It was what they always said.
Then they turned to the story of the pingos. Earth had already gotten the video footage, and in the intervening hours had reacted. Axelrod’s press team had decided to play it up in a major way. Another great success for the mission: WATER on Mars! Janet duly asked the team a long list of standard questions: how much water had they found, what did finding water mean to the mission, etc. As co-discoverers, Marc and Raoul fielded the questions, leaving Julia free to think her own thoughts.
What did the water mean? She sat back and envisioned life on Mars with plentiful water, no longer a cold, dusty desert. Under a pressurized dome the greenhouse effect would raise the temperature to something livable. A colony could grow plants, have open pools of water, even fountains, if they wished. She smiled as she thought about strolling along tree-lined walkways from hab to hab without helmet and suit, then realized with a start that she would never do it. They were just a few weeks from launching to Earth.
A few short weeks, something inside of her said.
How odd. When they’d arrived it’d seemed as though they had such a long time ahead of them. Now, suddenly, they’d made a major discovery, but so late…
She suddenly remembered the sample she’d picked up outside the vent. She’d been so worried about Viktor she’d forgotten about it!
She mentally tuned back in to the broadcast, suddenly impatient to be off. Could she slip away? Janet wished Viktor a speedy recovery, and transmitted some medical advice from the ground team of doctors. The public part of the broadcast ended. Then Janet turned to technical details about the upcoming liftoff test. Viktor’s accident was one more mishap to be overcome. Janet didn’t fail to mention the obvious: the sprained ankle meant their captain would be less effective if anything went wrong with the engine test fire of the Return Vehicle. What should have been a routine test now loomed as a potential crisis.
There had already been plenty to worry about. The subject of the ERV had been a touchy one ever since they’d arrived.
Soon after touchdown they’d discovered that the Return Vehicle was damaged. A failure in the aerobraking maneuver apparently had made the Return Vehicle come in a shade too fast, crushing fuel pipes and valves around the engines. None of the diagnostics had detected this, since the lines were not pressurized. In some places where the damage went beyond mere repair, Raoul had been forced to refashion and build from scratch several of the more tricky parts. Working with the Earthside engineers, he had been steadily making repairs.
In this he drew upon not only his technical training, but his family’s tradition of Mexican make-do. His father and uncle ran a prosperous garage in Tecate, just below the U.S. border. He’d grown up in greasy T-shirts with a wrench in his hand. Coming from a country with a chronic shortage of hard goods meant that “recycle and reuse” was not just a slogan but a necessity.
Viktor admired his work, and they understood each other at this basic level. The Russian space program, starting way back in the Soviet era, had always operated in the same way. Cosmonauts on Mir were expert at cannibalizing discarded electronic components to make repairs. Still, although Raoul was good at creative reuse and making novel pieces fit, he had never before had to work under this kind of pressure. Their return, and quite possibly their lives, depended on his repairs.
They ended the transmission on an edgy note. It was two months and counting to launch.
As soon as they signed off, Julia slipped away to her lab space, where she’d left the sample. She looked around at the usual clutter in her tiny lab. A mostly unused lab, she thought, since she’d not found anything living to study.
Ah, there it was. She held the sealed bag up to the light. The wiper material appeared to be damp, with a light orange smear in the center of the damp spot. What looked like drops of water had collected on the plastic of the bag over the damp patch. So there was water ice at the top of the vent! That was interesting by itself. It meant there was liquid water somewhere below the surface, and the cloud they’d seen was water vapor. Maybe all of them had found water today.
She slipped the bag under the dissecting microscope to have a quick look at the orange smear. It was probably just dust previously frozen into the ice, but she always checked anyway.
She looked through the eyepieces, expecting to see the familiar scatter of grainy dust and sand particles. Sure enough, they were there—but there was other stuff as well.
She rotated the nosepieces to get a closer view. Her heart caught in her throat. Trapped in the fine fibers of the wiper, it looked for all the world like cellular debris.
She sat back, her thoughts racing, reviewing in her mind how she had collected the sample and whether it could have been contaminated. The wiper had been clean, still sealed in its sterile wrapper, identical to all the others she had used unsuccessfully before this. And she had used the same technique as always. Except there was no second sample because of Viktor’s accident. Could she have delayed sealing the bag? No. She remembered stowing it in her sample pack just before his first cry of pain.
She looked at the sample again. It had to be real. This was the stuff on the ice at the mouth of the vent. But what was it?
She changed nosepieces again, altering the size of the image, then fiddled with the light source to see it in different ways. It was actually quite difficult to make out, but after fifteen minutes she was satisfied. It seemed to be a very pale-colored, dried up scum coated with red dust.
Pale because it lived underground, that fit. But unmistakably organic. Life!
Her yells brought all three of her crewmates running, or in Viktor’s case, hobbling.
They were a lot more reserved than she was.
“This is what you’re excited about?” asked Raoul, after taking a look through the microscope. “It looks like nothing at all.”
“Yes, but it’s organic nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“It can’t be anything else.”
Marc popped in. “What’s up?”
“Julia’s discovered organic nothing.”
“Really? Let me see.”
She’d learned from Raoul’s reaction. “As a geologist, how would you interpret this?”
Marc settled onto the seat, scanned the sample, changed the magnification, altered the light source. Viktor arrived as he was studying it. “Hmm,” said Marc. “There’s water in here.” He looked up. “Where’d you find this?”
“This is sample from vent?” asked Viktor.
Julia nodded. “Just outside. I swabbed one of the shiny frozen spots at the mouth of the vent as you started down. Here, sit down.”
“Looks like sand particles and some dust in a wet patch,” said Marc.
“What about the other stuff?” she asked.
“What other stuff?”
“There are bits of…” She was about to say “organic material,” but said instead “flaky material.”
“Wha? Oh, yeah I saw that, what is it?”
“That’s just the point, Marc, what is it? I think it’s dried organic material, but what else could it be?” Julia was aware of her deflating excitement. What if Marc had a ready chemical explanation? And she’d been so sure.
