Roger balled up a napkin and threw it, bouncing it off Alex’s head. “Listen to yourself, would you?” he said in an angry voice. “Keep them away. Us and them. Sean was bloody well right about us Earthlings. We can’t cooperate for anything. You’d think Sean was some kind of leper, the way you go on.”
Alex’s eyes showed his own anger. “I do not! Look, it’s natural to be afraid of something like this.”
“Something like what?” asked Mickey, who had come up behind Jenny.
She jumped, then looked up at Mickey. “The socalled infection that Sean has,” she said. “Just because no one quite understands it.”
Mickey dropped into a chair. “You’re talking to the expert on unreasonable fear,” he said. “The Micketeer, who turns into a bowl of quivering jelly once the lights are out and he’s underground. But, yeah, I agree with you about Sean. He shouldn’t be cut off from everyone like this.”
Jenny looked moodily down at the tabletop. “This is so stupid. Look at us. When there’s not much to do, the colonists turn against one another. My group’s better than your group. Your group stole my great-great-grandfather’s land, so now I’m going to punish you. Well, your group had it coming, because my great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather was beaten up by your great-great-grandfather’s great-great-grandfather. Stupid, stupid! So we keep everyone busy, and that works because nobody’s fighting anyone else. Great, but everyone’s going his or her own way, aren’t they? Everyone’s busy, but everyone’s busy with what interests that person. Nobody’s thinking for the whole colony.”
“Welcome to the real world,” Alex said. “I think the hardest thing we ever do is to try to find what we have in common. There just isn’t that much.”
“You don’t think so?” Jenny asked. “Being stuck on Mars doesn’t give us a common cause?”
“We’re only stuck for another few months now,” Alex said. “After that, anyone who wants to go back to Luna on the Magellan will be able to leave.”
“Not me,” Mickey said. “I don’t like the Lunatics.”
“There you go again,” Jenny said. “I mean, I wouldn’t go back either, but it’s not because I don’t like the moon colonists. I wouldn’t go back because we’ve built something here. It’s not perfect, but we’ve got a colony going. We got hit hard, and we lived through it, and we ought to stay. Because it’s the human thing to do. It’s the right thing to—” She broke off, sobbing, then jumped up from the table and rushed away. She wasn’t crying out of sadness, but out of frustration and anger. At that moment she knew that something had to be done. Somehow, somehow, the colonists had to learn to stand as one people.
Otherwise, the colony would die.
CHAPTER 9
Jenny was not particularly good at literature or history. She excelled in science. She was also very, very good at persuasion. And she had a knack of knowing just who could help her the most.
“You’re going to get me in big trouble,” complained Nickie.
“Can you tie into the main computer system or not?” Jenny demanded.
Nickie squirmed. They were in the girls’ dorm wing, in Nickie’s room. The walls were papered over with scenes from Earth—mountains, oceans, a hundred different living creatures. But the heart of it all was Nickie’s computer. She had a feeling for the machine, and she was the ace programmer among the Asimov Project students. “I did it before,” she reminded Jenny.
“Yes, and security is tighter now,” Jenny said.
Nickie shrugged. “I’m better now. Getting into the system is easy. The real trick is in not tipping everyone off. But, yes, I can do that. What do you want?”
“I want to know what the council thinks about the people in the hospital wing,” Jenny said. “And about the Martian life that’s appeared around the fumaroles and down in the tunnels. I want to know what they’re thinking about, what courses of action they’re considering.”
“Oh,” Nickie said. “Top-secret stuff.”
“Exactly.”
Nickie rubbed her nose. “Okay. Easy enough. Let me get started.”
The incredible thing was that Nickie probably believed what she was doing was easy. Her computer made a series of lightning raids, so fast they were not even detectable by the ordinary firewalls and safeguards. Zap! The index to the council’s minutes was theirs. Zap! Medical records were easy prey. Zap! The “Biology Department’s Estimate of the Situation” was safely copied.
It took Nickie less than a day to pull up everything that Jenny asked for. Jenny then got the eighteen remaining Asimov Project kids together late at night in an empty classroom, one that the medical department wasn’t using. She quickly explained what she thought they should do. “In summary,” she finished, “we need to know what everyone’s thinking. Now, we all have specialties, and I think we should divide up the responsibilities. Let’s break into groups, and each group will study some of the data that Nickie has gathered, then we’ll come back together and let everyone report.”
“Oh, man,” Alex groaned. “School’s not supposed to start again for another month!”
There was some grumbling, but not as much as Jenny had feared. It took everyone a couple of days to get through all the reports, but at last they were ready. They met again, and this time Jenny asked for quick overviews from everyone. She began with the medical information, since she was an adaptive biology specialist.
“Okay,” she said. “The bottom line is that no one who’s got the organism in his bloodstream is sick. They’re healthier than they’ve ever been, but in a different way. Their metabolisms are … optimized. They make better use of nutrients, they don’t need as much sleep as they used to, and even minor ailments have cleared up. Dr. Miles has even regrown a tooth he lost when he was still on Earth. The doctors think they’ve finally pinned down how Miles’s team all got the organism too. One of them crushed one of the blueberries in a vise to measure the hardness of the material it’s made of. Now, if that blueberry had some dormant bacteria—only they’re not really bacteria—”
“Please, Jenny,” said Roger with a groan. “Cut to the meat of it, please.”
Jenny sniffed, feeling a little offended. “We know Sean stuck his finger but not exactly how anyone else got the infection. I think it’s possible that the researcher breathed in some spores or something that became airborne when the blueberry was crushed. And then because they ran a little short of water, they put all their drinkable water together. They shared that—and that’s how it could have been transmitted to the others.”
Alex had to report on the council’s decisions. “All right,” he said. “It surprises me to find it out, but Dr. Ellman and Dr. Simak are on the same side in this. Both of them think the people with the bug should be taken out of quarantine. If everyone observes basic precautions, there’s nothing to indicate that this thingummy can be passed from person to person. It has to be, like, carried in the water or else injected into the bloodstream. But the other members of the council are afraid that everyone might panic if quarantine ends. What they want to happen is for the doctors to find some kind of cure for this Martian bug, or some kind of vaccine so it doesn’t affect everyone else.”
Others reported on the remarkable happenings down in the lava tunnels and in the fumarole field. It did seem as if a tipping point had been passed. The oxygen levels in the tunnels were way up. Humans couldn’t breathe the air down there yet, but in another five or six years, the atmosphere would be dense enough and oxygenated enough to support human life.
“Especially,” Mickey observed, “if the human life is like Sean. He could nearly get by on what’s available now, the way his lungs collect oxygen and his blood delivers it. In fact, in a normal atmosphere Sean’s breathing slows down to an unbelievable rate.”
More reports, and at the end of them all, Nickie said, “This is unfair. The majority of the council want to treat Sean like some kind of monster, and he isn’t. It isn’t his fault that he came down with this thing. And
it doesn’t seem like a disease to me!”
“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.”
CHAPTER 10
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 bein
g 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?”
Marsquake! Page 9