“Agree. Is too much like our daily work.”
People weren’t best considered, she felt, as racehorses. They just were.
Axelrod made his picks at a big press conference. Plenty of camera snouts, tons of tension. Feeding the eye-appetite of humanity. None of the astronauts wanted it that way, but Axelrod had licensed coverage of the event to a cable network on an exclusive.
“Got to raise capital, y’know. Send you folks to Mars with steaks and champagne.”
And the team of four were, the married couple, Raoul and Katherine. The very telegenic pilot, Marc Bryant. And Julia.
But not Viktor.
The four chosen astronauts sat at a long table on the dais behind Axelrod. She looked at the others. Raoul and Marc beamed, Katherine was smiling her careful astronaut’s smile that could mean anything. And Julia?
It was like a sudden lurch into zero g. Falling. No Viktor.
They were not just probabilities. She remembered thinking, We’re ourselves, not race horses.
She sat beneath the glaring, searching lights and thought, No Viktor. For two and a half years. By the time I get back, it will be over between us.
3
JANUARY 2018
THE CRACKLE OF THE RADIO STARTLED HER. “HOME TEAM HERE. GOT your heads-up, Julia. How is he?” Marc’s crisp efficiency came over clearly, but she could hear the clipped tenor anxiety, too.
“Stable.” She quickly elaborated on Viktor’s symptoms, glancing at his sleeping face. She’d had a year of physician’s assistant training and was the official medical officer, but Marc had more field experience, and a med school degree. She felt relieved when he approved of her treatment. “Got to think what this means,” he said laconically.
“We’ll be there for supper. Extra rations, I’d say.”
A small, very small joke. They had celebrated each major finding with a slightly excessive food allotment. Extra beer, too. She was in charge of brewing and they always had plenty on tap from the keg in the bio lab.
So far, they had not marked disasters this way. And they were having their share.
“My night to cook, too,” Marc said, transparently trying to put a jovial lilt to it. “Take care, Jules. Watch the road.”
Here came the heart-squeezing moment.
She turned the start-up switch and in the sliver of time before the methane-oxygen burn started in the rover engine, all the possible terrors arose.
If it failed, could she fix it? Raoul and Marc could come out in an unpressured rover and rescue them, sure, but that would chew up time…and be embarrassing. She wasn’t much of a mechanic, but still, who likes to look helpless?
Then the mixture caught and the rover chugged into action. Settling in, she peered out at the endless obstacles with the unresting concentration that had gotten her on this mission in the first place. To spend five hundred seventy days on Mars you wanted people who found sticking to the tracks a challenge, not boring. One of the job specs for astronauts was an obsessive-compulsive profile.
She followed the autotracker map meticulously, down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a boulder-strewn pass and down a narrow valley and across a flood plain, then over a pass…
Here, a drive back to base that proved uneventful was even pleasant. Mars was always ready to thunk a wheel into an unseen hole or pitch the rover down a slope of shifting gravel, so she kept exactly to the tracks they had made on the way out, a proven safe return. She had seen enough of this red-hued terrain to last a lifetime, anyway. Nothing out there for a biologist.
In the distance she caught sight of the formation she and Viktor had dubbed the Shiprock on the way out. It looked like a huge old sailing ship, red layers sculpted by eons of high winds. They’d talked about Ray Bradbury’s sand ships, tried to imagine skimming over the undulating landscape. The motion of the rover always reminded her a little of being on the ocean. They were sailing over the Martian landscape on a voyage of discovery, a modern-day Columbus journey. But Columbus made three voyages to the New World without landing on the continent. He “discovered” America by finding islands in the Caribbean, nibbling on the edges of a continent. Still, he got a holiday named for him…
A sudden thought struck her: was that what they were doing—finding only the fringes of the Mars biology? Many people had speculated that the subterranean vents were the most likely places for life on this planet. The frontier for her lay hundreds of meters below, out of reach. She sighed resignedly. But it had been great fun, at first.
She slurped more tea, recalling the excitement of the first months. Some of it was pure fame rush, of course. Men on Mars! (Uh, and a woman, too.) They were household names now, the first Mars team, sure bets for all the history books. Hell, they might eventually eclipse Neil Armstrong.
She was first author on a truly historic paper, the first submitted to Nature from another world. Barth, Bryant, Molina, & Nelyubov’s “Fossil Life on Mars” described their preliminary findings: it would rank with Watson and Crick’s 1952 paper nailing the structure of DNA. That paper had opened up cell biology and led to the Biological Century.
What would their discovery lead to? There was already a fierce bidding war for her samples. Every major lab wanted to be the first to examine the fossils, maybe extract Martian DNA, if any, and determine the relationship between Martian and Terran life.
With her small scanning electron microscope she’d gotten decent enough pictures to confirm that these were indeed fossils, and not just wavy compression features in the rock. They looked strikingly like stromatolite fossils, tough layer cakes of bacteria. Some of the bacteria in living stromatolites on Earth were photosynthetic cyanobacteria, and thus green, but the Martian rocks gave no color clues.
She started on her favorite speculation: where did life start? Mars was smaller and so cooled first. Life could have arisen here while Earth was still a hot lava ball. Then it could have gone to Earth via the meteorite express.
Organized life-forms from Mars seeding Earth’s primitive soup of basic organic molecules would have quickly dominated. Martians invade, eat Earthly resources! H. G. Wells with a twist. We may yet turn out to be Martians. Pretty heady stuff for the scientific community, and it would change our essential worldview. Full employment for philosophers, too, and even religious theorists.
The Martian meteorites with their enigmatic fossils had tantalized scientists for years. When first discovered, the big question had been whether the tiny shapes actually were fossils, because most people thought they knew that Mars was lifeless. Now we know about that part, at least, she thought.
But deep down she realized she’d wanted to find life, not fossils, and even more than that, L*I*F*E.
Marc was jazzed by the discovery of deeper deposits of fossils, separated by layers of sterile peroxide-laden sediments in the old ocean beds. That implied periodic episodes of a wetter and warmer climate.
But so far she had not found anything alive. Even the first volcanic vent they had explored had no life, only peroxide soil blown into it from the surface, like a dusty old mine shaft.
Before today, that is. And now they were about to leave, the subterranean reaches still unexplored. Damn!
After five hours Viktor was doing well, had regained his energy and good spirits. They even managed a clumsy but satisfying slap and tickle when she stopped the rover for lunch. In the cramped, fishbowl world of the hab, they’d learned to use the privacy of the rover to great advantage. Today she felt nervous and skittish, but Viktor was a persistent sort and she finally realized that this just might do both of them more good than anything in the medicine chest back in the habitat.
The route began to take them—or rather, her, since Viktor crashed again right after sex; this time she forgave him—through familiar territory. She had scoured the landscape within a few days of the hab. Coming down in the Gusev Crater, they got a full helping of Mars: chasms, flood runoff plains, wrinkled canyons, chaotic terrain once undermined by mud flows, dried beds of ancient rivers and lakes, even some mysterious big potholes that must have been minivolcanoes somehow hollowed out.
Her pursuit of surface fossil evidence of life had been systematic, remorseless—and mostly a waste.
