That meant heating the water jacket. They had ample power reserves in the nuclear thermal generator they carried down near the work level, so everything was pleasantly warm to the touch. The walls radiated it, the water shielding out the cosmic radiation, providing the vital fluid of their entire biosphere, and warming them. It was always a source of quiet reassurance to her that at night, sleeping together, she and Viktor were each blocking for the other some small fraction of the background radiation that lanced down from the skies here. Human shields against the unrelenting danger of the universe beyond Earth.
“You’re the big media star, now,” Marc said. “Axelrod sent you a congrats message. Here, I’ll play—”
“Belay that. I’m not strong enough.”
“Yeah, he’s going over the top a lot now.”
“The test?”
“Remember Viktor’s crack about there being an ‘i’ in ‘win’? Well, that ‘i’ is Axelrod, for sure.”
She smiled wanly. “He’s worried his billions might slip away.”
“You should a seen him last night, after you’d nodded off. Going over all kinds of details with the folks simulating the test, asking Raoul questions about the pressure levels. Man!”
“Does he understand it all?”
“Doubt it. He obsesses over it, though—knows how to do that.”
“They think they can do the test today?”
“If everything looks right to Raoul, yeah. He’d much rather be out there working than in here listening to Axy yammer on.”
She might as well get it over with. “How’d the greenhouse footage go over?”
Marc’s mouth twisted. “Couldn’t cover it up. You were yelling about the Mars life and that got onto the audio. We didn’t know it until the autofeeder had sent the whole segment Earthside.”
“Oh.”
“Axelrod loved it, action scene and all. Aired it right away.”
“He didn’t hold off?”
“He—hell, everybody—thought it was just an accident. But the audio gave it away, once you played it through carefully.”
She grimaced. “And only a million or two people bothered with that.”
“Right. At the Consortium, nobody realized the implications until too late.”
He thumbed on a stored video: SPECIAL MARSCAST. Massaged by the Consortium staff, the probable number in the audience was inserted at the bottom: 1,856,000,000. She often wondered how reliable these new smart estimator programs were, but the import was clear—the bulk of humanity that could watch was tuned in.
There she ran, looking like an idiot, mouth yawning and legs churning, eyes bulged out. Voice-over by a solemn commentator: “The greenhouse was punctured by a form of Mars life the team had not reported to anyone but the Consortium bosses. That is the only possible deduction from conversation mistakenly leaked by the Consortium itself, in the hubbub after Julia Barth’s heroic miracle run—”
“Off, off.” She waved it away.
“Look, it had to get out,” Marc said.
“Not now.”
“No kidding. Look at this.”
A jump cut to: “Already dozens of activist groups—led by the Protect Earth Party, PEPA, Mars First! and the newly formed, fast-growing Earth Only Movement, seen here in their Paris offices—have moved to legally compel the Consortium to not allow a liftoff of the Earth Return Vehicle. This would—”
“Lotsa luck,” Marc said dryly.
She chuckled. “A lawyer in Paris trying to stop Viktor from hitting the firing button, from a hundred million miles away?”
“They write out a writ or whatever, those guys think they’ve got the world by the tail.”
“That world, maybe. Not this one.”
“Hey, don’t look so sad, gal. This is just media fluff.”
She hadn’t realized that her expression was so easy to read. “I don’t like word getting out this way. MARS LIFE ATTACKS JULIA.”
“We went back over there and had a good look from outside. That spike, it’s still alive.”
“Surviving on the surface?” She blinked, eyes rusty.
“Tough sonofabitch. I gave it a yank, couldn’t pull it out.”
She nodded. “It’s attached to all the rest of the mat in there. That figures. It’s adapted to move in on any warm, wet site and exploit it to the full. What organization! To grow that fast—”
“Don’t put it that way to Earthside. They’ll all gang up on us.”
“Ummm… It’s tough, all right—but an anaerobe. Oxygen would kill it right away.”
“Why didn’t the greenhouse air do it in, then? The stuff in the vent was awfully sensitive to our oxy.”