The lava beds that the probe walked past were flaming orange. The black walls seemed to pulse with spectral energy. A sweep from a side-mounted light illuminated the nearby smoking wall in garish white. Virgil moved jerkily and the wall slipped away.

As the light and camera were sweeping back ahead, Pete Graham sat up straight in his chair.

"What was that?" he asked.

"What was what?" one of his assistants asked. Graham didn't hear.

"Stop him," he commanded. The others had long since gotten used to their project leader's use of masculine pronouns when referring to the probe.

A technician dutifully halted the forward progress of the probe. Virgil stopped dead.

Using his own keyboard, Graham shifted the focus of the camera. With a silent, fluid whir it moved back to where it had been a moment before.

Flecks of deep red in the vast pebbled black were washed pale under Virgil's brilliant light.

"There," Graham insisted. He pointed at the monitor. "What's that?"

Men left their own screens to crowd around Graham's. When they saw the shining silver object he was pointing to, they frowned in confusion.

"Looks too perfect to be naturally occurring," someone commented. "Maybe the Mexicans were doing some research and left something inside."

"They built something that could survive in this heat?"

The contours of the object were unclear. When Graham manually refocused Virgil's lens, he saw why.

The edges of the unidentified object were buried in solidified magma. A gleaming bubble of silver peered out from the ragged rock like an otherworldly orb. "Maybe it's from another planet," an eager voice suggested very close to Graham's ear.

Pete Graham scowled up at Clark Beemer. "Don't be an idiot, Beemer," the scientist snarled.