“Is it possible to believe that the formation could be a building of some kind?” Monique Bonnet asked.
Tony Reed, who had joined the three women when he saw them bringing their photos and papers to the galley, dismissed the idea. “It’s projection on Jamie’s part, a well-known psychological phenomenon,” he said. “We see what we want to see. We hear what we want to hear. That’s how palm readers make their money, telling their customers what they want to hear, no matter how outrageous it is. Something in Jamie’s subconscious wanted to see cliff dwellings and, voila! he saw them.”
Ilona leaned back in her chair, reminding Reed of a tawny jaguar stretching on a tree branch.
“The formation truly exists. It is not imaginary. We will see for ourselves whether it is natural or artificial once we get there,” she said, her husky voice sounding almost bored with the subject. “For now, we must decide which of us goes on the excursion with Jamie.”
Joanna nodded agreement and turned to Monique.
“You go,” said the French geochemist. “The two of you. I will remain here and tend the plants.”
Ilona frowned at her.
“You don’t want to go?” Joanna asked.
Monique made a Gallic shrug. “You want to much more than I do. It makes more sense for our biologist and biochemist to go.”
“But you are a part of our biology team, too,” said Ilona, straightening up in her chair. “We will need your expertise to test the soil at the bottom of the canyon.”
“You can bring samples back here to me.”
“But what about fossils?” Joanna asked, looking worried. “You have the most training in paleontology. We might miss something.”
Monique laughed lightly. “If there are any bones or skulls out there I’m sure you can find them as easily as I.”
“Microfossils?” Reed asked.
She turned her dimpled smiling face to the Englishman. “Tony, I have scanned every soil sample that we have taken. I have cracked rocks open and put microtome-thin slices under the microscope. There are no fossils. No microbes, living or long dead.”
Reed fingered his slim moustache. “Well…”
“But, Monique,” said Joanna, “suppose we come across fossils at the bottom of the canyon but we don’t recognize them as such? Organisms native to Mars. How would we know that we are looking at fossils?”
“How would I know?” Monique shot back. “How would any of us?”
Joanna cast an uneasy glance at her colleagues around the table.
Reed broke into a wide grin. “A classic problem, isn’t it? How do you recognize something that you’ve never seen before?”
The three women had no answer.
Jamie could feel the hostility building within the cramped confines of the rover with every kilometer they covered on their way to Pavonis Mons.
Dinner that evening was virtually silent. Even Mironov, whose normal expression was a pleasant smile, had nothing to say, no jokes to offer. Patel, perched like a nervous bird on the edge of the bench across the narrow table from Jamie, would not look at him.
Naguib tried to ease the tension.
“Tomorrow we reach the fracture zone, at last,” he said, mopping up the last bits of his meal with a thin piece of pita bread.
Feeling grateful, Jamie answered the older man, “Right. And we begin to get some absolute dates for the age of the lava flows.”
Patel put his fork down. “We have three little days to do the work that was originally scheduled for a full week.”
“I’m willing to work double shifts for those three days, Rava,” said Jamie. “I know you…”
“You know nothing!” the Hindu snapped. “Nothing except your mad desire to go to the canyon again and make yourself the hero of this expedition.”
“Hero?”
“Do you know how many years I have spent studying the Tharsis volcanoes? Not three. Not five. Not ten.” Patel was trembling with rage. “Fifteen years! Since I was an undergraduate in Delhi! For fifteen years I have pored over photographs of those shields, studied the remote measurements made by spacecraft. And now that I am finally here, you have cut down my time to three miserable days.”
Jamie felt no anger. He knew exactly what Patel was going through. He remembered how he had felt when Vosnesensky cut short his examination of the canyon and the cliff dwellings because of Konoye’s death.