Sometime you had to break the shale open, and the fossil is inside. He wished he had one of those hammers that geologists use. Estrela would have one, he knew, but she was down at the rockhopper. He looked around. Above the shale layer, he found a piece of the conglomerate about the size of a brick that looked ready to come loose. Trevor pried at it with his fingers, worked it back and forth until all of a sudden it popped loose.
He used the rock as a hammer. The shale broke easily, peeling off in flakes like the pages of a book. He looked at each one carefully, hoping for a fossil, but there was still nothing.
When his arm got tired, he put his hammer rock down on the ledge for a rest. He was so tired that his eyes had been looking at it for minutes before his brain noticed that there was something there to look at.
The piece of conglomerate he had been holding had a smooth, concave surface. It had been molded around something. It was hard to tell just what, but it couldn’t be natural. He raced back to the place he had found the rock. The trail of broken shale showed just exactly where he’d been. Yes, there it was, embedded in the rock, the piece that was left behind when he pried out the rock he used as a hammer, like a bas-relief protruding from the wall.
But what was it?
It was maybe six inches long, the diameter of his thumb, a perfect cylinder, but curved slightly, like a piece of macaroni. Looking closer at it, he could see slight pumpkin-ridges on the surface.
He tugged on the rock, but couldn’t pull it free. It didn’t matter. A fossil, he had found a fossil. There were fossils on Mars. There had been life on Mars.
And he, Brandon Weber, had found it.
PART FIVE
Brandon Weber
But the ethereal and timeless power of the land, that union of what is beautiful with what is terrifying, is insistent… The beauty here is a beauty you feel in your flesh. You feel it physically, and that is why it is sometimes terrifying to approach. Other beauty takes only the heart, or the mind.
The horizon was a sea of mirage. Gigantic sand columns whirled over the plain, and on both sides of our road were huge piles of bare rocks standing detached upon the surface of sand and clay. Here they appeared in oval clumps, heaped up with a semblance of symmetry; there a single boulder stood, with its narrow foundation based upon a pedestal of low, dome-shaped rock.
1
Fossil Hunters
They all clustered around the base of the cliff, looking at the layer of shale with his fossil embedded in it, examining his find. He felt inordinately proud. He had found it! Everybody else had stopped looking, but he had kept on. He, Brandon, had found fossils of life on Mars.
“It’s a great find, Trevor,” Ryan said, and he almost couldn’t help from dancing at the praise. “You’ve got sharp eyes.”
He ran fingers over it once again, feeling its surface, hoping that from tactile sense alone some message from the distant past would be transmitted through his fingertips. But the gloves were too thick, or perhaps no message was there to be sent.
It looked like nothing more than a six-inch length of some ordinary, dark brown garden hose that had somehow gotten glued into the rock. But that was impossible, of course. There were no garden hoses on Mars.
“Estrela,” Ryan said. “You’re the rock expert here. What do you think?”
“Me?” Estrela seemed startled to be asked. She seemed worn out, he suddenly thought. He was surprised how haggard Estrela looked. The pain of her arm must be wearing on her, he thought. Perhaps Tana needed to prescribe a stronger painkiller. “Clearly a fossil,” Estrela said. “I think.”
“What do you mean, you think?” Ryan pressed. “What is it?”
“Let me think.” Estrela’s voice was distant, a little weary. “This whole stratum was under the ocean,” she said. “We’re below the salt layer here, right? These are sedimentary layerings from the ocean floor. This one”—she touched the smooth blue rock layer—“is siltstone. Dried and compressed mud. This one here”—she touched another layer—“is a sandstone. This must have been a very shallow layer here. The layer with the fossil is a conglomerate; lots of different sediments pressed together. It’s right above the shale layer; more layered mud. Santa Luzia, shales often have a high carbon content. We’ve got to get the mass-spec here, look for organics.”
“But what is it?” Ryan repeated. “Is it a fossil, or not?”
“Truthful? I don’t know.” Estrela shrugged, and even through the helmet, he could see from her expression that the gesture must have been painful. “The only way to tell would be to see if there are more.”
Ryan shook his head. “We can’t. Time.” He looked at the others and repeated, “Really, we can’t. We’re spending too long as it is. You know how tight our supplies are; we’ve been almost ten days on the road so far, and we aren’t even a third of the way to the waypoint. Trevor may have found a fossil, but—”
They like me, Brandon thought. It was now or never. He interrupted. “Say,” he said, hesitantly. “Commander Ryan? I was, like, wondering. Would you do something? Like, a favor, you know?”
“Of course, Trevor,” Tana said, without thinking. “Anything. You name it.”
Ryan was slightly slower in replying. “I suppose that depends what, Trevor,” he said.
There was a big lump in his throat, he could barely squeak out his name. “Brandon,” he said.
“What?”
He took a deep breath. The air was cold, dry, metallic. “Brandon, not Trevor. Call me Brandon, okay?”
“Brandon? But your name’s Trevor. Isn’t it?”
“Oh, yeah, sure, my name is Trevor. Yeah. But Brandon is, like, a nickname, okay? I like it better. So could you call me Brandon?” He looked down and kicked a rock. It sailed off down the slope, bounced twice, and skidded downward in a tiny avalanche of dust.
Tana looked at Ryan. Ryan gave a minute shrug. “Sure, why not? From now on, you’re Brandon.” He looked around at them. “But we still have to get everybody up this cliff, anchor some cables, and get the rockhopper winched up. And it’s halfway into the afternoon, and we don’t have much time.
“So, let’s get moving now, shall we?”
2
Directions
Brandon Weber had an absolute sense of direction. He never questioned it, never thought about it, but no matter where they were, or how many twisty turns they had made in the wilderness, his built-in compass always knew which way was north.
He never bothered to think how extraordinary this was. After all, his brother Trevor had it too.
One time in high school he, along with a bunch of his high school buddies, had decided to go explore a cave. They weren’t organized or anything—Rip, one of his friends, had heard from another friend about a cave that somebody had found over in New Mexico. Kaipo, another one of his friends, had a car, and they drove out to explore it before the authorities found out about it and closed it up.
When he was younger, Brandon had often gone out exploring and rock climbing with his brother Trevor, but Trevor was a junior in high school now, and was busy being too cool to hang around much with his little brother. Brandon didn’t even invite him on this one. He’d tell Trevor about it later. This would be an adventure for him.