As I stared up at the steady, red point of Mars in the night sky, I couldn't help feeling that I could reach out and touch it; yet the vast distance between Earth and Mars opened like a fathomless ocean above me, an unknown space of danger to rival anything the great explorers had faced on their terrible journeys from the old world to the new. On one hand, I dreamed of walking on that red sand, perhaps along the famed green canals, and finding something, an artifact, a relic, a fossil, something that would mean I had discovered that life had once lived there. On the other hand, the possibilities of being killed in a rocket explosion, or hit by an asteroid on the long trip, of being lost in a sandstorm on the vast Martian desert, and dying in the extreme cold and oxygen poor atmosphere, seemed every bit as likely as the worst disasters faced by Henry Hudson, or Magellan.

The early robot explorers to Mars, the Viking and Explorer missions, had pretty much revealed that Mars was a dead, hostile place; dry, frozen in the absolute zero so far from the sun, bombarded by intense, unfiltered radiation. But there seemed to be enough evidence of scoured landscapes, of channels that resembled rivers, enough similarities with Earth to keep alive the possibilities that alien life once having thrived there, a hint that the old stories of Orson Wells in his War of the Worlds, or Isaac Asimov in his story The Martian Way, might be true. Imagine braving the dangers of the voyage, the terrible conditions on the planet itself, to find that fragment of an ancient temple or a palace, a bit of bone or pottery, the ruin of a building, that would shake the scientific world? I would stride along as a boy, thinking of the fame, the adulation, the accolades heaped upon me.

Somehow, the tantalizing thrill of being the one to find that incredible evidence of life on Mars drove me through my childhood and into adult life. I read about the terrible journey of Shakleton, and the men who died trying to cross Antarctica to reach the South Pole; I read about Hudson, cast adrift on the bay that carries his name, never to be seen or heard from again; I watched the documentaries of the astronauts who died in the early Apollo and Space shuttle missions. So I had no illusions about what I might be facing. But to be an Edward Leaky, or an Armstrong, or a Columbus! That was all I wanted to be.


I volunteered for the space program, and went through the flight training. I mastered the techniques of prospecting that would get me a job with the Astro Mining Corporation, just as it was beginning to look for valuable minerals in the asteroids and inner planets. The early missions proved the feasibility of finding, and then successfully mining and returning deposits to Earth. The endeavor was financially rewarding, and the company was increasing the scope and intensity of its operations. When they put an orbiter around Mars, and set up a base camp there, I put my name on a list of potential personnel to be selected for a prospecting mission. That might get me up to the destination of my dreams. I said nothing about wanting to look for relics and fossils. The Astro Mining Corporation was a deadly serious company; there was no room for mavericks in the costly and risky search for money generating ore.

The sheer costs of these missions ruled out anything for them except looking for the massive deposits that would bring the fortunes the investors had bet on. Safety and efficiency were the watch words of the company, and during my training, I learned about the many dangers of prospecting on Mars. The risk of falling meteorites. The inhospitable, absolute cold. The ferociousness of the sand storms, that had been the death of a few unlucky souls. It was sobering, but somehow, in the back of my mind, I thought myself a Lewis or a Clarke, blazing a trail into the unknown, across an unexplored landscape. Everywhere there might be tantalizing things to find. I made up a scheme for myself; I would do my prospecting, do my job, but at the same time, look for my evidence of fossils and relics. Who knows what I might find along the way?

At last I was selected for a mission, and placed on a crew of four. During the flight to Mars, which lasted nine months, I gradually got to know them. First was Fyodor Vozdvishenko, our commander, a stoic Russian who had been the veteran of a few prospecting missions on Mars, and knew the dangers of working there and didn't let anyone else forget it. I remember him scowling and barking out orders in his short, measured way; staring into your eyes and trying to look into your soul. I was always careful about what I said or did around Fyodor. And then there was Charlie Landruth, another veteran prospector, who had a wife and kids and was in it purely for the money. He was all business. Tim Russell was a young graduate of the space program who had just gotten married. He seemed to be always standing around the portholes of the capsule, staring out at the face of Earth rapidly dwindling away behind us, and becoming just another point in the sky, as though he regretted having come along. And then there was Weh Jing Peng, a talented astrogeologist from Peking University. He didn't say much either; always looking at you with that inscrutable smile, as if he knew something you didn't, and would let you in on it in his own good time.

Gradually the Earth receded, along the stretched umbilical chord of the distance of space, and faded to a small, blueish white dot among the countless dots of stars that filled the portholes. Gradually the tiny reddish dot of Mars grew and grew, until it finally filled the porthole with its dusty red face, crisscrossed by the greenish escarpments, canyons, and mountain ranges that ranged along its surface. Fyodor pointed out our landing site, and together we looked at it, a featureless spot on the vast desert between the great volcano Olympus Mons, and the stunning chasm of the Chrysallis Fracture. On his orders, we moved our supplies from the shuttle, which we would leave to orbit the planet unmanned while we descended to the surface, to the lander. The lander would take us down to the base camp, a tiny collection of metal huts containing our living quarters, the hydroponic gardens that provided our food, the generators that maintained the climate control, the galley, the communications center, and the garage where the rovers were kept. The trip to the surface would take a few hours.

It was a strange feeling, standing on the rusty, rock strewn Martian plain, looking up into that purple sky, and seeing Earth as a tiny speck of light. It was hard to believe that was home. After months in space, on the long journey to Mars, I had to admit that it seemed comforting. And yet, walking across the red planet, I couldn't deny the funny feeling that I had been there before. It seemed so eerily familiar. It was like landing in Europe and stepping out onto the continent of your ancestors. Or something like that.

I told that to my companion, Charlie Landruth, and he laughed. "You've been out in space too long," he said, tapping his finger on the shell of his helmet. But Weh Jing Peng, the astrogeologist from Peking University, did not laugh. He just looked at me with a strange, shining light in his eyes, as if he heard that I believed in the same religion he did.
Weh was the mysterious partner in our mission. When we had breakfast, he would stand in a corner of the little kitchen in the station, holding his cup of coffee, listening to us talk about mining projects. He never said anything. Then he would spend hours alone in his cubicle, pouring over photographs of the Martian landscape. I once asked him what he was looking for. Gold? Platinum? Uranium?

In a low voice, very calmly, like he was relating a secret he had carried with him from Earth, he told me: " I'm looking for signs of civilization."

I couldn't tell if he was joking or not. But my heart jumped. Could it be that I wasn't alone in this desire to search Mars for extraterrestrial life? Everyone knew the deadly seriousness of our mission, and the seriousness of our commander, Fyodor Vozdvishenko, in carrying it out. We had come to Mars on a mission funded by the Astro Mining Corporation to discover mineral deposits that would be valuable to industry on Earth. That was our job. We analyzed data from the satellite radar scanners and photography equipment, organized exploration teams, then set out in mobile land rovers to check out promising sites. It was a tedious, time consuming project that was scheduled to stretch over two years; more if we found promising leads. That wasn't even mentioning the danger. We were alone here, in this isolated camp; the orbiter shuttle that had brought us to Mars circled overhead like an empty can. The effect was of extreme isolation, and in order to keep our sanity, we focused on our work.

But now, the real reason I had come up here bubbled up, and I couldn't help hoping that someone else shared my enthusiasm for it. Could I trust Weh, and propose to him that we search for evidence of life together? I couldn't risk Fyodor finding out about this. I had to be careful. "You're not seriously looking for mysterious, lost, alien civilizations, are you?" I asked him.

He looked at me with that inscrutable smile. "Why not?"

"It just seems rather...far fetched, don't you think?"

"I don't know. The whole idea of life itself, of a civilization like ours, could be considered 'far fetched' too."

"But here are Mars?" I asked, playing devil's advocate. "This planet is a desert. It's as dead as a rock."

"But it may not have always been like this. You know as well as I do that plenty of evidence exists that there was once running water here."

"There MIGHT have been running water here. Lots of other phenomenon could account for the erosion patterns we've seen in the Martian desert. Wind. Stress fracturing. Seismic activity."

"But it also COULD have been water. And if it WAS water, then life would have been possible here."

"This planet is far too cold. It was always too cold. It's too far away from the sun."

Weh shook his head. "I'm not so sure of that. I've studied enough evidence across the solar system that suggests that millions of years ago, the entire interplanetary region was much warmer than it is now. Look at all the coincidental evidence on the planets. We know that millions of years ago, the frozen wastes of the North Pole and Antarctica were lush, tropical forests, and that the sea level was much higher than it is today. Cold blooded reptiles dominated the Earth, and evolved into enormous beasts. At the same time, there is this possibility of a warmer climate on Mars, with running water that carved out channels. And then there is the runaway greenhouse effect that turned Venus into an inferno, a blistering, seared rock. Along with the geological markings that suggest running water on the moons of the gas giants, that froze into ice."

It sounded intriguing. I was beginning to think his theory compelling. "What's the explanation, according to you?"

"My theory is that the sun was burning hotter millions of years ago," Weh said. "It may be that it goes through cycles of warmer and cooler periods, perhaps flunctuating in energy output by a few percent, over millions of years. We've seen similar cycles on other stars. If I am right, millions of years ago, Earth was a tropical, dinosaur infested swamp, and Mars was warm enough to be semi arid, with a climate similar to the Russian steppes, or Canada. Plants and animals, perhaps flowering plants and mammals, may have evolved here."

Charlie must have heard us, because he popped into the comlab. "What are you guys talking about? If you want to waste your own necks on a dangerous wild goose chase, that's your business. We don't have the time, and can't afford to take the risks, here. Our mission is to locate and extract mineral deposits. That's what the people who gave us our wonderful ride up here paid for. Any nonsense on company time and I'll have to report it to Vozdvishenko." We knew he was a no nonsense guy, on his third interplanetary mission. As a renowned and experienced veteran, he stressed economy and efficiency, and he commanded respect. he had once been caught in a sandstorm here and barely escaped. To say nothing of his responsibility for the costs involved in these missions.

I smiled. "Don't worry. We won't let our hypothesis interfere with our work. Right Weh?" I looked at Weh, and winked, and he looked back and nodded.

"Of course. We know how dangerous it is here."

Charlie grunted. "Good. Because next week, Tim and Weh are scheduled to check out a potential gold deposit up near Olympus Mons. And me and Larry here are going to be off looking for nickel alloys in the Chrysallis Fracture. It's not a picnic. People die up here often enough."

My heart fluttered. This was it. The moment of stepping out into the unknown, into the danger, with your life hanging in the balance. I looked out of one of the portholes. The dark, red, pebble strewn Martian plain stretched off into the distance, broken only by an occasional boulder, or the rim of an ancient crater, or a ridge of rock outcrops out by the horizon. Overhead, the purple sky twinkled with thousands of stars. I could imagine myself as Shakleton, or Hudson, cast adrift in that rowboat, never to be seen again, or lost in the endless frozen wasteland. Somehow, finding gold, or nickel, or alloys didn't seem worth the risk of death. But to find evidence of life! To change the scientific view of the history of the solar system! That seemed to be beckon me into that flickering distance.

"Well, I'm ready," I said. "Who knows? We may find that mother lode out there yet."

Charlie frowned. "This isn't a gold rush out on a pack mule train. You'd better take this seriously. I'm not risking my life with romantics."

Another voice could be heard back in the station. It was the scruffy, tense voice of our commander, Fyodor Vozdvishenko. "Weh, that's enough fooling around there for tonight. Come back here. I want to go over some things with you and Tim."

In the next week, we all had plenty to do. Charlie and I would be prospecting in the Chrysallis Fracture, a hundred kilometers to the southeast. It would take a day to get there in the rovers, and the whole trip would last a week, at least. We would have to camp out in one of the rovers. It would have to be stocked with instant food, water, charged batteries, emergency medical supplies, all our mining and scanning equipment, and our two way radio transmitter. Tim and Weh would be heading in another rover for Olympus Mons, two hundred kilometers to the northwest. Fyodor would remain behind in the base camp, to monitor our progress, and watch the weather conditions. Sandstorms could come at any time, and they could be as ferocious as hurricanes. He would have to mount a rescue mission with the remaining rover if necessary. Standard operating procedure, but enough to get your heart racing. The extreme isolation, the ever present cloud of imminent danger, weighed on you.

Through it all, Weh's theory kept buzzing around in my head like background music. It was like a science fiction story that might come true. I longed to talk to him about it, to see if he would join me in looking for evidence of life, but in the closely confined space of the station, with all of us working together on preparing for the excursion, it was hard to find a moment where we could talk. Charlie or Tim or Fyodor always seemed to be around. Finally, a moment came where Charlie and Fyodor were in the garage together, doing a safety check of the rovers, and Tim was in the kitchen, packing food.

"I have to admit, your idea sounds interesting," I whispered to Weh.

He turned around and looked at me with that inscrutable smile. "It would be even more interesting if that life that I keep talking about, turns out to be intelligent."

"Now you're talking. Imagine finding evidence of that. But we're separated. How are we going to coordinate a search?"

"It might work to our advantage. We could cover more ground that way. And it might raise fewer suspicions."

"How are we going to communicate? If one of us finds something, he's got to let the other one know what he's found. We'll need a special code."

"We'll say 'I'm adjusting my oxygen'. If one of us hears that, we'll know to go up one channel on the radio frequency, to commlink 2."

"And then we can say what we have to say to each other, without the others knowing."

"We'll keep anything a secret from Vozdvishenko and the others, until we can rendezvous, check out whatever it is we've found. Then we can break the news when we want. How we want to."

"We'll stash anything we find in our private containers."

"Yes. Perfect."

I was beginning to feel more and more like one of those great explorers, going off into the unknown, challenging the danger, taking the chance on finding something that might change history. "Good luck, Weh."

"Good luck."

Then we went about the rest of our preparations. All seemed to be going according to our plan, until Fyodor called me into the comlab and asked me if I knew if Weh was up to something. Charlie must have said something to him. I said no.

The stoic face of our commander peered out of one of the portholes at the red, rock strewn landscape stretching away from our station to oblivion. He turned and stared at me.
"You'd better be telling me the truth. I don't need anybody getting killed on my watch, especially going off on a tangent. And I can tell you something else too. I don't care how talented of a guy this is. Anything happens, and he's not coming up here again. I've heard too much about his dreaming of finding lost civilizations. This is serious business, Larry. Deadly business. It's not just his life, but Tim's as well, hanging in the balance. You understand that?"

I nodded. "Of course I understand. I don't want to die up here, believe me, boss. It was just a little idle speculation. And I don't think he wants to die up here either. He's got too good of a career ahead of him."

Fyodor's icy Russian stare never broke. "You'd better be right." Then, he turned to look back out at the wasteland again.

We spent the rest of that week making the final preparations for the prospecting trips. Charlie and I checked our mining gear, our radios, our space suits. We went over our rover, and studied the course headings and terrain maps. Fyodor updated us on the weather forecast. A low pressure system was forming on the far side of Mars; that was not good. The computer models had it moving into our vicinity as a strong sandstorm in a couple of weeks, with high winds and blinding conditions. We would have to get out and back as fast as possible. That didn't help Fyodor's mood. And it made Tim, Weh's partner, even more nervous. He couldn't help overhearing all the concerns about Weh's searching for evidence of life on a maverick lark.

"I just don't want you to leave me hanging," I overheard Tim telling Weh one night in the kitchen. "Promise me, Weh. I've got a new wife to come home to. I want to get back home."

"I promise," Weh said. "I've told everybody here. I know how dangerous it is. I've told Fyodor. I'm focused on the mission."

"You've never been here before either," Tim shot back. "I'm not sure you know how dangerous it is."

And so the mission started with all of us on edge. My stomach was in knots, my emotions roiling. On one hand, there was the fear that the desert of Mars might be my grave, just as Hudson's Bay had claimed that explorer's life; on the other hand, there was the possibility of a great breakthrough discovery. Ahead of us, lay the unknown.

We said goodbye at the crack of the Martian dawn; the sky a cold, deep violet, studded with stars. The lights on the land rovers shot out into narrow beams, illuminating isolated stretches of the rocky plain.

"Be safe, guys," Fyodor said to us in the garage. "You know my motto. And my mantra; keep in radio contact. Communicate with me every couple of hours. I'll give you weather updates. If I reel you in, head straight here. Report anything and everything." He was looking at me. Then he frowned and looked at Weh. "Remember guys. This is as dangerous as it gets. Good luck."

"See you in hell, Fyodor," Charlie called out as the garage door opened.

"Good luck, Weh, Tim," I said over the comlink. "See you back here."

"See you soon," Tim's voice crackled over the comlink. Weh said nothing.

The trip out to the Chrysallis Fracture was eerily uneventful. Our rover jogged and bumped its way slowly, hour by hour, through the empty Martian plain. As the day gradually brightened up, we could see the low line of hills on our right, over our shoulders, and beyond it, the immense rusty swell of the extinct volcano, Olympus Mons, the destination of Weh and Tim. Little by little, as we headed away, it began to be swallowed by the sharply curving Martian horizon. Other features, the crumbling lips of ancient craters, rose up on either side of us and then sank away as we passed them.

I couldn't help feeling the connection to our far flung comrades stretching thinner and thinner as they grew more and more distant. From time to time, Fyodor's voice would jump out of the radio, affirming our position and track, but then the radio would fall silent, and Charlie and I were left to ourselves again, alone, two tiny points in that vast, hostile space. It was a strange feeling, that crushing isolation, and it made the last tenuous link with the rest of mankind seem so fragile. Again and again I found myself looking up at that fuzzy, blue-white point in the southwest sky, our home planet, Earth. It caused the spirit of the old explorers, Columbus and Magellan and Armstrong, to leap to mind. Now I knew how they must have felt; driven by their need to find out if they were right, dogged by their fears that they might never see home or family again, weighed by the responsibility for the lives of everyone with them. In the long periods of silence when Charlie and I had nothing to say, I imagined the rust colored sand all around me covered with grass, trees sprouting up alongside the channels carved between the craters, and even the houses, the skyscrapers, of an alien civilization that might have been. Was it me, bringing my longing for culture up here to this desert, or some ghost of life, haunting the forgotten emptiness? I couldn't tell.

Charlie and I switched on and off driving, and each of us tried to get in a little sleep. In about a day or so, we reached the edge of the great escarpment known as the Chrysallis Fracture, a kind of Grand Canyon of Mars. We radioed Fyodor back at the base camp to let him know we had arrived safely and he let us know Tim and Weh had reached the foothills of Olympus Mons.

"Well," said Charlie, in his matter of fact way, "We might as well get to work."

We were camped out on the edge of the canyon. Working with a minimum of conversation, as quickly as we could, we set up the receiver that would link with the infrared scanner orbiting overhead. We plugged in our analyzer, and set it to scan for potential nickel alloy sites. We set up our little kitchen and cooked some compressed vegetables and tofu. We both looked out of the glass sides of the rover and in the dusky light, you could make out faint features of the immense rock fissures and pinnacles, the weathered cliff walls that opened before us. Overhead, the silent stars seemed at once familiar, and eerily forbidding. You couldn't help feeling how alone you were out there, how vulnerable you were, in the freezing cold and unbreathable atmosphere, the empty, unsupportive landscape. At those times, you realized your life was hanging by a thread.

"Man, it's -87 degrees out there," I said. "That's as cold as I've ever seen."

"I've seen worse," Charlie replied, "Out closer to the poles. Thank God we're near the equator."

I chuckled. "Yea, the tropics of Mars. You want to make a crack at that cliff tomorrow?"

"Yea. Before we get some sleep in, I want to go through all the equipment we're going to take. The drills, the climbing crampons, the cable links, everything. Let's make double sure everything is in order and working right. We don't need to have a problem on the cliff wall out here. How's your rock climbing skills?"

"Well, I'd rather just go over the desert sand with a metal detector. But it is what it is."

"We'll have to check those too. Remember everything they taught you. You have to concentrate out here. You are focused, right?" Charlie looked at me, as though trying to divine from my expression whether I had given up on the idea of looking for archaeological relics.

"Don't worry. I don't want to end up falling into that hole. They say it's 9,000 feet to the bottom. There's no coming back up from that."

"Bear that in mind. It'll keep your mind in the right place. I hope we find something promising. Something we can tell Fyodor about."

I sighed. "Ah, our boss. A bit edgy this time around."

Charlie frowned. "I'd be too with that crazy Weh on the verge of going AWOL. And you too."

I kept my tongue.

The next morning began with radioing Fyodor and telling him we were going to check out a promising rock outcrop about 200 feet below us down the cliff. He told us to be careful. He also told us that Weh had gone a trek around the base of Olympus Mons, towards what could be a gold deposit. Tim was monitoring him in the rover. My nerves jingled. Would I hear that message, 'I'm adjusting my oxygen'? Then we had breakfast, dried grain bars and dried fruit, and pulled on our outer space suits and helmets. Tightened up all the critical joints. Turned on our oxygen. And headed outside, in the murky light, and over the edge of the precipice with our equipment.

Foot by foot, I lowered myself down the wall of the cliff. The light from my helmet brightened the worn rock face, and I peered carefully into every crack, every crevice that I passed, straining to see that sparkle, that glint, or notice that carefully, intelligently hewn shape that might indicate a civilized being had made an object left there. At the same time, my nerves jangled at the tightness of the rope on which my life depended. One misstep, one loose end, one unhooked crampon, and I'd be hurtling down into oblivion. Again and again I couldn't help looking down, and the dizzying depth opened below me, and seemed to swallow me with its darkness and emptiness. In the dim light, you couldn't see the bottom.

But I didn't find anything, and there was no word from Weh. Only Charlie's voice crackled over the comlink, at regular intervals, to say he had found a vein of nickel, a spot of crystals. He was gathering samples. He asked me if I had found anything. I told him no. As the purple light grew darker, he told me we'd better start heading back and we scaled the cliff back up to the land rover. We secured Charlie's samples, and opened the door and went inside. The urgent message indicator was blinking. We looked at each other.

Fyodor's voice crackled over the comlink. "I've just gotten a message from Tim. He hasn't heard from Weh in six hours, and he's damned scared. He's afraid he's either gone back on his promise, or gotten lost, or might be dead. He wants to head back to base camp. I have to tell you, that sand storm is picking up speed. It's going to be in our vicinity in less than a week. And it's winds are up to 200 miles per hour. I'm making an executive decision and pulling you guys out to head up to their position at Olympus Mons, and see if you can find that bastard, if he's still alive. Here are the coordinates."

Charlie looked at me, and I shook my head. "I can't believe that he lied to us and pulled a stunt like that," I said. "Especially with a sand storm coming."

Charlie grimaced. "I hope you aren't mixed up in this. This sand storm is nothing compared with I'm going to do to anybody who fools around like this."

"Tim must be freaking out," I said, trying to distract him.

"We'll call him as soon as we get in range of the short wave radio. Well, we'd better get moving. And a perfectly good prospecting trip ruined. This is going to cut down on my percentage bonus." He angrily shoved his equipment under his seat.

But I was wondering why I hadn't heard from Weh. I was excited, and worried. Had he found something, and was hiding it from me? Was he in trouble? Dead? My stomach was turning into knots as we started up the rover and began the two day trip to Olympus Mons. Where was this trip taking me? To fame, or to ruin? The thought that something might be out there, a fragment of a building, a piece of a tablet, turned over and over in my mind. But the danger was there too; it was all around us, looming over the horizon, coming for us from the other side of Mars. We were in a race against time. In five days, we had to get to Olympus Mons, find Weh, and head back to base. And there could be no assurance we would get back alive.

We took turns driving, going full throttle. Fyodor called us a couple of times a day, basically to say that the situation was still the same. Tim had not heard from Weh. The sandstorm was getting closer, picking up momentum, getting more powerful. It was becoming one of those moments on one of those great voyages of exploration; everything hung by a thread, and yet, just over the horizon, that tantalizing glimmer of a great find seemed to hold out hope. As the landscape trailed by us, I couldn't help imagining sphinxes in the outcrops, statues in the rock pinnacles. What had happened? Had Weh found something? Or died trying?

On the second day out from Chrysallis, we radioed Tim. His voice was shaking, all right. "Can you guys hurry it up?" his voice pleaded, "I still haven't heard anything. He's got to be dead, right? By now? God, I just want to get out of here."

Charlie grit his teeth. "Get a grip, Tim. We'll be there by dusk. Try to get as many details as you can in order. His last GPS position. His track. His destination. When we get there, we've basically got one day to do a search, and then we've got to get the hell out of there."

"That sand storm is coming, Charlie," Tim moaned. "I don't want to waste another day. We'll never make it in these little rovers."

"Pull yourself together," I blurted out. "You know we've got to try to find him. We can't just turn our backs. He might still be alive. There's still a chance."

A million thoughts raced through my head as we rolled on steadily up towards the massive volcano looming in front of us. I could see Weh's body, stiff and frozen, lying stretched out on the slope. Or maybe he was lying in a cave, asphyxiated by lack of oxygen or overcome by radiation. Maybe just out of reach, was the golden sphinx he had found. I couldn't tell any of this to Charlie. He kept muttering about Weh's irresponsibility, and how he had jeopardized our mission, to say nothing of our lives.

Later that day, thanks to Fyodor's accurate coordinates, we pulled up to a land rover parked at the base of a foothill next to a reddish boulder. A dark shape inside it jumped up and turned around.

"Thank God you're here," Tim shouted over the radio.

"Yes," Charlie growled, "Now let's have a look at those GPS numbers and get moving after that nut job. We've got no time to lose."

I beat Charlie into their rover and poured over the coordinates. "Looks like he headed northwest around the volcano perimeter," I told Charlie. "If anything, he should be somewhere on the north slope. Or just around the base."

"Fine," Charlie said. "You take the slope. I'll look around the base. Tim, you stay here and keep Fyodor informed. Relay anything important Fyodor has for us."

"OK," Tim said. He was white as a sheet. "Good luck you guys. Be safe, for God's sake."

"Let's go," I said, jumping out of the rover.

I plodded off alone across the slope, walking as briskly as I could at first, in order to get in the vicinity of where Weh had disappeared. Then, as I got into the prime search area, I slowed down, checking the GPS monitor, looking for any sign of a footprint in the undisturbed waste around me. From time to time Charlie's gruff voice would bark over my comlink. "Found anything yet?" He said, again and again. "Nothing yet," I kept answering.
And step by step I kept plodding on into the unknown, with my heart pounding. What was I going to find? The great volcano, the largest in the solar system, loomed on my left, blotting out the stars. Boulders and rock outcrops littered the sandy landscape. On my right, the Martian plain stretched away to the curved horizon, broken only by a fissure or a channel that might have been a dried up riverbed. Then, as I scaled a wrinkle in the volcano's side, I saw a strange formation, an upraised outcrop, the size of a football stadium, nearly perfectly rectangular in shape. I stopped dead in my tracks. There could be no mistaking the intelligent look of the sharp lines and angles of the thing. I stared at it, hardly daring to believe what it might be, what it might mean. And then I looked over my shoulder at the vast emptiness behind me, yawning like a mouth preparing to swallow me. Tim's voice crackled over the comlink. "Fyodor says that we have an hour more guys."

Then, I heard a low voice over the comlink. "I'm adjusting my oxygen." The signal! My hand shook as I switched to channel two.

"I can see you, Larry," the voice hissed. "Larry, is that you?" It was Weh's voice.

"Weh?" I said, "Where are you? What the hell happened to you?"

"I've found it Larry!" he said, "It's this outcrop in front of you! It's in here!"

"Weh! That sandstorm is picking up momentum, and getting stronger. We've been looking for you. Fyodor says we've got one more hour! We're going to have to get out of here. What have you found?"

"We can't leave until I've shown this to you, Larry. Keep proceeding to the left hand corner of the rectangular outcrop. That's where the entrance is. I'll meet you there."

"Weh!" I shouted, "What have you found? What's in there?"

There was no answer. My steps quickened as I plodded through the rusty sand towards the outcrop. This was going to take more than an hour. I knew it. This was putting all our lives in danger. I knew that too. But I didn't call Charlie. The great shape in front of me, the structure, whatever it was, seemed to pull me forward. The rusty wall of the thing loomed larger and larger with every step that I took towards it. At first, it looked featureless, but the sides looked very smooth, very evenly hewn, and some kind of design seemed carved along it. Then, in the wall directly in front of me, I saw the definite outline of a humanoid face, with two eyes, a nose, and a fleshy mouth, chiseled into the red rock. Below it was a finely made doorway, with a lintel over it. In the doorway a figure was standing, waving his arms. It was Weh.

"Larry!" he called out, "In here! You've got to see this! Look what I've found!"

"This is incredible, Weh," I stammered. "I can't believe what I'm seeing."

When I reached the doorway, Weh turned and led me into the vast room that opened beyond the doorway. It was pitch black inside, but our flashlights illuminated the walls. Just then, another frantic message from Tim crackled over the comlink. "Larry! Charlie! Fyodor says that's it! We've got to leave! By the time you make it back to the rovers, we've got to head back to base camp. That sand storm is closing in!"

All kinds of thoughts raced through my mind. The blinding swirl and shredding winds of a Martian sand storm that could rip you out of your rover, or your space suit. And the science changing discovery of intelligent, civilized life on Mars. A discovery so compelling, it seemed worth risking your life for. And the lives of everyone else. Like a magnet, Weh's discovery pulled me against the will of my logic.

"One minute, Tim," I blurted into the mic. "I think I've found something. Give me another minute."

"For God's sake, Larry!" Tim shouted back, "I want to get out of here! I've got a wife at home!"

Then I heard Charlie's rasping voice. "What have you found, Larry? Is it Weh?"

Their voices seemed to fade like the faint orange glow of the outside world beyond the doorway behind us. Our flashlights lit up a wall of carved, red stone, inscribed with human figures, males and females, in some kind of dress; and figures of cats, dogs, birds, horses; in pairs, males and females, in a long parade leading to an image of a great spaceship. Then, there were trailing images of this spaceship, going on a journey, a journey to a blue and white planet on the other side of the room.

Weh's face was beaming inside his helmet.

"What do you make of it?" I stammered out.

"Remember the story of Noah's Ark? Well, maybe there is more to that legend than we thought. I've been studying these hieroglyphs. They all depict mammals. Mammals and flowering plants that evolved here, on the temperate, cool climate of Mars."

"Weh, what are you saying?"

"When the solar system began to cool off, the people here, sophisticated, advanced people, realized they had to leave or freeze to death. They devised a spaceship to take one group of humanoids, the founders of our race, along with the warm blooded creatures that they domesticated here, and the crops they grew, to Earth, in order to ensure their survival."

"Weh, you're saying that..."

"Our ancestors came from Mars!" Weh shouted in triumph. "This discovery proves that our civilization, our culture, and all the warm blooded creatures of Earth, all the crops we depend on, evolved on Mars!"

Charlie's voice crackled over the comlink. "Larry! What have you found? I'm heading for your coordinates. Is it Weh? What is it?"

Slowly, still in shock, I answered him. "It's Weh," I said, "He's found it. The Mars connection."

"The Mars connection?" Charlie blurted out, "What are you talking about? That storm is closing in. We're out of time. Our lives are in danger."

"Charlie," I said, "What would you say if I told you that we've found the Garden of Eden?"