Bernstein pointed to the control panel’s displays. “Batteries damned near died overnight,” he said.
“The solar panels are recharging them,” O’Connor replied.
“They won’t come back a hundred percent,” said Bernstein. “You know that.”
O’Connor bit back the reply he wanted to make. He merely nodded and murmured, “I know.”
Faiyum peered at the display from the laser they had set up outside. “I’ll be damned.”
The other two hunched up closer to him.
“Look at that,” said Faiyum, pointing. “The spectrometer’s showing there actually is methane seeping out of our bore hole.”
“Methanogens?” mused Bernstein.
“Can’t be anything else,” Faiyum said. With a wide smile, he said, “We’ve discovered life on Mars! We could win the Nobel Prize for this!”
“Posthumously,” said Bernstein.
“We’ve got to get this data back to Tithonium,” said O’Connor. “Let the biologists take a look at it.”
“It’s being telemetered to Tithonium automatically,” Bernstein reminded him.
“Yeah, but I want to see what the biologists have to say.”
The biologists were disappointingly cautious. Yes, it was methane gas seeping up from the bore hole. Yes, it very well might be coming from methanogenic bacteria living deep underground. But they needed more conclusive evidence.
“Could you get samples from the bottom of your bore hole?” asked the lead biologist, a Hispanic American from California. In the video screen on the control panel, he looked as if he were trying hard not to get excited.
“We’ve got the ice core,” Faiyum replied immediately. “I’ll bet we’ve got samples of the bugs in the bottom layers.”
“Keep it well protected,” the biologist urged.
“It’s protected,” O’Connor assured him.
“We’ll examine it when you bring it in,” the biologist said, putting on a serious face.
Once the video link was disconnected, Bernstein said morosely, “They’ll be more interested in the damned ice core than in our frozen bodies.”
All day long they watched the spikes of the spectrometer’s flickering display. The gas issuing from their bore hole was mostly methane, and it was coming up continuously, a thin invisible breath issuing from deep below the surface.
“Those bugs are farting away down there,” Faiyum said happily. “Busy little bastards.”
“Sun’s going down,” said Bernstein.
O’Connor checked the batteries’ status. Even with the solar panels recharging them all day, they were barely up to seventy-five percent of their nominal capacity. He did some quick arithmetic in his head. If it takes Tithonium five days to get us, we’ll have frozen to death on the fourth night.
Like Shackleton at the South Pole, he thought. Froze to death, all of ’em.
They made it through the second night, but O’Connor barely slept. He finally dozed off, listening to the soft breeze wafting by outside. When he awoke, every joint in his body ached, and it took nearly an hour for him to stop his uncontrollable trembling.
As they chewed on their nearly frozen breakfast bars, Bernstein said, “We’re not going to make it.”
“I can put in a call to Tithonium, tell ’em we’re in a bad way.”
“They can see our telemetry,” Faiyum said, unusually morose. “They know the batteries are draining away.”
“We can ask them for help.”
“Yeah,” said Bernstein. “When’s the last time Glory Hallelujah changed her mind about anything?”
O’Connor called anyway. In the video screen, Gloria Hazeltine’s chunky blond-haired face looked like that of an implacable goddess.
“We’re doing everything we can,” she said, her voice flat and final. “We’ll get to you as soon as we can. Conserve your power. Turn off everything you don’t need to keep yourselves alive.”
Once O’Connor broke the comm link, Bernstein grumbled, “Maybe we could hold our breaths for three, four days.”
But Faiyum was staring at the spectrometer readout. Methane gas was still coming out of the bore hole, a thin waft, but steady.
“Or maybe we could breathe bug farts,” he said.
“What?”
Looking out the windshield toward their bore hole, Faiyum said, “Methane contains hydrogen. If we can capture the methane those bug are emitting. . .”
“How do we get the hydrogen out of it?” O’Connor asked.
“Lase it. That’ll break it up into hydrogen and carbon. The carbon precipitates out, leaving the hydrogen for us to feed to the fuel cell.
