“What’s in a name?” Faiyum quoted. “A rose by any other name would still smell.”
“And so do you,” said Bernstein and O’Connor, in unison.
The major objective of the Excursion 3 team had been to drill three hundred meters down into the permafrost that lay just beneath the surface of Utopia Planita. The frozen remains of what had been an ocean billions of years earlier, when Mars had been a warmer and wetter world, the permafrost ice held a record of the planet’s history, a record that geologists (or aerologists) keenly wanted to study.
Outside at the drill site, the three men began the laborious task of hauling up the ice core that their equipment had dug. They worked slowly, carefully, to make certain that the fragile, six-centimeter-wide core came out intact. Section by section they unjointed each individual segment as it came up, marked it carefully, and stowed it in the special storage racks built into the hopper’s side.
“How old do you think the lowest layers of this core will be?” Bernstein asked as they watched the electric motor slowly, slowly lifting the slender metal tube that contained the precious ice.
“Couple billion years, at least,” Faiyum replied. “Maybe more.”
O’Connor, noting that the motor’s batteries were down to less than fifty percent of their normal capacity, asked, “Do you think there’ll be any living organisms in the ice?”
“Not hardly,” said Bernstein.
“I thought there were supposed to be bugs living down there,” O’Connor said.
“In the ice?” Bernstein was clearly skeptical.
Faiyum said, “You’re talking about methanogens, right?”
“Is that what you call them?”
“Nobody’s found anything like that,” said Bernstein.
“So far,” Faiyum said.
O’Connor said, “Back in training they told us about traces of methane that appear in the Martian atmosphere now and then.”
Faiyum chuckled. “And some of the biologists proposed that the methane comes from bacteria living deep underground. The bacteria are supposed to exist on the water melting from the bottom of the permafrost layer, deep underground, and they excrete methane gas.”
“Bug farts,” said Bernstein.
O’Connor nodded inside his helmet. “Yeah. That’s what they told us.”
“Totally unproven,” Bernstein said.
“So far,” Faiyum repeated.
Sounding slightly exasperated, Bernstein said, “Look, there’s a dozen abiological ways of generating the slight traces of methane that’ve been observed in the atmosphere.”
“But they appear seasonally,” Faiyum pointed out. “And the methane is quickly destroyed in the atmosphere. Solar ultraviolet breaks it down into carbon and hydrogen. That means that something is producing the stuff continuously.”
“But that doesn’t mean it’s being produced by biological processes,” Bernstein insisted.
“I think it’s bug farts,” Faiyum said. “It’s kind of poetic, you know.”
“You’re crazy.”
“You’re a sourpuss.”
Before O’Connor could break up their growing argument, their helmet earphones crackled, “Tithonium here.”
All three of them snapped to attention. It was a woman’s voice, and they recognized whose it was: the mission commander, veteran astronaut Gloria Hazeltine, known to most of the men as Glory Hallelujah. The fact that Glory herself was calling them didn’t bode well, O’Connor thought. She’s got bad news to tell us.
“We’ve checked out the numbers,” said her disembodied radio voice. “The earliest we can get a rescue flight out to you will be in five days.”
“Five days?” O’Connor yipped.
“That’s the best we can do, Pat,” the mission commander said, her tone as hard as concrete. “You’ll have to make ends meet until then.”
“Our batteries will crap out on us, Gloria. You know that.”
“Conserve power. Your solar panels are okay, aren’t they?”
Nodding, O’Connor replied, “They weren’t touched, thank God.”
“So recharge your batteries by day and use minimum power at night. We’ll come and get you as soon as we possibly can.”
“Right.” O’Connor clicked off the radio connection.
“They’ll come and pick up our frozen bodies,” Bernstein grumbled.
Faiyum looked just as disappointed as Bernstein, but he put on a lopsided grin and said, “At least our bodies will be well preserved.”
“Frozen solid,” O’Connor agreed.
The three men stood there, out in the open, encased in their pressure suits and helmets, while the drill’s motor buzzed away as if nothing was wrong. In the thin Martian atmosphere, the drill’s drone was strangely high pitched: more of a whine than a hum.
