The Martian Race (46 page)

This provoked a brief flurry within the governments who had to pay the bill. The Mars Board announced that the terms of the contest specified only that the first team returning successfully from Mars would be the winner. Anything else was between Airbus and the Consortium. Politicians carefully tiptoed away from the problem.

Intense public interest greased the negotiations. Airbus couldn't refuse the team their only chance to get home with the whole world watching. And none of the negotiators could have stopped the crew from taking the ship anyway.

Finally they agreed. Overnight, four billion dollars changed hands. They even made a little meaningless ceremony of it; she saw it on her news squirt. Deep in the bowels of a Swiss bank, a dolly heavily loaded with gold bars was wheeled from one vault to another.

She did some bargaining herself.

“I want a done deal,” she told Axelrod. “Here's how. I send samples back. Not live, preserved. Dead. No threat to Earth, so you have no problems with the crazies. After you get the prize, you don't own the samples, either. They belong to science. This is too big for proprietary secrecy.”

She took a steadying breath. Part of her training did not like talking back to The Boss.
Well, get used to it. Get used to years of it, probably.

“In return for sending the samples, I get the DNA analyses. Also a ton of biological lab gear, sent on the next ERV you're launching. Literally a ton—a thousand metric kilograms. I'll pick the equipment.”

She paused for the big leap. “And a biologist. I need somebody to work with here. Find a list of candidate astronaut biologists. I pick one. You send him—or her—on the next ERV.”

She smiled to take the edge from all this. It really disabled you, pitching to a camera with no feedback. “I get this—or you get nothing. No more information on what I find here. No videos of future vent descents. Zip, nada, zero.”

She allowed herself a raised eyebrow. “I expect my colleagues to send me the research papers based on my samples for review. First. Before leaking them to trivid or journals. That's the way it's done in science. Real science.”

She smiled to herself. The joke was on the pure-Earth fanatics. The samples were technically dead, but the way she was preserving them, the DNA wouldn't be harmed. Fat chance those samples wouldn't be sliced and diced every which way before a week was out. Every hotshot DNA lab on Earth was working up its protocols already, in anticipation. Eager hands would identify and slice out the specifically Martian genes, splice them into Earthly anaerobes, and have working pseudo-Martians within a month.

The march of science. Competition. She could count on it.

She couldn't prove any of her speculations, of course. Not without knowing more about Martian DNA.

One evening in the hab, after they were all tired out with the sheer grunt labor of farming water from the pingos, she had seen it. What to look for, once her samples reached the labs of Earth.

The DNA code might just hold the answer. Earth's code was mercifully redundant: a mistake in the coding was like a change in spelling that doesn't always alter the meaning. There were alternate spellings for the same amino acid. And of course proteins themselves have regions where a substitution of a different amino acid doesn't really matter. Room for error, with no consequences.

She had always thought that was a response to a rapidly evolving planet with lots of mutating agents: a Darwinian hotbox world. A rich world struck a balance between conservatism and experimentation, achieved over billions of years on a planet where evolution's lathe was always spinning.

Earth's climatic fluctuations changed the rules of survival, flipping from warm to cold and back again. It led some to postulate the Red Queen hypothesis: you have to keep running to stay in the same place, the entire biota evolving in fast lockstep to avoid being left behind. The pace was grueling, and a species lasted on average only a million years or so before running out of steam.

What would happen on Mars, where there may have been only one golden age of evolution, and a long twilight of one-way selective pressure? The young soil got ever colder, ever drier, the atmosphere ever thinner. Tough times … forever.

On Mars, would the DNA code be more conservative, simpler, and more precise?

Without sudden climatic shifts, the need for redundancy disappeared. Every error would be significant.

The price? Evolution would be slower. Even on Earth, most mutations were unfortunate, spelled gibberish, and killed the organism. Only a very few were useful.

On Mars, the chance of a successful mutation would be much smaller in the steadily worsening, harsh conditions.

But there had also been brief eras of warmth, when water flowed on the surface. Then what would happen? Evolution couldn't work fast enough to take advantage of the new conditions.

So … what else? Could
cooperation
have become the winning rule, and not competition?

She looked around the tiny hab commons room at her teammates. Five tough-minded types with different skills, fitting together into an efficient whole. Four had survived near disasters and a grueling eighteen months in this freezing, near-vacuum rustbowl because of their efficiency. That's what her subconscious had been trying to tell her.

Could it work on a planetwide scale?

Find a partner with the desired characteristic, instead of trying to evolve it yourself. A short period of wet and warm brought the mats out of the vents and into the lake beds. Light-sensitive organisms loosed from the mat—those “shrimp”?—could colonize the seas, making hay in the brief summer while the atmosphere lasted. Maybe they could even photosynthesize!

Life that found partners to help it maximize the wet-era opportunities would be successful. Glowing mats and photosynthetic microbes. Free-swimming forms and protective films. Peroxide eaters and watery membranes, all somehow trading their resources.

An entire ecology, now driven far underground, nonetheless finding a path through the great Darwinnowing …

But always meshed into the spreading network of organisms, great and small … evolution in concert. Organisms still died their pitiful deaths, genes got erased …

And the system could grow even more interlaced, she saw … deep in the guts of a slumbering world.

She worked in the slowly reviving greenhouse to soothe her soul and spark her imagination. Although Viktor insisted she keep her helmet on, she opened the faceplate to the soft air. And in time …

The Marsmat in the mist chamber had reached some kind of limit, and was not growing much anymore. When she had more time, she would start changing its environment and see what happened.

After the liftoff, she thought. Vast stretches of time beckoned from beyond that horizon.

Meanwhile, she planted another crop of vegetables. Marc was busy at the nuke every day, and she would have to tend the greenhouse alone after he left, anyway.

Marc had never really moved back into the hab. He and Raoul spent most of their time working at the Airbus site, driving back in late afternoon only to eat and sleep.

One day Raoul had come back alone. His only comment to Julia and Viktor was that he felt like the odd man out wherever he went on Mars these days.

Today she had promised herself a special treat. Over in the corner was a large plastic pot, holding her green soul mate, a western white pine. The seeds she'd gathered herself on a last break before their Earthside launch, a short hiking vacation in California's High Sierra. Buffeted by winds, sheared by ice storms, the pines clung to the stony soil in small groups. Just below timberline they were no taller than shrubs. Finding a partially gnawed cone in a snow bank, she'd tucked it into her pack.

Adapted to cold and dry, living at high altitudes under reduced oxygen, the pines were already partially adapted to living on Mars. And her tree had thrived in the greenhouse, growing to be an astonishing two feet high, with many side branches. The only wild Earth organism on Mars.

She brought her chair and sat beside it, looking carefully at the tips of the branches. She wasn't an expert on pines, and had never grown one before. The needles on this one were dark green, consistent with the reduced sunlight. The cold nights following the blowout had nipped some of the younger needles, but—
what's this?

Pale green needles at the branch ends! Yes, the tips were growing.
Well, look at that, you're going to make it after all.

She smiled broadly. The first tree on Mars.

40

MARCH 14,2018

T
HEY STOOD ON THE HILLSIDE AND WATCHED THE SPREADING RUSTY
sunset, stamping their feet against the cold.

What was going to be a midafternoon departure had succumbed to the inevitable last-minute delays. Julia and Viktor had thought they'd watch the launch from outside. It would make better vid footage, to be sure, but it somehow just felt right, too.

Over her suit comm came the last-minute chatter between Claudine and Marc.

“Pressurizing all okay.”

“Flow regular.”

“Max two four seven.”

“On profile.”

“Got the temp envelope steady.”

She let it wash over her, remembering their own departure, and how she'd felt.

There came another delay, something about the nuclear pile running a little too hot because the plates of high-grade uranium were squeezing a bit close together, not kept apart by the gas flow between them. Raoul said that would correct once they were full throttle, pouring water by from the high-pressure pumps. The water flashed into steam in an instant, heated by the plates. But it all had to synchronize.

This Airbus design used the workhorses of chemical rockets, valves and pumps and nozzles, but at vastly higher power levels. Just as the once-newfangled steamships still used hulls and decks and rudders, inherited from the Age of Sail. Perhaps they were witnessing the end of the Age of Liquid Oxygen, outmoded because no one would open up the solar system that antiquated way anymore, burning chemical energy into hot gas.

An era ending, an era beginning.

She shivered and her suit clicked with supporting warmth. Viktor said, “Earth rising.”

So it was. She close-upped the white dot on the horizon and again saw the two points of light, one a gray-white and the other a definite ocean blue.
Home.

The desert night fell quickly, applauded by the brilliant jewel starscape.

“Three, two, one. Ramping,” came Claudine's voice.

Below the slender ship the first bright steam blossomed. Cottony clouds billowed up, licking up past the square port, almost swallowing the rocket.

“Flow standard. Zero eleven seven.”

“Profiling steady.”

Viktor had started the vid and narration. “The
Spirit of Ares
launches for Earth on water from Mars. This is the first return from another planet since Apollo astronauts walked on the moon.”

It climbed up a growing spire, the alabaster banks of it lit from within with a hot orange glow.

The nuclear rocket climbed gracefully into the darkening butterscotch sky, leaving a huge plume behind. The gases fizzed away into nothingness.

Quick tears stung Julia's eyes. She imagined being on the ship, on her way home.
They're going home, and I'm not.

Telling her parents had been difficult, but they'd been very good about it. Her father was looking better, the results of the ultrasound cancer treatments optimistic. He would see her when she finally returned, he had said. However long that took.

The ship rose quickly, almost soundlessly, into the deepening blackness of Martian night.

She and Viktor shouted good-byes.

Marc called out altitudes, speeds, voice calm and flat.

She felt a sadness as they angled over at several kilometers up. The rocket plume blazed across the hard blackness.

Reluctantly she looked away from the hard spot of light above to a suddenly empty world, her world.

Then she saw it. A smudge of light toward the horizon. It was a pale white cloud, linear, fuzzier at one end. It seemed to point downward. She realized that she was looking north, and that the cloud glowed. A pale ivory finger of illumination spiked up from the surface, broadening.

It came from the vent, she knew instantly—an impossibly brilliant outpouring.

“Viktor, look. Swing the vid to the north. The vent is outgassing.”

To poke such a glistening probe of light into the sky must have cost the matting enormous energies, she thought. To make it, the vent would first have to be expelling a gusher of vapor. Then the mats would all have to pour their energy into the pale glow, coherently.

What coordination … and what control, over the venting of vapor itself? Could life have attained such levels?

And why did life
allow
vapor to escape? Was there some chemical clue she was missing?

The pearly lance, jutting up: a signal? Celebration? Mating dance? Her mind whirled giddily. With so much energy expended, there must be some purpose.

It was natural to see this as a pointed message, but there are many behaviors in biology that defy easy logic. She knew what she would like to believe, but …

Science was a systematic way to avoid fooling yourself, after all.

She closed her eyes to fix the image in memory. An ivory plume, towering kilometers into the sky, mingling with the gleaming stars.

So much to learn … She could stay here a lifetime and not know it all.

Hello, Mars. From a member of the Martian race.

Acknowledgments

T
HIS NOVEL ATTEMPTS A PORTRAYAL OF HOW HUMANITY MIGHT EXPLORE
Mars in the near future, at low cost and with foreseeable technology.

Undoubtedly reality shall prove the details wrong. Still, I hope to sound a note of realism in the sub-genre of exploration novels, to depict just how demanding true planetary adventuring will be.

Going to Mars could be a defining moment in the twenty-first century, precisely because it will be hard, tough and exciting. Our most basic and meaningful questions about life there simply cannot be answered by robots.