Yes, there were natives, of a sort, on Mars. Strange beings, albeit friendly, made up, except for a fraction of a percent, of sugar.
They were crystalline, these beings, covered over with prisms of bright red sugar that gave them, with their scuttling gait and long pointed tails, the appearance of man-sized lizards. A lot of their metabolism was a mystery to us, but we did know that they, like plants on Earth, lived by a sort of modified photosynthesis.
At first thought, this seems strange, since we are used to green as the primary necessity in a photosynthetic metabolism. But it made sense when you remember that foliage looks green because the green rays of the sun are reflected, and the red rays absorbed. Since a crystal passes only the rays which correspond to its color-structure, they did quite well, photosynthetically. Air and water were their chief foods, of course. The water they inhaled through rubbery-looking hollow tongues which extended a good two feet from their wide, dragon like mouths. The distance was a necessity, due to their exteriors, which, as I've said, were made of red crystalline sugar. They could take water on the inside, but it was fatal on the outside.
The first men on Mars had felt pretty silly standing guard over their encampments with water pistols. But the sugarfeet, as they came to be called, proved friendly enough in a nonobsequious way. They seemed, on investigation, to be the Martian equivalent of cats.
By that I mean that they must have been the self-sufficient pets of the Ancient Martians. They tended to be standoffish and annoyingly smug, but not menacing in any way. After all, why should they be menacing? We had nothing they wanted. Our food was useless to them, as were our clothes, gold or anything else in the way of possessions. They liked our water, of course, but long evolution in the Martian deserts had kept their physical need for this commodity down to a minimum. The average sugarfoot drank about a pint of water per week, which was no menace to us, even when we'd first landed and water was in short supply.
But of the Ancients, they could tell us nothing, any more than an alien landing on a depopulated Earth could find out about men from an alley cat. We knew there had been intelligent life, though. There were remnants of buildings still to be seen half-buried in the rust-red sands, and bewildering little artifacts for which no conceivable use had as yet been convincingly postulated. There was one thing, though, that bothered us about these buildings and artifacts.
They were made out of parabolite.
How had the Martians carved, or molded, or otherwise affected the shape of this indestructible mineral? We had no idea.
Marsport had a population of about one hundred thousand families, averaging five people to a family, so it was a good-sized city for Snow to hide herself in.
On the other hand, I wasn't absolutely sure just why I was looking for her. After all, I didn't really need the Amnesty. A collapser carries a lot of weight on its own. And an Amnesty's power was only in proportion to the esteem in which an approached individual held the authority of the World Government.