Mars (57 page)

“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.

W
ASHINGTON
: Edith was standing beside Alberto Brumado when the phone call came.

They had just returned to the red-brick house after dinner in Georgetown. Edith knew instinctively that the man was going to make his play for her. What she did not yet know was how she would react. Brumado was kind, intelligent, gentle, and even suave in a sort of bashful, boyish way.

What would he be like in bed? she wondered. And she found herself also wondering, Is Jamie bedding his daughter?

But the telephone interrupted Brumado as he was pouring two snifters of Osborne brandy. He crossed the bookshelf-lined living room and picked up the phone.

“Yes, this is he. … Oh, hello, Jeffrey, how are …” Brumado’s face went white.
“What?
She did? It’s certain?” He lapsed into a string of rapid Brazilian Portuguese. Then, realizing it, he switched back to English, breathless. “Yes, yes, yes. I’ll be right down. As soon as I can get a taxicab. Yes. Thanks! Thank you for calling! I’ll be there, surely!”

If he hadn’t been grinning from ear to ear Edith would have thought some disaster had hit the Mars explorers.

He looked across the room to her. “They’ve found living organisms on Mars. My daughter made the discovery!”

Edith yelled a Texas war whoop and ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. He held her around the waist and they kissed the way strangers do on New Year’s Eve.

Then, “I’ve got to get a taxi. We’re expected at NASA headquarters.”

“I’ve got to tell my boss!” Edith said.

“All the media will be informed,” Brumado said, pecking
at the phone with a trembling hand. “They’re calling a news conference for midnight.”

While he paced the oriental carpet, impatiently waiting for the taxicab, Edith phoned the network vice-president at his apartment in Manhattan.

“You have reached …,” an answering-machine tape started.

Edith felt a moment of exasperation, then started laughing. When the beep sounded she shouted into the phone, “This is Edie Elgin. I’m in the nation’s capital with Alberto Brumado and as soon as a cab can get here we’re goin’ to NASA headquarters.
They’ve found life on Mars
, buddy! And you weren’t home to take the call!”

Edith then phoned the network news office. The news director was at home, and the woman in charge at this hour of the evening had never heard of Edie Elgin.

“I’m a consultant to the vice-president’s office,” Edith explained.

“So?”

“I’ve got a story. I’ve got to get on the air from the Washington office here. Top priority.”

“What’s this all about?”

“It’s the biggest news break in the history of the business, honey!”

“Really?” The woman’s voice dripped suspicion.

Suddenly Edith hesitated. They’ll take it away from me, she realized. I’ll tip them off and they’ll call in the managing editor and the evening news anchor bastard and I’ll wind up in the cold.

“Can you give me the news director’s home number?” she asked.

“No.” Flatly.

“This is important, dammit!”

“If it’s that important you’d better tell me what it is.”

Edith took a deep breath. “Okay,” she said sweetly. “Just remember this call tomorrow when they fire y’all.”

She hung up the phone and turned to Brumado. “Is the taxi here? Do I have a minute to go to the bathroom?”

In the hour and a half between their arrival at NASA’s headquarters building and the official start of the news conference, Edith used up four spools on her miniaturized tape recorder, talking to the men who had gathered together to
drink champagne and smoke cigars. She was not the only woman at the impromptu party, but she was the only member of the media among the Mars Project people.

The news conference filled the building’s largest auditorium, even at midnight. Television crews elbowed one another for choice spots up front. The lights were blindingly bright, but nobody seemed to mind. Phalanxes of microphones and tape recorders were propped up on the long table at which the grinning NASA people assembled, shaking hands with one another, glowing with self-vindication. They sat Alberto Brumado in their midst.

Edith took a folding chair set up by the side wall, next to an emergency exit. She smiled to herself. She had her story, and she would continue to gather in all the details of the human side of this fantastic night. Even if she had to finish the job in bed with Brumado. That might not be such a bad way to end a night like this, she thought.

Although stodgy gray-haired NASA administrators officially broke the news to the goggle-eyed reporters, it was Alberto Brumado who ended up doing most of the talking. The soul of the Mars Project had his hour in the limelight. His smiling, triumphant face and voice were broadcast all across the world.

Life on Mars.

While Brumado answered the reporters’ myriad of questions and bantered happily with them, no one noticed that the physician in charge of the medical section sat at the very end of the table of NASA officials, looking tired and grim. No one asked him a question. No one paid him any attention at all. Which was just as well, because he had made up his mind to remain absolutely silent, no matter what. He was not the kind of man to rain on the organization’s parade.

Dr. Yang Meilin gave a disdainful snort at the data on her display screen. Pushing her chair away from the tiny desk, she got to her feet and opened the accordion-fold door of her infirmary.

Dr. Li was up in the command section, of course, in the middle of a three-way conversation with the excursion team down at Tithonium Chasma and the mission controllers at Kaliningrad.

So they have found life on Mars, Dr. Yang said to herself. And they are all sick, perhaps even dying. Could there be a connection? No, that cannot be, she said to herself.

The passageway was empty, silent except for the hum of machinery. Everyone in the craft is packed into the command module, Yang realized. No one is paying any attention to this medical emergency. No one is paying any attention to me.

When she reached the command module, Dr. Li was at the comm console. Every one of the display screens was lit up. Alberto Brumado himself was beaming happily from the main display, while the other screens showed bigwigs in Kaliningrad, Houston, and what appeared to be Tokyo. Men, all of them. The TV link to the excursion team was out due to the storm, but Joanna Brumado was on the radio, trying to answer the volleys of questions.