Marsquake! (12 page)

“Me either,” Jenny said. “Well, that’s it. Unless we can figure out some way to convince the council, they’re not about to let Sean out of quarantine.”

“And I’d bet you that
Magellan
fills up with people running away from Mars,” Roger added gloomily. “And then the
Argosy
will be back a few months later to take another six hundred. In three years nobody will be left. With the possible exception of the five patients in the quarantine ward.”

“I don’t know what to do,” Jenny confessed. “I can see the problem, but not the solution. But I do know who can figure out problems like this.”

“Who?” Elizabeth asked.

“Sean.”

Patrick whistled. “Tall order, Jenny,” he said. “I mean, I respect Sean. He might even be able to come up with an idea. But this isn’t something you could talk to him about on the computer system—someone might eavesdrop. So how are you going to get in touch with him?”

“Leave that to me,” Jenny said decisively.

“What seems to be
your problem?” Carla Meyer, one of the doctors in the temporary hospital dome, asked Jenny.

“I’m not sure,” Jenny said. “I feel sort of … different.”

“Ache anywhere?” Carla took out a small computer
chart and began to open Jenny’s file. “You got a clean bill of health at your last checkup.”

“I’m not hurting,” Jenny said. “Just the opposite. I’ve noticed that I’m feeling a lot better than I used to. Since I was on the expedition to the lava tubes with Sean Doe—”

“Let me do some tests,” Carla said hastily.

Jenny smiled. “That would be fine.”

Two hours later Carla was in an online conference with Dr. Boone over in the quarantine wing. “What are her symptoms?” Boone asked.

“Nothing too definite,” Carla said. “But look at this. Her blood pressure is lower than it was. Her respiration is lower than it was too. Temperature is stable. Her records indicate that she had a small scar at the base of her left thumb. It’s completely gone, not a trace of it—”

“That sounds like she’s picked up the microorganism all right,” Boone said. “Better get her over here as soon as possible.”

Jenny took the news very well. Dr. Boone admitted
her and said, “Infection with this organism is very, very hard to confirm. We haven’t been able to isolate it in the bloodstream of any of the others so far. In fact, the best test we have is to inject you with a few nanobots—the run-of-the-mill diagnostic type that look at such things as cell chemistry. They ordinarily have a life of three days in the bloodstream. If they disappear before that, you’ve got the same thing Sean and the others have.”

“All right,” she said.

According to the computer that monitored them, every single nanobot injected into her bloodstream stopped transmitting within an hour.

That afternoon, for the first time in weeks, Jenny got to eat dinner with Sean.

“You did what?” Sean
demanded, not sure he could believe his ears.

“Shh,” Jenny said. “I tricked them. Or Nickie and
I together did. It was easy. What we did was to change a few things on my last medical report. We made my blood pressure a little higher, my respiration and pulse rate a little higher, and we said I had a scar in a place where I’ve never really had one. So when I had my examination this time, it looked as if my symptoms were similar to yours.”

“Did they do the nanobot test?”

“Sure they did,” Jenny said. “But it’s a funny thing about nanobots. Computers can’t track them if they’re given frequencies that don’t quite match the bots’ transmitters.”

Sean groaned. “Of all the dumb things—”

Jenny’s face turned red. “Don’t you dare call me dumb! I had to get in to see you, because you’re the only one who can come up with some way to force the colonists to see that what they’re doing to you is wrong!”

Sean got up and paced the floor. “I wish I knew how to do that! As far as Dr. Boone can tell, this little critter is some kind of symbiote. It doesn’t make its host sick. The host gives it a place to live, and it
comes in and … redecorates. Makes things better. None of us are suffering at all, and we’re all in a lot better physical shape than ever before. The bugs haven’t eaten my brain. I’m doing just as well on all the tests as I ever did. I was very slightly farsighted, but now I’ve got perfect vision. Mickey ought to get infected—he’s always talking about how he’d like to throw away his specs! But how do I convince everyone else? That’s the big problem. People are scared of us. I don’t know, maybe they expect us to sprout hair and fangs and run around on all fours howling at the moon—”

“Moons,” Jenny corrected automatically. “Mars has two.”

“I know, I know,” Sean said grumpily. He sighed. “Okay, I see the problem. It’s basically the same as it always was. Us against them. The rest of the colony are the
us
. They think anyone with this Martian bug in his body is one of
them
. But we haven’t really changed, not in any important way. We’re just better equipped now to live on Mars than we used to be, that’s all.”

Jenny was lost in thought. “You know,” she said slowly, “I just thought of something. I wonder if Boone’s considered it. The difference between prokaryotes and eukaryotes.”

Sean glared at her. “What are you talking about?”

Jenny glanced up. “It’s an old puzzle. The first living cells on Earth were prokaryotic bacteria. Do you know what that means?”

Sean shook his head.

“We had it in biology,” Jenny complained. “Whatever that bug has done, it hasn’t improved your memory! Okay, prokaryotic bacteria are small and simple. They existed on Earth as far back as three and a half billion years ago. Their cells don’t have nuclei—”

“Oh, right,” Sean said. “I do remember. Eukaryotic cells are much larger, and they have a nucleus. They showed up about a billion and a half years ago. So what?”

“So a lot of scientists have speculated that the nuclei of eukaryotic cells started out as some kind of virus. But what if the virus didn’t come from Earth?
What if it was the kind of bug that’s in your system now? That might be why it can affect you. You’d expect the biology to be so different that a Martian germ would have no effect on a human. But if the nuclei of our cells is related to Martian life—”

“Wow,” Sean said. “But how did this thing get to Earth a billion and a half years ago?”

“I told you, scientists have found traces of things that look like bacteria in Earth meteorites that got blasted off the surface of Mars by volcanoes or asteroid impacts.”

“Boy, wouldn’t that be strange,” Sean said. “All that time ago a meteorite hits the Earth, some kind of weird Martian bug hooks up with Earth life-forms, and
boom!
We’re all in the same … boat.”

Jenny tilted her head. “Sean, are you getting an idea?”

“I just may be,” Sean said. “I just may be.”

It took another week.
Then one morning Dr. Simak, her expression grim, addressed everyone on Marsport. “I have just received news that is of concern to us all,” she told the colonists. “The council debated the wisdom of even making this public, but in the end, I feel we owe it to all of you who have fought so hard to keep the colony going to tell you everything.

“According to information we have received, the primary water-distribution unit for the colony has been sabotaged. The same Martian microorganism that has infected six members of our colony has been introduced to the water supply. By now, every person in the colony must have the microorganisms in his or her body.

“This is dire news. The relief ship from Earth, the
Magellan,
is due in little more than a month. Under the circumstances, I don’t believe the
Magellan
would take aboard anyone from Marsport. We are, in effect, all quarantined.

“That being so, I have issued a directive to the hospital wing. The six colonists identified as victims of infection are being released. There is no point in keeping them separate if we are all carrying the microorganism. We are investigating now to discover who contaminated the water supply.”

Oddly, none of the
Asimov Project kids panicked. Instead they threw a “Welcome Back” party for Sean and Jenny—and they all bubbled over with news. “The whole
basin
is full of these Martian plants! They’re amazing! They don’t burn up in heat, and they don’t freeze when the temperature drops all the way down to—”

“Hey, Sean, you think I’ll be able to throw my glasses away anytime soon? They’re kind of a pain, to tell you the truth—”

“Man, we are gonna be in so much trouble! But hey, it’s great to have you back!”

“Rather exciting, isn’t it? You know, everyone’s really a Martian now! No one can leave—I mean, not even the Lunatics would take us!”

“Hey, hey,” Sean said, laughing. “Come on. We’ve still got a long way to go before we’re out of the woods. Let’s give it some time to work, though, and then we’ll see how we’re doing.”

The nanobot test seemed to show that
everyone
was affected. Nobody felt much different. None of them had the dramatic changes in metabolism that Sean and Dr. Miles showed. Dr. Boone confessed that he was stumped. He told the council, “The only thing we can figure is that somehow this thing is fantastically adaptive. The first carriers were affected the most because it was unfamiliar with our physiology. Now it seems to be making minimal changes.”

Rormer, who had become a representative to the council, demanded, “How can that be? What, do these microscopic bits of life have some kind of
telepathy
?
Do they somehow
communicate
with each other?”

Dr. Boone had no answer.

The Asimov Project kids were everywhere, and they eavesdropped on a lot of conversations.

“How are you feeling?”

“Me? Very well. Strange, isn’t it?”

“Who put the stuff in the water? That’s what I want to know.”

“I hear they just got a tip-off that it had happened. Nobody knows how—”

“Well, it doesn’t seem to be hurting us.”

“Did you hear? The Kelly couple are expecting a baby! The first baby to be born on Mars!”

“It will be infected too—”

“What difference does it make?”

“No one can ever go back to Earth now!”

“Do you want to go back to Earth?”

“Well, no, but that’s not the point—”

The hospital wing, no longer divided, kept busy for days and days. No one felt very sick, but everyone wanted to be checked, just in case. Some hypochondriacs
complained of strange pains and odd feelings, but these passed. People adjusted.

The growth of Martian life in the lava tubes exploded. Traces of green appeared at the lower depths of Mariner Valley, the deepest canyon on Mars. At its floor, the air pressure was higher than at any other point on the surface. As the Martian winter ebbed away toward spring, delicate lines of living green began to show where ice crystals formed.

Satellite images of the North Pole showed that as the polar cap melted, a wave of green began to sweep southward. Mists rolled in the thickening Martian atmosphere, filling craters. There were unconfirmed reports of snow. No natural snow had fallen on Mars in millions of years.

And the
Magellan
came closer, ever closer.

The ship from Luna
entered Mars orbit a few days before the official beginning of the Martian spring. Sean and the other Asimov Project kids met again.
“This is it,” he said. “Anyone going to chicken out?”

No one did, though some of them had nervous, frozen grins.

“Nickie, we need one more miracle from you. Think you can do it?” Jenny asked.

“Watch me,” Nickie said. “Of course, it may be the
last
thing that I do.”

“Okay, everyone,” Sean said. “This evening at eighteen hundred hours. Wish us luck.”

“Oh, I do,” Roger said fervently. “Believe me, I do!”

Just at six o’clock Dina Brandis’s image appeared on every active viewscreen in the colony. “Good afternoon, everyone,” she began.

And then the picture changed. Now it showed a classroom, and standing in the classroom were all of the Asimov Project kids, nineteen of them. The twentieth and last, Nickie, sat off to the right at a computer. Sean and Jenny stood a little ahead of the others. “Hi, everyone,” Sean said. “We’ve overridden Dina’s signal this afternoon. We’ve got a confession
to make and something important to tell you. Please make sure that everyone you know is watching. We’ll wait three minutes.”

Nickie looked up from her computer console. “Okay. I’ve killed the sound. Are we going to go through with this, you guys?”

“Bloody well have to, don’t we?” Roger said. “No choice, I’d say.”

“Are the doors locked?” Jenny asked.

Nickie nodded. “Top-security lockdown on the whole wing. It’ll take them an hour to figure out what I’ve done and fix it. We’re safe for that long. By then the word will be out.”

“For better or worse,” Jenny said. “Oh, I’m nervous.

“I’m not exactly calm myself,” Sean admitted.

“Hey, you’re the Martian superman,” Mickey told him. Mickey, despite everything, still needed his glasses.

“Okay,” Nickie said. “Coming up on three minutes. In ten seconds. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five.”

Sean counted the rest off silently to himself. Then,
when Nickie gave him a nod, he said, “I don’t know how many of you realize this, but today’s an anniversary. One Martian year ago today, I came to Mars. There were other colonists with me. I didn’t know you very well back then, but since that time, I’ve come to be friends with most of you. And with these guys here, the Asimov Project students. You might remember that when Mars got cut off from Earth, we all decided to stay here. We’re still here, and we’re staying.”

Jenny stepped forward. “I’ve got a confession to make. Everyone on Mars thinks he or she is infected with a Martian microorganism. Well, you’re not. Sean has it, and four other people that we know about definitely have it. But it isn’t catching, at least it isn’t unless you try really hard to get it. And the doctors are convinced that it’s harmless if you do catch it.”