“I was thinking along a different track. Suppose they’re not here for very long.”
“A flags-and-footprint expedition? That won’t win them anything. But we’re just guessing again. We don’t know. It’s like dealing with Br’er Fox and the tar baby.”
“I agree, we don’t know much at all. That bothers me. But what gets me is we’re sitting on the biggest news to hit Earth in centuries. And I can’t tell anyone! To hell with private ventures and prizes if this is what it means.”
She was surprised at how agitated she was. Maybe it was contagious. Time for another session with Erika.
“Well, I don’t know what to say. We just gotta ride with it for a while, I guess.” He stretched. “Back to my beans. Have fun with your shrimp.”
She plunged happily back into her work. Outside, the wind whistled softly around the plastic walls. It was another reason she enjoyed the greenhouse—the sighing winds. Sounds didn’t carry well here, and the hab was so insulated it was virtually cut off from any outdoor noise.
She was keenly aware that these were probably the only samples she was going to get, and there were many tests to run. As well, biologists all over Earth would want samples. She decided to try to grow some more. After all, we’ve grown Earthly crops here…
After some thought, she settled on a variant of the standard greenhouse mist chamber. On Earth these were used to induce cuttings to grow roots. Here she hoped it would encourage the mat to grow. If it likes light, heat, and water, that’s what I’ll provide.
She set it up next to the outside wall of the greenhouse for light. She prepared a shallow tray with some neutralized Martian soil for substrate. She guessed that the peroxides would be bad news for even the indigenous life. Rigging a sprinkler system came next, then concocting a watery brew of inorganic elements to sprinkle it with. Dunno what it uses for energy—there are Earth organisms that like sulfur, even one that uses manganese. So I’ll give it a metal cocktail and it can pick what it likes. She made it airtight—duct tape to the rescue!—and provided a Martian air supply by splicing it into the glove box duct.
“Okay, I’m off.” Marc’s words broke into her musings.
Julia realized she’d been completely lost in her work.
“Is it time already? What’s for dinner?”
“Greenhouse surprise.” He held up a bag of vegetables. “I feel goulashy tonight.”
“Mmmm. I’ve got to finish up here, then I’ll be along. I want to try culturing the mat, see if I can keep it healthy. It’d be a pity to have to bring back only preserved samples.”
“Shouldn’t be too difficult. Keep it in a cold, dark, airless closet.”
“Yeah,” she said absently. “I wish I knew for sure what triggers the swimming forms to pop out of the mat. But then I don’t know why there are motile forms at all.”
“Yeah, where would they go?”
“They swim, so that implies water. Lakes, rivers, oceans. Do you think there’s open water farther down in the vent?”
He shrugged. “Could be. It’s warm enough for sure.”
“Doesn’t help me much. I took several samples going down, and there are actually more swimming forms in the mat that’s high up in the vent.”
“Up high? Why would that be?”
“Well, I’ve got a crazy idea. I fooled around with the conditions in their sample dishes. Add water, and a few of them pop out. Warm it up, and more come out. But when you add light, they come pouring out. Water, heat, light…all together what do they suggest?”
“Ah…good times topside?”
“Yes. Your warm and wet episodes. Maybe the motile forms are the seeds, or the explorers. Bits of mat get blown out of the vent during outgassings. When conditions improve on the surface, the bits of mat land in a puddle, or a lake. The motile forms pop out and swim away to colonize it.”
“Ingenious. I like it,” said Marc, catching her enthusiasm.
“My problem is timing. What’s your best guess about how often it could’ve happened?”
“A warm and wet time? My cores in Ma’adim Vallis covered a couple billion years of Mars history. From crater wall evidence there were at least two big, long-lasting lakes in Gusev crater. And I found several other layers with fossil microbes, as you recall. So, averaging something that I probably shouldn’t, maybe every four hundred million years there’s a major warming period. It’s preceded by heavy volcanism. That provides the CO2 to warm up the planet for a while.”
“Four hundred million years is a long time to wait for a swim.”
“Well, in between times, there are those upwellings of crustal water triggered by gosh knows what. Volcanoes, maybe. That gives them more chances.”
“That sounds better.”
“Yeah, and outgassings with bits of mat probably happen on a time scale of months, or at most years. So if there were a flood event, the mat could take advantage of it.”
“Marc, you’re a genius. Spiffy geology—sorry, areology—on demand.”
He left humming. A happy geologist.
Outside, the sun was setting, and she knew the temperature was starting its steep plunge to subzero range. The thin atmosphere didn’t have enough mass to buffer temperature changes. From one minute to the next it could change by twenty degrees Centigrade.
The dune buggy cruised slowly by, churning sand. She waved at Viktor enthusiastically through the murky sides of the greenhouse. They all knew to go back to the hab at sundown, another safety procedure to minimize risk.
After her shower she met Viktor in their bedroom. She unwrapped from her waffle-weave robe and sprawled, relishing nudity. The robe was cozy and allowed Raoul and Marc no tantalizing glimpses; no point in making it any harder on them.
Early on, she and Viktor had arranged their two cabins so that one was a bedroom and the other an office. They met there before dinner to unwind together on the nights when neither of them was cooking.
Innumerable nosy media pieces had dwelled on the tensions between a crew, half married and half not, complete with speculations on what two horny, healthy guys would feel like after two years in a cramped hab with a rutting couple just beyond the flimsy bunk partition. What tensions would emerge?
So far the answer was, nothing much. Raoul and Marc undoubtedly indulged in gaudy fantasy lives and masturbated often (she had glimpsed a porno video on Raoul’s slate reader), but in the public areas of the hab they were at ease, all business.
There was no room for modesty in the hab, four people in a small condo for two years. They had unconsciously adopted the Japanese ways of creating privacy without walls. They didn’t stare at each other, and didn’t intrude on another’s private space unless by mutual agreement.
