JANUARY 2018
THE CRACKLE OF THE RADIO STARTLED HER. “HOME TEAM HERE. GOT your heads-up, Julia. How is he?” Marc's crisp efficiency came over clearly, but she could hear the clipped tenor anxiety, too.
“Stable.” She quickly elaborated on Viktor's symptoms, glancing at his sleeping face. She'd had a year of physician's assistant training and was the official medical officer, but Marc had more field experience, and a med school degree. She felt relieved when he approved of her treatment. “Got to think what this means,” he said laconically.
“We'll be there for supper. Extra rations, I'd say.”
A small, very small joke. They had celebrated each major finding with a slightly excessive food allotment. Extra beer, too. She was in charge of brewing and they always had plenty on tap from the keg in the bio lab.
So far, they had not marked disasters this way. And they were having their share.
“My night to cook, too,” Marc said, transparently trying to put a jovial lilt to it. “Take care, Jules. Watch the road.”
Here came the heart-squeezing moment.
She turned the start-up switch and in the sliver of time before the methane-oxygen burn started in the rover engine, all the possible terrors arose.
If it failed, could she fix it? Raoul and Marc could come out in an unpressured rover and rescue them, sure, but that would chew up time … and be embarrassing. She wasn't much of a mechanic, but still, who likes to look helpless?
Then the mixture caught and the rover chugged into action. Settling in, she peered out at the endless obstacles with the unresting concentration that had gotten her on this mission in the first place. To spend five hundred seventy days on Mars you wanted people who found sticking to the tracks a challenge, not boring. One of the job specs for astronauts was an obsessive-compulsive profile.
She followed the autotracker map meticulously, down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a boulder-strewn pass and down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a pass …
Here, a drive back to base that proved uneventful was even pleasant. Mars was always ready to thunk a wheel into an unseen hole or pitch the rover down a slope of shifting gravel, so she kept exactly to the tracks they had made on the way out, a proven safe return. She had seen enough of this red-hued terrain to last a lifetime, anyway. Nothing out there for a biologist.
In the distance she caught sight of the formation she and Viktor had dubbed the Shiprock on the way out. It looked like a huge old sailing ship, red layers sculpted by eons of high winds. They'd talked about Ray Bradbury's sand ships, tried to imagine skimming over the undulating landscape. The motion of the rover always reminded her a little of being on the ocean. They were sailing over the Martian landscape on a voyage of discovery, a modern-day Columbus journey. But Columbus made three voyages to the New World without landing on the continent. He “discovered” America by finding islands in the Caribbean, nibbling on the edges of a continent. Still, he got a holiday named for him …
A sudden thought struck her: was that what they were doing— finding only the fringes of the Mars biology? Many people had speculated that the subterranean vents were the most likely places for life on this planet. The frontier for her lay hundreds of meters below, out of reach. She sighed resignedly. But it had been great fun, at first.
She slurped more tea, recalling the excitement of the first months. Some of it was pure fame rush, of course. Men on Mars! (Uh, and a woman, too.) They were household names now, the first Mars team, sure bets for all the history books. Hell, they might eventually eclipse Neil Armstrong.
She was first author on a truly historic paper, the first submitted to Nature from another world. Barth, Bryant, Molina, & Nelyubov's “Fossil Life on Mars” described their preliminary findings: it would rank with Watson and Crick's 1952 paper nailing the structure of DNA. That paper had opened up cell biology and led to the Biological Century.
What would their discovery lead to? There was already a fierce bidding war for her samples. Every major lab wanted to be the first to examine the fossils, maybe extract Martian DNA, if any, and determine the relationship between Martian and Terran life.
With her small scanning electron microscope she'd gotten decent enough pictures to confirm that these were indeed fossils, and not just wavy compression features in the rock. They looked strikingly like stromatolite fossils, tough layer cakes of bacteria. Some of the bacteria in living stromatolites on Earth were photosynthetic cyanobacteria, and thus green, but the Martian rocks gave no color clues.
She started on her favorite speculation: where did life start? Mars was smaller and so cooled first. Life could have arisen here while Earth was still a hot lava ball. Then it could have gone to Earth via the meteorite express.
Organized life-forms from Mars seeding Earth's primitive soup of basic organic molecules would have quickly dominated. Martians invade, eat Earthly resources! H. G. Wells with a twist. We may yet turn out to be Martians. Pretty heady stuff for the scientific community, and it would change our essential worldview. Full employment for philosophers, too, and even religious theorists.
The Martian meteorites with their enigmatic fossils had tantalized scientists for years. When first discovered, the big question had been whether the tiny shapes actually were fossils, because most people thought they knew that Mars was lifeless. Now we know about that part, at least, she thought.
But deep down she realized she'd wanted to find life, not fossils, and even more than that, L*I*F*E.
Marc was jazzed by the discovery of deeper deposits of fossils, separated by layers of sterile peroxide-laden sediments in the old ocean beds. That implied periodic episodes of a wetter and warmer climate.
But so far she had not found anything alive. Even the first volcanic vent they had explored had no life, only peroxide soil blown into it from the surface, like a dusty old mine shaft.
Before today, that is. And now they were about to leave, the subterranean reaches still unexplored. Damn!
After five hours Viktor was doing well, had regained his energy and good spirits. They even managed a clumsy but satisfying slap and tickle when she stopped the rover for lunch. In the cramped, fishbowl world of the hab, they'd learned to use the privacy of the rover to great advantage. Today she felt nervous and skittish, but Viktor was a persistent sort and she finally realized that this just might do both of them more good than anything in the medicine chest back in the habitat.
The route began to take them—or rather, her, since Viktor crashed again right after sex; this time she forgave him—through familiar territory. She had scoured the landscape within a few days of the hab. Coming down in the Gusev Crater, they got a full helping of Mars: chasms, flood runoff plains, wrinkled canyons, chaotic terrain once undermined by mud flows, dried beds of ancient rivers and lakes, even some mysterious big potholes that must have been minivolcanoes somehow hollowed out.
Her pursuit of surface fossil evidence of life had been systematic, remorseless—and mostly a waste.
Not a big surprise, really, in retrospect. Any hiker in the American west was tramping over lands where once tyrannosaurus and bison had wandered, but seldom did anybody notice a bone sticking out of the ground. Julia was more systematic and probed deeper in the obvious places, where water had once silted up and could have trapped recently dead organisms. Algal mats, perhaps, as with the first big life-forms on Earth. But she had no luck, even in a year and a half of snooping into myriad canyons and promising beds of truly ancient lakes. That didn't mean life wasn't somewhere on the planet. It had been warm and moist here for a billion years, enough for life to evolve, even if Mars had not supported surface life for perhaps three billion or more years.
She stamped her feet to help the circulation. Space heaters in the rover ran off the methane-oxy burn, but as always, the floor was cold. Mars never let you forget where you were.
She tried to envision how it must have been here, billions of years ago. This was her cliché daydream, trying to impose on the arid red wastes the romance of what they could have been, once upon a time.
Did life give way with a grudging struggle, trying every possible avenue before retreating underground or disappearing?
The planet did not die for want of heat or air, but of mass. With greater gravity it could have held on to the gases its volcanoes vented, prevented its water vapor from escaping into vacuum. Recycling of carbon didn't happen on Mars, the CO2 was lost to carbonate rocks. The atmosphere thinned, the planet cooled …
Split from hydrogen by the sun's stinging ultraviolet, the energetic oxygen promptly mated with the waiting iron in the rocks. The shallow gravitational well failed. Light hydrogen blew away into the yawning vastness of empty space. The early carbon dioxide fused into the rocks, bound forever as carbonate. Had Mars been nearer the sun, the sunlight and warmth would simply have driven water away faster.
So those early life-forms must have fought a slow, agonizing retreat. There were eras when lakes and even shallow, muddy seas had hosted simple life—Marc's cores had uncovered plenty of ancient silted plains, now compressed into sedimentary rock. But no fossil forests, nothing with a backbone, nothing with shells or hard body parts. If higher forms had basked in the ancient warmth here, they had left no trace.
The squat hab came into view in the salmon sunset.
They had landed in the ancient flat bottom of Gusev Crater, whose distant ramparts reared over a kilometer into the rosy sky. A hundred fifty klicks across, Gusev was a geologist's playground.
One of astronomy's more arcane pleasures was eclectic naming. Gusev was a mini–United Nations. To the south lay the Ma'adim Vallis, “Martian Valley” in Arabic. Gusev himself had been a nineteenth-century Russian astronomer. Some French Planetary scientists working for the Americans had given the small crater near their base the Greek name Thyra.
She could see the slumped peaks of Thyra as she headed south. One of the major reasons to land here had been a tantalizing dark spot on Thyra's southern rim. Under telepresence guidance from Earth, Rover Boy had found promising signs that the spot was a salt flat left by a thermal vent. True enough, but when they arrived they found that the site had not given off anything for maybe half a billion years. A crushing disappointment, that first month. But if there had been venting, maybe there was still, nearby. She had lived with that ebbing hope for a year and a half.
Well, now she had her vent. And it had injured Viktor within a few minutes.
Looking like a giant's drum, seven meters high and eight meters across, the hab—their former command module—stood off the ground on sturdy metal struts. Sandbags on the roof cut their radiation exposure. Inside, the two stacked decks had the floor space of a smallish condo, their home for the last twenty months. A thousand carefully arranged square feet. Not for the claustrophobic, but they would certainly be nostalgic for it in the cramped quarters of the Return Vehicle they would shortly be boarding.
By now the hab was familiar to billions of Earthbound TV viewers and Net surfers. Everyone on Earth had the opportunity to follow their adventures, which were beamed daily from Ground Control and carried on the evening news. Their webpage registered over a hundred million hits in the week following the landing. Mars had ceased to be space and had become a place.
Raoul and Marc climbed down out of the hab as she approached in the last slanting rays of a ruddy sunset, two chubby figures in dark parka suits. Only Raoul's slight limp from frostbitten toes distinguished them. The tracker system had alerted them. Thanks to the mission planners, they would not have to carry Viktor in. The rover mated directly to hab airlock.
But first, a little ceremony they had devised: salvaging water from the rover. Even with Viktor hurt, they followed procedure.
The methane-oxygen burn made carbon dioxide, which the engine vented, and pure water. She backed the rover to the conical return ship. The gaudy NASA emblem they had completely covered with a plated-on, red-on-white MARS CONSORTIUM in wrap-around letters a meter high. Axelrod had made a point of including that thumb-in-your-eye gesture in the payload.
Outside, Raoul and Marc hooked the water condensers to the input lines, so the chem factory inside could store it. They had full tanks of methane and oxygen for the liftoff, but water was always welcome, after the parching they had taken on the long flight here.
They waved to her. Their little rituals; the guys made the gesture as a way of saying “welcome home.” In the bleak, rusty dusk, the cold of night biting already through to her, the symbolism was important. Mars was sharp, cold, and unrelenting, and they all felt it to the bone.