Writers of the Future, Volume 28 by L. Ron Hubbard Page A

off.
    “Are you leaking ? Are you hurt ? ”
    “No leaks,” he said, but I could hear pain in his voice. “And I’m fine, just help me get up.”
    I moved one more slab and couldn’t miss its obvious uniformity. Jack had been right again. The basalt covering had been designed to come apart easily. The shell’s inside face had been serrated in a grid pattern, the squares held together by a thin strip of surface stone that was easily broken once the interconnecting tensions and supporting soil had been removed.
    I turned my attention to what lay beneath the shell. It appeared to be a solid block of diamond. I switched on my helmet light and looked inside. Prickles and chills crawled up my back, as I unwittingly uttered the phrase from the old science fiction classic. “My God, it’s full of stars.”
    Jack grunted as he brushed off dust and checked his suit and harness equipment for damage. “Stop screwing around. What do you see ? ”
    I opened my mouth, but words wouldn’t come. The interior of the block was filled with what looked like constellations of sparkling stars. It was as if someone had cut a block of the stunning Martian midnight and buried it for us to find.
    “Malcolm ? ” Jack moved up next to me, leaning in to see.
    The star-like points in the block only glowed when my light touched them. My scientific mind argued that they could be impurities or microfractures in the diamond block, but part of me knew I was looking at a three-dimensional celestial map.
    “A map,” Jack whispered.
    My comm link hissed and popped, then Courtney’s voice intruded on our discovery. “Come in, Malcolm, this is Mars Base One.”
    I almost succumbed to training and long ingrained habit to answer her, but remained silent. I glanced at Jack, but he was totally focused on the block’s interior.
    “Come in, Malcolm. We’ve had fliers all over the area since the storm ended. There are no communication anomalies. We don’t know what you two are doing out there, but the commander is pissed.” She paused for a second, then resumed. “He says Jack is going home no matter what, but considering the amazing find you reported he might consider letting you stay. If you call in now.”
    The urge to respond with a long string of obscenity was nearly overwhelming. They were prepared to let me die in the storm, yet were now threatening to punish me ? I bit my lip, made sure my frequency setting was set for local and Jack’s channel and told him.
    “We’d better hurry. Base just called. I don’t think they know where we are yet, but they are sure looking.”
    We started digging faster. When Nellie returned, I focused my efforts on getting video of the map from every exposed angle. By sundown the three of us had cleared two more sides, leaving only the bottom and one side still covered, but the light failed quickly in the canyon.
    Base had tried to call me and Jack several more times during the day and at one point we saw a flier high in the east, over the area we’d been heading before killing my transponder.
    “We’d better dig in for the night,” Jack said.
    “If we’re going to uncover this, we’d better work through the night,” I said. “Now that the wind has died, they’ll eventually see Nellie’s fresh tracks and follow them back here.”
    “Yeah, but if we’re lucky they won’t find the tracks until tomorrow, then it will take hours for them to get here by truck or blimp. But if they keep those fliers looking all night, they would see our work lights or even our IR signatures and be here before morning. I think we should get underground.”
    I hated to leave the find for that long, but reluctantly agreed. Once out of our suits and settled in our burrow for the night, I linked my suit’s computer to Nellie so that we could both see the video on her foldout display screen. I instructed the computer to build a 3D map based on the footage and overlay the actual video with graphics. We both immediately noticed