Man Camp, Page 3

A few miles into the canyon, Venturer stopped at the base of one of the giant rock cliffs to bore a sample for testing. The only sound around for miles, other than that of the wind blowing through, was the faint whirr of it's drill. One good thing about rovers was in a situation like this, anticipating the unknown in a world of utter desolation such as Mars would give a human explorer a bad case of the heebie-jeebies. But fear was never in a rover's programming.

  It was almost finished when it's sensors picked up a movement on one of the nearby hillsides. It stopped drilling and moved back a few feet, panning it's main camera toward the upper slope. About fifty feet above, some rocks rolled down. Not enough for an avalanche. But peculiar.

  Venturer slowly panned the camera from the farthest left to the farthest right of the slope, zooming in toward the source of the movement. It's heat sensors picked up a source near a boulder. The camera slowly continued to zoom in further and found a dark shape appearing to be sitting on top of the boulder. It resembled a human form, flexing an arm about chest high as if it were scratching it's armpit.

  Venturer monitored it for over three minutes. It hadn't moved a muscle. The rover then snapped a picture and began to move further on down the valley floor.

  The picture, once it reached the JPL lab, would be left for it's team of scientists and visual technicians to pore over thoroughly. All of the evidence, the data from the heat sensors and the image from the photograph, gave a very likely possibility that the image may be some form of intelligent life.

  But that was not for Venturer to judge as it continued on with it's programmed mission of mapping and prospecting Mars. It was only a machine, nothing more.

  Once the rover went out of sight beyond the cliffs, the shape stood up from the boulder and walked further across the slope of the hillside.

  8

  Second Chances