Mars Life Read Free Page B

look like a valley. The cliffs on Carleton’s left were more than three kilometers high. The valley was so wide that he couldn’t see its other wall: it was over the horizon.

    They call Mars the red planet, he mused as they trudged along to the site. Yes, most of its surface is rust red dust. Iron oxides. A red desert, from pole to pole. But look at that cliff face: bands of ochre and pale yellow and light brown along with the iron red. You can’t stand here for ten minutes without wanting to be a geologist.

    Several klicks along the cliff face was the sloping ramp of dirt and rocks that Jamie Waterman had used for the first transit down to the floor of Tithonium, back during the First Expedition, more than twenty years ago. The original Mars base had been up on the plateau in those early days. But it was down here on the valley floor that the Martian lichen had been discovered, struggling to stay alive through frigid nights and dust storms that smothered everything in their path.

    And in that notch high up in the cliff wall Waterman had found the ruins of buildings: brick structures erected by intelligent Martians more than sixty million years ago. Intelligent Martians who were wiped out by an extinction-level meteor strike, just as the dinosaurs on Earth had been driven into extinction by a killer meteor impact.

    There were three buckyball cables running along the cliff face now, to carry people and equipment from the base on the valley floor to Waterman’s village up in the cleft in the rocks. Only, it wasn’t a village. Carleton was convinced of that. Some sort of shrine, more likely. Or a fortress. The village was down here, on the valley floor. Had to be. If only I could find it, he thought. If the damned lichen are smart enough to live down here, where it’s warmer and there’s some moisture from the frost that forms overnight, then the Martians must’ve been smart enough to do the same.

    Except that he hadn’t found any village. Not yet, he told himself. It’s here, you just haven’t gone deep enough yet.

    “Is that the site?” Doreen asked, pointing with a spade toward the edge of the pit a few dozen meters ahead.

    “That’s it,” Carleton said.

    “And you think there’s a village buried here?” Doreen put down the spade and the bag of brushes.

    They stopped at the edge of the pit. It was fifty meters across and about twenty meters deep, almost square in shape. Its bottom looked freshly swept, cleaned of all debris and dust, nothing but bare jagged rock. To one side of where they were standing rested the tables bearing mesh grids for sifting rubble and the hoist that Carleton used to lower himself into the pit.

    As he carefully took his packages from the cart and lowered them to the ground in his stiff-jointed suit, Carleton said, “Ground-penetrating radar showed indications of a gridwork about thirty meters below the surface. Nature doesn’t produce grids; intelligence does.”

    “But you haven’t found anything,” Doreen said, not accusingly, he thought. If anything, she sounded sympathetic.

    “Haven’t gone deep enough yet. The village is underneath sixty-some million years of compacted dust.” If it’s here at all, he added silently.

    “And you excavate with explosives?”

    “Beats digging.”

    “But doesn’t that blow up the fossils you’re looking for?”

    “I’m not down deep enough for fossils yet. When I find something I’ll start digging by hand.”

    “Sounds weird, blasting away like that.”

    He chuckled at her. “There’s precedent for it. Dart or Broom or one of those paleontologists in South Africa a century or more ago, they used dynamite to excavate fossil sites.”

    “It still sounds weird,” Doreen insisted gently.

    “Don’t sweat it,” he said. “I sift through the rubble after each blast, to see if there’s anything in it. So far, nothing. It takes a long time, but digging by hand would be really tedious.”

    He could see