Nobody had thought much about what the hab would be like if the newlyweds—well, it had been well over two years now, most of that time in space—got into a serious spat. Maybe on the half-year flight home they would find out. She would worry about that then; for right now—
Viktor was already in the cabin when she arrived, fairly humming. She kissed him warmly. “I had a wonderful time in the lab. How was your day?”
“My afternoon, you mean. You forgot we had lunch together? At newest bistro on Mars? Airbus Café?”
“I forgeet noothing, you old Rooussian bear.” She liked to think that her accent was maybe lousy, but funny. At least he had never complained.
She looked around the room fondly. Add a TV set, a couch, and some beer, and they could be in one of those Hong Kong stacked microapartments. It was amazing how good it felt to be working again.
Viktor must’ve sensed her mood right away. “Okay. Tell me about Marsmat. What is it?”
“I sectioned a few pieces and looked at them with every microscope I have. It’s a complex biofilm, all right, with layers of different types of organisms—anaerobic one-celled organisms, I guess.”
“Has had billions of years to work.”
“Subsurface life on Earth isn’t as advanced as this, though.”
“Conditions different.”
“Ummm, yeah. Here the valiant anaerobes didn’t have to fight a poisonous atmosphere of nasty oxygen.”
“How advanced is this Marsmat? Or should call Marshroom?” His eyes twinkled.
“Leave terminology to the pros, please. The mat seems to be more advanced than a standard Earth biofilm, but maybe it only looks that way because it’s bigger. There’s a system of channels for transporting fluids, so even the interior cells get nutrients delivered and waste taken away. Like a communal circulatory system.”
“Where is pump?”
“There doesn’t have to be one.”
“How does water move around?”
“Well, I think it moves vertically, not around.”
“How do you get water to top of mat without pump? You said there was hundreds of meters of it.”
“If the water column is unbroken, evaporation from the top pulls the water up. It’s just like a tree. Evaporation from the leaves sucks the water up from the roots.”
“So mat is flat tree?”
She looked at him with raised eyebrows. “That’s not a bad way to look at it. The channels have some kind of stiffening in them. They remind me of xylem tubes—” She stopped at his slightly strained look.
“Am engineer.”
“Okay. Botany lesson. A tree has a lot of narrow tubes—the xylem—that transport water up to the top—darn near four hundred feet for the tallest redwoods. The xylem tubes are dead, so the water isn’t pumped up, it’s pulled up—passively. Biology taking advantage of physics. It would work the same way here, only because of the .38 g’s, a tree on Mars could be much taller.”
“How tall is mat?”
“Don’t know. We were down close to one klick and the structures were getting bigger. There was mat material way up in the vent, within a few tens of meters of the top. So, it extended several hundred meters at least.”
“Is pretty tall, even on Mars.”
“Well, I’m just working with ballpark estimates here. Plus I don’t know for sure how the water transport works. For example, there were cablelike structures running vertically and horizontally—looked like a circulatory system. Maybe they were full of water tubes. And—”
From the kitchen came the sound of the dinner bell.
She stopped, suddenly out of gas. “Gosh I’m hungry.”
Viktor laughed. “Pavlov was right. Ring dinner bell, get hungry.”
She savored the air. “Mmmm, we’re having goulash. Marc spent hours picking veggies. Let’s go.”
She never got around to asking him about his day in the ERV.
22
MEALS AFTER A DAY OF OUTSIDE WORK WERE SERIOUS MATTERS. MARC had concocted a delicious beef dish loaded with greenhouse produce, a variant of his now-famous Mars Goulash. His original recipe had been an instant success, on both planets. Millions of people ate it regularly, and demanded more. The crew’s subsequent book, Recipes from Mars, was the hottest-selling cookbook ever, part of the Mars fever that gripped Earth since their mission began. Never mind that most of the recipes were from their mothers, reworked by the NASA nutritionists.
The first ten minutes were mostly sincere compliments uttered through mouthfuls of it.
“Say,” she said to perk up matters, “I’m figuring out how to announce the vent discovery.”
Marc said, “Let ol’ Axy’s people handle it.”
“Not done right, you get more woo-woo stories,” Viktor said.
“You mean worse than that one about you?” Raoul grinned. “RUSSIAN STARTS DIAMOND MINES.”
Julia said, “Remember that first month? ASTRONAUTS VISIT FACE ON MARS.”
