The younger man pointed. “Over there, in the hard suit with the orange sleeve stripes, by the sifter. That’s Doreen McManus with him. She’s the nanotech specialist I told you about.”
The figure in the hard-shell suit turned slowly, awkwardly, like a medieval knight in a rusted suit of armor.
“Waterman!” Carleton called. “Over here.”
Jamie stepped carefully around the scattered rocks toward Carleton, Graycloud beside him. The anthropologist’s face was hidden behind the reflecting coating of his helmet visor but his voice in Jamie’s headphone was brimming with enthusiasm.
“Take a look at these.” He gestured with a gloved hand to a half dozen plastic containers arranged in a neat row along the table by the sifter. Each one had an odd-shaped rock in it. “We just pulled them up this morning.”
None of the rocks was larger than palm-sized. They all looked gray and undistinguished to Jamie. His geologist’s eye noticed that one of them had a darker band in its middle.
Reaching for it, Jamie asked, “May I?”
Carleton said, “Gently. Be careful with it. I think that darker streak might be pigment.”
“Pigment?”
“Might be a shard from pottery.”
Using two hands, Jamie picked up the irregularly shaped piece out of its plastic container. The gloves of his nanosuit were so delicate that he could feel the rough edges of the shard. It was thinner than his little finger, slightly curved. By god, Jamie thought, this really could have been part of a bowl once.
He looked up at Carleton. “You’ll have to have this analyzed.”
“Damned right.”
Jamie handed the piece back to the anthropologist. “Do you have the equipment you need?”
“Some. I can do a spectral analysis of the pigment.”
“If that’s what it is.”
Carleton’s voice dropped a tone, went darker. “Yes, if that’s what it is.”
“The geology team can do a thorium/lead dating measurement,” Jamie mused, “to tell how old it is.”
“Not potassium/argon?”
Remembering earlier attempts at fixing the dates of Martian rocks, Jamie replied, “The argon tends to outgas over time; throws the measurement off.”
“I’ll want a carbon-14 run, too. Then we can see if the pigment’s a different age from the rest of the shard,” Carleton said as he carefully deposited the piece back in its container.
Jamie shook his head. “This stuff probably dates back sixty million years. C-14 won’t be any good for that kind of time.”
Carleton chuckled. “You’re right. I was thinking of human artifacts, on Earth. We’re a lot younger, aren’t we?”
“Yes, we are,” said Jamie. Silently he added, And we’re still here. Not extinct.
Jamie looked again at the other rocks in their little boxes. “And what about these?”
“Don’t know yet. I’m collecting anything that looks even faintly interesting. For example, this one,” he pointed to a slim fragment, “just might be a piece of bone.”
Jamie saw that it had a slight indentation running its length, but otherwise there was nothing that looked bonelike to his eyes.
“You’ll have to do an MNA test on it.”
“Martian nucleic acids, right.” Carleton hesitated, then said, “The bio people tell me they need more sensitive equipment. The stuff they have here is pretty primitive compared to what’s available back on Earth.”
Jamie remembered that biologists on Earth had teased molecules of DNA from sixty-million-year-old fossils of dinosaurs. There was even talk of recreating a Tyrannosaurus rex a few years ago, before the fundamentalists took control of the Congress. What would the New Morality think about us recreating a Martian? Jamie wondered. They’d blow up this base and everybody in it, he thought.
He asked Carleton, “You’ve already talked to the biologists here at the base?”
“About my vertebra. I asked them to do an MNA run on it.”
“I see.”
“Their equipment isn’t sensitive enough. If there’s any organic material left on the vertebra it’s so minuscule that their reading is down in the noise.”
“We’ll need better equipment, then,” Jamie muttered. Then he added, “Or we’ll have to send the fossil back to a lab on Earth.”
“Oh no!” Carleton said sharply. “That’s my discovery. That fossil doesn’t leave my sight.”
“We could ship you back home with it.”
“I’m staying here. And so are whatever finds we make. I’m not letting any Earthside lab steal my credit.”
Jamie started to reply, but pulled in a deep breath instead. No sense starting a fight here, he told himself. The man’s had his troubles with university bureaucracies in the past. I can’t blame him for being possessive. He wants the mountain to come to Mohammed. Trouble is, resupply missions cost money. Money that we haven’t got.
Then he thought, But on the other hand, if the biologists want so badly to test his fossil for nucleic acids, maybe they’ll have enough clout to fund a mission here. That would be helpful.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Jamie said.
“Good,” said Carleton. “And while you’re at it, I could use a few trained paleontologists, too.”
Jamie smiled at him and suppressed an urge to ask if he wanted anything else.
Rome: The Vatican
Monsignor Fulvio A. DiNardo, S.J., scurried along the garden pathway from the television studio toward the stately building that housed the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, where his office was.
He walked fast, short arms pumping, short legs scampering beneath his black, knee-length surplice, which he wore over his workaday clerical suit. He looked more like an overaged wrestler than a priest. Although he was not tall, his build was burly, with a barrel-shaped body and thick limbs heavy with muscle. He kept his scalp shaved but there was always a dark stubble over his jaw no matter how closely he shaved. Despite his fierce appearance, Monsignor DiNardo was a truly gentle man, a dedicated Jesuit, a confidant of the Pope and the cardinals who advised the pontiff. He was also a world-class geologist.
He nodded perfunctorily to the priests and nuns and friars strolling much more leisurely along the walk. They seemed almost like statues compared to his heart-pumping pace. DiNardo had always been a man on the go. Once he had tried using a bicycle to get across the Vatican grounds faster, but Cardinal Castiglione had nearly had a heart attack over the incident and forbade DiNardo from resorting to such infamous tactics. DiNardo obeyed, of course, although he tried to point out to his apoplectic superior that he had considered a motorbike but rejected the idea as too noisy, too disruptive.
So now he hurried toward his office on foot, looking like a black-garbed badger trotting on its hind legs.
DiNardo had actually been selected to be the lead geologist on the First Martian Expedition, but was struck down by a gall bladder attack mere days before he was to leave Earth. Jamie Waterman replaced him and went on to discover the ruins of Martian buildings in the cliffs of Tithonium Chasma.
I might have made that discovery, he had often thought. And just as often he’d told himself that God, in His infinite wisdom, had given that glory to the Navaho. DiNardo couldn’t see how that furthered God’s plan for the universe, but he accepted the situation with a good heart—or tried to.
Now DiNardo mopped his shaved scalp with a blood red handkerchief as he neared the Academy building.
The television broadcast had been a farce, he thought angrily. That slimy moderator, Ventura, had no interest in discussing the discovery of a fossil bone on Mars. He was out for sensation, not science. Moderator! DiNardo silently spat the word. The man is an immoderate egomaniac.