The Martian Race (12 page)

Marc said, “We could maybe manage a few days in the rover, no more.”

“Good enough. I'll start packing.”

“Not so fast. We've all got to agree.”

Squeezing in a half hour here and there, Julia ran her test. The results were relayed to her computer, in the paperless mode demanded by Mars. The problem of consumables like paper on long space missions was approached in a variety of ways.

Back in the days of Mir, the cosmonauts had been paper-deprived. They repeatedly requested something to write on, to no avail. It was simply too expensive, and there was no place to put the waste paper. In frustration the cosmonauts used cardboard from boxes, backs of food containers, and finally the walls of the station itself. The urge to express themselves, if only to write notes, turned out to be fundamental.

The psychologists studying spaceflight had duly noted this, so Julia was able to lounge in a comfortable flight couch after dinner with her personal electronic slate and call up the data squirted from the gas chromatograph in the greenhouse hours before.

For data, going paperless was simple: digital/electronic readouts instead of long scrolls of paper written on by ink-filled needles, covered with squiggly analog lines. Reams of paper were replaced by the newest digital storage techniques.

Julia enjoyed living without paper clutter and its attendant disorganization. Besides a few photos, the only piece of paper on her wall was a printout of the mission time line from just before liftoff. Featured prominently was the entry: 3/14/2018—Launch date!!

She fed the raw data into an initial converter program. As it scrolled across her screen, she felt a growing excitement, and some puzzlement.

She called across to Viktor, “It's alive!”

“What is alive?” He looked up from his reading. Books were tiny cartridges that fed into their personal slates. New ones came from Earth regularly.

“The sample from the vent, luv. It's clearly organic material.” She couldn't help grinning.

“What does it mean, organic? Contains carbon?”

“Well, not just that. There are inorganic carbon-containing substances, like calcium carbonate. I mean, complex carbon-based molecules that are produced only by living organisms.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, proteins, sugars, fats, that sort of thing.”

“You found this in the sample?”

“Well, I found mostly degraded pieces of them. More amino acids—protein building blocks”—she said hastily, to his blank look— “than proteins. Nucleotides instead of DNA, that sort of thing. This stuff was freeze-dried and chewed up.”

“Chewed? What could chew?” He was being maddeningly obtuse.

“It's just a figure of speech. Degraded is what I meant. And before you ask, I suspect a combination of the UV and the peroxides in the dust. Together they do a great job of sterilizing everything on the surface. I think I caught them in the act by that vent.”

“You sure is not contaminated?”

“Well, more samples would be better, but that's all I've got, and I don't see how—”

“Is not very good argument.”

She began to feel steamed. “But I can't go back to get more unless you all agree. And I suspect you won't agree unless I have more proof!”

“Is question of priorities right now. We must make sure ERV will get us back. That is first.”

“What about afterwards?”

“Ask again then.”

But she tried again at breakfast, laying out her results as they shoveled down the oatmeal. After communal hot cereal, they usually each nuked a precooked breakfast. Mars
Needs Calories!
It was a good time to set what they were doing that day.

Raoul shook his shaggy head. All the men were letting their hair grow out to the max, then would shear it down to stubble just before liftoff, including beards. The “Mars Bald” look, as Earthside media put it, went for Julia, too. In the cramped hab of the return vehicle, shedding hair would be just another irritant. If it got into their gear, especially the electronics, it could be dangerous.

He gestured at the injured Viktor. “Without him, we'll take longer to complete checkout. Marc, I know it's not your job, but I'll need both you and Julia to help. I want to eyeball every valve and servo in the undercarriage.”

“Okay, I can see why you need all of us for that. But once it's done—”

“Until we've done the liftoff, planning is pointless,” Viktor said in a voice that reminded them all that he was, sprained ankle or not, the commander. She had hoped he would reconsider overnight.

So far he had rarely needed to throw his weight around. Julia shot him a look and saw in his face the man who was the commander first and her lover second. Which was probably as it should be at this moment, she knew. Even if a part of her did not like such facts right now.

She said slowly, “I have a quick run we could do.”

Viktor looked up from his recliner, “For jewels, I hope.” He was not going to help her.

She grimaced, but went along with their laughter. His jibe was completely in character. Viktor was deeply marked by the bad years in Russian space science following the collapse of the Communist economy. She recalled his saying, “In those dark years, the lucky ones were driving taxicabs, and building spaceships on the side. The others just starved.” Not only research suffered. Some years there had been no money, period. Faced with no salaries, staff members in some science institutes found new ways to raise money, sometimes by selling off scientific gear, or museum collections. It was like her grandparents, who had grown up during the Great Depression; money was never far from mind. So Viktor made a fetish of following Consortium orders about possible valuable items: he scrounged every outcropping for “nuggets,” “Mars jade,” and anything halfway presentable. They all got a quarter of the profits, so nobody griped. Still, Viktor's weight allowance on the flight back was nearly all rocks—some, she thought, quite ugly.

“No, for science.”

Viktor gave her a satirical scowl.

Raoul eyed her skeptically. “Your vent idea again.”

“Yep. I want to go back.”

“I've studied the whole area around it,” Marc said. “My seismic profiles from last year show that it's honeycombed with subterranean caverns. Funny we never caught an outgassing before.”

The Consortium wanted information on water and underground gasses; they could use it on later expeditions, or sell the maps to anyone coming afterward. Marc had now processed some of the data; the rest he would work on during the trip home.

Raoul shook his head, scowling. “We've already got one injury. And we've looked in one vent earlier—it was no good, right?”

“It was just a small blowhole, not really useful—”

“Crawling down more holes isn't in the mission profile, not this late.”

“True, but irrelevant,” she said evenly. “There's new information. You know what I found. That
changes
the profile.”

Raoul was the tough one, she saw. Viktor would support her eventually, if she could fit her plan into mission guidelines. Marc, as a geologist, had a bias toward anything that would give him more data and samples. He had been the most interested in her results, though dubious.

“It's too damned dangerous!” Raoul suddenly said. “Do you want to be the last soldier killed in the war?”

“Bad analogy,” Julia said automatically.

“Well,” Marc said mildly, “we could use our seismic sensors to feel if there are signs of a venting about to occur, and—”

“Nonsense,” Raoul waved away this point. “Have you ever measured a venting?”

“Well, no, but it can't differ greatly from the usual signs on Earth—”

“We do not know enough to say that.”

She had to admit that Raoul was right in principle; Mars had plenty of nasty tricks. It certainly had shown them enough already, from the pesky peroxides getting in everywhere—even her underwear—to the alarming way seals on the chem factory kept getting eaten away by mysterious agents, probably a collaboration between the peroxide dust and the extreme temperature cycles of day and night.

She said carefully, “But our remote sensing showed that venting events are pretty rare, a few times a year.”

“Those were the big outgassings, no?”

“Well, yes. But even so, they are low density. It's not like a volcano on Earth.”

“Low density, but could be hot?”

“Yes, I suppose—”

“Hot, and something that attacks seals on the suits. Our pressure suits do not provide good enough insulation. I believe we all agree on that.”

This provoked rueful nods. The biggest day-to-day irritant was not the peroxides, but the sheer penetrating cold of Mars.

Raoul's style was to hedgehog on the technicals, then leap to a grand conclusion. She got ahead of him by not responding to the insulation problem at all, but going to her real point. “The vents must be
key
to the biology. We can't walk away now.”

“That's the whole point. We should walk away—while we still can. We've been lucky so far, only minor injuries—frostbite, bruises, sprains, it could have been a lot worse. We have done enough on biology,” Raoul said adamantly.

“Look—”

“No.” He cut her off with a chop of his hand, the practical mechanic's hand with grime under the fingernails. “The ERV is our job now.”

And they all had to agree. Getting back came first. In Raoul's set jaw she saw the end of her dreams.

Julia worked alone after that. The urge to be away from the others was like an itch.

After the last go-around she had nothing more to say to her crew-mates. So when she finished her tasks she went straight back to the hab. She cycled through the air lock, suit-showered, shucked her helmet and outerwear, and moved to the flight deck. Hiking the room heat, she settled into the ergonomic chair and called up the latest e-mail from Robbie and Harry on the comm screen. Maybe it would distract her.

They had attached a New York ETimes article about the latest antics of the Protect Earth Party and a new group, the Mars First! activists. PEPA had terrorized NASA for years with their fears that a menace from space would be brought back on a Mars rock—or even a Moon rock.

In 1997, a National Research Council report on sample return from Mars concluded, “While the probability of returning a replicating biological entity in a sample from Mars is judged to be low and the risk of pathogenic or ecological effects is lower still, the risk is not zero.” That was enough for PEPA. “Not zero” equated in their eyes to a certainty.

They—that is, the lawsuits—had made NASA agree to Chicken Little protocols to contain, sterilize, or abandon space samples from other planets. Robbie called PEPA the Andromeda Strain party.

After the launch accident, PEPA had looked for fresh meat. With their favorite target, NASA, out of the game, their entire pack of lamprey lawyers had descended on Axelrod. They started by charging that sending a manned mission to Mars violated the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

“What the hell is that?” Axelrod had asked.

One of his assistants read it to him. He was being charged with planning a mission that was going to “produce harmful contamination of a celestial body,” a treaty violation.

His reaction had been unprintable. His lawyers found a copy of the treaty. They discovered, of course, that it was a set of flimsy protocols with no teeth. And that it didn't cover future violations. Bottom line: PEPA couldn't stop him from launching or landing on Mars.

It had been a pleasure for Axelrod to grind their faces into this fact, in court.

But then, the article said, PEPA had been joined by the Mars First! activists—who, conversely, didn't want Earth to contaminate Mars. Both groups wanted the two planets to stay strictly apart, for opposite reasons.

“An unholy alliance of the absurd,” Axelrod was quoted as saying in the article.

What, demanded MF PEPA, was being done to ensure that indigenous life on Mars is protected from the ravages of Earth bacteria?

“Genocide, that's what it is,” their spokeswoman exclaimed. “The so-called discovery of the New World all over again. European explorers brought diseases like measles, syphilis, and flu to the Indians, who died by the millions. Now we're doing it again, to a whole planet!”

They cited Ray Bradbury, whose fictional Martians died from earthly diseases. That it was fiction was a fine point they didn't appreciate.

And of course they sued Axelrod also.

Julia was amused by the article, but it also raised an interesting point. Did either planet threaten the other?

Traditional menace-from-space scenarios assumed an Earth-centric attitude.
Earth attacked! Outer space invaders!
The Andromeda strain, the Triffids, various evolved Martians, and lots of squishy aliens loomed.

And what was the fate of the fictional menaces from space? The Andromeda strain was done in by the pH of Earth's ocean after being rained out of the clouds. H. G. Wells's Martians succumbed to local microbes within a few days. The authors had reasonably assumed that a planet with a lively biosphere could put up a good fight.

But that was only fiction. Was there any real data to suggest that Earth could be at risk from an incoming Mars microbe?

First, it would have evolved in an oxygen-free, carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere—anaerobic. Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere would be the first challenge, vastly reducing where it could live. Oxygen is a potent poison even to many organisms on Earth.

Then, Mars has lain beneath a thin skin of carbon dioxide, thicker in the past but always carbon dioxide, for four billion years. Even so diminished, it still contains much more carbon dioxide than Earth's atmosphere. Even if Martian metabolism were not immediately poisoned by our air, there might not be enough carbon dioxide to sustain it.

And finally, Mars has been delivering rocks to Earth for billions of years, without any resulting Mars plagues. So far, Earthly diseases have all been from Earth. And that's reasonable, because vastly different life-forms wouldn't pose a biological threat to Earth life anyway.

She remembered the Nauga, a stuffed monster toy invented by some ad agency to push a particular type of leatherlike vinyl cloth. The really interesting thing about vinyl was that it had been created in the lab by chemists, and it was a novel arrangement of atoms, a new molecule. After it was introduced, it was found to be inedible to all earthly life. There simply were no digestive enzymes that could attack the vinyl configuration of atoms.