“Please do not touch the rock,” Joanna said. “Perhaps the rest of you could look around this area to see if any other rocks show such color. But do not touch them in any way. Do you all understand?”
Suddenly she was in charge. She wasn’t whispering anymore. The lovely little butterfly had turned into a dragon lady. What had started out as a geology field trip had turned into a biology session, and Jamie was just one of the flunkies. He felt his lips pressing into a tight angry line.
But he knew that she was right, and within her rights. He climbed slowly to his feet inside the cumbersome suit.
“Okay, boss,” he replied with exaggerated deference. “To hear is to obey.”
Joanna did not notice any humor in his crack. She detailed Monique to stand guard over the rock and ordered the other four to scour the area for other green spots. Connors, in his white hard-shell suit, stood to one side like a policeman, observing without participating. Joanna headed back toward the spot where she had left her sample cases, almost skipping across the rocky desert sands.
“Formidable.” Monique’s voice sounded amused.
Jamie asked, “Say, were any of us smart enough to bring a camera with him?”
“I have a camera,” said Toshima.
Jamie said, “Could you take a series of snaps of the rock and the region around it, from every angle-complete three hundred sixty degrees?”
“Most certainly.”
Jamie thought back to hunting trips he had taken with his grandfather Al. They would always snap photos of each other with their catch-deer, rabbit, even the gila monster that Jamie had shot with his twenty-two when he had been no more than ten years old. His mother hated to allow Jamie to go hunting, but his father could not stand up to grandfather Al’s determination. “You can’t keep the boy cooped up in a library all the time,” Al would argue. “He ought to be out in the open.” Then, when they were alone together up in the wooded hills, his grandfather would tell him, “They’re trying to make you a hundred percent white, Jamie. I just want you to keep a little bit of yourself red, like you ought to be.”
Jamie looked back at the rock, small enough to pick up and carry, especially in this light gravity. It’d make a great photo to send back to my grandfather, he thought. Me inside this damned suit with the rock for my trophy.
But he did not pose for Toshima’s camera.
Joanna returned after nearly half an hour with Vosnesensky at her side toting the two hefty silver-coated specimen boxes plus a pair of long slim poles that looked to Jamie like fishing rods. He knew that they were marker poles, with tiny radio beacons at their tips. He grinned to himself: Joanna’s even got the Russian working for her now.
“I wondered if I would ever have to use these,” she was chattering. “I never thought I would need them on the first day of field work!”
The others had found no other spots of green in the hundred meters or so they had examined in all directions around the rock. The soil was crisscrossed now with the prints of their cleated boots, except for a sacrosanct half meter surrounding the rock. No one had dared to come any closer for fear of damaging or destroying some vital evidence.
Vosnesensky stopped and bent slightly forward, hands on hips, as if doing obeisance to the rock. In his bright red suit he looked to Jamie like a fat bell pepper with a hump on its back.
Joanna took charge. “Do not touch the rock. Before we do anything, I will need soil samples from the ground immediately around the rock and then underneath it.”
“I can use the corer,” Jamie said, reaching for the tool at his belt. “It attaches to the pole, so we can get samples from as deep as five meters.”
“Good,” said Joanna.
“That can also tell us if there is permafrost beneath the surface, no?” asked Ilona, sounding excited for the first time since they had landed.
He nodded; then, realizing no one could see the gesture through his tinted visor, he added, “Yes, that’s right.”