The Martians(20)

The commotion woke the rest of the sleepers. Immediately the conversation returned to the matter of John's discovery, and Roger agreed that their supplies were sufficient to allow a trip back upcanyon. And the storm had stopped; dust coated their dome, and was piled half a centimeter high on its uphill side, but they could see that the sky was clear. So after breakfast they suited up, more awkward than ever on the tilted floor, and emerged from their shelter.

The distance back up to where they had met John was much shorter than it had seemed to Eileen in the storm. All of their tracks had been covered, even the sometimes deep treadmarks of the wagon. John led the way, leaping upward in giant bounds that were almost out of his control.

“There's the gendarme where we found you,” Roger said from below, pointing to the spine on their right for John's benefit. John waited for them, talking nervously all the while. “There's the first duck,” he told them. “I see it way over there, but with all the sand, it looks almost like any other mound. This could be hard.”

“We'll find them,” Roger assured him.

When they had all joined John, they began to traverse the canyons to the south, each one a deep multifingered trench in the slope of Mars facing Olympus Mons. John had very little sense of where he had been, except that he had not gone much above or below the level they were on. Some of the ducks were hard to spot, but Roger had quite a facility for it, and the others spotted some as well. More than once none of them saw it, and they had to trek off in nine slightly different directions, casting about in hopes of running into it. Each time someone would cry, “Here it is,” as if they were children hunting Easter eggs, and they would convene and search again. Only once were they unable to locate the next duck, and then Roger pumped John's memory of his hike; after all, as Ivan pointed out, it had been the full light of day when he walked to the site. A crestfallen John admitted that, each little red canyon looking so much like the next one, he couldn't really recall where he had gone from there.

“Well, but there's the next duck,” Roger said with surprise, pointing at a little niche indicating a side ravine. And after they had reached the niche John cried, “This is it! Right down this ravine, in the wall itself. And some of them have fallen.”

The common band was a babble of voices as they dropped into the steep-sided ravine one by one. Eileen stepped down through the narrow entrance and confronted the nearly vertical south wall. There, embedded in hard sandstone, were thousands of tiny black stone snail shells. The bottom of the ravine was covered with them; all of them were close to the same size, with holes that opened into the hollow interior of the shells. Many of them were broken, and inspecting some fragments, Eileen saw the spiral ribbing that so often characterized life. Her earphones rang with the excited voices of her companions. Roger had climbed the canyon wall and was inspecting a particular section, his faceplate only centimeters from stone. “See what I mean?” John was asking. “Martian snails! It's like those fossil bacterial mats they talk about, only further advanced. Back when Mars had surface water and an atmosphere, life did begin. It just didn't have time to get very far.”

“Nobleton snails,” Cheryl said, and they laughed. Eileen picked up fragment after fragment, her excitement growing. They were all very similar. She was taxing her suit's cooling system, starting to sweat. She examined a well-preserved specimen carefully, pulling it out of the rock to do so. The common band was distractingly noisy, and she was about to turn it off when Roger's voice said slowly, “Uh-ohh. . . . Hey, people. Hey.”

When it was silent he said hesitantly, “I hate to spoil the party, but . . . these little things aren't fossils.”

“What?”

“What do you mean?” John and Ivan challenged. “How do you know?”

“Well, there are a couple reasons,” Roger said. Everyone was still now, and watching him. “First, I believe that fossils are created by a process that requires millions of years of water seepage, and Mars never had that.”

“So we think now,” Ivan objected. “But it may not be so, because it's certain that there was water on Mars all along. And after all, here are these things.”

“Well . . .” Eileen could tell he was deciding to let that argument pass. “Maybe you're right, but a better reason is, I think I know what these are. They're lava pellets—bubble pellets, I've heard them called—although I've never seen ones this small. Little lava bombs from one of the Olympus Mons eruptions. A sort of spray.”

Everyone stared at the objects in their hands.