6. Moon of Mars. If visible against daylight sky, show inner moon, Phobos, as it rises in west and crosses Martian sky in four hours. (It is not necessary to show entire four-hour transit. Use telescopic lens to show Phobos changing phase from “new” to “quarter” to “full.” Tape can be edited to fit time allowed for broadcast.)
S O L 3: NOON
Jamie’s first instinct was to blink and rub his eyes, but his gloved hands bumped into the transparent visor of his helmet.
He stared at the rock. It was roughly two feet long, flat-topped and oblong. Its sides looked smooth, not pitted like most of the other rocks. And on one side of it there was a distinct patch of green.
He walked slowly around it, stepping over other small rocks and around the larger ones that were strewn everywhere. There was no green anywhere else. If I’d come up on the other side of it I’d never have noticed the color, he realized.
One rock. With a little area of green on one of its flat sides. One rock out of thousands. One bit of color in a world of rusty reds.
“Waterman, I do not see you,” Vosnesensky called.
“I’ve found something.”
“Come back toward the dome.”
“I’ve found some green,” Jamie said, annoyed.
“What?”
“Green.”
“Where are you?”
“What do you mean? What is it?”
Jamie scanned the area around him. “Can you see the big boulder with the cleft in its top?”
“No. Where…”
“I can!” Joanna’s voice, brimming with excitement. “Just to the west of the second lander. See it?”
“Ah, yes,” said Monique.
“This way,” Joanna called.
Within a minute seven hard-suited figures appeared over the horizon just to the right of the cleft boulder. Jamie waved to them and they waved back.
Then he turned to the rock, his rock. Sinking slowly to his knees in the awkward suit, he leaned as close to it as he dared. He almost expected to see ants or their Martian equivalent busily scurrying around the ground.
What he saw, instead, was nothing but the powdery red sand and the rust-colored rock with a streak of green running down its flattish side. Christ, it looks like a little vein of copper that’s been exposed to the air. But then Jamie remembered that there was precious little oxygen in the Martian air. Enough to turn a vein of copper green? How long had the vein been exposed to the air? Ten thousand years? Ten million?
He leaned back on his haunches, his back to the approaching scientists.
“Where is it?” Joanna asked breathlessly.
“You look as if you’re praying,” said Naguib’s reedy nasal voice. “Has it made a believer of you?”
“Don’t get too worked up,” Jamie told them, looking up as they surrounded him and the rock. “I think it’s just a streak of oxidized copper.”
Patel, in his yellow suit, clumsily got down on all fours to peer closely at the rock. “Yes, I believe that is so.”
Joanna flattened herself beside him. “It might be just the surface coating of a colony that lives inside the rock. Like the microflora in Antarctica, they use the rocks for shelter and absorb moisture from the frost that gathers on the rock’s surfaces.”
“I am afraid that it is nothing more than a patina of copper oxide,” Patel said in his Hindu cadence and British pronunciation.
“We must make certain,” said Monique, as calmly as if she were selecting a wine at a Paris bistro. Cool head, Jamie thought. Warm heart?
“We’ll have to take it inside…”
“Don’t touch it!” Joanna snapped.
“We can’t examine it in any detail out here,” Jamie said. “We’ve got to bring it inside the dome.”
“It is a possible biological sample,” Joanna said with unexpected proprietary fierceness.
It’s copper oxide, thought Jamie.
Struggling to her feet, Joanna said, “I left my bio sampling cases when you called. They can maintain the ambient conditions inside them. If you bring the rock into the dome and it is suddenly thrust into our environment it would kill any native organisms that may be inside it.”
Jamie nodded inside his helmet. She was right. Even though the chances were that the green streak was just a patina of copper oxide, there was no sense screwing up what might be the biggest discovery of all time.