“They have pressed work suits especially for landing,” Viktor said dismissively. “Show business. Let them work here a month, they look like us.”
“Threadbare, stained, beat up,” Raoul agreed. “I sure would hate to spend the next two years in that chicken coop they’ve got.”
“And already they have been for over half a year,” Viktor said.
“Everything does seem small,” Raoul said. “The whole ship does, in fact. I’d like to crawl up under that cowling, see how the nuke is pinned in—”
“Crawl under ERV’s skirts, if that’s on your mind,” Viktor said, earning another round of guffaws.
“I wonder where they’ve got their supplies stowed,” Raoul persisted.
“It did not look to me like there is enough carrying capacity for years of the supplies,” Viktor said.
“Another layer of storage, I’d guess,” Marc said. “Between the fuel tanks and that equipment bay. Use the food for shielding from the nuke, that’s the way I’d want it.”
Raoul nodded. “They had more time to design and build. Their engineers probably thought of a few more twists.”
“Those bedrooms of theirs are tiny,” Julia said.
“Maybe they all sleep together,” Marc deadpanned.
Viktor grinned. “Sell that story to the tabloids, make another million.”
“Hey, don’t think I couldn’t,” Marc said. “You should see what some of the big shows are hinting at. Two women, one guy, going to Mars for years. My uncle sent me a squirt on that—therapists talking, giving it some intellectual covering fire, while the host makes cheap jokes and they show ‘suggestive’ videos.”
“Better than three guys, one woman, for years?” Julia asked mildly.
“Lots better,” Marc said. “Plays to male fantasies and all.”
She shot back, “How about female fantasies?”
“No market,” Viktor said. They all laughed, a little ruefully.
21
JANUARY 20, 2018
IT WAS MIDAFTERNOON WHEN THEY REACHED ZUBRIN BASE. BY UNSPOKEN consent, Marc parked the dune buggy by the ERV. Raoul and Viktor manhandled the repair kit off the buggy, grunting. Mass weighed less on Mars, but its inertia was the same. They disappeared quickly into Raoul’s fix-it shop.
“Look at them go.” Julia smiled at their retreating backs. “Kids with new toys.”
Marc snorted. “And I suppose you’re not eager to get at those bio samples?”
“Not at all, but I’ll race you to the greenhouse anyway.”
In their lobster suits this was a joke. Over the months they had learned how to walk without looking like overstuffed teddy bears, but the suits were cumbersome.
As they approached the hab, she was struck by how clunky it looked compared to Airbus’s sleek nuke. The shape of a giant tuna can, its lines were not improved by the rows of sandbags they’d stacked on the top for radiation protection. Still, it had the familiarity of home, and they’d lived in it fairly comfortably for almost two years.
A thought struck her. “Hey, Marc, what’re they gonna do for rad protection in that nuke? They can’t do what we did, that’s for sure.”
“Maybe they have some fancy shielding under the skin of their craft.”
“No one talked about it when you were on their project?”
“Uh-uh. We didn’t even know if the thing could fly at that point. But it’s a good question.”
By the time they emerged from the hab in skinsuits and insulated Marswear parka and pants, it was about 4 P.M., and across their rosy pink work yard the shadows were lengthening, blue streaks across a red landscape.
They walked the thirty meters around the hab and alongside the length of the inflated walls to the greenhouse air lock, moving in the slow-motion skipping dubbed “Mars gait” by Earthside media. Julia regretted the lateness of the hour. Still, it was late spring and the sun would be up for several more hours.
She entered the greenhouse eagerly, shucking her outerwear and helmet. She was elated to finally have some biology to work on. Early in the mission, she had repeated the robot Viking biology experiments, hoping to find something different. She spiked samples of the Martian dirt—“regolith” to Marc—with water and nutrients, sealed them in small pressure vessels, and incubated them. She then checked for any gases produced by the metabolism of life-forms in the soil.
This time life is looking for life directly, no robots in the way.
To avoid the embarrassing possibility of introducing her own microflora into the experiment, she had initially worked with the samples only outside, under the cold red-stained sky. But in her pressure suit and insulating outerwear she was clumsy, and each step went slowly. They all had special two-layer gloves that allowed them to peel back the heavy insulation down to a thin, flexible inner glove. But her hands got quickly cold and stiff and it wasn’t like working barehanded.
In response to her complaints, Viktor had fashioned the greenhouse glove box. The elevated greenhouse temperatures kept the water from freezing and speeded up the results enormously.
Sure enough, as in the Viking experiments, there was an immediate response of dry surface peroxides to the water. A spike of oxygen. When that had run its course, she bled off the gases and resealed the pressure vessels. Nothing further happened. Viking and all the other probes had found only chemistry after all, no evidence of life.
She’d tried this experiment with samples plucked from Marc’s cores, and anyplace that looked promising. And she’d never found anything different.
Finally, she’d streaked a plate with a dirty spoon after dinner one night, and cultured some vigorous Earth bacteria. These she ran through the same experiment, with fresh Martian dirt. After the initial spike of oxygen from the chemistry, she’d gotten nothing more.
The peroxides had savaged the microbes, ripping apart cell walls. It was quite clear why the robot landers had found no signs of organic chemistry. For Earth life, Mars was like living in a chemical blowtorch.
But this time it was different. Waiting for her were living samples.
