JANUARY 17, 2018
THE NEXT DAY SHE GOFERED AGAIN, BUT THERE WASN'T MUCH BUSINESS.
Raoul spent most of his time in his ERV workshop, carefully fashioning collars around the plumbing he had repaired. A lot of the wrecked metal he had to melt, recast, and rework on a lathe or hot-press foundry. These tools were little miracles of lightweight design, hauled from Earth at his insistence.
His judgment had paid off in spades. Without these beautifully engineered instruments they would have been doomed from their first day here, unable even to begin repairing the damage the ERV had suffered on its landing. But now Raoul complained, when he was tired and down at the end of every day, about how little he had brought. Every evening he found a new variant on “If I'd just brought a …”
So Julia gave him—and Viktor, who with his bum ankle labored as well as he could at detail work in the ERV shop—all the help she could. But a machinist she wasn't. After a few mistakes Raoul discouraged them from even coming into the ERV bay where he worked.
Getting in and out of anything—ERV, habitat, the pressured rover—was so laborious, they kept the “lock-pass-throughs” (a NASA term) to a minimum. And with every one they brought red dust fines into the ERV, even with the two-shower system designed to wash them away.
So by midmorning she was out of work. She was getting away with a nonprotocol method, running errands for Raoul and Viktor in a skin-suit instead of the bulky, full-pressure lobster shell she should have used. The skinsuits were highly elastic jobs that sealed the wearer up at high enough pressure to work, without using the pressure joints and elaborate infrastructure of the big suits. Of course, even with a battery pack and electrical wiring to heat it, the skinsuit demanded an outer layer of arctic-style jacket and leggings. She felt like the Pillsbury dough boy, but better off than she would in the full pressure, tin can suit.
And nobody had ever mastered the cycle in a lobster suit, either. She pedaled the tricycle around on her errands, the movements far easier in her skinsuit, and relished the almost nostalgic feel of it.
Biking on Mars! Even with three balloon tires to keep her gliding over the sand, it felt like a bike ride. Cruising along summer avenues, or cross-country, had been a childhood pleasure. She could not help but cast her mind a mere half year ahead, when she would be biking down to the shimmering beach with her parents, a warm wind sending her hair streaming, Viktor laughing beside her …
Maybe, she reminded herself sternly.
After two years, the crew functioned smoothly together, anticipating one another's needs wordlessly. The efficiency of true teamwork bore fruit: now they were ahead of schedule for the next engine test.
Still, she could not let go of her own itchy ideas. The night before, she had lain beside Viktor in the cool darkness and let her thoughts run. Or rather, spin pointlessly, with no traction to guide them.
She needed a good, solid talk, but sensed that Viktor was too distracted to really hear her. Time to have a session with Erika, her Earth-side counselor. She was trying to think of a way to work it in when Marc came inside with another task.
As biologist, she managed the hab's life support. The air scrubbers needed adjustment and filter changes. It was her turn to do the housekeeping, too. They fought a steady battle to keep dust down. Their suit shower plus self-shower converted the virulent peroxides on the dust surface to oxygen, a useful gain, and left her with watery soil for the greenhouse. They used a toilet that neatly separated solid and liquid waste, and the urine got recycled.
The one trick the bioengineers had not managed was converting the solids to anything useful or even nonsickening. Let the next expedition “realize existing in situ resources,” as the NASA manuals had put it, by composting.
The biological protocols demanded that they bury their waste here. Now their third capsule of wonderful waste was ready. “Let's do it now,” Marc said. “One less item on the list for the final checkout.”
It took two hours for her and Marc to get the awkward plastic liner out of the hab underskirting and onto the hauling deck of the dune buggy. Amazing, how large half a year of four people's shit was! A big, brown mass inside a mercifully opaque plastic sack, compacted and frozen solid. They had to do this—in full pressure suits, of course. Marc had already dug the pit for it a few klicks away, using Rover Boy's back-hoe. The peroxide dust would probably eat through the plastic within a few years, but then it would also neutralize the biological elements of the mess. Here was the bizarre surface chemistry's sole advantage—it made the risk of contamination tiny. No isolation lab on Earth was remotely as hostile to organic chemistry.
Mars taught hard lessons. How much Mother Earth did for humans without their noticing, for one. Recycling air, water, and food was an intricate dance of chemistry and physics, still poorly understood. She had to tinker with their systems constantly. Let the CO2 rise and they could all be dead before anyone noticed anything wrong. Watch the moisture content of the hab's air or they would all get “suit throat”— drying out of the throat until voices rasped.
Humans were walking litterbugs. The four of them shed human dander, duly vacuumed up and used in the greenhouse for valuable proteins and microorganisms. Early on, she had set out a sample—“a dish of dander,” she had called it in a published Letter to Nature—and Mars had killed every single cell within an hour. This surface was the most virulent clean room in the solar system.
Finally she could distract herself no longer from her inner conflict. She told the others she needed a break and went into the hab. “Good, rest,” Viktor sent on comm.
First, she showered twice and had a tiny glass of cognac—a minor breach of rules—to put the dung job behind her.
As soon as she had water on for tea, she turned on some piano pieces by Chopin. They all had divergent musical tastes. Viktor liked awful, moody Tschaikovsky and Mahler, Raoul some skippy South American steel-drum bands, Marc syrupy string gloop. Seldom could they agree on music over the hab speakers for long. Instead, they listened to their headphones. Safety dictated that they not play music while in their suits, because sound was a useful warning.
Chopin's brilliant, fast runs were soothing as she sat herself before the vid camera, needing a talk session. The real-time link was open, as it should have been, so she unloaded all her pent-up pressures on her counselor Earthside—Erika the Eager, Julia's private name for her. Julia had gone for days without sending anything to Erika, and now, alone in the hab, she found all sorts of largely unsorted emotions gushing out.
“Erika, you asked me last time why I was unsatisfied with the mission, and I stalled. Okay, here's the truth. Home!—sure, I want to get going. Sometimes, the call of it is an ache in my heart. My Mums and Dad, and the—what's that old saying?—the cool green hills of Earth …”
The trouble with delayed therapy was that her monologues lacked shape. With eight minutes’ time delay, real ping-pong discussions had proved impossible.
Still, they helped. She went on.
“Leaving Mars … Y'know, behind me I can feel the yearning of millions, of a whole civilization reaching out. I want to bring them something really big.”
As she talked it out, she understood better. Why had the issue of life here come to loom so large in the contemporary mind? It dominated all discussions and drove the whole prize-money system. Viktor and Raoul thought economic payoffs would be the key to the future of Mars, but they were engineers, bottom-line men, remorselessly practical. Just the sort you wanted along when a rocket had to work, but unreliable foreseers, particularly in their prophets-of-profits phase.
Certainly profit had motivated Axelrod to mount this whole huge project. But there was more to it than that.
She suspected that the biologists themselves were to blame. Two centuries before, they had started tinkering with the ideas of Adam Smith and life-of-the-party Thomas Malthus, drawing the analogy between markets and nature red in tooth and claw. The dread specter of Mechanism had entered into Life, and would never be banished, not after Darwin and Wallace's triumphal march across the theological thinking of millennia. God died in the minds of the intellectuals, and grew a rather sickly pallor even among the mildly educated.
All good science, to be sure. But to Julia, the biologists had left humanity without angels or spirits or any important Other to talk to. Somehow our intimate connection to the animals, especially the whales and chimps and porpoises, did not fill the bill. Humanity needed something bigger.
“So the way I see it is, behind our being here is a restless, unspoken craving. It's the scientific class, people like me, reaching out—through the space program, through the radio listeners of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence—for evidence that we intellects aren't alone. That's why our discovery of fossil microbes satisfied nobody, not even me.”
She poured into words her sense of the tragic desolation outside. Mars had fought an epic struggle over billions of years, against the blunt forces of cold and desiccation, betrayed by inexorable laws of gravitation, chemistry, and thermodynamics. Had life climbed up against all the odds, done more than hold on?
“To me, evolution of even bacteria in such a hellish, dry cold is a miracle. But I can't leave it at that!”
She went on about trying to persuade the others, the varying positions of each, then remembered that this wasn't a strategy session. And Erika would not enter into any quarterbacking, anyway. Each counselor kept professional confidentiality and stayed out of crew disputes.
“So, well, just wish me luck. And don't try to talk me out of it!”
The trouble with therapy at long distance was that she would have loved a response right now. She paused, feeling awkward. “I just have to face up to the others, I guess.”
She could get an answer that evening, after Erika had a chance to think and frame something suitable; the counselors were on instant demand by the Consortium.
But as she punched off with her usual wry salutations, Julia realized that she did not really need a reply. Once the pressures were out, she felt much better.
The vent beckoned. And there was such a short time left.