Marsquake! (11 page)

“Look, I’m sorry,” Sean said. “But what am I supposed to do? I can’t tell my immune system to stop doing it—I don’t even know how to get its attention!”

More news came in: The greenhouse dome had been sealed off, because Mackenzie suggested that whatever was loose in Sean’s bloodstream had also gotten into the soybeans. The original sample had burgeoned, and now a whole production cylinder overflowed with yellow-leaved soybean plants that were
producing unusable soybeans in record numbers.

Sean felt as if he were going crazy. He felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. He hated being forced to lie around and do nothing except submit to endless medical tests. Dr. Miles was an excellent biologist but a boring roommate—he studied photos of his precious fossil discovery for hours on end, then explained to Sean what each and every little part of the creature might have been used for during life. A little of that went a long, long way.

Mickey, Alex, and especially Jenny tried to keep his spirits up. They called all the time to chat, to encourage him to hang in there, and to see how he was doing. He was doing great, he told them all, apart from feeling as if he were coming down with cabin fever—the urge to break out of the hospital wing and run screaming through the corridors, chased by the doctors.

Patrick got in touch once, to tell Sean that he was going to visit the fumarole field with Chris Wu and his team. Sean wished him a good trip and told him to send back some pictures.

He was totally unprepared for the ones that came back the next day.

“Remarkable!” Dr. Miles kept
saying. “Completely remarkable! Who would have believed it even remotely possible?”

Sean stared at the pictures Patrick had sent back. They were, well, remarkable.

On the one hand, the landscape hadn’t changed very much since he had first seen it pictured in Amanda’s viewscreen. The broad, shallow basin was about the same as it had been, and the fumaroles hadn’t actually grown any. But clinging to the edges of the steam fumaroles were … plants? Maybe not plants in the Earth sense. But something was growing there.

A close-up shot showed the top of one of the fumarole domes. When Sean had first seen them, he had no sense of scale, but a metal ruler in the image
showed that the dome was about a meter tall and somewhat broader. At the summit, a round hole sent out an almost constant jet of steam, invisible until it hit the cold air outside, then instantly condensing into billowing clouds of vapor.

A dark green fringe had accumulated around the mouth of the fumarole, and featherlike tendrils fluttered and waved in the invisible column of superheated steam. Whatever the thing was, it liked heat.

“That’s nearly three hundred degrees,” Miles said. “How does it stand the heat? Of course, it may be similar to the black smokers back on Earth. Those are underwater volcanic vents, you know. A unique ecosystem exists around them, based on sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. The only ecosystem on Earth that doesn’t depend on sunlight…”

Very interesting, no doubt, but Sean didn’t much care whether the frilled, feathery thing lived on heat or sunlight or month-old oatmeal. “Why are these things showing up now?” he asked.

Miles grimaced. “I don’t know, but since I’m a dedicated scientist, that doesn’t stop me from guessing. I
think two things have triggered this. The first is that we’ve been enriching the Martian atmosphere with water vapor for years now. I have a sneaking suspicion that we hit a balance point. The amount of available water vapor on the surface, and of ice and liquid water underground, has reached a critical moment. Dormant life has begun to reawaken because the water it needs is available. Second, I think the quake had something to do with it. The fumarole activity shows that heat is coming up through the crust. That may have warmed microscopic life-forms in the tunnels, letting them begin to reproduce. I think the time’s just ripe, in other words.”

Ripe for microscopic organisms
and weird Martian plants, perhaps, but not for Sean. More days crept by, with him becoming more and more irritable. “Look,” he said to Amanda at last, “we’re not dying or anything. We can’t stay here forever. I mean, we’re
part of the colony, not guinea pigs for the doctors.”

“I know, Sean,” Amanda said in a sympathetic voice. “I wish I could wave a wand and say you’re welcome back into the colony, but the council won’t let me do that. Whatever is in your systems seems like a disease to everyone here. Until we can find some way to immunize everyone, the council isn’t about to let you break your quarantine.”

“But that’s crazy!” Sean insisted. “None of the doctors have come down with this whatsis. It’s not as if we’re plague carriers.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

Jenny was almost as upset as Sean. “He’s been in the hospital for nearly a month!” she raged to Alex and Roger as they sat at a table in Town Hall. “What are they going to do—keep him there the rest of his life?”

“It’s a raw deal,” Alex agreed uncomfortably. “But you have to see the council’s point. I don’t want some kind of otherworldly germ crawling around in my bloodstream.”

“Come off it, Benford,” Roger said sarcastically. “In your case, it could only be an improvement!”

“What I can’t understand is why I didn’t come down with this … this infection, whatever it is,” Jenny said. “I was right beside Sean all the time. We ate together in the tents. If this bug were as contagious as everyone thinks it is, I’d have it by now.”

“Maybe it doesn’t like your blood type or something,” Roger said. “Or maybe it takes getting stuck with a spiky crystal.”

“But Ted Miles and the others didn’t get stuck!” Jenny objected. “They brought back some of the blueberry things and all of them helped to section them for microscopic analysis, but nobody got cut. Then when they went back, they were careful to keep their specimens in biohazard containers. They had to pick it up some other way.”

“And the doctors can’t figure out what that was,” Alex said. “I can understand why they want to keep them all in quarantine. It’s terrible for Sean and the others, but if they don’t even know how you get this
disease, it makes sense to keep them away from the rest of the colony.”

Roger balled up a napkin and threw it, bouncing it off Alex’s head. “Listen to yourself, would you?” he said in an angry voice. “Keep them away. Us and them. Sean was bloody well right about us Earthlings. We can’t cooperate for anything. You’d think Sean was some kind of leper, the way you go on.”

Alex’s eyes showed his own anger. “I do not! Look, it’s natural to be afraid of something like this.”

“Something like what?” asked Mickey, who had come up behind Jenny.

She jumped, then looked up at Mickey. “The socalled infection that Sean has,” she said. “Just because no one quite understands it.”

Mickey dropped into a chair. “You’re talking to the expert on unreasonable fear,” he said. “The Micketeer, who turns into a bowl of quivering jelly once the lights are out and he’s underground. But, yeah, I agree with you about Sean. He shouldn’t be cut off from everyone like this.”

Jenny looked moodily down at the tabletop. “This is so stupid. Look at us. When there’s not much to do, the colonists turn against one another. My group’s better than your group. Your group stole my great-great-grandfather’s land, so now I’m going to punish you. Well,
your
group had it coming, because my great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather was beaten up by
your
great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. Stupid, stupid! So we keep everyone busy, and that works because nobody’s fighting anyone else. Great, but everyone’s going his or her own way, aren’t they? Everyone’s busy, but everyone’s busy with what interests that person. Nobody’s thinking for the whole colony.”

“Welcome to the real world,” Alex said. “I think the hardest thing we ever do is to try to find what we have in common. There just isn’t that much.”

“You don’t think so?” Jenny asked. “Being stuck on Mars doesn’t give us a common cause?”

“We’re only stuck for another few months now,” Alex said. “After that, anyone who wants to go back to Luna on the
Magellan
will be able to leave.”

“Not me,” Mickey said. “I don’t like the Lunatics.”

“There you go again,” Jenny said. “I mean, I wouldn’t go back either, but it’s not because I don’t like the moon colonists. I wouldn’t go back because we’ve built something here. It’s not perfect, but we’ve got a colony going. We got hit hard, and we lived through it, and we ought to stay. Because it’s the human thing to do. It’s the right thing to—” She broke off, sobbing, then jumped up from the table and rushed away. She wasn’t crying out of sadness, but out of frustration and anger. At that moment she knew that something had to be done. Somehow, somehow, the colonists had to learn to stand as one people.

Otherwise, the colony would die.

Jenny was not particularly
good at literature or history. She excelled in science. She was also very, very good at persuasion. And she had a knack of knowing just who could help her the most.

“You’re going to get me in big trouble,” complained Nickie.

“Can you tie into the main computer system or not?” Jenny demanded.

Nickie squirmed. They were in the girls’ dorm wing, in Nickie’s room. The walls were papered over with scenes from Earth—mountains, oceans, a hundred different living creatures. But the heart of it all was Nickie’s computer. She had a feeling for the machine, and she was the ace programmer among the Asimov Project students. “I did it before,” she reminded Jenny.

“Yes, and security is tighter now,” Jenny said.

Nickie shrugged. “I’m better now. Getting into the system is easy. The real trick is in not tipping everyone off. But, yes, I can do that. What do you want?”

“I want to know what the council thinks about the people in the hospital wing,” Jenny said. “And about the Martian life that’s appeared around the fumaroles and down in the tunnels. I want to know what they’re thinking about, what courses of action they’re considering.”

“Oh,” Nickie said. “Top-secret stuff.”

“Exactly.”

Nickie rubbed her nose. “Okay. Easy enough. Let me get started.”

The incredible thing was that Nickie probably believed what she was doing
was
easy. Her computer made a series of lightning raids, so fast they were not even detectable by the ordinary firewalls and safeguards.
Zap!
The index to the council’s minutes was theirs.
Zap!
Medical records were easy prey.
Zap!
The “Biology Department’s Estimate of the Situation” was safely copied.

It took Nickie less than a day to pull up everything that Jenny asked for. Jenny then got the eighteen remaining Asimov Project kids together late at night in an empty classroom, one that the medical department wasn’t using. She quickly explained what she thought they should do. “In summary,” she finished, “we need to know what everyone’s thinking. Now, we all have specialties, and I think we should divide up the responsibilities. Let’s break into groups, and each group will study some of the data that Nickie has gathered, then we’ll come back together and let everyone report.”

“Oh, man,” Alex groaned. “School’s not supposed to start again for another
month
!”

There was some grumbling, but not as much as Jenny had feared. It took everyone a couple of days to get through all the reports, but at last they were ready. They met again, and this time Jenny asked for quick overviews from everyone. She began with the medical information, since she was an adaptive biology specialist.

“Okay,” she said. “The bottom line is that no one
who’s got the organism in his bloodstream is sick. They’re healthier than they’ve ever been, but in a different way. Their metabolisms are … optimized. They make better use of nutrients, they don’t need as much sleep as they used to, and even minor ailments have cleared up. Dr. Miles has even regrown a tooth he lost when he was still on Earth. The doctors think they’ve finally pinned down how Miles’s team all got the organism too. One of them crushed one of the blueberries in a vise to measure the hardness of the material it’s made of. Now, if that blueberry had some dormant bacteria—only they’re not really bacteria—”

“Please, Jenny,” said Roger with a groan. “Cut to the meat of it, please.”

Jenny sniffed, feeling a little offended. “We know Sean stuck his finger but not exactly how anyone else got the infection. I think it’s possible that the researcher breathed in some spores or something that became airborne when the blueberry was crushed. And then because they ran a little short of water, they put all their drinkable water together.
They shared that—and that’s how it could have been transmitted to the others.”

Alex had to report on the council’s decisions. “All right,” he said. “It surprises me to find it out, but Dr. Ellman and Dr. Simak are on the same side in this. Both of them think the people with the bug should be taken out of quarantine. If everyone observes basic precautions, there’s nothing to indicate that this thingummy can be passed from person to person. It has to be, like, carried in the water or else injected into the bloodstream. But the other members of the council are afraid that everyone might panic if quarantine ends. What they want to happen is for the doctors to find some kind of cure for this Martian bug, or some kind of vaccine so it doesn’t affect everyone else.”

Others reported on the remarkable happenings down in the lava tunnels and in the fumarole field. It did seem as if a tipping point had been passed. The oxygen levels in the tunnels were way up. Humans couldn’t breathe the air down there yet, but in another five or six years, the atmosphere would be
dense enough and oxygenated enough to support human life.

“Especially,” Mickey observed, “if the human life is like Sean. He could nearly get by on what’s available now, the way his lungs collect oxygen and his blood delivers it. In fact, in a
normal
atmosphere Sean’s breathing slows down to an unbelievable rate.”

More reports, and at the end of them all, Nickie said, “This is unfair. The majority of the council want to treat Sean like some kind of monster, and he isn’t. It isn’t his fault that he came down with this thing. And it doesn’t seem like a disease to me!”