6
Back at the Cortez Inn, a U-shaped motel where his room was on the left side of the U, Travis sat on the edge of his dark brown bedspread and examined the rock again.
He had gripped it too hard when he first took it out of the towel, and once again little particles flaked off. He gathered them into a tissue so he wouldn’t risk losing any more of the specimen.
He thought about how it might have been made.
He wasn’t a specialist in minerals, but he knew a few things from his studies. Under certain conditions in nature, sand and rocks could change density and appearance if they were impacted with enough heat.
There was something called fulgurite, or petrified lightning, a kind of primitive glass that was made from lightning hitting sand. Lava rocks were made when molten lava rapidly co
