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 cycles 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.
They had attached a New York ETimes article about the latest antics of the Protect Earth Party and a new group, the Mars First! activists. PEPA had terrorized NASA for years with their fears that a menace from space would be brought back on a Mars rock—or even a Moon rock.
In 1997, a National Research Council report on sample return from Mars concluded, “While the probability of returning a replicating biological entity in a sample from Mars is judged to be low and the risk of pathogenic or ecological effects is lower still, the risk is not zero.” That was enough for PEPA. “Not zero” equated in their eyes to a certainty.
They—that is, the lawsuits—had made NASA agree to Chicken Little protocols to contain, sterilize, or abandon space samples from other planets. Robbie called PEPA the Andromeda Strain party.
After the launch accident, PEPA had looked for fresh meat. With their favorite target, NASA, out of the game, their entire pack of lamprey lawyers had descended on Axelrod. They started by charging that sending a manned mission to Mars violated the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
“What the hell is that?” Axelrod had asked.
One of his assistants read it to him. He was being charged with planning a mission that was going to “produce harmful contamination of a celestial body,” a treaty violation.
His reaction had been unprintable. His lawyers found a copy of the treaty. They discovered, of course, that it was a set of flimsy protocols with no teeth. And that it didn’t cover future violations. Bottom line: PEPA couldn’t stop him from launching or landing on Mars.
