"This is no crash," said Baler. "This looks like the remains of an air-lane beacon of some sort."
"Does it? Not like any I've ever seen. It reminds me more of some of the gadgets they find here and there—the remnants of the Ancients. They used to build junk like this."
"Hook up the sand-blower," suggested Jim Baler. "We'll clear some of this rubble away and see what she really looks like. Can't see much more than what looks like a high-powered searchlight."
Barney hauled equipment out of the flier and hitched it to a small motor in the plane. The blower created a small storm for an hour or so, its blast directed by suit-clad Barney Carroll. Working with experience gained in uncovering the remains of a dozen dead and buried cities, Barney cleared the shifting sand from the remains of the tower.
The head was there, preserved by the dry sand. Thirty feet below the platform, the slender tower was broken off. No delving could find the lower portion.
"This is quite a find," said Jim. "Looks like some of the carvings on the Temple of Science at Canalopsis—that little house on the top of the spire with the three-foot runway around it; then this dingbat perched on top of the roof. Never did figure out what it was for."
"We don't know whether the Martians' eyes responded as ours do," suggested Barney. "This might be a searchlight that puts out with Martian visible spectrum. If they saw with infrared, they wouldn't be using Terran fluorescent lighting. If they saw with long heat frequencies, they wouldn't waste power with even a tungsten filament light, but would have invented something that cooked its most energy in the visible spectrum, just as we have in the last couple of hundred years."
"That's just a guess, of course."
"Naturally," said Barney. "Here, I've got the door cracked. Let's be the first people in this place for six thousand years Terran. Take it easy, this floor is at an angle of thirty degrees."
"I won't slide. G'wan in. I'm your shadow."