New Frontiers (29 page)

“A precedent,” said Ms. Harte, as she picked up the menu that lay atop her plate.

“This state is a trendsetter.” Franklin was beaming.

“Justice Halpern voted with the majority?” she asked.

Nodding vigorously, Franklin told her, “He wrote the majority opinion, no less.”

Ms. Harte smiled prettily. “I'll bet VR Duels, Inc. will declare a dividend.”

“Very likely,” Franklin agreed happily. “Very likely.”

They both ordered trout, and Franklin picked a dry white wine to go with the fish.

“I really want to thank you,” Franklin said, once they had sipped at the wine. “I know it was quite a sacrifice for you.”

“Sacrifice?”

“The club's board turned down your petition about the Men's Bar.”

Ms. Harte shrugged prettily. “It wasn't
my
petition. I don't care about your old Men's Bar.”

“Oh,” said Franklin. “When I first talked to you about it, I thought—”

“I'm not a radical feminist. The petition was just the bait for your trap. And it worked.”

Franklin nodded, a little warily, and turned his attention to the trout.

She said, “So now the good citizens of this state can settle their differences with a duel in virtual reality.”

“Under the specified conditions. Both parties have to sign a formal agreement to make the results of the duel binding on them.”

She took another sip of wine, then said. “It's funny. You told me that Justice Halpern was a champion pistol shot, but he was worse than I am.”

“There's a big difference between shooting at a target and firing at someone who's shooting back at you,” Franklin said. “And that Dragoon's revolver we gave him is a lot different from the Glock he's accustomed to.”

“I suppose,” Ms. Harte agreed faintly. “But boy, he was a really rotten shot, you know. I deliberately missed him four times and I still had to pretend to be hit; he never came close to me.”

Franklin hissed, “For God's sake don't let anyone else know that! If it ever gets back to him…”

“Don't worry, my lips are sealed,” she replied. “After all, an assistant district attorney has got to have some discretion.”

With a relieved chuckle, Franklin said, “You'll get the next opening in the DA's office. It's all set. We just have to wait a few months so Halpern doesn't start putting two and two together.”

She nodded, but then asked, “So why did you go through all this? Why are you so intent on getting VR duels accepted as legally binding?”

Franklin eyed her carefully for a long, silent moment. At last he answered, “Several reasons. First, it will help people get their differences settled without waiting for months or even years for a court to come to a decision for them.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Second, it will unclog court calendars. A lot of petty nuisance suits will disappear. People will fight duels instead of calling for lawyers.”

“Lawyers' incomes will go down, you know.”

“Yes, but it's all for the best,” Franklin said loftily. “It will make our society better. Healthier. People will take out their aggressions in harmless but emotionally satisfying virtual reality duels. As a former psychologist, I'm certain that it will be a great benefit to society.”

“Really?”

“So some lawyers won't make as much money,” he went on. “They won't have as many ambulances to chase. So what? Money isn't everything. We have to think of the greater good.”

“I see.” Ms. Harte broke into a knowing grin. “And just how much money have you invested in VR Duels, Inc.?”

Franklin tried to keep a straight face but failed. Smiling like a true lawyer, he replied, “Quite a bit, Roxanne, my dear. Quite a healthy goddamned bit.”

 

INTRODUCTION TO

“MARS FARTS”

 

First, I should apologize for the somewhat vulgar title. But, as you will see, it really is appropriate.

Satellites placed in orbit around the planet Mars have detected occasional whiffs of methane gas in the thin Martian atmosphere. They seem to appear seasonally, in the springtime.

Methane is a compound of carbon and hydrogen. The gas is quickly broken up into its constituent elements by solar ultraviolet radiation. The freed hydrogen presumably wafts to the top of the atmosphere and eventually boils away into space.

So the methane is destroyed almost as soon as it is produced. Yet something produces fresh methane every year.

On Earth, microbes living deep underground use the energy of our planet's hot core to drive their metabolism. They eat rock or iron and excrete methane.

Could such methanogenic bacteria be producing the methane found in the Martian atmosphere?

Here is a frontier to be explored!

 

MARS FARTS

 

“A CATHOLIC, A
Jew, and a Muslim are stuck in the middle of Mars,” said Rashid Faiyum.

“That isn't funny,” Jacob Bernstein replied, wearily.

Patrick O'Connor, the leader of the three-man team, shook his head inside the helmet of his pressure suit. “Laugh and the world laughs with you, Jake.”

None of them could see the faces of their companions through the tinting of their helmet visors. But they could hear the bleakness in Bernstein's tone. “There's not much to laugh about, is there?”

“Not much,” Faiyum agreed.

All around them stretched the barren, frozen, rust-red sands of Utopia Planita. Their little hopper leaned lopsidedly on its three spindly legs in the middle of newly churned pockmarks from the meteor shower that had struck the area overnight.

Off on the horizon stood the blocky form of the old
Viking 2
lander, which had been there for more than a century. One of their mission objectives had been to retrieve parts of the
Viking
to return to Earth, for study and eventual sale to a museum. Like everything else about their mission, that objective had been sidelined by the meteor shower. Their goal now was survival.

A barrage of tiny bits of stone, most of them no larger than dust motes. Once they had been part of an icy comet, but the ice had melted away after God-knew-how-many trips around the sun, and now only the stones were left when the remains of the comet happened to collide with the planet Mars.

One of the rare stones, almost the size of a pebble, had punctured the fuel cell that was the main electrical power source for the three-man hopper. Without the electrical power from that fuel cell, their rocket engine could not function. They were stranded in the middle of the frozen, arid plain.

In his gleaming silvery pressure suit, Faiyum reminded O'Connor of a knight in shining armor, except that he was bending into the bay that held the fuel cell, his helmeted head obscured by the bay's upraised hatch. Bernstein, similarly suited, stood by nervously beside him.

The hatch had been punctured by what looked like a bullet hole. Faiyum was muttering, “Of all the meteoroids in all the solar system in all of Mars, this one's got to smack our power cell.”

Bernstein asked, “How bad is it?”

Straightening up, Faiyum replied, “All the hydrogen drained out during the night. It's dead as a doornail.”

“Then so are we,” Bernstein said.

“I'd better call Tithonium,” said O'Connor, and he headed for the ladder that led to the hopper's cramped cockpit. “While the batteries are still good.”

“How long will they last?” asked Bernstein.

“Long enough to get help.”

It wasn't that easy. The communications link back to Tithonium was relayed by a network of satellites in low orbit around Mars, and it would be another half hour before one of the commsats came over their horizon.

Faiyum and Bernstein followed O'Connor back into the cockpit, and suddenly the compact little space was uncomfortably crowded.

With nothing to do but wait, O'Connor said, “I'll pressurize the cockpit so we can take off the helmets and have some breakfast.”

“I don't think we should waste electrical power until we get confirmation from Tithonium that they're sending a backup to us.”

“We've got to eat,” O'Connor said.

Sitting this close in the cramped cockpit, they could see each other's faces even through the helmet visors' tinting. Faiyum broke into a stubbly-chinned grin.

“Let's pretend its Ramadan,” he suggested, “and we have to fast from sunup to sundown.”

“Like you fast during Ramadan,” Bernstein sniped. O'Connor remembered one of their first days on Mars, when a clean-shaven Faiyum had jokingly asked which direction Mecca was. O'Connor had pointed up.

“Let's not waste power,” Bernstein repeated.

“We have enough power during the day,” Faiyum pointed out. “The solar panels work fine.”

Thanks to Mars's thin, nearly cloudless atmosphere, just about the same amount of sunshine fell upon the surface of Mars as upon Earth, despite Mars's farther distance from the sun. Thank God for that, O'Connor thought. Otherwise we'd be dead in a few hours.

Then he realized that, also thanks to Mars's thin atmosphere, those micrometeoroids had made it all the way down to the ground to strafe them like a spray of bullets, instead of burning up from atmospheric friction, as they would have on Earth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he told himself.

“Tithonium here,” a voice crackled through the speaker on the cockpit control panel. All three of them turned to the display screen, suddenly tight with expectation.

“What's your situation, E-3?” asked the face in the screen. Ernie Roebuck, they recognized: chief communications engineer.

The main base for the exploration team was down at Tithonium Chasma, part of the immense Grand Canyon of Mars, more than three thousand kilometers from their Excursion 3 site.

O'Connor was the team's astronaut: a thoroughly competent Boston Irishman with a genial disposition who tolerated the bantering of Faiyum and Bernstein—both geologists—and tried to keep them from developing a real animosity. A Muslim from Peoria and a New York Jew: how in the world had the psychologists back Earthside ever put the two of them on the same team, he wondered.

In the clipped jargon of professional fliers, O'Connor reported on their dead fuel cell.

“No power output at all?” Roebuck looked incredulous.

“Zero,” said O'Connor. “Hydrogen all leaked out overnight.”

“How did you get through the night?”

“The vehicle automatically switched to battery power.”

“What's the status of your battery system?”

O'Connor scanned the digital readouts on the control panel. “Down to one-third of nominal. The solar panels are recharging 'em.”

A pause. Roebuck looked away, and they could hear voices muttering in the background. “All right,” said the communicator at last. “We're getting your telemetry. We'll get back to you in an hour or so.”

“We need a lift out of here,” O'Connor said.

Another few moments of silence. “That might not be possible right away. We've got other problems, too. You guys weren't the only ones hit by the meteor shower. We've taken some damage here. The garden's been wiped out and E-1 has two casualties.”

Excursion 1 was at the flank of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

“Our first priority has to be to get those people from E-1 back here for medical treatment.”

“Yeah. Of course.”

“Give us a couple of hours to sort things out. We'll call you back at noon, our time. Sit tight.”

O'Connor glanced at the morose faces of his two teammates, then replied, “We'll wait for your call.”

“What the hell else can we do?” Bernstein grumbled.

Clicking off the video link, O'Connor said, “We can get back to work.”

Faiyum tried to shrug inside his suit. “I like your first suggestion better. Let's eat.”

With their helmets off, the faint traces of body odors became noticeable. Munching on an energy bar, Faiyum said, “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew were showering together in a YMCA…”

“You mean a YMHA,” said Bernstein.

“How would a Muslim get into either one?” O'Connor wondered.

“It's in the States,” Faiyum explained. “They let anybody in.”

“Not women.”

“You guys have no sense of humor.” Faiyum popped the last morsel of the energy bar into his mouth.

“This,” Bernstein countered, “coming from a man who was named after a depression.”

“El-Faiyum is below sea level,” Faiyum admitted easily, “but it's the garden spot of Egypt. Has been for more than three thousand years.”

“Maybe it was the garden of Eden,” O'Connor suggested.

“No, that was in Israel,” said Bernstein.

“Was it?”

“It certainly wasn't here,” Faiyum said, gazing out the windshield at the bleak, cold Martian desert.

“It's going to go down near a hundred below again tonight,” Bernstein said.

“The batteries will keep the heaters going,” said O'Connor.

“All night?”

“Long enough. Then we'll recharge 'em when the sun comes up.”

“That won't work forever,” Bernstein muttered.

“We'll be okay for a day or two.”

“Yeah, but the nights. A hundred below zero. The batteries will crap out pretty soon.”

Tightly, O'Connor repeated, “We'll be okay for a day or two.”

“From your mouth to God's ear,” Bernstein said fervently.

Faiyum looked at the control panel's digital clock. “Another three hours before Tithonium calls.”

Reaching for his helmet, O'Connor said, “Well, we'd better go out and do what we came here to do.”

“Haul up the ice core,” said Bernstein, displeasure clear on his lean, harsh face.