The Martian Race (29 page)

After some thought, she settled on a variant of the standard greenhouse mist chamber. On Earth these were used to induce cuttings to grow roots. Here she hoped it would encourage the mat to grow.
If it likes light, heat, and water, that's what I'll provide.

She set it up next to the outside wall of the greenhouse for light. She prepared a shallow tray with some neutralized Martian soil for substrate. She guessed that the peroxides would be bad news for even the indigenous life. Rigging a sprinkler system came next, then concocting a watery brew of inorganic elements to sprinkle it with.
Dunno what it uses for energy—there are Earth organisms that like sulfur, even one that uses manganese.
So
I'll give it a metal cocktail and it can pick what it likes.
She made it airtight—duct tape to the rescue!—and provided a Martian air supply by splicing it into the glove box duct.

“Okay, I'm off.” Marc's words broke into her musings.

Julia realized she'd been completely lost in her work.

“Is it time already? What's for dinner?”

“Greenhouse surprise.” He held up a bag of vegetables. “I feel goulashy tonight.”

“Mmmm. I've got to finish up here, then I'll be along. I want to try culturing the mat, see if I can keep it healthy. It'd be a pity to have to bring back only preserved samples.”

“Shouldn't be too difficult. Keep it in a cold, dark, airless closet.”

“Yeah,” she said absently. “I wish I knew for sure what triggers the swimming forms to pop out of the mat. But then I don't know why there are motile forms at all.”

“Yeah, where would they go?”

“They swim, so that implies water. Lakes, rivers, oceans. Do you think there's open water farther down in the vent?”

He shrugged. “Could be. It's warm enough for sure.”

“Doesn't help me much. I took several samples going down, and there are actually more swimming forms in the mat that's high up in the vent.”

“Up high? Why would that be?”

“Well, I've got a crazy idea. I fooled around with the conditions in their sample dishes. Add water, and a few of them pop out. Warm it up, and more come out. But when you add light, they come
pouring
out. Water, heat, light … all together what do they suggest?”

“Ah … good times topside?”

“Yes. Your warm and wet episodes. Maybe the motile forms are the seeds, or the explorers. Bits of mat get blown out of the vent during outgassings. When conditions improve on the surface, the bits of mat land in a puddle, or a lake. The motile forms pop out and swim away to colonize it.”

“Ingenious. I like it,” said Marc, catching her enthusiasm.

“My problem is timing. What's your best guess about how often it could've happened?”

“A warm and wet time? My cores in Ma'adim Vallis covered a couple billion years of Mars history. From crater wall evidence there were at least two big, long-lasting lakes in Gusev crater. And I found several other layers with fossil microbes, as you recall. So,
averaging something
that I probably shouldn't, maybe every four hundred million years there's a major warming period. It's preceded by heavy volcanism. That provides the CO
₂
to warm up the planet for a while.”

“Four hundred million years is a long time to wait for a swim.”

“Well, in between times, there are those upwellings of crustal water triggered by gosh knows what. Volcanoes, maybe. That gives them more chances.”

“That sounds better.”

“Yeah, and outgassings with bits of mat probably happen on a time scale of months, or at most years. So if there were a flood event, the mat could take advantage of it.”

“Marc, you're a genius. Spiffy geology—sorry, areology—on demand.”

He left humming. A happy geologist.

Outside, the sun was setting, and she knew the temperature was starting its steep plunge to subzero range. The thin atmosphere didn't have enough mass to buffer temperature changes. From one minute to the next it could change by twenty degrees Centigrade.

The dune buggy cruised slowly by, churning sand. She waved at Viktor enthusiastically through the murky sides of the greenhouse. They all knew to go back to the hab at sundown, another safety procedure to minimize risk.

After her shower she met Viktor in their bedroom. She unwrapped from her waffle-weave robe and sprawled, relishing nudity. The robe was cozy and allowed Raoul and Marc no tantalizing glimpses; no point in making it any harder on them.

Early on, she and Viktor had arranged their two cabins so that one was a bedroom and the other an office. They met there before dinner to unwind together on the nights when neither of them was cooking.

Innumerable nosy media pieces had dwelled on the tensions between a crew, half married and half not, complete with speculations on what two horny, healthy guys would feel like after two years in a cramped hab with a rutting couple just beyond the flimsy bunk partition. What tensions would emerge?

So far the answer was, nothing much. Raoul and Marc undoubtedly indulged in gaudy fantasy lives and masturbated often (she had glimpsed a porno video on Raoul's slate reader), but in the public areas of the hab they were at ease, all business.

There was no room for modesty in the hab, four people in a small condo for two years. They had unconsciously adopted the Japanese ways of creating privacy without walls. They didn't stare at each other, and didn't intrude on another's private space unless by mutual agreement.

Nobody had thought much about what the hab would be like if the newlyweds—well, it had been well over two years now, most of that time in space—got into a serious spat. Maybe on the half-year flight home they would find out. She would worry about that then; for right now—

Viktor was already in the cabin when she arrived, fairly humming. She kissed him warmly. “I had a wonderful time in the lab. How was your day?”

“My afternoon, you mean. You forgot we had lunch together? At newest bistro on Mars? Airbus Café?”

“I forgeet noothing, you old Rooussian bear.” She liked to think that her accent was maybe lousy, but funny. At least he had never complained.

She looked around the room fondly. Add a TV set, a couch, and some beer, and they could be in one of those Hong Kong stacked microapartments. It was amazing how good it felt to be working again.

Viktor must've sensed her mood right away. “Okay. Tell me about Marsmat. What is it?”

“I sectioned a few pieces and looked at them with every microscope I have. It's a complex biofilm, all right, with layers of different types of organisms—anaerobic one-celled organisms, I guess.”

“Has had billions of years to work.”

“Subsurface life on Earth isn't as advanced as this, though.”

“Conditions different.”

“Ummm, yeah. Here the valiant anaerobes didn't have to fight a poisonous atmosphere of nasty oxygen.”

“How advanced is this Marsmat? Or should call Marshroom?” His eyes twinkled.

“Leave terminology to the pros, please. The mat seems to be more advanced than a standard Earth biofilm, but maybe it only looks that way because it's bigger. There's a system of channels for transporting fluids, so even the interior cells get nutrients delivered and waste taken away. Like a communal circulatory system.”

“Where is pump?”

“There doesn't have to be one.”

“How does water move around?”

“Well, I think it moves vertically, not around.”

“How do you get water to top of mat without pump? You said there was hundreds of meters of it.”

“If the water column is unbroken, evaporation from the top pulls the water up. It's just like a tree. Evaporation from the leaves sucks the water up from the roots.”

“So mat is flat tree?”

She looked at him with raised eyebrows. “That's not a bad way to look at it. The channels have some kind of stiffening in them. They remind me of xylem tubes—” She stopped at his slightly strained look.

“Am engineer.”

“Okay. Botany lesson. A tree has a lot of narrow tubes—the xylem—that transport water up to the top—darn near four hundred feet for the tallest redwoods. The xylem tubes are dead, so the water isn't pumped up, it's
pulled
up—passively. Biology taking advantage of physics. It would work the same way here, only because of the .38 g's, a tree on Mars could be much taller.”

“How tall is mat?”

“Don't know. We were down close to one klick and the structures were getting bigger. There was mat material way up in the vent, within a few tens of meters of the top. So, it extended several hundred meters at least.”

“Is pretty tall, even on Mars.”

“Well, I'm just working with ballpark estimates here. Plus I don't know for sure how the water transport works. For example, there were cablelike structures running vertically and horizontally—looked like a circulatory system. Maybe they were full of water tubes. And—”

From the kitchen came the sound of the dinner bell.

She stopped, suddenly out of gas. “Gosh I'm hungry.”

Viktor laughed. “Pavlov was right. Ring dinner bell, get hungry.”

She savored the air. “Mmmm, we're having goulash. Marc spent hours picking veggies. Let's go.”

She never got around to asking him about his day in the ERV.

22

M
EALS AFTER A DAY OF OUTSIDE WORK WERE SERIOUS MATTERS
. M
ARC
had concocted a delicious beef dish loaded with greenhouse produce, a variant of his now-famous Mars Goulash. His original recipe had been an instant success, on both planets. Millions of people ate it regularly, and demanded more. The crew's subsequent book,
Recipes from
Mars, was the hottest-selling cookbook ever, part of the Mars fever that gripped Earth since their mission began. Never mind that most of the recipes were from their mothers, reworked by the NASA nutritionists.

The first ten minutes were mostly sincere compliments uttered through mouthfuls of it.

“Say,” she said to perk up matters, “I'm figuring out how to announce the vent discovery.”

Marc said, “Let ol’ Axy's people handle it.”

“Not done right, you get more woo-woo stories,” Viktor said.

“You mean worse than that one about you?” Raoul grinned. “
RUSSIAN STARTS DIAMOND MINES.
”

Julia said, “Remember that first month?
ASTRONAUTS VISIT FACE ON MARS
.”

Marc added, “Followed by
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN TEMPLE FOUND
!”

Raoul shook his head in disbelief. “After you and Julia turned up those fossil cells, it was
DINOSAUR BONES IN MARS ROCKS.
“

Viktor said, “Of course right away followed by
COVER-UP OF ANCIENT DINOSAURS FROM MARS.”

Marc said, “Those were the real woo-woo press, though. Media crap. But the
Tokyo Times
had that big feature
SAND SKIING ON MARXIAN SLOPES
, with pictures. All from a shot of me falling down! Just digitally add skis and go with it.”

“Remember the
Frankfurter Zeitung
piece
METEOR ATTACK
! when we had a tiny hole?” Raoul said.

“The news shows played the sound of it for days,” Julia recalled. “And then somebody changed that little whistle into a pop song background and paid Axelrod royalties.”

Viktor nodded. “No money made from
MARS QUAKES
one, though. Maybe because no quake.”

Raoul said, “The truth never stops them. You guys forgotten
FIRST BABY DUE ON MARS
?”

Julia laughed. “That came right before
ABORTION RIFT SPLITS MARS COUPLE
.”

Viktor added, “Then was
DIVORCE ON MARS? CONSORTIUM NOT TALKING
.”

Marc said, “Hey, they didn't let any of us off easy.
LOVE TRIANGLES RUMORED AT GUSEV
, that was in some Chinese paper.”

Raoul grimaced. “It never ends. This last week, my media summary had
CONSORTIUM TO AIRBUS: ‘WE'LL SHOOT YOU DOWN’
and
NUKE ROCKET STERILIZES AIRBUS CREW
. And that was after my gofer program supposedly edited out the real crap.”

“How can a program know nonsense?” Julia asked. “Or the public? When Marc found ice, some supposedly respectable show features
BURIED ANCIENT CANALS DISCOVERED
. Science gets treated like candy.”

Raoul said, “Axelrod told me once that journalism is the first draft of history. I hope not for us.”

Viktor said soberly, “Our world has not enough to excite it. So it makes up things.”

Julia nodded intently. “They have the usual wars and scandals, celebs and accidents. But what's to
do?
Shave a fraction of a second off the hundred-meter race, if you devote your younger life to it. Be the hundredth person to climb a certain high peak—never mind Everest, the crown is a trash heap now. Most of the people in our own countries are just sitting at home and watching the twenty-first century on vid.”

“Not us,” Marc said quietly.

“Thank goodness!” Julia said. “Maybe being here so long makes me see it better, but geez, how
trivial
most lives are.”

“Not here,” Raoul said. “Here, it's desperate.”

“And now we are desperate to leave it,” Viktor said.

They ate in silence for a while, Julia still thinking. Marc switched the music to Mozart, their signal for dessert—strawberry shortcake, her favorite. When she could tear her mind away from her stomach, she looked over at Raoul. She could tell by his drawn, solemn face that it had been a long day and he was distracted. Precisely because it was all-important, nobody had mentioned his repairs.

As they finished up, Raoul announced, “We should all listen to Earthside's latest.”

“Spare me,” Viktor said. “You look, I lie down.”

“No, I replayed some of this, it's important.”

They settled in before the big screen. She and Marc had filed the obligatory story of the first social call on Mars, with all their footage. The first item in the priority vid was a squeezed, edited, and enhanced version. Raoul wanted to speed through it but the others wanted to see how they came off—not bad, of course, with emphasis on beaming faces rather than the fuming pingos.