Viktor shrugged. She let it go. Instead of fretting over the situation, very little of which they could do anything about, she settled into her acceleration couch and called up her e-mail. Ah good, one from the folks. It was a vid. When her dad appeared on the screen she studied him carefully. He seemed animated and happy.
“Hi, honey. Hope you’re doing okay. We think we understand your situation and understand it’s pretty difficult. Axelrod’s folks keep us informed, but I’m sure they put their own spin on things. Thanks for cc’ing me on your bio e-mails, they’re fascinating. But we’d love to hear how you’re feeling, when you can spare the time.”
Oops. How long since I last e-mailed? She checked her “sent” file. Almost a week. The prodigal daughter screws up again. She’d been assuaging her conscience by sending copies of her scientific transmissions. Guess that only works so long.
She went back to the message. “On the other front, I have some better news. I’ve found a group of doctors with an experimental treatment for liver cancer. Not drugs or radiation, but ultrasound.” She listened carefully. “It’s from the same folks who invented the ultrasound arterial cleaning technique. They had both ideas at the same time, but it’s taken a lot longer to get the bugs ironed out of this one. Lotsa tech stuff, but basically, they can zap the cancer without harming the healthy liver tissue. And that’s the main threat of this type of cancer—it’s all mixed up with healthy tissue. They’ve done all the animal tests and some small-scale human trials, and the results are good.”
Wow, she thought.
He stopped and took a deep breath.
“So, we’re flying to Los Angeles in a couple days. Your mother and I feel pretty optimistic about this treatment. It won’t do any harm, and at the very least it’ll buy me more time. So don’t worry about me, sweetie. You have some tough decisions to make and I don’t want to make them any harder.”
A bit of unrelated family news, and he signed off. She got up and stretched. Long ago she had learned to kick back from problems when somebody else was doing the right thing. No fretting, no burning of useless anxiety. Time for some fun.
She donned her pressure suit for a trip to the greenhouse. After days in the hab, she was longing for some different scenery.
“No taking helmet off,” Viktor reminded her sternly. “I will be watching.”
The greenhouse welcomed her, as always. An oasis of green in a red desert…
Except that the plants had frozen during the night after the blowout. Dead, brown vines hung from their support lines. Upright plants had simply collapsed in place.
“Viktor,” she called over the comm, “while you’re making up the maintenance schedule, don’t forget that the greenhouse needs replanting ASAP.”
“I make note. Everything dead?”
“Just about. I haven’t done an inventory but I don’t see any green.” After checking the readout on the internal atmosphere, she opened the faceplate of her helmet, sniffed tentatively. It was just hab air with a faint tinge of vegetation. She sighed. It wouldn’t smell fresh again until plants grew.
She went straight for the repaired mist chamber. Viktor had strengthened the joints, and they seemed secure. She peered through the transparent walls—
And was astounded by what she saw.
A riot of diminutive shapes. And even—yes—colors! Faint, but definite.
Over in the far corner was the original celery-like spike. Underneath the nozzle that sprayed the nutrients was a small pool covered by a pinkish scum. Bet it’s teeming with Marc’s “shrimp.” At the center of the chamber was a tangle of pale blue filaments. The remaining mat surface was smooth or sported bumps of varying size. It was larger than before the blowout.
Her thoughts were racing. How could those pale blobs of mat have spawned this diversity?
She saw two possibilities. The mat could be a community of different organisms, finally large enough to express its true complexity. Microbes on Earth had chemical systems that allowed them to count their neighbors. If enough were present, the microbes turned on new genes and assumed different characteristics.
Or…it was one organism of extreme plasticity. And minute differences in the environment were causing radical changes in the organism.
Like slime molds. They spend most of their life as single wandering cells. As such, they cruise their landscape of wet, rotting wood like the familiar amoeba. But a drop in moisture causes a radical change in behavior and morphology. Using chemical attractants, great numbers of individual cells aggregate and differentiate into an elaborate reproductive structure of great beauty and brilliant color.
Hmmm. On second thought, that’s a cooperative effort also.
She went back to the microscope slides she’d made. Those cell types really did look different. But the slime mold model was also attractive. She didn’t have enough data to be able to decide.
Two heads would be way better than one.
Damn Chen anyway. Why couldn’t we have cooperated on this discovery, rather than be at swords’ points!
What had really surprised her during the vent descent was how large and complex the structures were. It was a throwback to the grand old days of the Precambrian on Earth, three billion years ago, when anaerobes had ruled the Earth. With the exception of the stromatolites near Perth, living anaerobes on Earth were minute, and most lived solitary lives. Even biofilms, communities of bacteria, were microscopic.
On Earth, evolution’s crown went to the oxy users, the animals. They had grazed away the bacterial mats with their superior energy. But here the anaerobes ruled, and they’d evolved new forms.
Hmmm. Maybe the best analogy was the marsupials of Australia—furry vertebrates, not true mammals. They breed more slowly than true placental animals, like rodents, and thus were eliminated all over the Earth except for the huge, isolated island of Australia. Free of superior competitors, they populated an entire continent, evolving completely unique forms such as kangaroos, wombats, and the duck-billed platypus.
Was that what had happened on Mars? A planet that never evolved plants because it cooled off too quickly, so it never got an oxygen atmosphere to poison the original life-forms? Without the superior energetics of the oxy users to compete with, the anaerobes had slowly colonized, evolved, blossomed.
She did some quick calculations and saw that the available volume of warm, cavern-laced rock below Mars was comparable to the inhabitable surface area of Earth. Plenty of room to try out fresh patterns.
But would evolution have produced the same answer to the riddle of survival on Mars as on Earth? Something tickled the edge of her mind, but she couldn’t quite get it.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw movement outside. The dune buggy with two suited figures was returning to the ERV. She sighed inwardly.
They weren’t any different here on Mars than they’d been on Earth. Competitive, unruly, passionate oxy users all. Driven. They were only a microcosm of the larger strifes and divisions on the home planet.
34
FEBRUARY 1, 2018
“WELL, WELL, THIS IS VERY INTERESTING,” SAID MARC.
He was doing a routine download from sensors they’d left at various sites, mostly for weather monitoring. Despite the chilly relations between the two men living in the ERV and Viktor and Julia in the hab, they all understood that routine maintenance had to continue. For almost two years, their lives had depended on well-functioning equipment. Raoul and Marc had come over earlier in the dune buggy, and Raoul quickly got to work checking the life-support system.
“Um?” Julia looked up from her slate.
