The little three man crew of the supply ship, as they were taking off for their return journey, promised they'd tell 'em what we really wanted when they got back, but I doubt the message ever got broadcast over the home and family television sets. Anyway, scientists are supposed to be cold, unfeeling, inhuman creatures who wander around looking noble, wise, and above it all.
In the beginning I'd thought that once I got the heavy work of installation completed, I could do a little wandering around looking wise and noble, myself. No such luck. I'd no more than get set up to show one experiment than it was over; and I'd have to dismantle, move, and set up for another. We'd thought the lighter gravity of Mars, thirty-eight percent, would make the labor easy. But somehow there was still lifting, tugging, pulling, hauling, cursing.
But then, nobody wants to hear how the scientist has to work to get his miracle. The whole essence is the illusion that miracles can be had without work, that all one needs is to wish.
All right. So we'll get to the miracle.
Now we were finally ready to get down to the real test, the main reason for our coming out to Mars—Project Slow-Burn.
VanDam chose a little pocket at the center of that little cluster of hills to our West—that little cluster of hills everybody has seen in the pictures radioed back to Earth.
We didn't know it at the time, but that little cluster of hills was causing quite an uproar among archeologists back home. No archeologist had been included in the expedition, and now they were beating their breasts that from the pictures those hills looked mighty artificial to them. There was too much of a hint that the hills might once have been pyramids, they said; incredibly ancient, perhaps weathered down eons ago when the planet was younger, before it had lost so much of its atmosphere, but maybe still containing something beneath them.
We didn't hear the uproar, of course. Administration deemed it unnecessary for us to bother our pretty little heads about such nonsense. In fact the uproar never got outside the academic cloister to reach the public at all. Administration should have listened. But then, when does man listen to what might interfere with his plans to spoil something?
We got all set to go in that little pocket at the center of the hills. The spot was ideal for us because the hill elevations gave us opportunity to place our cameras on their top to focus down into the crater we hoped would appear.