Return to Mars

by Ben Bova

  Olympus Mons was nearly thirty thousand meters tall, more than three times taller than Mt. Everest.

  “Might’ve been wind shear,” Rodriguez guessed, “but up at that altitude the air’s so thin it shouldn’t be a problem.”

  “How long has the plane been out of contact?” Jamie asked.

  Rodriguez glanced at the digital clock set into the comm console. “Fifty-three minutes, fifty-four.”

  Jamie let out his breath. “Well, we’ve got number one, and a backup in storage, at least.”

  “Only the one backup.”

  “We’ll have to use it if number two is down.”

  “Yeah, I know. But I don’t want to send the backup out to the mountain until I figure out what went wrong with number two.”

  Jamie pushed himself to his feet. Looking down at Rodriguez’s somber face once more, he grasped the younger man’s sturdy shoulder.

  “Don’t blame yourself for this, Tomas. It isn’t your fault.”

  The astronaut shook his head sadly. “How do you know?”

  For the first time in almost two weeks, all eight of the explorers sat together for dinner. Trumball monopolized that conversation with his plans for recovering the Pathfinder/Sojourner hardware at Ares Vallis. He and Rodriguez got into a heated discussion on how reliable the backup fuel generator’s landing engines were.

  “I don’t care what the computer simulations say,” Rodriguez said, with unaccustomed fervor. “You’re gonna be putting your necks on the line based on what some engineer assumed and put into the simulation program.”

  Jamie knew that the astronaut was feeling the shock of losing the unmanned soarplane.

  “You mean,” Trudy Hall corrected, “what some programmer assumed out of the engineer’s assumptions.”

  “And they both worked for the company that built the rocket engines,” Stacy Dezhurova pointed out.

  “Aw, come on,” Trumball disagreed. “We’ve got test data, for chrissakes. They fired those engines dozens of times.”

  Jamie let them argue. Let Tomas work off some steam about the plane. He’s blaming himself for losing it, or at least for not being able to figure out what happened to it. Let him argue and make some points for safety and caution. It’ll do us all some good.

  Jamie had decided to buck the decision on flying the backup generator to Pete Connors and the rocket experts back on Earth. Trumball wasn’t going to go traipsing off to Ares Vallis unless the top experts in the field agreed that the generator could be flown reliably and be positioned where they needed it for the excursion.

  But Dex seemed to have every angle figured out. He’s been working on this plan for a long time, Jamie thought, probably from before we took off from Earth. He’s shrewd, all right. A very clever guy.

  Across the table from Jamie sat Vijay Shektar, as silent as he was. Her eyes were on Trumball, who was putting on an animated defense of his idea against the combined doubts of both the astronauts and Possum Craig.

  Craig’s attitude amused Jamie. He muttered darkly, “Murphy’s Law, Dex: if anything can go wrong, it will. And you’ll be a helluva long way from help when it does.”

  Trumball was utterly undeterred by such cautions. Jamie realized, though, that Craig had hit the sensitive point squarely. Expedition regulations required that no excursion be made so far from base that a backup team could not reach a stranded rover. If Trumball got into difficulties all the way out at Ares Vallis, there would be no way to rescue him.

  Unless Stacy or Rodriguez could fly the rocketplane out to them. Even at that, the plane could only carry two people at a time. We’d need two rescue flights. Dicey, Jamie thought. Very dicey, but just good enough to squeeze through the safety regs. Nodding to himself, Jamie realized again that Dex had worked out every angle of this trek to Ares Vallis.

  Jamie turned his gaze back to Vijay, who was still watching Trumball with an amused half-smile on her lips.

  If Dex wants to risk his ass, so what? Jamie thought. Then he remembered that Dex would not go alone. Too bad, he thought. And immediately felt guilty about it.

  NIGHT: SOL 18

  “… AND THAT’S THE PLAN, DAD,” DEX TRUMBALL SAID INTO THE PIN mike hanging a few millimeters before his lips. “You can start soliciting bids for hardware that’s been sitting on Mars for more than a quarter of a century! Oughtta bring in a few megabucks, huh?”

  Trumball was sitting on the bunk in his quarters, laptop resting on his knees, earplug and microphone connected to the machine. Not that he was afraid of anyone overhearing him, although the privacy walls of these cubicles did not extend to the dome’s ceiling, of course. Nor did he expect a quick reply from his father; the distance to Earth defeated that. Besides, he knew his dad; the old man would want to think this over for a while before answering his son.

  Dex felt quite confident that his father would be impressed with his idea. Retrieving the Pathfinder and its little Sojourner rover would be a masterstroke. He could picture the frenzied bidding by museums and entertainment moguls all around the world. Dad’s got to like it, he told himself. It’s money in the bank.

  Darryl C. Trumball was in his office, talking on the phone with the head of his London office. Real estate values in eastern Europe were nosediving again, and the elder Trumball saw opportunity smiling upon him once more. Buy cheap, sell dear: that had been his guiding principle all his life. It had never failed him.

  One wall of Trumball’s office was a huge window with a sweeping view of Boston harbor. He could make out the masts of Old Ironsides at its pier in Charleston. Trumball tested his eyesight that way, every clear day. The opposite wall was a smart screen that could show panoramic views of anything he chose to look at. He had shown his staff the videos of Mars his son had sent to him personally. They had all been dutifully impressed.

  At the moment most of the smart wall was blank; only the sleekly handsome face of the head of the London office was showing, in one corner.

  “I’m afraid the French are doing their best to make things sticky for us,” said his London office chief, dolefully.

  “In what way?” Trumball asked.

  The man was the picture of u dapper English upper-class type: silver hair, trim mustache, Savile Row suit jacket.

  He replied, “They’ve dug up some rather antique European Union requirements about tax rates on property…”

  As the Londoner spoke, the message light on Trumball’s desktop phone console began to blink. He touched it with the elegant pen he had been twirling nervously in his fingers. The console’s little display screen spelled out: PERSONAL MESSAGE FROM YOUR SON.

  “…so I’m afraid that we’ll either have to deflect the Froggies in some manner or face the prospect of adding a tax surcharge to every—”

  “I’ll have to get back to you on that,” Trumball said abruptly.

  The Englishman looked surprised.

  “Something personal has come up. My son. He’s with the Mars expedition, you know.”

  “It’s not trouble, I hope.”

  “I doubt it. I’ll get back to you. In the meantime, see if there’s a way to sweet-talk the French into seeing things our way.” Sweet talk was Trumball’s term for a bribe.

  The Englishman looked skeptical, but he said, “I’ll look into it.”

  “Good.”

  Trumball cleared the wall screen, then pulled up his son’s message. Dex’s face loomed over him, enormous. Trumball quickly adjusted the size of the image to normal.

  “Dad, I’ve got the deal of the century for you,” Dex began, with a canary-eating grin on his face.

  Trumball listened to his son’s scheme for retrieving the old hardware, thinking that the boy looked thinner than normal. If his mother saw this she’d go into hysterics and want to tell him to eat more and watch his vitamin supplements.

  But he soon forgot about Dex’s physical appearance as his son excitedly unreeled the details of his plan. By god, Trumball thought, the boy’s got a good idea there. I could
get a dozen bidders going for that old junk with a few phone calls. That’s all it’d take. Maybe not even that many. By the end of the day there’d be hundreds of bidders, from every corner of the globe.

  Then a new thought struck him. What if we offered the hardware to the French? They must have some science museum that’d want it. Or the Paris Disney land!

  He laughed out loud. Sweet-talk the French with this old heap of space junk and get them to ease up on the Eastern Europe deal. That’d work! Wait till I tell the London office about it. Show them who’s the man who can solve their problems for them. Tell them their year-end bonuses ought to go to me

  He replayed Dex’s message through from the beginning, then called his resident science advisor, a physicist from MIT whom he kept on retainer. He made two more calls after that, one to the CEO of the firm that made the landing engines for the fuel generator’s rocket vehicle, the other to the mission control people at Tarawa.

  It was dusk by the time Trumball had enough information to make his decision. Only then did he send a message to his son on Mars.

  The next morning Dex had plenty of work to do, cataloguing the rocks and soil samples he had brought back from Tithonium Chasma and testing selected rocks to see if they bore hydrates inside them. Like a surgeon dissecting a tumor, he cut open several rocks with a diamond-bladed saw, then sliced out sections so thin he could see through them.

  Like a surgeon, he had an assistant working with him: Trudy Hall, whose interest in the water content of the rocks was equal to his own. All day they spent in the geology lab, examining the rocks in the scanning gas chromatograph/mass spectrometer. Its miniature laser flashed a microscopic amount of the rock sample into vapor, which the GCMS resolved into its constituent molecules.

  By the end of their day, the two of them were tired and aching from bending over lab equipment for long hours without a break. Yet Trudy was practically prancing as they left the geology lab and headed for the galley. Dex was grinning from ear to ear, too.

  “You guys look happier than honeymooners,” said Possum Craig, looking up from the workbench where he was repairing a balky valve from one of the air pumps.

  “You betcha, Wiley,” Trumball said, with a wink. “If she could cook, I’d marry her.”

  “I can cook,” Hall shot back, “but I’m much too young to consider marriage.”

  Jamie Waterman came across the dome floor to them, his stolid face showing a hint of curiosity.

  “Anything?” he asked, falling in with Trumball and Hall as they headed for the hot water urn.

  “Quite a bit,” Trudy said. “Quite a bloody bit, actually.”

  Jamie broke into a puzzled smile. “Well, are you going to tell us about it?”

  “I thought we’d wait until dinner,” Trumball said, still grinning broadly, “when everybody’s gathered around the campfire.”

  “How about a little preview?” Jamie asked.

  Trumball looked at Trudy Hall. “Should we tell him?”

  She glanced at Jamie, then turned back to Dex. “Well, he is the director, actually.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  Jamie folded his arms across his chest. “Come on, you two. What have you found?”

  “Simply this,” Trudy replied, almost bubbling with excitement.

  “The rocks that contain hydrates also contain lichen. The arid rocks have no lichen in them.”

  “The lichen must be able to sense the hydrates,” Trumball said. “They can smell the presence of water, somehow, even when it’s not liquid.”

  “Even when it’s chemically locked up inside the molecular structure of the rock!” Hall added.

  They had reached the hot water dispenser, but none of them reached for a cup.

  Jamie asked slowly, “Are you sure about that?”

  “Every sample we tested,” Dex replied. “Hydrates and lichen together; no hydrates, no lichen.”

  Shaking his head, Jamie said, “No, I mean about the lichen sensing water.”

  “How else would you explain it?” Hall asked.

  “Well, maybe lichen that try to establish themselves in rocks that don’t bear hydrates just die out, from lack of water.”

  Trudy’s face fell. “Oh.”

  “Now wait,” Trumball said. “That’s one possibility, okay, but that doesn’t mean—”

  “Occam’s razor, Dex,” said Hall glumly.

  “What?”

  “Occam’s razor,” she repeated. “When you have two possible explanations for a phenomenon, the simpler one is usually correct.”

  “That doesn’t mean he’s right,” Trumball said, almost belligerently.

  “Yes, I’m afraid it does,” Trudy said, her voice down almost to a whisper. ”We were so excited about finding the hydrates that we overlooked the obvious explanation.”

  Trumball frowned at her, then turned to Jamie. “I still think we ought to look deeper. Maybe the lichen really can sense hydrates in the rocks.”

  “Maybe,” Jamie admitted. “But wouldn’t your time be better spent figuring out how they crack the water molecules out of the rock? That’s’ a real problem.”

  Hall’s face brightened again. “Yes, that is the problem, isn’t it? That’s an incredible adaptation!”

  Jamie nodded and started to walk away. He kept himself from smiling about bursting Dex’s balloon until he was safely behind the closed door of his own quarters.

  Trudy and Dex gave the full account of their day’s work to the whole team over the dinner table. Everyone agreed that Jamie’s explanation for the absence of lichen in the non-water-bearing rocks was more likely: lichen that tried to establish themselves in the arid rocks died from lack of water. Trumball held out grudgingly for the idea that the lichen could somehow sense the hydrates, hut it was halt-hearted and soon drowned out in the excitement of trying to figure out how the organisms extracted usable water from the hydrates.

  Fifteen different theories were proposed in as many minutes, with everyone throwing in ideas as fast as they could think of them. Everyone, Jamie noticed, except Rodriguez, who sat in moody silence. He’s still blaming himself for losing the soarplane, Jamie thought. What can I do to snap him out of it?

  Possum Craig came up with a theory about the lichen: “I think the li’l buggers all got degrees in chemistry and they build tiny li’l chem labs inside the rocks.”

  The others hooted and yowled.

  “Now wait,” Trudy Hall said, as the laughter died down. She was sitting across the table from Craig, and looked him squarely in the eye as she said, “Dr. Craig is completely correct, actually.”

  The table fell silent.

  ”If the lichen actually are extracting usable water from the hydrates, then they must be excellent chemists and they must have extraordinary chemical equipment built into them.”

  Mitsuo Fuchida, down at the end of the table, spoke up. “A thought has just occurred to me: What happens to the lichenoids when they use up all the water inside a particular rock?”

  They all turned toward him.

  Fuchida went on, “An individual rock has only so much water in it, right? What do the lichenoids do when they have consumed all the water in the rock?”

  “They must die of desiccation,” Hall said, reluctantly.

  “They must reproduce before that and spread their seed to other rocks,” suggested Vijay Shektar,

  “Maybe they go into a spore state,” Trumball suggested, “and wait until another source of water becomes available.”

  “We haven’t seen any spores.”

  “You haven’t looked for any.”

  “That’s true,” Hall admitted.

  “Wait a minute,” Jamie said. “This brings up a major question, doesn’t it? There’s only a finite number of hydrate-bearing rocks. What happens when the lichen have drained all of them?”

  “Maybe the rocks without hydrates have been cleaned out by the lichen in earlier years,” Trumball said.

  Hall shook her head. “That’s
a process that would take millennia … eons, for goodness’ sake.”

  “That’s the time scale for planetary development,” Craig said. “Jus’ like ol’ Carl Sagan used to say: billions and billions of years.”

  “It’s also the time scale for evolutionary development of life-forms,” Fuchida added.

  “Jesus and all his saints,” muttered Trumball. “It’s just like Lowell said—this planet is dying.”

  “Lowell was the one who saw canals?” Stacy Dezhurova asked.

  With a nod, Trumball replied, “He thought he saw canals and proposed that Mars was inhabited by intelligent creatures who were struggling to stay alive.”

  “Aren’t we all?” Trudy quipped.

  “All what?”

  “Struggling to stay alive.”

  “No, seriously,” Trumball said. “Lowell’s canals were mostly eye-strain and optical illusion. But his basic idea was that Mars was losing its air and water, the whole planet was dying …”

  Trudy Hall said in a hushed voice, “And that’s exactly what we’re finding.”

  “The lichen are struggling to stay alive,” Jamie said, “but they’re running out of the resources they need.”

  “Using up the hydrates in the rocks.”

  “Dying off, slowly.”

  “But dying.”

  “Or going into a spore state,” Trumball reminded them. “Suspended animation, waiting for better conditions to arise, so they can swing back into life again.”

  “How long can they stay that way?” Craig asked.

  Fuchida said, “Spores from the age of dinosaurs have been revived on Earth.”

  “Millions of years, then.”

  “Tens of millions.”

  “Spores survived on the Moon’s surface,” Dezhurova pointed out. “Despite vacuum and hard radiation.”

  “Lunar spores?” Trumball asked.

  “Spores we brought with us, without knowing it,” the cosmonaut answered. “They were waiting on the old Apollo hardware when we, got back there, more than forty years later.”

  “Didn’t they decontaminate the Apollo hardware before they took off for the Moon?”