Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (12 page)

              “If our first strategy is to detect and, if possible, annihilate these rocks, the second strategy is an alternative in case the first one fails—arrange a planet in the solar system that can receive human life if Earth becomes uninhabitable, be it due to impact with a cosmic body or an internal phenomenon on our planet like what happened during the Permian.

              “Of the choices at hand, Mars seems to be the best candidate. Venus’s atmosphere is too dense and its clouds are sulfuric acid. It’s too hot, in addition to having a day that is one-year long. The Moon will never have an atmosphere and it will share Earth’s destiny. Jupiter and Saturn’s great satellites, like Ganymede, Europa and Titan, are very far away. Jupiter is at the end of the world, seven hundred million kilometers away and Saturn is even beyond the end of the world, at more than a billion kilometers. Now... Mars is not perfect, but it has water, a day equal to ours and at sixty million kilometers, it’s a close neighbor. It’s freezing because it has a rarified atmosphere and that is what we have to improve.

              “In order to transform Mars into a habitable planet, we can take various paths. These stratagems have one thing in common: living beings are indispensable for the new planet and here I am thinking about microbes and plants. Plants will take on the principal role since they last longer, consume little energy, are easily modified without constituting a threat and improve the environment where they are implanted in two ways: they diminish the carbon dioxide that is in excess in Mars’s thin atmosphere, transforming it into oxygen, like what happens on Earth. They also contribute to increasing the Martian atmosphere’s mass, increasing its pressure.

              “I’ll tell you something of my experience in the greenhouse we built at Mariah’s house and in which we are trying to prepare plants that cannot survive on Earth but that would survive on Mars. Worse than the cold—and I can guarantee you that Mars is cold, worse than the lack of oxygen and I can guarantee you that walking around with an oxygen tank on your back is complicated, what is worse is the lack of pressure.

              “Humans need water because we are made principally of water and that is not lacking on Mars. But water must be in a liquid state and to keep it a liquid at our normal temperature in order to not boil at thirty-seven degrees, having minimum atmospheric pressure is indispensable,” Sofia Suren continued.

              “On Earth, it gets colder, there is less oxygen and water boils at a lower temperature as we increase our altitude. We can go to the top of Mt. Everest because, in spite of everything, there is still temperature and pressure that a specially trained person can survive for some time—hours. They can spend hours there, but not days. Above eight kilometers is the so-called zone of death for common mortals, even the young.

              “There is, however, an altitude at which the pressure is so low that water boils at thirty-seven degrees. That altitude is nineteen kilometers and is called the Armstrong limit. No one can survive above that limit for even a minute. It is not a question of training. If Everest had an altitude of twenty kilometers, no one could go there without a spacesuit because his blood would boil, so let me simplify this.

              At this point, a young man from twelfth grade football team, Ted Sullivan, slightly sweaty, commented, “Yes, please simplify it because I’m looking at you and my blood is already boiling despite feeling enormous pressure in my heart.” It was a signal that Sofia was spending too much time on Mars. She quickly came back to Earth, responding, “It’s not your blood that is boiling, son. It’s other bodily fluids. You have to pay attention to that when you’re next to people.”

              “Oh, mermaid, careful. You’re approaching the Sullivan limit,” the boy warned.

              “Okay, Sullivan, you’ve already said what you practiced saying at home before coming here. It turned out well, but you’re done,” Sofia said. The principal moved in his chair and the boy remained quiet.

              “Think about Mars as just another continent,” the young scientist challenged them. “When the red planet had oceans, the amount of free land was perhaps equal to the surface of Asia and the Americas combined. It’s merely one more continent waiting for us.

              “So, what are we doing in the greenhouse on Violet Street? We’re preparing plants to be able to survive on Mars and transform its atmosphere into one more like our own. We pay a price the closer we get to our objective: we come up with plants that cannot survive on the Earth,” Sofia forced. “Remember that, in order to grow, plants need specific conditions. Sahara Desert plants will not survive in a Brazilian rainforest, and neither these nor those would survive in the northern United States. What’s dangerous about bringing plants from the Sahara Desert to our garden? For the plants, it’s very dangerous—they won’t survive, but, for us, there is no danger. We’d only have more garbage to carry out.

              “Mariah, who you can find in a past yearbook at this fantastic school, is going to explain now why we brought the least sophisticated part of our research to this city and why, sometimes, you see trucks painted with those famous overlapping open circles that mean biological hazard and then we’ll willingly answer whatever questions you might have.”

              The public applauded and Mariah Dexter came forward. Sofia Suren had dealt with the most global part and she now had to leave them unconcerned, notably Dr. Radcliff and her questions about the safety of the greenhouse’s effluents, specifically the permeability of the soil, contamination of the lake and the stability of the mutagens used. It went well. No one imagined a young woman so simple and well known would harm the neighborhood where she also lived.

              At the end of the conference, the scientists were surrounded by students, teachers and by several residents, including Dr. Radcliff. While they exchanged greetings and a few words, they saw Dr. Crane’s very tall figure in the background.

              “We didn’t know you were coming,” Sofia said, smiling. “You make us feel very important. Thanks.”

              People looked at that charismatic individual who they didn’t know.

              “We liked your presentation very much,” Crane said, smiling paternally. “It’s difficult to perceptibly translate what we do in science and explain our work’s usefulness to people. You have a talent for both things. Congratulations.”

              It wasn’t clear if Crane was using we as the majestic plural or as a true plural and, in the latter case, who were “we”? Could it be NASA?

              “Look who’s here,” Mariah whispered to Sofia, pointing at a young, very tall blond man with lots of freckles and wearing glasses who was approaching them.

              “My God, it’s
Eric
. What am I going to do?” Sofia asked.

              “Give him a kiss that will transform him into Prince Charming,” her friend suggested.

              “Go very far away and die, Mariah. You talk to distract him,” Sofia said.

              “He brought you a Christmas present. He’s the greatest,” Mariah whispered. “What could it be? A shredder for canceled cards? A robot that plays chess with its feet?”

              “Hello, Mariah. Hello Suren,” Eric greeted them.

              “Hello, Eric,” Mariah said. “Is that for me?”

              “No, it’s for Suren.”

              “Thank you,” Sofia accepted. “I don’t have anything for you. What is it? Can I open it?” she asked.

              “No, open it at Christmas. I made it,” Eric clarified.

              “Well,” Sofia said awkwardly.

              They looked around. Dr. Crane had walked away. They went to the car and opened the package. It was a five hundred-million-pixel digital camera capable of picking up even gamma rays and was resistant up to at least two hundred degrees below zero. A card wished her a Merry Christmas and said the camera could be used in the Martian greenhouse.

              “It’s a declaration of love,” Mariah said.

              “That part, I noticed. But why a heavy camera that is as ugly as the devil. Is it so I can take selfies in the Martian greenhouse?”

              “It’s better than the last one, the periodic table in classic Greek. And his parents’ bank account is still lovely,” Mariah joked.

              “I’ll pass.”

              “You have to get over that, Sofia.”

              “I’ve tried, Mariah. It’s not easy.”

              “Now it is. Give him the present back,” Mariah responded.

              “I’m going to feel like a witch.”

              At that point, Dr. Crane appeared, knocking on the window.

              “Hello, Uncle,” they both greeted him. “We lost sight of you.”

              “I didn’t want to interrupt earlier, but I’m going to extend you an invitation. Do you want to visit my lab at NASA? I’ll give you a lift in my airplane.

              “Excellent,” Mariah said. “When?”

              “The day after tomorrow. You’ll be back home in time for Christmas,” the professor promised.

* * *

Crane’s laboratory looked like an airport hangar. There were dozens of engineers and millions of dollars of investment there. Sofia took Eric’s camera to try out, but NASA did not allow photographs. The professor was interested in the instrument and asked them to tell the young man to call him. When they reached his office, they took several selfies of the three together.

              One of the things that surprised the young scientists was the international nomenclature in which Crane was involved. He was a man of a thousand hats. All types of identified geological structures on the planets and asteroids were the subject of proposals to name them that later had to be approved internationally. Crane, due to his classical and scientific culture, had been representing the United States in this consensus seeking organization for several months. For him it was a hobby. Sofia and Mariah were literally overwhelmed by that place’s technological sophistication. It was something epic that made them feel small but, upon taking their leave, Crane told them, “This seems great, but it’s irrelevant when compared to just one truly good original idea. At times a great leap is taken in a stairwell.” They didn’t believe him.

              At Mariah’s house, Sofia reviewed the photos taken with Eric’s camera. They were better than usual. The colors were excellent and the images had so many pixels that you could easily zoom in on any detail, keeping the high definition. If only the boy were as interesting as his camera.

              Instead of going to the Martian greenhouse with her friend, she spent the evening looking at the photos of Crane’s office. How had Anthony Crane reached that level in his career without a large number of publications or patents? His work probably remained in the sphere of industrial secrets. How had he found time to feed his classical culture? Many of the words Crane used in his nomenclature hobby were unknown to her, originating in dead languages. Sofia digitalized the photographs and ran a character recognition program, followed by automatic translation. To her surprise, the word Mariah appeared several times in diverse languages. Mount Moriah, Myr, Meryet, the Latin phrase Stella Maris, among others. Sofia was apprehensive. Crane was trying to give her friend’s name to geological structures in the universe. It was clearly inappropriate; it seemed like an obsession or a passion. She decided not to say anything to Mariah about it, but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like a pathological fixation to her. “This Uncle is nuts,” she typed distractedly on the computer. “Or it’s a disease,”
she wrote. On the computer’s monitor, an analysis appeared that said,
“Zero coincidences and one synonym: disease = virus” “Virus?”
she pondered and typed virus. On the screen she saw,
“Robot Virus with Organic Profile.”

      What could this be?
Sofia thought.
This doesn’t seem to be astronomic nomenclature.
She looked for this expression in the photograph and discovered it was the title of a work, resting among pages spread about a side desk that appeared in the selfie. The author’s name was illegible, but the global project was “Advanced Computer Automatism.” Sofia amplified those pages in the high resolution photograph and corrected the effect of having been taken at an angle. She recognized that it was software.

     That night, she slept at the Dexters. It was restless sleep. In the morning, she decided to return the present to Eric to not give him hope regarding her feelings. Eric realized what she was trying to say by returning it. Sofia told him of NASA’s interest in his camera and gave him Prof. Crane’s number. She showed him the strange software she had digitalized and asked him if he could figure out what it was and to send her any idea he had. He responded that if she changed her mind, she knew where his house was. Two days later, Eric sent her an email that Sofia printed and then deleted. To Eric, it appeared to be a computer virus that worked like a game, making black billiard balls appear on the infected computer’s monitor whenever it used equations having the inverse of the square of the distance or if it observed a mirror, among other variables that he could not figure out, since the software was incomplete. If she gave him more data, perhaps he could help.