Mars Life (10 page)

“Oh lord, spare me your stupid clichés.”

Itzak Rosenberg and Saleem Hasdrubal were unlikely partners. Izzy was an Oxford-educated Londoner, small and soft-looking, with the frizzy reddish blond hair of his distant ancestors from Poland and Belarus. Sal was from Chicago, tall and lanky enough to have made his way through school playing basketball.

They argued about everything, from international politics to ethnic cuisines. They even argued about the importance of geology versus biology. Izzy, a geologist, had been blown away when he was nine years old by his first visit to the chalk cliffs of Dover; the secret history that they contained in their layered striations set him on his life’s course. Sal had been equally thrilled with his first visit to the dinosaur reconstructions at Chicago’s Field Museum, on a class trip when he was in the seventh grade. He won a basketball scholarship to Purdue, then went on to the University of Chicago for an eventual doctorate in cellular biology.

Now they stood glumly in their nanosuits on the surface of Mars, near the minor crater Malzberg, disappointed that the geyser they were hoping for had so far refused to erupt.

They had been living at the crater’s edge for more than a week in one of the campers, a bullet-shaped vehicle with a big, bulging windshield that looked like an insect’s eyes; it rode on a set of eight springy metal wheels. It looked to Sal’s city-raised eyes like an urban bus, although he’d never seen a bus so coated and smeared with reddish dust.

All around them stretched the barren rusty plain, cold and silent except for the faint whisper of a thin breeze. The Sun hung high in the cloudless butterscotch sky, but the thermometer on the wrist of Izzy’s nanofabric suit read thirty-six below zero. Summer weather, he thought wryly.

Dr. Chang, the mission director, was stretching the safety regulations to allow these two scientists to go out on this Excursion without an astronaut to drive the camper. But there were only nine astronauts at Tithonium Base and they were committed to other, larger excursions along the floor of the rift valley and out to the huge volcanoes of the Tharsis highlands.

Originally, Chang had sent an automated rover to the Malzberg crater, a small six-wheeled robot that was supposed to go into the crater and deploy a set of sensors that would monitor the heat flow and other conditions at the site. But the doughty little rover had broken down inside the crater. Rosenberg and Hasdrubal had been sent to repair it, but the machinery was too old, too worn, too clogged with years of Martian dust, for them to get it working again. Despite the detailed advice from technicians back at the base, they could not bring the rover back to life.

So now they stood at the edge of the crater waiting like expectant fathers for a geyser that had so far failed to materialize. They had come out as repairmen but had urged Chang to let them stay and observe as scientists. Chang had reluctantly allowed it; not all that reluctantly, actually: he wanted to capture a geyser as much as they did.

The crater was slightly less than two hundred meters across, oval in shape, about thirty meters deep. Its rim of rubble was new and fresh looking. There were no smaller craters inside it, an indication that it was quite young. Two dozen metal boxes and pole-like instruments were arrayed along its slopes and bottom: seismometers, heat-flow probes, digital cameras, even miniaturized spectrometers in case the geyser actually blew and there was some erupting gas to analyze. A half-dozen shallow trenches showed where they had scooped up soil samples to analyze back at the base for the dim chance of finding microbial life.

“Everything’s right,” Sal Hasdrubal said, to no one in particular. “It’s a young crater. The heat flow measurements peak at its bottom. The permafrost layer is only a dozen meters down from the surface. Why doesn’t it blow?”

“It will, sooner or later,” said Rosenberg.

“Later might be a thousand years from now.”

“Or this afternoon.”

Hasdrubal shook his head inside his transparent helmet. “Nah. The fucker’s gonna blow soon’s as we pack up and leave.”

“Which will be tomorrow,” said Izzy. “We’ll have to lift the rover into the cargo bay, if we can.”

Sal shifted his gaze to the inert rover, sitting squat and silent alongside their camper. Dumb little fucker, he said to himself. Then he shrugged inwardly. Shouldn’t complain. I guess after ten years of work you’re entitled to a breakdown.

“We’ll get it in,” he said to Izzy. “Only weighs one-third of what it would on Earth.”

Rosenberg gave him a doubtful look. “We’ll have to use the winch.”

“Yeah,” Hasdrubal agreed. Then, drawing in a deep breath, he said, “Come on, let’s get back into the camper. This friggin’ suit’s startin’ to smell like a garbage can.”

“You have a lovely way with words, Sal.”

They began trudging back to the waiting camper, two nanosuited figures completely alone as far as the eye could see.

“How come they don’t name craters after Muslims?” Hasdrubal abruptly asked.

“They’re named after scientists, mostly,” said Rosenberg. “Newton, Kuiper, Agassiz . . .”

“Plenty named after Jews. Why not Muslims?”

Rosenberg sighed heavily. “Perhaps it’s because there are so few Muslim scientists?”

They had reached the camper’s airlock hatch. As he pecked at the keypad to open it, Sal countered, “Oh yeah? What about Abdus Salam? He won the Nobel Prize, for chrissake. What about Alhazen or Avicenna or Omar Khayyam? He was a great astronomer, you know.”

“Oh, spare me,” Rosenberg muttered.

“It’s anti-Islamic prejudice,” Sal said as he climbed up into the coffin-sized airlock and sealed the hatch, leaving Rosenberg standing outside by the silent robotic rover.

“By the well-known Jewish cabal,” Rosenberg retorted, his voice sounding close to exasperation in Sal’s clip-on earphone.

“You said that, I didn’t.”

Once they had wormed out of their suits and vacuumed most of the dust off them, they went up to the camper’s front end and sat at the padded seats. The faint pungent tang of ozone penetrated even up to the cockpit, baked out of the superoxides in the dust by the heat of the camper’s interior.

Hasdrubal sat in the driver’s seat, Rosenberg beside him. Through the curving windshield they could see the crater, as inert and uncooperative as ever. Both men were unshaven: Rosenberg’s once-neat little goatee looked decidedly ragged, Hasdrubal’s jaw was covered in dark fuzz.

As they checked the instruments, Sal muttered, “The heat flow’s there, goddammit. Why don’t she blow?”

“Not enough heat to melt the permafrost, obviously,” said Rosenberg.

“Oughtta be. Look at the numbers.”

Rosenberg sighed again. “Science, my friend, is the difference between what you think ought to be and what actually is.”

Sal nodded reluctant agreement. “It’s a perverse universe.”

“It is indeed.” Rosenberg started out of his seat. “Let’s get some lunch. I’m famished.”

Hasdrubal watched him head back to the minuscule galley built into the camper’s curving bulkhead, then turned back to stare out the windshield again. Come on, goddammit, he urged silently. I know you’re gonna blow, why not do it while I’m watchin’? Why not let me see what you can do?

But the crater remained silent, inactive.

Sonofabitch, Sal cursed fervently.

Suddenly a bright streak arched across the sky. A sonic boom pinged weakly in the thin Martian air.

“Hey, there’s a ship comin’ in,” Hasdrubal called back to the galley.

Rosenberg barely looked up from the sandwiches he was making. “It must be the flight that’s bringing Waterman in,” he said.