The Martian Race Read online

  She refused a seat, took a sip of bitter coffee, and said flatly, “What? Don't string it out like the nuke surprise.”

  “That's my Julia, always subtle,” Axelrod said, utterly at ease. He even straightened his tie.

  She felt her hopes rise. “I'm learning from you.”

  “I just spent half a billion bucks to keep you all from worrying. We've got to have a crew member we can work with now, right away. And he has to have the right mix of skills. Geologist and backup pilot.”

  A sudden suspicion dawned on Julia. “Marc?”

  Axelrod looked startled, nodded vigorously. “He'll be here tonight. I've bought Marc back from Airbus.”

  “What!” Viktor said.

  “Just how a baseball manager buys an outfielder,” Axelrod said proudly. “The way I figured it was, they're a long time off from getting into the air. Hell, they don't have their main engines off the drawing board! These Chinese gentlemen—and a lot of Germans and French, too—they have time to train a replacement. We don't. So—money talks. Big surprise.”

  “In this case,” Raoul said, “it must have shouted.”

  “Marc got half a billion?” Viktor's incredulous mouth stayed open.

  “No, Airbus. I bought his contract. He wasn't too happy, so I gave him a li'l bonus.” Quickly Axelrod held up both hands, palms up. “One I'm gonna give you three, of course. A clean million. Each.”

  “Good lord,” Raoul said.

  Julia felt the same. It wasn't the money, but the dizzying swirl of events. She could readily face danger, relentless drills, and high g's, but not the emotional wrenching of the last few days.

  “You are the kind of capitalist we Russians do not know how to be,” Viktor said with grudging respect.

  “I'll take that as a compliment. I kinda thought you'd all like to have this settled right away.” Axelrod grinned as if he had anticipated this; and he had. He snapped his fingers, and through a side door came three of his executives. Incongruously, they were carrying glasses. And champagne. “Figured we'd toast to the day, now that the Consortium crew is complete.”

  Julia accepted a glass—then, somehow, another. She did not quite hear the rest of Axelrod's rambling toast, her mind was so abuzz.

  She was going to Mars with three guys.

  No girl talk or consolation, as she had rather vaguely assumed. Not that Ice Queen Katherine had ever been forthcoming. Still …

  There came a moment when Raoul had taken in a tad too much champagne and he leaned over to Viktor and said, “You two will be playing grab-ass all the way to Mars and back?” He murmured it mildly, only the words carrying his barbed meaning.

  She brushed it aside, knowing abstractly that there would be a reckoning on this somewhere downstream. The celebrations soon widened as people came into the office and more champagne showed up.

  Then one of Axelrod's minions was saying grandly, “We all feel the same here, and that's what helped us get through this crisis. Leadership, yes. But there's no I in the word team,” he concluded with a flourish of champagne.

  Julia had never liked these Consortium cheerleader types, with their solemn sayings. She especially didn't like them after a few glasses of what was actually a quite fine champagne. She wanted to applaud when Viktor stodgily replied, “There is in your word, win.”

  9

  JANUARY 12,2018

  THE NEXT MORNING SHE SUITED UP AND TOOK THE SAMPLE OUT TO THE greenhouse. Under the protocols for handling possible Mars life, some of her equipment was set up outside of the hab. In a worst-case contamination scenario, they could abandon the greenhouse.

  Attitudes about Mars life verged on schizophrenia. It was at once the most sought-after discovery and the most feared. Glory in the knowledge that we were not alone in the universe! Cringe in terror of the threat of alien life!

  Using the portable glove box, she opened the sample bag. There was so little of the stuff, she decided to analyze it for Earth-like organic molecules by running it through the gas chromatograph. She didn't have enough to try multiple tests.

  She was dying to try some quick and dirty chemical tests, assaying bits of the sample to see if the basic constituents of life—proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, nucleic acids—were the same here. Or at least close enough to respond to the same chemical tests.

  But this way she'd find out if it was organic, and if it resembled Earth life in its components. It was a lot more work this way, and she'd have to wait to find out. Oh well.

  She immersed the wiper in methanol. Starting the extraction was all she had time to do just then. The rest would have to wait.

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  There was plenty of grunt labor to get ready for the liftoff test. Gear they had used on the repairs, supplies dumped months ago in a hurry, scrap parts—all had to be hauled away from the Return Vehicle. On the long glide back to Earth, every extra kilogram they carried made their fuel margin that slimmer, and it wasn't that fat to begin with.

  Julia didn't mind the heavy labor. The low gravity helped but the laws of inertia still governed. Manhandling gear into the unpressured rovers to stow it for the next expedition—if there was one—at least gave her a chance to think; simple jobs didn't absorb all her concentration. She hefted a bulky package onto the top of a pile, puffed—and that was when all her frustrations surfaced and she decided to do some pushing of her own.

  Through their usual heavy-carbo lunch she planned. Right after, she found Marc in the hab's geology lab, packing a core for transport.

  “So what do we do now?” she asked. “Just you and me?”

  Their last, long expedition in the rover was out, that much was clear. Safety protocols demanded two in the rover. Both mechanics, Raoul and Viktor, had to be working on the Return Vehicle. Marc was the backup pilot, so he would be needed to help Viktor, at least through the liftoff trial.

  “You're going to tell me, right?” He grinned.

  “I'm not going to sit around twiddling my thumbs for my last two months on Mars. Not when I think we've finally found Martian biology.”

  Marc said crisply, “You can't go out for a week by yourself, Julia.”

  “I know. Come with me, Marc. There's enough time left for a vent trip. Maybe even more than one.”

  The extensive Return Vehicle repairs had cut into all their schedules. For the weeklong rover trips, mission protocol decreed that one of the pair be a mechanic—Raoul or Viktor. When the two of them were tied up doing Return Vehicle repairs, Julia and Marc were restricted to day trips in the rover. Marc had filled his time setting off lots of small seismic blasts, and was surprised to discover extensive subterranean caverns several hundreds of meters down. So far they hadn't found a way into any of them, and Julia knew Marc was itching to get down there.

  But Marc looked doubtful. “You did that already. I thought we agreed it was a bust. No life or fossils.”

  “Yes, but we picked a vent that was a blind alley. It didn't go down deep enough. The one Viktor and I found yesterday may be it. Finally.”

  Marc frowned, distracted by his chore. “You haven't proved it yet.”

  “I'm working on it. For now, consider the possibility that we stumbled on the entranceway to an underground ecology,” she urged, caught up in her vision. “On Earth, anaerobes went underground or underwater to get away from the nasty poisonous oxygen atmosphere. They've thrived for billions of years in the most hostile places. Here on Mars, the anaerobes only had to fight the cold and drought. They must have followed the heat and gone underground.”

  Marc frowned. He had heard pieces of this argument before, his scowl said. He thought most life-on-Mars theorizing was just a way of avoiding the really interesting geology—sorry, areology—of this place. “Uh, where d'you want to look?”

  “If my tests show the sample is organic, then of course the vent Viktor and I found yesterday.”

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

  “Good enough. I'll sta
rt 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 cy
cles 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.