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machine to its knees. Around Sparta the landscape heaved and groaned; rhythmic waves of soil raced past and slowly died away, leaving floating red dust in their wake.
    The explosions were thunder arriving swiftly in the highly conductive atmosphere from a corona of lightning bolts that had bloomed about the head of Mount Maxwell, 300 kilometers away and eleven kilometers up in the sky. The simultaneous earthquake came from the bowels of the mountain, continuing the violent eruption which had begun three hours earlier.
“Rover Two, this is Azure Dragon. We show you at the cliffs. The canyon mouth is one-half-kilometer to your right.”
     
A reddish-black volcanic scarp emerged with startling suddenness out of the bright glow at horizon’s edge. Sparta veered right–
     
–and felt the first sign of trouble, a dragging reluctance in the second joint of her right front leg. There was no point in stopping. She could keep going on five legs, if she had to. Or on three.
    She favored the troubled limb, holding it off the ground, but by the time she reached the canyon mouth five minutes later she knew it was useless–a seal had failed, and the lubrication in the joint had fried. She jettisoned it, leaving it behind like a cast-off stick. She held her surviving foreleg aloft and scurried into the canyon mouth on the remaining four.
    Twisting, turning between narrowing walls of rock patinaed with a dark metallic sheen, once a rushing watercourse . . . milleniums of recurring flash floods had carved cinctures into these desert walls, but that was a billion years ago, and the heated rock had sagged like belly fat, obscuring the thin soft layers of chalk and coal that would have shouted “life” to the cameras of any passing probe.
    Evidence of past life had eventually emerged anyway, when remote-controlled prospecting robots grazed over the surface of Venus. In the scattered calcium carbonates and shales and coal beds, a dozen fragments, no more, of macroscopic fossils emerged from the stone–a dozen fragments in twenty years of exploration, but those were more than enough to fuel the human imagination. Those bits of intaglio had been reconstructed a hundred ways by sober experts, a thousand ways by less inhibited dreamers. No one really knew what the organisms had looked like or how they had lived, and the prospect of ever finding out seemed dim.
Then, only months ago, a prospecting robot had broken into a cave in the cliffside of this canyon. . . .
     
Sparta rounded a rocky shoulder and came to a halt, blocked by a fresh fall of boulders from high up the cliff. The pale exposed facets of rock were shockingly bright and crisp against the blackened and corroded cliff.
     
“Azure Dragon, this is Troy.”
     
“Come in, Inspector.” Port Hesperus was closer now; the radio delay was hardly more than a hesitant pause.
    “The site’s buried by a landslide. Meter-length radar shows the rover and an HDVM underneath. Weak infrared, low reactor flux, they must be in auto-shutdown. Probably crushed their cooling fins. There’s movement in the bell. I’m going to dig them out.”
“Stand by, Inspector.”
     
With her one good foreleg she began clawing at the rockpile.
     
“Inspector Troy, our instruments show you have lost the use of your right forelimb. LS controller advises against risking the remaining forelimb. Do you read?”
     
Another lightning bolt crackled the aether. Moments later the thunderclap shook the rover.
     
“Rover Two, please acknowledge.”
     
She heard them loud and clear, as well as they heard her effortless breathing and read her steady biostats. “Let’s both save our breath,” she said.
    Her remaining foreleg was efficient at yanking the blocks of basalt and solidified tuff from where they had fallen. Her multiple joint-motors whined ceaselessly, loud in the dense atmosphere. Dust rose in that thick air like swirls of mud. She dug into the slide a couple of meters and then had to back out,