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.”
