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wasn’t a ground-shaking blast: just a little whump followed by a cloud of dust that slowly wafted away from the pit.
    She walked beside Carleton to the edge of the excavation. Its floor was covered now with broken, shattered bits of rock.
    “Now we start the day’s real work,” he said to her.
    * * * *

    It took hours to spade up the rubble, pack it into containers, and hoist it up to the surface. Carleton was impressed with Doreen’s willingness to work. And the fact that she could move so much more easily in her nanosuit than he could in his unwieldy hard shell. The strangely small sun climbed higher in the saffron sky. Temperature’s getting up to twenty below, Carleton surmised as they hauled rock shards to the sifter.
    He felt perspiration trickling along his ribs and saw Doreen absently try to wipe her brow, only to bump her gloved hand against the spongy bubble of her inflated helmet.
    “You should’ve worn a head band,” he told her. “Keeps the sweat out of your eyes.”
    Blinking hard, she said, “I didn’t think I’d be sweating when it’s so cold.”
    “The suits keep your body heat in.”
    “Now you tell me.”
    The sifter rattled away. Carleton stopped it to study the contents of the tray beneath it, running his gloved fingers through the dust, finding nothing more than grains of rusty sand. Then he and Doreen poured still another load of shattered rock and started the machine rattling again. Even in the gentle gravity of Mars his arms were starting to ache.
    “So much of science is manual labor,” he said as they strained to lift another carton of rubble onto the sifter’s grid. “Just plain donkey work. Hours of it. Years of it. All for the chance of making a discovery.”
    “It’s a lot easier in the nanolab back at Selene,” Doreen said, puffing slightly from exertion. “Nanomachines are teensy little things.”
    He laughed. “And the Moon’s gravity is even lighter than Mars’s.”
    “We should be using nanomachines here,” she said.
    “Here? For what?”
    “They could build bigger domes for us, pull out atoms of iron and other metals from the ground and build really strong domes, big as you want.”
    Carleton felt impressed. “You could do that?”
    “Sure,” she replied, her voice eager. “Back at Selene they build spacecraft out of carbon soot. Nanomachines turn the carbon into pure diamond, stronger and lighter than steel.”
    “So you think we could build a bigger, safer base with nanobugs.”
    She nodded brightly inside her helmet. She’s really good-looking, he thought. Not much of a figure but her face is pretty, with those big soulful gray-green eyes. Carleton smoothed the rubble over the grid and reached for the switch that would start the sifter working again.
    “That’s a funny-looking piece of rock,” Doreen said, pointing to one of the shards on the grid.
    Carleton grunted and picked up the odd-shaped rock in his gloved hand. It rested in his palm easily. He held it for a moment, then turned it over and brought it up almost touching his visor so he could look at it more closely.
    He goggled at it. He actually felt his eyes bugging out, felt the breath gush out of him.
    “Dr. Carleton?” Doreen said. “Carter? Are you okay?”
    It took several tries before he could say, “It’s a funny-looking piece of rock, all right. It’s a vertebra! I’ll eat camel dung if it’s not a goddamned mother-loving vertebra!”

ALBUQUERQUE: UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO

    Let’s put this in perspective,” Jamie said to Dex and the Navaho president. “It doesn’t have to mean the end of everything.”
    “The hell it doesn’t,” Dex muttered.
    “Most of our funding comes from the Foundation,” said the Navaho president. “The government’s contribution is important, I know, but we get most of our money from private donors, don’t we?”
    Dex answered, “Private contributions have been tailing off. It’s harder and harder to get major donations; the big money