Three hours passed this way, and Roger’s easygoing tone changed; not to worry, Eileen judged, but rather to boredom, and annoyance with John. Eileen herself was extremely concerned. If John had mistaken north for south, or fallen …
‘I suppose we should go higher,’ Roger sighed. ‘Although I thought I saw him back when we brought the waggon down here, and I doubt he’d go back up.’
Suddenly Eileen’s earphones crackled. ‘Psss ftunk bdzz,’ and it was clear again. ‘Ckk ssssger, lo! ckk.’
‘Sounds like he may have indeed gone high,’ Roger said with satisfaction, and, Eileen noticed, just a touch of relief. ‘Hey, John! Nobleton! Do you read us?’
‘Ckk ssssssss … yeah, hey … sssss kuk sssss.’
‘We read you badly, John! Keep moving, keep talking! Are you all –’
‘Roger! ckk. Hey, Roger!’
‘John! We read you, are you all right?’
‘… sssss … not exactly sure where I am.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘Yes! Just lost.’
‘Well not any more, we hope. Tell us what you see.’
‘Nothing!’
So began the long process of locating him and bringing him back. Eileen ranged left and right on her own, helping to get a fix on John, who had been instructed to stay still and keep talking.
‘You won’t believe it.’ John’s voice was entirely free of fear; in fact, he sounded elated. ‘You won’t believe it, Eileen, Roger, crk! Just before the storm hit I was way off down a tributary to the south, and I found …’
‘Found what?’
‘Well … I’ve found some things I’m sure must be fossils. I swear! A whole rock formation of them!’
‘Oh yeah?’
‘No seriously, I’ve got some with me. Very small shells, like little sea snails, or Crustacea. Miniature nautiloids, like. They just couldn’t be anything else. I have a couple in my pocket, but there’s a whole wall of them back there! I figured if I just left I wouldn’t be able to find the same canyon ever again, what with this storm, so I built a duck trail on the way back over to the main canyon, if that’s where I am. So it took me a while to get back in radio clear.’
‘What colour are they?’ Ivan asked from below.
‘You down there, be quiet,’ Roger ordered. ‘We’re still trying to find him.’
‘We’ll be able to get back to the site. Eileen, can you believe it? We’ll all be – Hey!’
‘It’s just me,’ Roger said.
‘Ah! You gave me a start, there.’
Eileen smiled as she imagined John startled by the ghostlike appearance of the lanky, suited Roger. Soon enough Roger had led John downcanyon to Eileen, and after John hugged her, they proceeded down the canyon to Dr Mitsumu, who again led them up the slope to the tent, which rested at a sharper angle than Eileen had recalled.
Once inside, the reunited group chattered for an hour concerning their adventure, while Roger showered and got the waggon on an even keel, and John revealed the objects he had brought back with him:
Small shell-shaped rocks, some held in crusts of sandstone. Each shell had a spiral swirl on its inside surface, and they were mottled red and black. By and large they were black.
They were unlike any rocks Eileen had ever seen; they looked exactly like the few Terran shells she had seen in school. Seeing them there in John’s hand, she caught her breath. Life on Mars; even if only fossil traces of it, Life on Mars. She took one of the shells from John and stared and stared at it. It very well could be …
They had to arrange their cots across the slope of the tent floor, and prop them level with clothes and other domestic objects from the waggon. Long after they were settled they discussed John’s discovery, and Eileen found herself more and more excited by the idea of it. The sand pelting the tent soundlessly only made its presence known by the complete absence of stars. She stared at the faint curved reflection of them all on the dome’s surface, and thought of it. The Clayborne Expedition, in the history books. And Martian life … The others talked and talked.
‘So we’ll go there tomorrow, right?’ John asked Roger. The tilt of the tent made it impossible for Roger to set up his bedroom.
‘Or as soon as the storm ends, sure.’ Roger had only glanced at the shells, shaking his head and muttering, ‘I don’t know, don’t get your hopes up too high.’ Eileen wondered about that. ‘We’ll follow that duck trail of yours, if we can.’
Perhaps he was jealous of John now?
On and on they talked. Yet the hunt had taken it out of Eileen; to the sound of their voices she suddenly fell asleep.
She woke up when her cot gave way and spilled her down the floor; before she could stop herself, she had rolled over Mrs Mitsumu and John. She got off John quickly and saw Roger over at the waggon, smiling down at the gauges. Her cot had been by the waggon; had he yanked out some crucial item of clothing? There was something of the prankster in the man …
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 centimetre 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 waggon. 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 multi-fingered 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, imbedded in hard sandstone, were thousands of tiny black stone snail shells.