosity?”

Jamie smiled broadly. “That’s great! I was afraid I’d made you sore.”

The Russian grinned back at him. “Not so. Once Dr. Li took the responsibility of allowing this change in the traverse, my objections vanished. I would like to see this Grand Canyon too.”

Jamie slept soundly, dreaming of Mesa Verde and his grandfather.

They awakened after their third night aboard the rover at the first eerie light of dawn, the faintest pale pink brightening of the sky along the flat eastern horizon. Jamie pulled his coveralls over his briefs, then set up the folding table between their bunks and popped two precooked breakfasts into the microwave while Vosnesensky was in the lavatory. The Russian, already in his tan coveralls and soft slipper-socks, spooned down his steaming oatmeal while Jamie took his turn at the toilet.

As Jamie was washing up he heard Vosnesensky shout, “Jamie! Look at this!”

He ducked out of the narrow lavatory and saw that Vosnesensky was up in the cockpit. Squeezing past the table, Jamie hurried there.

Vosnesensky had pulled back the thermal shroud. The plastiglass bubble canopy was twinkling with faintly glistening little glimmers that winked on and disappeared like fireflies. Jamie felt his breath catch in his throat.

“Dewdrops,” Vosnesensky said. “Morning dew.”

“It condenses on the glass.” Jamie reached out his fingers to touch the bubble. It was cold but dry inside. Even while he watched more tiny droplets appeared and flickered out, evaporating before his eyes, vanishing so quickly that he would have missed them altogether if others had not glimmered into brief existence. Like tiny diamonds they sparkled for a heartbeat and then were gone. After a few minutes they stopped completely. Jamie realized that he would never have suspected they had been there if he had not seen them himself. Mikhail caught them at just the right moment.

“There is moisture in the air here,” the Russian said. “A little, at least.”

“Frost,” Jamie murmured. “Must be ice particles that form in the air at night. They melted on the warm surface…”

“And evaporated immediately.”

“Where’s the moisture coming from?” Jamie asked. Turning to the Russian, “Mikhail, how far are we from the canyon?”

“An hour’s drive, perhaps a little more.” Vosnesensky slid into the pilot’s seat and punched up a map display on the control panel’s central screen. “Yes, about one hour.”

“Let’s get going! Right away! I’ll drive.”

“I will drive,” said Vosnesensky firmly. “You are too excited. You would drive like a cowboy, not an Indian.” Then he chuckled deep in his throat at his own wit.

Jamie blinked at the Russian. Humor, from Mikhail? That’s even more rare than morning dew on Mars.

Now the rover lurched and swayed as Vosnesensky threaded between rocks and over ridges, every ounce of his attention focused on his driving. He had the throttle full out and the segmented vehicle was making its best speed across the rusted desert. To Jamie, sitting at Vosnesensky’s right, the rover was a large metal caterpillar inching its way across the Martian landscape. The dusty red ground was strewn with rocks, as everywhere, although craters seemed to be much fewer than farther west. Boulders as large as houses lay here and there, making Jamie itch to go out and investigate them.

But they stayed inside the rover, comfortable in their coveralls, and stuck to their low-speed dash toward the Grand Canyon of Mars. Jamie gripped the stone fetish in his pocket. There’s moisture in the air in the morning, he kept repeating to himself. It must be coming from the canyon. Must be.

He worried in the back of his mind that Dr. Li’s approval might be countermanded by someone in the chain of command on Earth. He wanted to be at their destination when such a signal came in—or so close that they could do some exploring before they had to obey the command to return to base. Mikhail seems to want it too, Jamie thought. In his own way he’s as excited as I am.

“I have never met an Indian before,” Vosnesensky said abruptly, without taking his eyes from his driving.

“I’m not much of an Indian,” Jamie replied. “I was brought up to be a white man.”

“But you are not white.”

“No, not entirely.” The rover jounced over a little rill, bouncing Jamie in his seat. “In the States we have people from every part of the world—all the nationalities of Europe, Asians, Africans…”

“I have heard about the problems of your blacks. We learned in school how they are hold down by your racist system.”

Jamie felt himself bristling. “Then why is the only black man on Mars an American? Why haven’t the African nations joined in this expedition?”

“Because they are poor,” the Russian answered, deftly maneuvering the rover around a new-looking crater about the size of a swimming pool. “They cannot afford luxuries such as space exploration. They can barely feed their people.”

“Is this really a luxury, Mikhail? Do you think that reaching out into space is a waste of money?”

“No.” Vosnesensky’s answer was immediate and firm beyond the shadow of a doubt.

Thinking of the run-down pueblos and crumbling old adobe homes in New Mexico, Jamie mused, “I wonder. Sometimes I think the money could have been better used to help poor people.”

The Russian shot him a quick glance, then returned to his driving. For long moments he said nothing and Jamie watched the dusty red land pass by, rocks, tired worn gullies, craters, little wind-stirred dunes. Off toward the horizon he saw a dust swirl, as red as a devil, spiraling into the pink morning sky.

“What we do helps the poor,” Vosnesensky said. “We are not taking bread from their mouths. We are enlarging the habitat of the human species. History has shown that every expansion of the human habitat has brought about an increase in wealth and a rise in living standards. That is objective fact.”

“But the poor are still with us,” Jamie said.

A slight note of exasperation crept into the Russian’s voice. “The Soviet Federation alone has spent thousands of billions on aid to poor nations. The United States even more. This expedition to Mars has not hurt the poor. What we spend here is a pittance compared to what they have already received. And what good does it do for them? They go out and produce more babies, make a new generation of poor. A larger generation. It is endless.”

“So they’re not going hungry because we’re here on Mars.”

“Definitely not. They lack discipline, that is their problem. In the Soviet Federation we pulled ourselves up from a backward agricultural society to a powerful industrial nation in a single generation.”

Yes, Jamie replied silently, with Stalin in the driver’s seat. He didn’t care how many millions starved while he built his factories and power plants.

“But tell me, what was it like when you were growing up in New Mexico? It is near Texas?”

“Yes,” Jamie said. “Between Arizona and Texas.”

“I have been there. Houston.”

“New Mexico is nothing like Houston.” Jamie laughed. Then, “Actually, I did most of my growing up in California. Berkeley. That’s where my parents taught, at the university. I was a kid when we moved there. But I spent a lot of my summers in Santa Fe, with my grandfather.”

It had been a trying day. Jamie was almost seventeen, finishing high school, a vast disappointment to his parents because he had no clear idea of what he wanted to study in college.

His parents had flown with him to Santa Fe, where he was to spend the summer. His grandfather had just announced that he had secured a full scholarship for Jamie at the university in Albuquerque—if Jamie wanted it.

They were sitting in the dining room of Al’s house, up in the hills north of Santa Fe, the evening meal long finished as they sat and talked across the big oak table littered with the remains of roasted goat.

The dining room was large and cool, with a slanted beamed ceiling high above the floor of gleaming ochre tiles. Through its broad window Jamie could see adobe-style town houses dotting the slopes that ran down to the city. Al owned most of them; rental condos for the skiers in the winter and the tourists who wanted to buy genuine Indian artifacts all year long. The sun was going down toward the darkening mountains. Soon there would be another spectacular New Mexico sunset painting the sky.

Jamie had gobbled every scrap of the cabrito, enjoying the spices that Al’s cook had used so generously. His mother, who would eat lapin and even frogs’ legs without a qualm, had barely touched her dinner. Jamie’s father had eaten his portion easily enough, but now he unconsciously rubbed his chest, as if the spices had been too much for him.

“I’m sure you meant well, Al,” Lucille was saying, with her sweetest, most persuasive little-girl smile, “but we had just assumed that Jamie would stay at home and attend Berkeley.”

“Do the boy good to get a different slant on things,” Al said, pulling a pack of slim dark cigarillos from his shirt pocket. “That’s what schoolin’s supposed to be all about, isn’t it: gettin’ an education? That moans more than books and class work, don’t it?”

Lucille frowned as her father-in-law lit up and blew a cloud of thin gray smoke toward the beamed ceiling. She cast a sharp glance at her husband.

With a slight cough, Jerome Waterman said, “Dad, the boy hasn’t even made up his mind about what he wants to study yet, let alone about where he wants to go to school.”

They’re talking as if I get to make the decisions, Jamie thought. But they’re not even asking me what I think.

His father was going on, “Considering his grades and the results of his aptitude tests…”

“Aw, bullshit on all that crap!” Al blurted. Then he turned his most flattering smile on his daughter-in-law. “Sorry for the language, Lucille. But I don’t think those psychologists could find a skunk in their own clothes closet, let alone help a seventeen-year-old boy figure out where he wants to head in life.”

“I will not have Jamie turned into an Indian,” Lucille said firmly.

Al guffawed, a reaction Jamie had seen him use often in his store when he needed a moment to frame his thoughts before replying to a tough question.

“What do you think, Lucy? You think I want him workin’ in a store, waitin’ on tourists from Beverly Hills or New York? You think I want him wastin’ away his life in some dumb-ass pueblo raisin’ sheep and drinkin’ beer the rest of his life?”

“He’s shown an aptitude for science,” Jerry said.

“Then let him study science! They got fine scientists at Albuquerque. All kinds of geologists and whatnot.”

Geology. Jamie had spent long hours collecting rocks in the arid hills and arroyos. Al had taken him up to Colorado to see the Mesa Verde cliff dwellings, and out to Arizona for the Grand Canyon and the big meteor crater.

“Some of the finest scientists in the world are at Berkeley,” Lucille was saying stiffly. “In the physics department alone…”

Al interrupted her. “Hell, here we are talkin’ about the boy’s future as if he wasn’t even here. Jamie! What do you think about all this? What’ve you got to say?”

Jamie remembered the Grand Canyon. That vast chasm carved into the Earth. The colors of the different layers of rock, layer after layer. The whole history of the world was painted on those rocks, a history that went incredibly farther back than the span of time human beings had existed.

“I like geology,” he said. “I’d like to study geology, I think.”

More than an hour had passed since they had started off. Jamie was fingering the bear fetish in his coverall pocket as the rover climbed the slope of a ridge, laboring up a steepening grade that was strewn with smallish rocks and pebbles. The red soil seemed sandy, crumbly. Jamie could hear the electric motors that drove each individual wheel whining, struggling.

Vosnesensky slowed the vehicle to a crawl. Looking out ahead, Jamie could see only the approaching top of the ridge and the pink sky beyond it. Not a cloud in that sky, it was as clear and empty as the deep blue skies he had known in New Mexico.

“Can’t we go any faster?” Jamie urged. “The moisture’ll be all baked out of the air by the time we reach…”

Abruptly Vosnesensky tramped on the brakes. Jamie lurched forward, reflexively jabbing his hands out to the control panel. He started to complain, then gaped at what lay outside the plastiglass canopy.

“We are here,” Vosnesensky said.

What Jamie had thought was the ridge line was actually the rim of the canyon. Beyond it there was a huge, vast, yawning emptiness. They were perched on the edge of a cliff that dropped away precipitously for miles and miles. Another few feet and the rover would have pitched over the rimrock and plunged down forever.

“Jesus Christ,” Jamie breathed.

Vosnesensky grunted.

Jamie stood up in his chair, peering as far as he could into the depths of the enormity of Tithonium Chasma. It was dizzying, and knowing that this gigantic cleft was merely one arm of Valles Marineris, that the valley system stretched more than three thousand kilometers eastward, made his head swim even more.

Then he felt his heart clutch in his chest. “Mikhail—it’s there. The mist…”

Frail gray feathers of clouds were wafting through the vast canyon far below, like a ghostly river that glided silently past their round staring eyes.

“The sunlight has not reached that deep into the canyon,” Vosnesensky said.

“Yeah.” Jamie pushed out of his seat and started back toward the airlock and the hard suits. “Come on, we’ve got to get this on tape before the clouds evaporate. There’s moisture down there, Mikhail! Water!”

“Ice particles,” the Russian said. He followed Jamie toward the suit locker.

“They melt into liquid water.”

“And evaporate.”

“And form again the next night.” Jamie was struggling into the lower half of his suit. “The moisture doesn’t go away. It stays in the valley—for a while, at least.”

He had never put on a hard suit so quickly. After the lower half, the boots (it was much easier that way), then the torso, finally the helmet. Vosnesensky helped him into his backpack and checked all the seals and connections while Jamie quivered like a bird dog on the scent.

As he was grabbing for the video camera Vosnesensky said sternly, “Gloves! Think before you step outside. Go down the checklist no matter how excited you are.”

“Thanks,” Jamie said, feeling sheepish.

“In fact,” Vosnesensky said, sliding his helmet over his head and fastening the neck seal, “the more excited you are the more you must force yourself to stop and go through the checklist point by point.”

“You’re right,” Jamie said impatiently.

The Russian grinned at him, like a squat bear showing its teeth. “If you kill yourself here I will be in big trouble with Dr. Li and the controllers in Kaliningrad.”

Jamie found himself grinning back. “I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble, Mikhail.”

“Good. Now we are ready to go outside.”

It was not fair to call it a canyon. Jamie could not see the other side, it was beyond the horizon. The abyss named Tithonium Chasma was so vast, so awesome, that at first Jamie merely stared out from behind his tinted visor, numb with excitement and an overpowering feeling of reverence.

Unbidden, words from his long-forgotten childhood formed in his mind:

“The camera.” He heard Vosnesensky’s voice in his helmet earphones. “The sunlight is beginning to evaporate the mist.”

Jamie shook himself inside the hard suit and got to work. He panned the vidcam up and down the valley, then from the lip of the rimrock where they stood out to the mist-shrouded horizon. Wherever the sun touched the clouds dissipated, dissolved into thin air. Like the old myths of ghosts that vanish when the sun comes up, Jamie told himself.

“It’s not right to call this a valley,” he muttered as he worked the camera. “That’s like calling the Pacific Ocean a pond.”

Vosnesensky said, “If you will be all right here for a while, I will set up a sensor unit.”

“I’ll be okay,” Jamie said. “I’ll be fine.”

For hours he watched the mists dissolving as the pale sun rose higher in the rose-pink sky. Down in the deepest recesses of the rocks there must be places where the mist clings, where the sunlight can’t reach, Jamie said to himself. Little oases where there are droplets of liquid water and warmth from the sun’s heating of the rocks. Little pockets down there where life might hang on.

By noontime he had used up three videocassettes and was inserting a fourth one into the camera. The mists were almost entirely gone now and he could see the rock formations standing like proud ancient battlements, marching off in both directions from the spot where he stood. The valley floor was so far below that he could only see the distant part of it, curving off past the horizon. Misty shadows still clung among the rocks down there.

“They’re differentiated, Mikhail,” Jamie said into his helmet microphone. “The rock walls here are layered. There was an ocean here once, or maybe an enormous river. Look at the layers.”

Vosnesensky, standing beside him once more, said, “All the rocks look red.”

Jamie laughed. “And on Earth all the trees look green. But there are different shades, Mikhail.”

He pointed with a gloved hand along the line of cliffs. “Look out there. See, this top layer is cracked vertically, weathered pretty badly. But the layer under it is smoother, and much darker in color.”

“Ah, yes,” said Vosnesensky. “Now I see.”

“And the layer under that is streaked with yellowish intrusions.

Maybe bauxite, or something like it. This region must have been a lot warmer once, a long time ago.”

“You think so? Why?”

Jamie started to reply, then realized he was indulging in wishful thinking. “Good question, Mikhail. We’ll make a scientist out of you yet.”

He heard the Russian’s deep chuckling. “Not likely.”

Jamie squinted up at the sun. “Let’s set up the winch. I want to…”

“Not down there!”

“Just the first three layers,” Jamie said. “I know we can’t get down to the bottom or anywhere near it. But I can reach that layer with the yellowish intrusions, at least. Come on, the sun’s starting to hit this side.”

“No lunch?”

“You can eat lunch after the winch is up. I’m too excited to eat.”

In his stolid, immovable fashion Vosnesensky insisted that they both eat before breaking out the winch and climbing harness.

“Nutrition is important,” the Russian insisted. “Many mistakes are made because of hunger.”

Despite himself Jamie grinned. “You sound like a commercial for bran flakes, Mikhail.”

Neither man bothered to take off more than his helmet and gloves once inside the rover. They each ate a hot meal perched on the edge of their facing half-folded bunks in their cumbersome hard suits. Vosnesensky brought the bottle of vitamin supplement pills from their little pharmaceutical cabinet.

“We forgot at breakfast,” he said, handing the bottle to Jamie.

“Right.” Jamie shook one of the orange-colored pills loose. “Wouldn’t want to miss the Flintstones.”

Vosnesensky scowled, puzzled. “It is no joke. Our diet lacks vitamins; we get no sunshine on our skins. The supplement is necessary.”

“Besides,” Jamie kidded, “it’s written into the mission rules.”

Jamie popped the pill into his mouth and washed it down with the last of the coffee in his mug. God, what I’d give for a cup of real coffee instead of this instant crap!

Then he saw that the sunlight was slanting into the rover through the canopy up in the cockpit.

“Come on, Mikhail, we’re wasting time.”

It took all four of their hands to work the harness over Jamie’s backpack and crotch, then fasten it across his chest. With the Russian standing guard at the winch, Jamie lowered himself gingerly down the steep face of the cliff. Far, far below some tenuous threads of mist still clung to the rocks, gray and ghostly, slowly rising and sinking like long ocean swells or the breath of a sleeping giant.

There was no opposite wall of the canyon in sight, it was too far away beyond the horizon. Instead of the trapped feeling that had frightened him at Noctis Labyrinthus, Jamie felt as if he were working his way down the face of a mesa back home. Biggest goddammed mesa anybody ever saw, he said to himself as he peered down between his dangling feet toward the bottom, miles below. If this were New Mexico, the other end of this canyon would be in Newfoundland.

Jamie had to consciously force himself to turn his attention to chipping out rock samples. Still, as he started his work, dangling in the harness, he wondered about the world at the bottom of the solar system’s largest canyon. We didn’t expect mists in the summertime, didn’t think there’d be enough moisture in the air for that. Down in the Hellas Basin, yes. But we didn’t expect it here. Wish we could have taken samples of the stuff. Maybe it’s ice crystals. But it doesn’t look like an ice fog. How can you tell, though? The rules are different here; at least the conditions are. Down toward the bottom of the canyon there must be a completely different ecosystem from what we see up on the surface. Maybe the air’s denser down there. Wetter. Warmer. Maybe there’s life down there, hiding out in warm little niches the way our ancestors used to live in caves.

We should have set up base camp here, not out on that dumb plain. Then we could have spent our time exploring the canyon. This old rut in the ground has more to tell us than anyplace else on Mars.

Dangling in the harness, suspended a few meters from the lip of the canyon and many kilometers from its mist-shrouded bottom, Jamie thrilled that the cliffs here were completely different from those at the Noctis Labyrinthus badlands. There the cliff walls were a uniform slab of iron-red stone. Here the cliffs were layered, tier upon tier, as weathered and seamed as the mesas back home, rich pages of a petrified book that told the entire history of this world to those with the skill and patience to read it.

The topmost layer of the cliff, just under the caprock, had been almost soft; the rock there, crumbly, easily broken loose. On Earth it would have been weathered away by wind and rain in a geological twinkling. But here on dry, calm, gentle Mars it could remain for eons, undisturbed except for the slow erosion from the sun’s warmth and the night’s cold that eventually cracked it. Even so, there was no water in this layer, Jamie was willing to bet. Not even permafrost. If there had been, the water’s expansion and contraction during the day-night cycle would easily have crumbled such friable stone.

The next tier was much tougher rock, its color a deeper red. More iron, Jamie guessed. Shergottite, like the meteor I found in Antarctica.

Jamie whacked away with his hand pick until he had several loose bits of the rock in his free hand. Chips and flakes fell clattering down, down beyond sight and hearing toward the canyon bottom so far below. As he slipped the rock samples into a collecting bag Jamie realized he was soaked with sweat from the exertion. The suit’s fans were buzzing, sounding angry at him for pushing them so hard. He pulled in a deep breath of canned air as he carefully tucked the pick into its loop on his belt and then pulled out the ballpoint pen (guaranteed to work even in zero gravity) and labeled the sample bag precisely: date, time, exact distance from the rim. He got his depth, measured from the canyon’s edge, by having Vosnesensky read off the tick marks on the winch’s tether.

“Not much daylight remaining.” Vosnesensky’s voice sounded as remote and unemotional as a computer.

Jamie glanced up, then leaned a booted foot against the rock wall to turn himself around in the harness.

His leg flared into a million pinpricks. Hanging in the harness, both legs had gone asleep. Jamie muttered and cursed to himself as he flailed his legs and wiggled his toes to get some circulation going again. He felt as if a whole colony of ants were gnawing at his legs.

“What is it?” Vosnesensky’s voice was suddenly urgent. “Are you all right?”

“My goddam legs are asleep,” Jamie answered.

“I will pull you up.”

“No… it’ll be okay in a minute or so. I want to get down to that third tier, where the yellow stuff is.”

“Time is getting short.”

“Isn’t it always?” Jamie looked out across the vast chasm, saw the shadows creeping toward him. “We’ve got another hour, at least.”

“One hour,” said Vosnesensky, with implacable finality.

“Yeah. Okay.”

Jamie pushed the sample bag into the pouch strapped to his right thigh, next to his fetish, then started to reach up to the keypad on his chest that controlled the winch. And froze.

His eyes caught a dark rift in the cliff wall a kilometer or more off to his left, a horizontal cleft with a flat floor and a slightly bulging overhang of rock above it. Like the cleft at Mesa Verde where the ancient ones had built their village of dried mud bricks.

And there were buildings in the cleft.

Jamie felt the breath rush out of him, felt his insides go hollow, drop away as if he had been suddenly pushed off the edge of the tallest mountain in the universe.

They can’t be buildings, a part of his mind insisted. Yet as he stared he could make out square shapes, walls, towers. There was no haze to obscure his vision; the air was as clear as a polished mirror at this level.

Fumbling at his belt without taking his eyes from the vision, Jamie found the video camera clipped there and yanked it free. He banged it against his visor, his head jolting back in surprise, then held it steady and adjusted its telescopic lens.

His hands were shaking so badly all he could see at first was a blurry jumbled image. Fiercely, snarling inwardly, Jamie forced himself to a desperate calm, like a frightened man who knows he must aim his gun accurately or be killed.

The dark cleft in the rocks steadied and pulled itself into sharp focus. Deep inside it, well into the shadows of the overhang, Jamie saw the flat surfaces and crenellated outline of whitish rocks.

He was icy cold now. They’re rocks, he told himself. Not buildings. Just a formation of rocks that look roughly like walls and towers made by intelligent creatures.

And yet.

Jamie cranked the lens to its fullest magnification, then squeezed the camera’s trigger until its tiny beeping told him the cassette had been used up. Only then did he take the vidcam from his eyes.

“I’m coming up,” he said, shouting even though the microphone built into his helmet was bare centimeters from his lips.

Vosnesensky sounded surprised. “Is something wrong?”

“No, Mikhail, nothing’s wrong. Something’s right.”

“What? What did you say?”

It took more than fifteen minutes for the winch to lift him back to the rim of the canyon. Jamie had not realized he had traversed so far down. He spent the time trying to see more of the cleft, trying to convince himself not to let his imagination run loose, trying to stay calm and not babble once he got up there with the Russian again.

From the rim he could not see the cleft. As he shrugged himself out of the harness he said hurriedly to Vosnesensky, “Get into the rig, Mikhail. Quick! There’s something down there you’ve got to see.”

“Me? Why…”

“No time for discussion,” Jamie urged as he slipped the harness over the Russian’s fire-red backpack and started buckling it across his chest.

Puzzled, reluctant, Vosnesensky pulled the thigh straps tight and clicked them to the locking mechanism on his chest while Jamie reloaded the camera.

“What is it?” he asked. “What have you found?”

“A mirage, I think,” Jamie said. “But maybe…”

Swiftly he described the cleft and the shapes inside it. Vosnesensky said nothing as he backed himself to the lip of the rimrock and stepped off.

“Wait!” Jamie yelled. He shoved the camera into Vosnesensky’s gloved hands and fastened its tether to his equipment belt. “Use it as a telescope. But shoot the whole damned cassette. Keep shooting until it’s all used up.”

“Where do I look?” Vosnesensky asked as he descended. To Jamie he looked like an old-fashioned deep-sea diver lowering himself into the abyss.

Jamie kept rattling off instructions as the winch motor hummed thinly and Vosnesensky dropped lower.

“I see it!” For the first time since he had met the Russian, Vosnesensky sounded excited. “Yes, interesting formations of rock inside…” His voice trailed off.

“What do you think?” Jamie asked.

No answer for many minutes. Then, “It can’t be a city. It looks like rock formations.”

“Yeah.” Jamie paced nervously back and forth along the canyon rim. Down below the Russian was silent.

Finally, “The tape is finished. I am coming up.”

“Is it real?” Jamie asked as the winch labored, whining.

“Real, yes. But not artificial. It could not be.”

“Never mind what it could or couldn’t be. What is it?”

“Unusual formations of rock. But natural, not man-made.”

“Martian-made.”

“Not that either.”

Jamie knew he should agree. It couldn’t be artificial. It couldn’t be a village created by intelligent Martians. It couldn’t be the ancestors of his ancestors, the forerunner of Mesa Verde and the other cliff dwellings of the Anasazi. He knew it could not be.

But by the time Vosnesensky was standing beside him once more and pulling free of the harness Jamie was babbling, “We’ve got to get the rover to that spot on the rim, right on top of it, so we can lower down and look in there for ourselves. We’re too far away to make certain from this distance and if there’s any chance, any slightest chance at all, that we’ve found the remains of intelligent life, holy Christ, Mikhail, it’s the biggest discovery in the history of the world!”

Vosnesensky remained strangely silent, like a stolid schoolmaster who is accustomed to sudden enthusiasms from his young students. Jamie kept on chattering and the Russian remained silent as they took the winch apart, stowed it in the rover’s equipment module, and then clumped into the airlock.

Once inside the living section they took their helmets off. Jamie could see that Vosnesensky looked solemn, almost pained. His heavy jaw was covered with several days’ stubble, making his face seem even grimmer than usual.

He realized he had been virtually raving. “Well, we can drive over there tomorrow morning, first light. Right?”

The Russian shook his head. “Not right. We have been ordered to return to the base.”

“Ordered? By whom? When?”

“This afternoon, while you were down in the climbing rig. The order came over the command frequency; I heard it in my suit. Dr. Li himself specifically ordered us to return to the base camp. There has been an accident.”