Mars

SOL 37: AFTERNOON

Grounded.

Jamie felt like an errant teenager being punished by his parents. The rover was in perfectly good shape, and even though he felt weak and headachy, he saw no reason why he should not be moving onward, closer to the “village” he had seen.

That’s where we’ve got to go, he kept telling himself. Maybe I can even climb up there, once we get to the base of the cliffs where that cleft is. I’ll bet there’s even a natural path up the cliff face to that cleft and the formation inside it. Or maybe they carved steps out of the rock.

The day outside seemed perfectly clear, despite Toshima’s insistence that a dust storm was howling down the length of the canyon and would soon engulf them.

There had even been the mists out there earlier in the morning, thin gray tendrils of haze that hovered in the early morning chill and slowly evaporated as the sun reached down into the canyon. Like ghosts that vanish when the light touches them, Jamie thought.

If the mists evaporate and then form again the next morning, he reasoned, either the moisture remains inside the canyon or it’s renewed from some source of water vapor underground. Or in the cliff walls.

Christ! There’s so much for us to look for and they’ve got us stuck inside this aluminum can!

For the fortieth time that morning he paced the length of the rover’s command module, from the cockpit bulkhead past the little galley and the narrow passage between the folded-up bunks to the equipment racks and finally the airlock at the back end.

Connors called from the cockpit, “I think it’s starting.”

Jamie rushed the nine strides it took to span the module’s length and ducked his head past the bulkhead. Through the cockpit’s bulbous canopy the canyon outside seemed just the same as the last time he had looked.

Connors anticipated him. “Take a squint at the sky.”

Jamie slid into the empty seat beside the astronaut so he could look upward. The pink sky seemed normal enough—almost.

“It’s gotten ten percent darker in the past five minutes,” Connors said, holding up a color comparison chart.

“There’s really going to be a storm.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d better go back and tell the others.”

“Might as well. We got nothing else to do.” Connors slipped on his headset as he spoke and reached for the comm unit’s switch.

Joanna and Ilona were sitting so close together in the lab module that their shoulders almost touched. The lighting was low, more from the glowing displays on the computer screens than from the dimmed overhead strip lamp.

Neither of the women looked up as Jamie stepped in from the airlock. They were both bent over something on the workbench.

“The storm is starting,” Jamie said.

Joanna turned her head slightly to look at him over her shoulder. In the dimness he could not make out the expression on her face, only that she seemed terribly pale.

“The figures on the core samples are on the screen here,” she said, tapping the computer humming beside her.

“Anything interesting?”

“See for yourself,” she said, turning back to the work she and Ilona were doing.

Jamie frowned slightly at her abrupt manner. He leaned over, since there were no other chairs in the lab, and read off the figures on the screen.

Not much different from the values they had gotten from other corings, he saw. Except that there was no ice in the sample, no layer of permafrost.

Then where’s the water coming from? Jamie asked himself.

He punched up a side-by-side display that compared the results of the core samplings taken near the dome with those from here in the canyon. Trivial differences, much less than Jamie had expected. Except for the water. There’s less water here than up on the plain. Less! That doesn’t make any sense.

The wind was keening outside. Straightening up, Jamie felt a kink in his back. He had been bent over longer than he had realized. The wind was really singing now. There were no windows in the lab module, no way to see what was going on outside.

Joanna and Ilona were still bent over their work. The diamond saw buzzed briefly, then whined as it bit through rock.

“I’m going up front to see what the storm looks like,” he said.

“Good,” said Joanna, without raising her head.

Curious, he asked, “What the hell are you working on that’s so fascinating?”

“Go up front, Jamie, and leave us alone. We will call you when we are ready to talk.”

Son of a bitch, Jamie grumbled to himself. Then he remembered how proprietary Joanna had become when they had found the green-streaked rock.

Half puzzled, half angry, he made his way back into the command module. Connors was still up in the cockpit, munching on a candy bar, headset still clamped against his ear although he had swung the microphone arm up and away from his mouth.

“Toshima says we’ll be in this for the rest of the day,” he announced glumly.

Jamie stared at the scene outside. The wind was howling like a squalling infant, high-pitched and thin. It had become quite dark out there, an eerie kind of fluctuating darkness, not like nighttime even though the lighting level was down to about its value just after sunset. Shadowy, like having a blanket thrown over your head. Menacing, somehow, deep down in the gut. Jamie could barely see the cliff face, less than fifty meters from the rover’s nose. The sky was obliterated by darkness.

He slid into the cockpit seat and looked down at the display in the instrument panel’s main screen. Connors had it showing a satellite view of the region. Jamie could see the canyon complex clearly, but the inside of the twisting labyrinth of canyons was filled to the brim with billowing clouds of reddish-gray dust. They looked soft, undulating like the waves of the ocean, thick enough to buoy up your body if you cared to sprawl on them.

“Vosnesensky’s pissed because we don’t have a cover to put over the canopy,” Connors said. “He’s afraid the dust will scratch up the plastic so bad we won’t be able to see out of it.”

“Is it? Scratching?”

Connors shook his head slowly. “Hard to tell, so far. Don’t hear anything that sounds like scratching, do you?”

“The dust particles are microscopic in size.”

“Yeah, but gritty.”

“Nothing we can do but wait,” Jamie said.

“How they doing back there?”

Jamie huffed. “They’re so busy they don’t even care about the storm.”

“They’ll miss the show.”

He wondered again about the lack of water in the core samples. Something must be wrong. We’re missing something.

“If we covered the canopy we wouldn’t be able to see this,” Connors said. His voice sounded tired.

“What about the cameras?”

“They’re all on automatic. We’ll get a complete record of the storm, unless the sand chews up the lenses too bad.”

“We’ve got replacement lenses aboard, don’t we?”

“Sure.” Connors puffed out a weary sigh. “I wouldn’t have the strength to put a cover over her anyway.”

“Still feel bad?”

“Worse. How ’bout you?”

“Pretty lousy.”

“Think we oughtta check in with Reed?”

“If he had anything to tell us he’d call,” Jamie said.

“Yeah. Guess so.”

Jamie leaned back and watched the dust storm billowing outside, tired and perspiring despite having done nothing all day. The gauges on the instrument panel told him that the wind was blowing a steady two hundred twenty-five kilometers per hour, with gusts up to nearly two-ninety. He could hear its high-pitched shrieking. Yet the rover was not rocked; it remained solid, without so much as a quiver. Jamie knew that the thin air of Mars packed very little punch. At almost three hundred kilometers per hour the wind had the force of a twenty-mile-per-hour zephyr on Earth.

Toshima called in and asked for the air temperature outside the rover.

“Goin’ up,” Connors reported, surprised. “It’s up to just about ten degrees.”

Jamie mentally converted the centigrade figure to fifty degrees Fahrenheit.

Toshima smiled toothily in the display screen. “Friction from dust particles heats the atmosphere. There could be lightning.”

“Lightning?”

“It is possible. Be certain all equipment is protected.”

Connors blew out an exasperated breath. “Everything’s buttoned up, but the comm antenna’s standing out there in the wind like a lightning rod.”

“It is grounded, isn’t it?”

“Sure, but how many amps will this lightning be packing?”

Toshima looked blank. Jamie realized that when he did not know the answer to a question he simply did not reply at all.

“Okay,” Connors said, “I’m going to crank down the antenna in between transmissions.” The astronaut glanced at the digital clock on the panel. “I will call you in forty-eight minutes, at exactly fifteen hundred hours.”

The meteorologist nodded.

“If you’ve got an emergency call for us, send it over the voice radio or the computer link. Those antennas are flush to the roof. We can talk through the modems if we have to.”

“I understand.”

Connors signed off, then turned to the bank of switches on his left side. Through the shrill of the wind Jamie heard the faint click of a rocker switch, then the buzz of an electric motor overhead.

“That antenna’s right over the cockpit. If it attracts a bolt of lightning we could get fried.”

The electric motor’s hum turned into a rasping growl.

“Kee-rap! It’s stuck. Fuckin’ dust must be packed into the joints.” Connors flicked the switch up and down several times, his usual easygoing manner disintegrating into frustrated wrath. The motor whined and strained. With a shake of his head Connors said, “Stuck in the halfway position. Won’t reach the satellite and still sticking up enough to attract lightning. Useless goddam piece of junk!” He pounded a fist against the panel.

“It is grounded, though,” Jamie said, half a question.

“Yeah, but who knows how much juice a Martian lightning bolt might carry?”

Looking out at the dark clouds blowing past the cockpit, Jamie muttered, “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.”

“Wonder what the hell else the dust is screwing up.”

Jamie felt his eyebrows rise.

“Like the wheels, maybe,” Connors grumbled. “Maybe we’ll have to walk back to the dome.”

Jamie looked more closely at the black astronaut. It was not like Connors to complain or be so bitter. The man’s face was shining with perspiration. His cheeks looked hollow, his eyes sunken and bloodshot.

“Maybe we should take another dose of that antibiotic,” Jamie said.

Tapping the digital clock display Connors said testily, “Not until seventeen hundred hours. Doctor’s orders.”

They both heard the footsteps at the same instant and turned in their chairs. Joanna was almost running up the length of the command module toward them. Her heart-shaped face was haggard, but she was smiling the biggest smile Jamie had ever seen on her.

“We have it!” she said, almost breathless. “Living organisms! In the rocks!”

Fast as Connors’s flier’s reflexes were, Jamie scrambled out of his seat first. His throat was so tight he could not say a word, but he pounded down the module after Joanna and ducked through the airlock hatch, Connors right behind him.

Ilona was half slumped over the optical microscope, its intense light the only illumination in the lab module. Profiled against the bright white light she looked totally spent, exhausted like a woman who had just given birth.

She smiled up at Jamie. Wanly.

“Inside the rocks,” Joanna said, her voice a reverent whisper. “Just as you said back at McMurdo…”

Jamie found himself staring at Ilona. She looked terribly weak.

“It is something like terrestrial lichen,” Joanna was explaining, ignoring her coworker. “They have a hard silicate shell to protect them from the cold, but the shell is water permeable. And there are windows in it that allow sunlight through.” She was almost babbling. “We think the windows are transparent mainly in the infrared, but they obviously let visible wavelengths pass through them too, to some extent. Their internal water is apparently laced with some form of alcohol, a natural kind of antifreeze. They must go dormant at night or whenever the temperature drops so low that even their antifreeze crystallizes, then they become active again when the temperature rises enough for their antifreeze to liquefy. It is definite! It is real! Look for yourself!”

Ilona managed to move her chair slightly so Jamie could bend over the microscope. He saw a mottle of colors, purplish circular things interlaced with threads of a lighter bluish tone.

“I thought they were orange.”

“They are,” Ilona said softly. “We stained them for the microscope.”

“They take up dyes the same way terrestrial tissues do!” Joanna was still excited, exultant. “They polarize light the same way terrestrial organisms do! They must be based on the same kind of nucleic acids and proteins!”

“It’s too soon to say that,” Ilona corrected in a whisper.

Jamie was still peering into the microscope. Martian organisms. Living creatures of Mars.

“They are like the crustose thalli of Antarctica,” he heard Joanna say into his ear. “Do you see the outer cortex and then the clusters of algae?”

“The purple things?”

“Yes.” She even laughed, shakily. “The purple things. They are alive, Jamie.”

He straightened up and gave Connors a chance to squint into the microscope.

“It is life, Jamie,” said Joanna, tired but triumphant. “It is merely a form of lichen and it must remain dormant almost all the time. But it is alive and native to Mars.”

“We’ve done it!” Despite her exhaustion there was joy in Ilona’s voice. “We’ve found life on Mars.”

“I guess you have,” said Jamie. His insides were trembling. He felt awed by their discovery.

Connors grinned at the women. “You guys’ll get the Nobel Prize for this.”

“Yes, yes,” Joanna said. “I suppose we will. But what does that matter? Nothing matters now. We have found what we came for! Whatever happens from now on, it does not matter.”

Ilona suddenly sagged against Jamie’s shoulder for support. Jamie felt her going limp, collapsing. Outside, the dust storm sang its own melody.