She drew in a warm, foggy breath. Life! The only human-friendly biosystem within a hundred million miles. Until they had ventured to dear, dry Mars, nobody had felt, month after month, how barren the rest of Creation was. In this little space, cupped against the soil, was a tiny human garden. Its moist promise reminded her of the vent descent.
She walked back over to the mist chamber. It was hard to see inside due to the condensation, but there seemed to be a mass of Marsmat against the greenhouse wall. Interesting. It’s growing toward the light, like a damn plant. Only even thinking of it as a plant is wrong; it’s alien. Oh, well, I’ll check it later. Gads. There’s so much to do here all of a sudden.
In her head a list of studies was assembling. Now that the vent life was reproducing, she’d need more microscopic work to determine how it divided. If it had some type of chromosomes or was truly prokaryotic. And a whole bunch of interesting stuff about what environmental clues it responded to…
Her mind was whirling happily. There was enough work here for years, not weeks! She sighed. If they lifted off quickly in order to beat Airbus back, she’d have to figure out how to keep her precious specimens alive for over half a year. But that was for later.
Today she was going to find out whether the vent harbored a distant cousin, or an alien.
She looked over her library of genes. They represented a wide spectrum of organisms, the soup to nuts of Earth life.
It was reasonable to expect that Mars life would most closely resemble Earth’s primitive anaerobes, the archaebacteria, for a couple of reasons. If Earth and Mars had exchanged life early on, there would have been something like these organisms on both planets. Both worlds had an early CO2-rich atmosphere, after all.
On Earth, wildly successful photosynthetic bacteria—once called blue-green algae—sucked up the CO2 and produced oxygen as a waste product. So abundantly, in fact, that they altered the planetary atmosphere. After about two billion years, Earth’s atmosphere contained only a tiny amount of CO2, and about 20 percent oxygen. Soon afterward, multicellular life arose to take advantage of the energetic oxygen. The anaerobes retreated underground, where they remained still.
That revolution probably never happened on Mars. The atmosphere had bled away before the great blooming of the photosynthesizers. As the air thinned and the temperature dropped, the surface water froze, then sublimed away.
And life? Well, it went underground—and here it was, growing not a meter away.
Many people thought they knew life had never had a chance on Mars. Dead wrong! So what had been the real history of Mars life? And could she figure it out in three weeks? Or less?
Might as well go for it.
She picked three arrays of genes from different kinds of archaebacteria, at random, and set them up for testing against the solution of prepared Marsmat DNA.
She worked methodically, compensating for the inherent clumsiness of the glove box by being slow and careful. She remembered a poster in the office of one of her more obnoxious faculty advisors. Under a large picture of a rhino were the words “I may be slow, but I’m always right.”
No one would argue with a charging rhino, but they would with her. She had to be very careful.
At last she completed the protocols and inserted the first incubated gene array into the little electronic reader that was hooked up to her slate.
The image of the gene array appeared. As she watched, the biological bingo board started to light up with a few fluorescent hits. Aha, gotcha. One part of the board in particular was live. When the reader was finished, she saved the results, popped the sample out, and put in the second one. This bingo pattern was similar: a few hits here and there, and a concentration in one area. Finally, the third sample was being read. She concentrated on where the hits were. Lessee, somewhere in this program is the list of what genes are where in this field…
Forty percent of archaebacterial genes did not match any other Earth life genes. Were they too primitive, or what?
No one really knew. They were included in the arrays, however.
Through her intense concentration she felt something odd. What…?
It was a slight breeze rippling her hair. This had just registered when her ears popped.
Pressure drop? The lock seal failing?
“Oh no—I’m busy!”
Her training kicked in. She nudged her comm connection in the collar of her skinsuit. “Marc, I’ve got a pressure drop out here.” Always report trouble, even if you don’t understand it.
He responded immediately. “Keep talking.”
She pulled her hands out of the thin inner glove linings, looking around. The heat and humidity had painted the walls thick with beaded moisture. “The lock looks okay, but…” You couldn’t tell if a seal was failing without—
The breeze increased. Not toward the lock. Blowing down and to her right.
She knelt and peered around. The footing of the glove box was firmly attached to the low greenhouse bench and she could see nothing beyond. The damp was pleasantly warm but obscured her view. She edged around the hard plastic of the box. With her right hand she wiped moisture off the side, peering inside.
Was that a thin whistling? “Might have a micro-meteorite puncture. Trying to find—”
She froze. Something was standing straight up from the soil in the chamber. Pale, like celery in its sinewy rippling. It curved partway up, toward the side of the box. She looked toward the seal between box and greenhouse wall. A thin fog hung in the air there.
“Looks like one of my samples has grown like crazy. The Mars life, it’s wedged itself into the comer where the box—”
The whistling suddenly rose to a shriek.
Startled, she rocked back on her heels. The wind whirled by her head. Toward the wall. Her ears popped again.
“Damn! The leak’s growing.”
She could see it now. The stalk stuck out from the corner where the box met the wall. It moved visibly, forcing itself through.
Falling into the crack?
She refused to believe it was moving on its own.
Why grow toward the edge?
The Mars plant had stuck through the tough plastic and into the greenhouse. The end of it was pointed, leathery. It had poked out through the absolute worst place, breaking out to Martian pressures and the greenhouse at the same point.
Automatically she reached for it. Cold, wet, slick, tough. She pulled at it. Rubbery resistance.