“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 start 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.
