The Martian Race (24 page)

What had it come to? Anything?

18

JANUARY 19,2018

S
HE WOKE TO THE BITING TANG OF BLACK
C
OLOMBIAN PERKING IN THE
pot, the scent mingling with a buttery aroma of pancakes, the sizzle of bacon in its lake of fat, all lacing in their steamy collaboration to make a perfect moist morning—

And then she snapped awake, really awake—on the hard rover bunk, hugging herself in her thermoelectric blanket. Once all her waking dreams had been about sex; now they were about food. She wasn't getting enough of either, especially not since Viktor's ankle.

The sprain would heal by the time they were on the long glide Earthward; their rations would not improve until they were back eating steak. She pushed the thought of meat out of her mind and sat up. First feelers of ruddy dawn laced a wisp of carbon dioxide cirrus high up; good. Today she got to burrow, at last.

“Hey Marc! I'll start the coffee.”

No dallying over breakfast, though the hard cold that came through the rover walls made her shiver. She peered out the viewport as she munched a quick-heat breakfast bar. They would run on in-suit rations today, no returning to the Spartan comforts of the rover.

By the early pink glow the cable rigs still looked secure, anchored to the rover's twin winches, which revved up nicely with a thin electrical whine. Marc didn't trust the soil here to hold, based on some nasty close calls. So first they arranged cross-struts of monofilament cabling, to take lateral shear as they went down the steep incline. She helped drive into the loose soil a Y-brace that would keep their lines from scraping on the rim.

Care taken now would pay off in speed down below. They each had a separate winch and driver, rugged and light. Metal cable was much too heavy to fly to Mars, and not necessary under the lighter gravity. So far the peroxide dust did not seem to have affected the tough fibers. So far.

The first part was easy, just backing over. She always felt a bit funny, stepping backwards down a steep drop. They had practiced in Nevada deserts, but here the utterly unknown was at her back, where she couldn't see it. A ruddy sunup was just breaking in pink streamers across the distant hills. Shadows the color of dried blood stretched across the hummocked land.

At the rim the rock was smooth, and this time, dry. There was no trace of the ice and intriguing organic scum she had harvested with Viktor only a week earlier. Any vapor from the vent had evaporated away. The Martian atmosphere was an infinite sponge.

The vent snaked around and steepened as the pale light of late dawn from above lost out to the gloom. The rock walls were smooth and eight meters wide.

“Big hole,” she said, “once you get inside.”

“Promising,” Marc allowed. “Gotta be cautious about geology we don't understand yet.”

They reeled themselves down, letting the winches do the work. Quickly they reached a wide platform and the passage broadened further. Every ten meters down they checked to be sure the cable was not getting fouled. They were both clipped to it and had to time their movements to keep from getting snarls.

Cautiously they edged along the ledge, headlamps stabbing into the darkness. She was trying to peer ahead but her eyes were cloudy for some reason. She checked her faceplate but there was no condensate on it; the little suit circulators took care of that, even in the cold of full Martian night. Still, the glow from Marc's suit dimmed.

“Marc, having trouble seeing you. Your lamp die?”

“Thought I was getting fogged. Here—” He clambered over on the steep slope of the ledge and shone his handbeam into her face. “No wonder. There're drops of something all over your faceplate and helmet. Looks like water drops!”

“Water … ?”

“We're in a fog!” He was shouting.

She saw it then, a slow, rising mist in the darkness. “Vapor on Mars?”

“A water-ice blend, I'd say. Condenses out pretty fast, see?” White crusts coated nearby rocks.

“Not pure water.”

“No, probably hydrogen sulfide and stuff, too.”

She wanted to snap her fingers, but of course her gloves stopped her. “Yes! It could be a fog desert in here.”

“A what?”

“Ever been out in a serious fog? There's not much water falling, but you get soaked anyway. There are deserts where it doesn't rain for years, like the Namib and the coast of Baja California. Plants and animals living there have to trap the fog to get water.”

She thought quickly, trying to use what she knew to think about this place. In fact, frogs and toads in any desert exploited a temperature differential to get water out of the air even without a fog. When they came up out of their burrows at night they were cooler than the surrounding air. Water in the air condensed on their skin, which was especially thin and permeable.

Julia peered at the thin mist. “Are you getting a readout of the temperature? What's it been doing since we started down?”

He fumbled at his waist pack for the thermal probe, switched it to readout mode. “Minus fourteen, not bad.” He thumbed for the memory and nodded. “It's been climbing some, jumped a few minutes ago. Hmm. It's warmer since the fog moved in.”

They reached the end of the ledge, which fell away into impenetrable black. “Come on, follow the evidence,” she said, playing out cable through her clasps. Here the low gravity was a big help. She could support her weight easily with one hand on the cable grabber, while she guided down the rock wall with the other.

“Evidence of what?” Marc called, grunting as he started down after her.

“A better neighborhood than we've been living in.”

“Sure is wetter. Look at the walls.”

In her headlamp the brown-red rock had a sheen. “Ice! Enough water to stick! Last week some of this stuff was all the way up to the entrance.”

“I can see fingers of fog going by me. Who woulda thought?”

She let herself down slowly, watching the rock walls, and that was why she saw the subtle turn in color. The rock was browner here, and when she reached out to touch it there was something more, a thin coat. “Mat! There's a mat here.”

“Algae?”

“Could be.”

“Hot damn!”

She let herself down further so that he could reach that level. The brown scum got thicker before her eyes. “I bet it comes from below.”

She contained her excitement as she got a good shot of the scum with the recorder and then took a sample in her collector rack. Warmer fog containing inorganic nutrients would settle as drops on these cooler mats. Just like the toads emerging from their burrows in the desert?

Analogies were useful, but data ruled, she reminded herself. Stick to observing. Every moment here will get rehashed a millionfold by every biologist on Earth … and the one on Mars, too.

Marc hung above her, turning in a slow gyre to survey the whole vent. “Can't make out the other side real well, but it looks brown, too.”

“The vent narrows below.” She reeled herself down.

“How does it survive here? What's the nutrient source?”

“The slow-motion upwelling, like the undersea hydrothermal vents on Earth.”

Marc followed her down. “Those black smokers?”

She had never done undersea work, but everyone was aware of the sulfur-based life at the hydrothermal vents. Meter-long tube worms and ghostly crabs. They harvested from the bacteria that existed on chemical energy in the warm volcanic upwelling. The vent communities on Earth were not large, a matter of meters wide before the inexorable cold and dark of the ocean bottom made life impossible.

She wondered how far away the source was from here. Kilometers?

Down. Slow, careful, watch your feet.

In the next fifty meters the scum thickened but did not seem to change. The brown filmy growth glistened beneath her headlamp as she studied it.

Poked it. Wondered at it.

“Marsmat,” she christened it. “Like the algal mats on Earth, a couple of billion years ago.”

Marc said wryly, puffing, “We spent months and only found fossils, up there in the dead lake beds. The real thing was hiding from us down here.”

Ten meters more. Reeling out the impossibly thin black cable, the life cord.

The walls got closer and the mist cloaked them now in a lazy cloud. “You were right,” Marc said as they rested on a meter-wide shelf. They were halfway through their oxygen cycle time. “Mars made it to the pond scum stage, and it's still here.”

“Not electrifying for anybody but a biologist, but better than just fossils. This is more than just algal scum. It implies a community of organisms, several different kinds of microbes aggregated in, okay, slime—a biofilm.”

She peered down. “You said the heat gradient is milder here than on Earth, right?”

“Sure. Colder planet anyway, and lesser pressure gradient because of the lower gravity. On Earth, one klick deep in a mine it's already fifty-six degrees C. So?”

“So microbes could survive farther down than the couple of klicks they manage on Earth. They're stopped by high heat.”

“Maybe.”

“Let's go see.”

“Now? You want to go down there now?”

“When else?”

“We're at oxy turnaround point.”

“There's lots in the rover.”

“How far down do you want to go?”

“As far as possible. There may be no tomorrow. Look, we're here now, let's just
do
it.”

He looked up at his readouts. “Let's start back while we're deciding.”

“You go get the tanks. I'll stay here.”

“Split up?”

“Just for a while.”

“Mission protocol—”

“Screw protocol. This is important.”

“So's getting back alive.”

“I'm not going to die here. I'll go down maybe fifty meters, tops. Got to take samples from different spots.”

“Viktor said—”

“Just go get the tanks.”

He looked unhappy. “You're not going far, are you?”

“No.”

“Okay then. I'll lower them down to the first ledge if you'll come back that far to pick them up. Then I'll come down too.”

“Okay, sounds fine. Let's move.”

He turned around and started hauling himself up the steep wall. “Thirty minutes, then, at the first ledge.”

“Yeah, fine.”

“Julia …”

“See you in thirty minutes,” she said brightly, already moving away.

Into utter darkness. Marc's helmet light receded quickly. The slope below was easy and she inched down along a narrow shelf. Paying out the cable took her attention. Methodical, careful, that's the ticket. Especially if you're risking your neck deep in a gloomy hole on an alien world.

Despite the risks, she felt a curious lightness of spirit—she was free. Free on Mars. Maybe for the last time. Free to explore what was undoubtedly the greatest puzzle of her scientific life. She couldn't be cautious now.

Her brother Bill flashed into her mind. Marc reminded her of him, but was much more wary. Bill had taken life at a furious pace, cramming each day full, exuding boundless energy. They went on exploring trips together as children, later as nascent biologists. He was unstoppable: up and out early, roaming well after dark. There was never enough time in the day for everything he wanted to see. “Slow down, there's always tomorrow,” people would tell him.

But his internal clock had served him well, in a way. He was cut down at age twenty-two when his motorcycle slid into a truck one rainy night when sensible people were home, warm and dry. Looking around the church at his funeral, Julia felt he'd lived more than most of the middle-aged mourners. Bill would've approved of her right now, she was sure.

A flicker from her handbeam brought her back. She looked down, shook it. The beam brightened again. Damn, not now.

“Marc! Bring some batteries, too. My handbeam's getting feeble.”

A long pause. Had he heard? She relied upon the signal going up the thin wire in her monofilament cable, then getting rebroadcast from the rover to him. A useful backup for times like this, when they were out of line of sight. But did the connection still hold, after 500 days exposed to the brutal weathering here?

“Yeah, copy. Had to get up that last long climb.”

“Easy does it.”

The harness and yoke under her arms was making it impossible to move around. She wrestled it off and held it in one hand while she worked her way around a protrusion. It felt good not to be tied up. She was getting the knack of moving down here. Slow, steady, letting her eyes pick out telling details.

The mat was thicker here, as she'd guessed it would be closer to the elusive source.

She landed on a wide ledge and moved briskly across it, mindful of time passing. The floor was slippery with Marsmat but rough enough so she could find footing. Sorry, she said silently to the mat,
but I've got to step on you.

Her handbeam flickered again, died. She shook it, leaned forward to look at it with the headlamp, then felt a sudden hard blow to her forehead.

The lamp went out.

She fell backwards. It was like a dream, plenty of time but nothing to grab.

Slow-motion, into the Martian darkness.

19

JANUARY 19,2018

S
HE
B
ECAME
A
WARE
O
F
A F
AINT
T
INNY
C
ONVERSATION
I
NTERSPERSED
with crackles.

Ghost voices … sounded like … she concentrated … Viktor … and Marc.

Of course! It was her suit comm. How
dopey of her not to recognize them right away!
Now what were they saying? Something about Airbus and a landing. More crackles. She was too far underground to hear clearly. She gave up. Marc
would tell her later.

She lay there, waiting for the surprise to go away, automatically checking her suit readouts. All normal, no damage. She'd dropped the handbeam in the fall.
Must've run into an overhang.
Utter pitch dark.

Where was her damned handbeam?
There was a faint glow to her left.
That must be it.