Marsquake!

by Brad Strickland

  And then there was the curious incident of the broken leg.

  Every colonist had to have a thorough physical examination once every six months. A Martian year ran approximately 669 Earth days, so that meant about four physicals in a Martian year. Sean’s first physical had come several weeks after his arrival at Marsport, the second one during the late Martian summer. His third came toward midwinter, not long after the strange yellow soybean plants had turned up.

  The medic put him through the usual battery of tests and gave him a clean bill of health—except for one thing. “I thought you had an old leg fracture,” she said.

  “I do,” Sean told her. “I broke my right leg when I was about ten years old, and it didn’t heal right.”

  “Not according to the latest images.”

  “But I did break my leg. I wouldn’t forget something like that,” Sean said with a smile. “I mean, it doesn’t bother me or anything, but I definitely had a bad fracture.”

  The medic said, “Check this out.” She activated a viewscreen and put up a shadowy image, a composite picture made up from several imaging processes. It showed a close-up of the bones in Sean’s right leg. “This is from your last exam.” She touched the screen with a pointer, tracing an obvious zigzag line close to Sean’s ankle. “Here’s the break. It’s knitted well, but no one could miss seeing this.”

  The picture changed to an almost identical one. “I took this ten minutes ago. Where’s the fracture?” She handed the pointer to Sean. “You show me this time.”

  There was none. “Maybe that’s my left leg?” Sean asked tentatively. “If you got the picture reversed—”

  “I didn’t,” the medic said. “I don’t know how, but that old weak area of bone has healed over beautifully—so completely that if I hadn’t seen the pictures, I wouldn’t have believed it. What’s going on here?”

  “What’s going on here?” Amanda asked.

  Dr. Boone, the chief medical officer for the colony, shook his gray head. “Dr. Simak, I wish we had an answer for you.”

  Sean watched them, feeling like a bug on a microscope slide. He was in an isolation room, and it was pretty spooky. The bed he lay on was monitoring his body functions. The overhead light was harsh, unpleasant. And ever since the medic had taken the strange images of his leg to Dr. Boone, Sean had been stuck in what felt like solitary confinement.

  The attendant who brought him his meals came in dressed in a space suit—or what looked like one. It was actually a biohazard suit, sealed up against all possible microorganisms. The attendant’s air supply came through a hose from outside the room; he passed through three airlocks on the way in, one of them a scrub-down room where the suit received a mist of a powerful antiviral and antibacterial spray.

  Amanda came to the window and looked through it. “Sean, how are you?” Her voice came though a speaker, sounding somewhat depersonalized.

  “I’m fine!” he complained. “This is really cracked. The reason I’m in here is nothing is wrong with me!”

  “That’s not quite the case,” Dr. Boone said. He referred to an electronic chart. “Sean’s metabolism is showing some startling changes. He’s tolerant of a great range of temperatures—he seems to be comfortable even if the ambient temperature is close to freezing or above body heat. Normal human body temperature in a healthy person is thirty-seven degrees. Sean’s temperature fluctuates over a sevendegree range on either side of that, as if he has some ability to adapt to external heat or cold. It’s not that great, but it’s definitely beyond normal range. In fact, when the outside temperature is really cold, he seems to be running a fever that would kill anyone else—except he seems very comfortable, and his brain, heart, and lungs show no damage at all. We find that his digestive system is operating at a remarkable level of efficiency, and so are his lungs—he doesn’t need nearly as much oxygen as he should. His resting pulse rate is fifty, about twenty beats per minute less than we’d expect. His respiration rate after vigorous activity is sixteen. We say forty is normal. When he’s at rest, his respiration rate can fall as low as eight, as opposed to the normal thirty. His blood hemoglobin is richer in oxygen than we’d expect, and his old scars and fractures have all vanished.”

  “That’s good, though,” Sean protested.

  “It’s not normal, Sean,” Dr. Boone said firmly.“Until we figure out what’s going on here, we’re going to have to keep you confined for study. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

  Confined for study. Sean thought of the yellow soybean plants. Mackenzie treated them the same way Boone was treating him, distrusting seemingly beneficial changes, not daring to let the plants out of their isolation frame.

  Sean began to wonder how long he might be stuck in this bed, in this room. He wasn’t a plant—and he wasn’t a freak of nature or a medical curiosity, either! “I don’t like this,” he said.

  Amanda said, “Sean, please try to understand. We’re going to try to help you. I’ll ask you to put up with this until Dr. Boone can find out what’s happening to you. Do it for me, please.”

  Sean sighed. “Okay. But this is really dinged. I mean, I feel fine! But I’ll behave. Just get this over with as soon as you can. I miss my friends.”

  “We’ll hurry as much as we can, Sean,” Amanda said. “I promise.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Sean wasn’t alone for long—but when company arrived, he wished it hadn’t. On the second day of his isolation, Sean heard voices, and then Ted Miles appeared in the doorway. “You too,” he said flatly.

  Sean, who had been sitting up in bed reading, asked, “Why did they let you in?”

  “Because I’ve got whatever you have,” Miles replied. “And there are three others in isolation across the hall. We went to retrieve the fossil—and you won’t believe what we found.”

  Sean put aside the small computer. “I’d believe just about anything now,” he said.

  “Well, first of all, we retrieved the fossil. It’s not a chordate—no spinal column, anyway. It’s sort of wormlike, sort of insectlike. What’s left is an exoskeleton of a little creature that was only a quarter as long as your little finger when it—”

  “Dr. Miles,” Sean said carefully, “that’s very interesting, but why are you in here?”

  “The air,” Miles said, sitting on the edge of the other bed in the room. “The air in the lava tube was higher in oxygen content than it should have been. We ventured down as far as the drip you found—and there are things growing on the walls now.” Miles furrowed his forehead. “Plants, I suppose. A very thin layer of something, anyway. Not photosynthetic, though—they’re using chemical energy, extracting it from the minerals that line the tunnel walls. I think we’ve found where the blueberries came from.”

  “Huh?”

  “A sphere is a pretty neat solution to a space problem,” Miles said thoughtfully. “The organism extracts what it needs from the minerals, and it’s left with some sulphates, some copper, a few other byproducts. It grows in a pattern that forms these into spheres, each sphere colonized with the organism. Oh, another byproduct is oxygen. All it needs to get started is a sufficient amount of water, it seems. We provided that. Just the leakage from our pressure suits and the small amount of waste water we lost through normal living triggered the growth, we think—”

  “Dr. Miles,” Sean said with a touch of desperation, “what have we both got? Some kind of disease?”

  “Another kind of organism,” Miles said. He sighed. “Look, Sean, I have to give you a little biology lesson for you to know what I’m talking about. Not understand it necessarily, because I can’t understand it myself. There’s something—call it a bacterium, because that’s closest to an Earth model, but this is much smaller—that we picked up in the tunnels. It got into our bloodstream somehow. Now, the big problem that Earthly disease germs have is that if they’re too successful, they commit suicide.”

  “This isn’t making sense,” Sean complained.

  Miles held up a hand. “Be
ar with me. A virus, say, one of the very deadly ones, one that causes hemorrhagic fever, invades a healthy human body and reproduces. It reproduces at a fantastic rate, and as the virus does so, it destroys human cells. One infected cell becomes a virus factory, fills with the viruses, then bursts, and the viruses spread throughout the body. But as they do, they wreck the host, kill it—and then all the viruses still in the body die too.”

  Sean fought down rising alarm. “You mean we’re—”

  “No, no, I don’t think this is fatal,” Miles said. “Just the opposite, in fact. I don’t know how, but these Martian organisms have enough of an affinity for our biology so they can live in our cells. But unlike Earth viruses, these organisms”—Miles made a flipping gesture—“throw switches in our body. They encourage greater efficiency, promote healing, in general tune us up.” He made a face. “This is a very inexact description, but it gives you the idea at least.”

  “So we’re going to be okay?”

  “Who knows?” Miles asked gloomily. “We’re going to be prisoners, at least for some time. They have to treat this as a disease. We may just be in the early stages. Who can say what this thing may do to us?”

  That was bad enough. Worse came later. Sean learned before the day was over that the council had decided to evaluate everyone else on team nine, but no one showed signs of the illness. The medical facilities were being divided—half of the medical personnel, all volunteers, would remain in the hospital dome where Sean and the others were being studied. The other half would take supplies and equipment into the education dome and set up a hospital there for other colonists. Everyone who had gone into the tunnels was being tested.

  Meanwhile the council was quarantining anyone who had been exposed to the organism—it still had not been definitely isolated, although the doctors agreed that Miles’s guess must be pretty close to what was actually going on.

  Amanda communicated with Sean through his computer link to tell him what was going on. He asked if anyone other than himself, Dr. Miles, and the three other members of Miles’s second expedition to the lava tube had shown any symptoms yet.

  “No,” Amanda replied. “That’s a relief, of course, but we’re watching them very carefully. Help the doctors in any way you can, Sean. We need to know how this got started.”

  But it was another day before the key piece of evidence came—and when it did, it wasn’t from Sean. A very worried Jenny called him, asked him more questions about how he felt than he wanted to answer, and almost as an afterthought said, “It must have happened when you stuck your finger.”

  “When I stuck—” Sean broke off, feeling like an idiot. He hadn’t even told anyone about that. It was so minor, and it hadn’t seemed to break the skin. But it was a definite possibility.

  When he told the doctors about the pinprick, he almost wished he hadn’t brought it up. They put his right forefinger through a scrutiny worthy of the rarest specimen in the universe. Electron microscopes, MRI imaging, X-rays, a hundred other tests took a peek at his finger. Finally, when nothing showed up, the doctors even injected nanobots into his skin. These were incredibly tiny machines, hardly more than molecule size. They prowled through the capillaries of his finger, found a very slight lesion, and checked it out. These particular nanobots didn’t actually treat disease, and even if they did, there was nothing to treat. The small injury was already healed when they found it. Then, one by one, the nanobots broke down.

  “Your body’s reacting to them as if they’re disease organisms,” one of the doctors complained. “That’s not supposed to happen! These things are engineered to be compatible with the human body. But your immune system’s destroying them.”

  “Look, I’m sorry,” Sean said. “But what am I supposed to do? I can’t tell my immune system to stop doing it—I don’t even know how to get its attention!”

  More news came in: The greenhouse dome had been sealed off, because Mackenzie suggested that whatever was loose in Sean’s bloodstream had also gotten into the soybeans. The original sample had burgeoned, and now a whole production cylinder overflowed with yellow-leaved soybean plants that were producing unusable soybeans in record numbers.

  Sean felt as if he were going crazy. He felt fine. Better than fine, in fact. He hated being forced to lie around and do nothing except submit to endless medical tests. Dr. Miles was an excellent biologist but a boring roommate—he studied photos of his precious fossil discovery for hours on end, then explained to Sean what each and every little part of the creature might have been used for during life. A little of that went a long, long way.

  Mickey, Alex, and especially Jenny tried to keep his spirits up. They called all the time to chat, to encourage him to hang in there, and to see how he was doing. He was doing great, he told them all, apart from feeling as if he were coming down with cabin fever—the urge to break out of the hospital wing and run screaming through the corridors, chased by the doctors.

  Patrick got in touch once, to tell Sean that he was going to visit the fumarole field with Chris Wu and his team. Sean wished him a good trip and told him to send back some pictures.

  He was totally unprepared for the ones that came back the next day.

  “Remarkable!” Dr. Miles kept saying. “Completely remarkable! Who would have believed it even remotely possible?”

  Sean stared at the pictures Patrick had sent back. They were, well, remarkable.

  On the one hand, the landscape hadn’t changed very much since he had first seen it pictured in Amanda’s viewscreen. The broad, shallow basin was about the same as it had been, and the fumaroles hadn’t actually grown any. But clinging to the edges of the steam fumaroles were … plants? Maybe not plants in the Earth sense. But something was growing there.

  A close-up shot showed the top of one of the fumarole domes. When Sean had first seen them, he had no sense of scale, but a metal ruler in the image showed that the dome was about a meter tall and somewhat broader. At the summit, a round hole sent out an almost constant jet of steam, invisible until it hit the cold air outside, then instantly condensing into billowing clouds of vapor.

  A dark green fringe had accumulated around the mouth of the fumarole, and featherlike tendrils fluttered and waved in the invisible column of superheated steam. Whatever the thing was, it liked heat.

  “That’s nearly three hundred degrees,” Miles said. “How does it stand the heat? Of course, it may be similar to the black smokers back on Earth. Those are underwater volcanic vents, you know. A unique ecosystem exists around them, based on sulfur-oxidizing bacteria. The only ecosystem on Earth that doesn’t depend on sunlight…”

  Very interesting, no doubt, but Sean didn’t much care whether the frilled, feathery thing lived on heat or sunlight or month-old oatmeal. “Why are these things showing up now?” he asked.

  Miles grimaced. “I don’t know, but since I’m a dedicated scientist, that doesn’t stop me from guessing. I think two things have triggered this. The first is that we’ve been enriching the Martian atmosphere with water vapor for years now. I have a sneaking suspicion that we hit a balance point. The amount of available water vapor on the surface, and of ice and liquid water underground, has reached a critical moment. Dormant life has begun to reawaken because the water it needs is available. Second, I think the quake had something to do with it. The fumarole activity shows that heat is coming up through the crust. That may have warmed microscopic life-forms in the tunnels, letting them begin to reproduce. I think the time’s just ripe, in other words.”

  Ripe for microscopic organisms and weird Martian plants, perhaps, but not for Sean. More days crept by, with him becoming more and more irritable. “Look,” he said to Amanda at last, “we’re not dying or anything. We can’t stay here forever. I mean, we’re part of the colony, not guinea pigs for the doctors.”

  “I know, Sean,” Amanda said in a sympathetic voice. “I wish I could wave a wand and say you’re welcome back into the colony, but the council won’t let me do that. Whatever
is in your systems seems like a disease to everyone here. Until we can find some way to immunize everyone, the council isn’t about to let you break your quarantine.”

  “But that’s crazy!” Sean insisted. “None of the doctors have come down with this whatsis. It’s not as if we’re plague carriers.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Jenny was almost as upset as Sean. “He’s been in the hospital for nearly a month!” she raged to Alex and Roger as they sat at a table in Town Hall. “What are they going to do—keep him there the rest of his life?”

  “It’s a raw deal,” Alex agreed uncomfortably. “But you have to see the council’s point. I don’t want some kind of otherworldly germ crawling around in my bloodstream.”

  “Come off it, Benford,” Roger said sarcastically. “In your case, it could only be an improvement!”

  “What I can’t understand is why I didn’t come down with this … this infection, whatever it is,” Jenny said. “I was right beside Sean all the time. We ate together in the tents. If this bug were as contagious as everyone thinks it is, I’d have it by now.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t like your blood type or something,” Roger said. “Or maybe it takes getting stuck with a spiky crystal.”

  “But Ted Miles and the others didn’t get stuck!” Jenny objected. “They brought back some of the blueberry things and all of them helped to section them for microscopic analysis, but nobody got cut. Then when they went back, they were careful to keep their specimens in biohazard containers. They had to pick it up some other way.”

  “And the doctors can’t figure out what that was,” Alex said. “I can understand why they want to keep them all in quarantine. It’s terrible for Sean and the others, but if they don’t even know how you get this disease, it makes sense to keep them away from the rest of the colony.”