The grooves had been perfectly, and unmistakably, carved into the stone. And both astronauts immediately interpreted them in the same way: whatever had made the lines had intended them to point towards something that was now buried under the rock and debris of the cliff-wall.
They sat in silence for several minutes before Montreaux regained his composure. He pressed a button on his communicator pad and hailed the MLP.
“Dr Richardson, please confirm that you are getting the data feed from Captain Marchenko’s and my helmet cams.”
There was a momentary pause.
“Hi there. What am I looking at?” Jane said in a confused voice.
“Please confirm that you are getting this data feed and that it is being stored correctly, Dr Richardson,” he said plainly.
“That’s affirmative, Captain Montreaux, both feeds coming in, there’s a bit of atmospheric interference, a little worse than when we spoke earlier. But what the hell am I looking at?”
“We are out of your line of sight, I imagine that is causing the interference,” he explained. “Can you give a quick assessment of the material we are standing on?”
There was a long silence, after which the scientist spoke quite cautiously. “I would say from its colour that it could be an igneous rock, it resembles obsidian.”
“Igneous? Obsidian?” Montreaux asked.
She sighed. “Igneous rocks are basically cooled down magma that on Earth forms most of the crust,” she elaborated. “Basically, magma leaves the mantle, normally during movement of tectonic plates or during a volcanic eruption, for instance, and solidifies as it becomes part of the crust because it is further from the heated core of the planet. In theory, the closer the magma is to the surface when it hardens, the faster it will do so because the ambient temperature will be lower. If magma cools slowly, the solid crystals that form can easily be bigger than your fist. As the rate of cooling increases, however, so the size of those crystals decreases. If the magma is on the surface, what we would normally call lava, and the environmental conditions are just right, it can cool so fast that crystals hardly have the opportunity to form, in which case we get obsidian. In these cases, the crystals have to be observed under a microscope.”
Danny ran his hand along the smooth surface. “Could obsidian be this smooth, naturally?” he wondered.
“Absolutely. Polished obsidian was even used for mirrors thousands of years ago. I would expect a substance such as obsidian to be that smooth naturally. Danny, can you show me a more ground level view, please, from the edge of the stone across it?”
He obliged, climbing down the side of the stone that Captain Montreaux had just emerged from. He scanned the edge of the stone, and then raised his head slightly and tilted it down so that Jane would be able to appreciate how flat and rectangular it was.
“Fascinating,” she said eventually. “It looks perfectly flat, and the stills I have taken from the video feed suggest that the angled edges I have seen are all at ninety degrees.”
“What do you make of the grooves, Dr Richardson? Could they have been carved or etched into the surface?” Montreaux asked.
“No,” she replied. “At least not if the stone is indeed obsidian. Obsidian is very similar to flint, in that it splinters and creates flakes. Fantastic for making arrow heads and knives, but very difficult to craft, and virtually impossible to chisel or strike with any reliability. When used in ornaments nowadays, it is usually polished, so it’s relatively easy to create a smooth and accurate edge. However, a groove is entirely different: I don’t think you could polish a groove into a flat piece of stone, at least not a groove like that.”
“Can’t you use lasers?” Danny offered.
“Indeed you can. In fact the only useful application of obsidian I can think of right now is surgical knives. The blades of precision instruments can be fashioned using a laser. Because of the compact nature of the crystals that make up the rock, the width of obsidian blades can literally be measured in molecules, so they are hundreds of times more accurate than steel.”
“Stone knives?” Montreaux was amazed.
“Even now they’re still used in heart surgery, Yves,” she confirmed.
Montreaux took a step back and contemplated the stone beneath him. He found his eyes inexorably drawn towards the crater wall by the grooves. He wanted nothing more than an excuse to start digging like crazy, but if this was what he sensed it to be, then things would have to be done properly. “Dr Richardson?”
“Yes?”
He measured his words carefully, not wanting her to infer anything unprofessional. “Having seen the stone we are standing on, its dimensions, shape and,” he paused, as if looking for the correct terminology, “other characteristics, what do you think made it?”
“I am not a geologist by trade, Captain,” she replied without hesitation. “However, I have seen some incredibly unbelievable rock formations on Earth, particularly where cooling magma is involved. The grooves may have been set as the magma cooled, possibly the imprint of other stones, maybe even by water, which we know at some time existed in abundance in this area. This stone could be a naturally occurring phenomenon. I would need to see a sample.” She waited for a response, but none came. “And I would very much like to visit the stone myself,” she added.
Danny looked at Montreaux and winked. “Jane, cut the bullshit now, OK? We’ll use that last bit as a sound-bite for Earth, you sounded great,” he said. “Now tell us what you really think.”
“Danny, you are standing on a perfectly flat surface, as smooth as a pane of glass, with perfect parallel sides and straight edges, all seemingly at a perfect ninety degrees to each other,” she said. “Not only is the stone flat, it also appears to be horizontal, which is why you two aren’t slipping off it. It’s also jutting straight out of the side of the crater, possibly pointing directly to the centre of said crater. And to top it all off, there is a groove in its surface that is not only aligned with the stone itself, but is also uniformly one-point-eight centimetres deep and ten-point-six centimetres wide – I know because I’ve checked it from the video feeds you sent. Can any one of these features on their own be produced in the natural world? On Earth, certainly. On Mars? Who knows, but the laws of physics are no different here to back home, we simply have different environmental conditions. I would say that probably yes, too. Now you’re left with the big question.” She paused. “Is it possible for all of these features to be found together, in the same place, given the context of the stone?”
“Dr Richardson, I appreciate your thorough summation of the situation, but could you just give us a straight answer?” Captain Montreaux was getting uncharacteristically impatient. He knew what the answer was, he just wanted to hear her say it.
“Yves, I am a scientist, and we never say things of any major significance in anything less than five hundred words. But to be blunt, there is no doubt in my mind that what you are standing on was put there. And although I cannot believe I am even saying this, I am sure that you and Danny are not the first beings to have stood on it, either.”
There was a very long, weighted silence.
Captain Montreaux couldn’t help but remember the journey to Mars, the conversation with Lieutenant Su Ning, the suspicious circumstances of her death. He had known then that something big was going on, and things certainly didn’t get any bigger than this. On the one hand he was excited at the magnitude of their discovery, but on the other he knew that people were prepared to kill them to cover it up. His heart sank. He knew deep down that nobody back on Earth of any importance to him would ever find out about their discovery. He also now knew why they had landed on the northern edge of the Hellas Basin rather than any other, and why the pre-planned coordinates of their rover expeditions had been so exact. And now that they had found the Jetty, what next?