Mars

by Ben Bova

  What he saw, instead, was nothing but the powdery red sand and the rust-colored rock with a streak of green running down its flattish side. Christ, it looks like a little vein of copper that’s been exposed to the air. But then Jamie remembered that there was precious little oxygen in the Martian air. Enough to turn a vein of copper green? How long had the vein been exposed to the air? Ten thousand years? Ten million?

  He leaned back on his haunches, his back to the approaching scientists.

  “Where is it?” Joanna asked breathlessly.

  “You look as if you’re praying,” said Naguib’s reedy nasal voice. “Has it made a believer of you?”

  “Don’t get too worked up,” Jamie told them, looking up as they surrounded him and the rock. “I think it’s just a streak of oxidized copper.”

  Patel, in his yellow suit, clumsily got down on all fours to peer closely at the rock. “Yes, I believe that is so.”

  Joanna flattened herself beside him. “It might be just the surface coating of a colony that lives inside the rock. Like the microflora in Antarctica, they use the rocks for shelter and absorb moisture from the frost that gathers on the rock’s surfaces.”

  “I am afraid that it is nothing more than a patina of copper oxide,” Patel said in his Hindu cadence and British pronunciation.

  “We must make certain,” said Monique, as calmly as if she were selecting a wine at a Paris bistro. Cool head, Jamie thought. Warm heart?

  “We’ll have to take it inside …”

  “Don’t touch it!” Joanna snapped.

  “We can’t examine it in any detail out here,” Jamie said. “We’ve got to bring it inside the dome.”

  “It is a possible biological sample,” Joanna said with unexpected proprietary fierceness.

  It’s copper oxide, thought Jamie.

  Struggling to her feet, Joanna said, “I left my bio sampling cases when you called. They can maintain the ambient conditions inside them. If you bring the rock into the dome and it is suddenly thrust into our environment it would kill any native organisms that may be inside it.”

  Jamie nodded inside his helmet. She was right. Even though the chances were that the green streak was just a patina of copper oxide, there was no sense screwing up what might be the biggest discovery of all time.

  “Please do not touch the rock,” Joanna said. “Perhaps the rest of you could look around this area to see if any other rocks show such color. But do not touch them in any way. Do you all understand?”

  Suddenly she was in charge. She wasn’t whispering anymore. The lovely little butterfly had turned into a dragon lady. What had started out as a geology field trip had turned into a biology session, and Jamie was just one of the flunkies. He felt his lips pressing into a tight angry line.

  But he knew that she was right, and within her lights. He climbed slowly to his feet inside the cumbersome suit.

  “Okay, boss,” he replied with exaggerated deference. “To hear is to obey.”

  Joanna did not notice any humor in his crack. She detailed Monique to stand guard over the rock and ordered the other four to scour the area for other green spots. Connors, in his white hard-shell suit, stood to one side like a policeman, observing without participating. Joanna headed back toward the spot where she had left her sample cases, almost skipping across the rocky desert sands.

  “Formidable.” Monique’s voice sounded amused.

  Jamie asked, “Say, were any of us smart enough to bring a camera with him?”

  “I have a camera,” said Toshima.

  Jamie said, “Could you take a series of snaps of the rock and the region around it, from every angle—complete three hundred sixty degrees?”

  “Most certainly.”

  Jamie thought back to hunting trips he had taken with his grandfather Al. They would always snap photos of each other with their catch—deer, rabbit, even the gila monster that Jamie had shot with his twenty-two when he had been no more than ten years old. His mother hated to allow Jamie to go hunting, but his father could not stand up to grandfather Al’s determination. “You can’t keep the boy cooped up in a library all the time,” Al would argue. “He ought to be out in the open.” Then, when they were alone together up in the wooded hills, his grandfather would tell him, “They’re trying to make you a hundred percent white, Jamie. I just want you to keep a little bit of yourself red, like you ought to be.”

  Jamie looked back at the rock, small enough to pick up and carry, especially in this light gravity. It’d make a great photo to send back to my grandfather, he thought. Me inside this damned suit with the rock for my trophy.

  But he did not pose for Toshima’s camera.

  Joanna returned after nearly half an hour with Vosnesensky at her side toting the two hefty silver-coated specimen boxes plus a pair of long slim poles that looked to Jamie like fishing rods. He knew that they were marker poles, with tiny radio beacons at their tips. He grinned to himself: Joanna’s even got the Russian working for her now.

  “I wondered if I would ever have to use these,” she was chattering. “I never thought I would need them on the first day of field work!”

  The others had found no other spots of green in the hundred meters or so they had examined in all directions around the rock. The soil was crisscrossed now with the prints of their cleated boots, except for a sacrosanct half meter surrounding the rock. No one had dared to come any closer for fear of damaging or destroying some vital evidence.

  Vosnesensky stopped and bent slightly forward, hands on hips, as if doing obeisance to the rock. In his bright red suit he looked to Jamie like a fat bell pepper with a hump on its back.

  Joanna took charge. “Do not touch the rock. Before we do anything, I will need soil samples from the ground immediately around the rock and then underneath it.”

  “I can use the corer,” Jamie said, reaching for the tool at his belt. “It attaches to the pole, so we can get samples from as deep as five meters.”

  “Good,” said Joanna.

  “That can also tell us if there is permafrost beneath the surface, no?” asked Ilona, sounding excited for the first time since they had landed.

  He nodded; then, realizing no one could see the gesture through his tinted visor, he added, “Yes, that’s right.”

  Vosnesensky commanded, “Pete, bring the video camera here. We must have a record of this.”

  The astronaut said, “Right,” and headed back toward the camera he had left on its tripod.

  “My still camera is almost out of film,” Toshima said. “I will take the last few frames now and change rolls.”

  “No!” snapped Naguib. “Don’t take the chance of high-energy radiation spoiling the film. Here, take my camera. It has a full roll in it.”

  “Thank you,” said Toshima.

  Connors lumbered into sight again, dangling the vidcam in one gloved hand. When he was satisfied that both still and video photographers were ready, Vosnesensky ordered, “Proceed.”

  But no one moved until Joanna said, “I want four samples, one from each side of the rock, as far down as you can go.” Then she added, “Please.”

  Jamie leaned on the pole and the corer bit into the ground. It buzzed through the first few centimeters easily enough but then the going got tough. Jamie pushed hard, breaking into a sweat.

  “It’s gotten like hardpan,” he grunted.

  “Or permafrost?” Ilona suggested hopefully.

  Jamie pulled up the pole and let Patel, his fellow geologist, work the mechanism that neatly dropped the slim column of red dirt from the corer’s sharp teeth into one of Joanna’s sample boxes. Patel worked slowly, carefully, to make certain that the crumbly cylinder did not break apart.

  Jamie noted that the column was striated. Different shades of red. Fluvial deposits, he guessed. There must have been an ocean here at one time. Or at least a big lake.

  Four samples from the sides of the rock. Jamie had to stop his digging several times to let the fans of his suit clear away th
e mist that built up inside his visor. Despite his exertions, neither Patel nor any of the others made the slightest move to help him. Instead they peered at the samples and invented instant theories to explain their appearance.

  They’re all too entranced with what’s going on to even think of helping, he told himself. Besides, they got an Injun to do the heavy work. Why should they bother with it?

  “All right now,” said Joanna, after four samples were resting in the first case. She sank slowly to her knees and bent over the rock.

  Jamie got down beside her. “You’ll need help lifting…”

  “No!” she snapped. “I can do it myself. This is Mars, after all.”

  Jamie flushed with sudden anger and then felt sheepish. She’s right. The damned rock only weighs a few pounds here. And she’s not going to let anybody touch it but herself.

  Toshima clicked away and Connors focused the vidcam tightly on the rock as Joanna reached out and grasped it at both ends, keeping clear of the green patch on its side. She tugged the rock up off the ground and placed it inside the other silver sample case as tenderly as a mother laying her newborn infant in its crib.

  Jamie stared hard at the ground beneath the rock. Flattened and smoothed by the rock’s weight but otherwise no different from the rest of the soil. What did you expect? he asked himself. A Martian rattlesnake coiled up under it?

  “Now if you will please take a core sample from the ground that was beneath the rock,” Joanna said as she sealed the lid of her sample case.

  “How deep?”

  “As deep as you can go,” she said. “If you please.”

  Jamie did it. While they all watched in silence he dug the pole in as far as it could go. Gently, delicately, he pulled the core sample up …

  “Look!” shouted Monique Bonnet.

  “What?”

  “What is it?”

  “I thought …” She was almost breathless. “When you pulled out the stick, I thought I saw sunlight glinting off … something.”

  “Something?”

  “What?”

  “Was it water droplets?” Ilona asked.

  “Perhaps,” said Monique. “I don’t know. It was gone in the blink of an eye.”

  Ilona dropped to her knees so hard that Jamie was afraid she would hurt herself or bang up her suit. She wormed her gloved hand down into the hole that he had dug and pulled it out swiftly. The sleeve of the suit was smeared with reddish dust and crumbling bits of rust-colored dirt.

  “Look! Look!”

  A half dozen tiny glinting drops of moisture were on her gloved fingers, like dew on the petals of a flower. Before any of them could say a word the droplets disappeared, evaporating into the thin cold Martian air.

  “It’s water!”

  “It-must-be water!” Monique said, her voice vibrating with excitement. “Below the ground. Water!”

  Naguib was laughing like a schoolboy. “We’ve discovered water! The first water found on an extraterrestrial body! It’s only a few drops, but it’s water! And liquid water at that!”

  Jamie stood there leaning on the pole, all his physical tiredness from the digging evaporated just like the droplets from Ilona’s glove. The others were practically capering, waving their arms and almost dancing in their hard suits, they were so thrilled.

  All except Joanna, who remained kneeling before the hole that Jamie had dug for her like a worshiper at a strange altar, flanked on either side by her filled and carefully sealed sample cases.

  And Jamie, who stood behind her with the pole gripped in both hands, standing like a Navaho warrior with his lance butted on the dusty ground, wondering what his colleagues would do if that green patch actually turned out to be real living Martian organisms.

  DOSSIER: JOANNA MARIA BRUMADO

  At the age of sixteen Joanna took her first lover and learned that her mother was dying.

  An only child, she had spent all her life at home under the gentle, loving hand of a mother who never raised her voice yet ruled her household absolutely. When she was younger Joanna had adored her father, who traveled the world over and was enormously respected and admired. As she began to understand the urges flowing within her own body, though, she started to see her father with new eyes. She realized that women—even her mother’s friends and students her own age—looked at Alberto Brumado with more than respect and admiration in their glances.

  “Your father is handsome and very romantic,” Joanna’s mother told her. “Why shouldn’t other women yearn for him?” And she smiled to show that she was not concerned about her husband’s faithfulness.

  “He loves us too much to care about anyone else,” Joanna’s mother assured her. Then she added, “His obsession is the planet Mars, not some student young enough to be his daughter.”

  Joanna had been born in São Paulo; her father had taught at the university there. But his quest for Mars eventually dictated that the family move to the capital, Brasilia, although they spent the hottest months of each year in Rio de Janeiro, like the politicians and their advisors.

  Wherever they lived, Joanna did so well at the convent schools that her parents decided to send her to a prestigious preparatory school in the United States. She had pleased her father by showing an aptitude for science. She had pleased her mother by obeying her one unbendable rule: “Do not do anything that you can’t tell me about afterward.”

  Joanna had intended to tell her mother about the tall fair-haired instructor who had taken her to bed. She was madly in love and bursting to tell her mother all about it. She waited a week and then could wait no more. She telephoned her mother.

  To learn that her mother had been stricken with a serious heart seizure that very morning and taken to the hospital. Joanna forgot school and her lover; she hastily packed a bag and flew to Brasilia.

  She could tell from her father’s face that there was no hope for her mother. The doctors at first did not even want to allow her to see the stricken woman, fearing an emotional outburst that would hasten the end. With the same iron self-control that she now realized had been her mother’s main strength, Joanna assured them that she would not upset her dying mother. They looked from her utterly determined face to her father, who nodded. “Let her see her mama,” said Alberto Brumado in a broken, tear-strangled voice. “She may not have another chance.”

  Her mother looked very pale, very tired. Tubes ran from her slim arms to strange machines that chugged and beeped behind the bed. Another tube ran up her right nostril. Joanna thought they were sucking the life out of her mother.

  She did not cry. She stood by the edge of the high bed and stroked her mother’s hair, realizing for the first time how thin and gray it had become. Her mother opened her eyes and smiled up at her.

  “Mama …”

  “My lovely daughter,” the woman whispered. “How beautiful you have become.”

  “Mama, I love you so much!”

  “Don’t worry about me, dear.” Her voice was so weak that Joanna had to bend down to hear the words.

  “I don’t want you to die.”

  Blinking her dry eyes slowly, Joanna’s mother whispered, “It is your father you must care for now. I can’t protect him any longer. You must do it for me.”

  “Protect him?”

  “His work. It is very important, To him and the whole world. Don’t let him be distracted. Don’t let anything stand between him and his work. Protect him. Help him.”

  “I will, Mama. I will.”

  “You’ve always been a good girl, Joanna. I love you very much.”

  “I love you, Mama,”

  “Protect your father. Remember.”

  “I promise, Mama.”

  Those were her mother’s last words. Joanna kept her promise. She became her father’s shield against any distraction that might interfere with his great, consuming goal. Especially any female distraction. Joanna attended college where her father taught. She traveled with him around the world. She kept house for him. She never took
another lover.

  SOL 3: EVENING

  They trooped back into the dome, suits and equipment smudged with red dust.

  Despite their excitement over the green-streaked rock, Vosnesensky insisted that they follow mission protocol and carefully clean their suits and all their gear before stepping into the main section of the dome. The area just inside the airlock, where the hard suits and outside equipment were stored, served as the cleanup and maintenance section. Its partitions reached up to the curving dome itself.

  “We will have to use the biological decontamination procedures if we have found native life forms,” Vosnesensky grumbled as he pulled off his suit.

  Jamie was vacuuming the dust from his boots with the angrily buzzing little hand machine thinking, You would take the greatest discovery in history and make a chore out of it, wouldn’t you?

  Tony Reed, standing just inside the door of the partition, his nose wrinkling at the acrid smell that filled the area, cast curious eyes at Joanna’s sample boxes.

  “In that case,” he said, “we’d have to make this section airtight, with the sort of envelope they have in biology labs.”

  “That can be done,” Vosnesensky said as he lifted the torso of his hard suit over his head.

  Let’s see what we’ve got first, thought Jamie.

  As soon as she was finished dusting her suit Joanna lugged the cases to her small biology bench, where she had an isolation box and remote manipulators to work with. The Martian rock would be kept in a Martian environment while she examined it. Ilona and Monique went with her.

  “Mother and daughters,” muttered Naguib, watching them through the window in the partition as they marched off to the bio lab.

  “Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite,” said Reed, his eyes also fixed on them.

  Jamie, finally free of his hard suit, felt too tired to go to his cubicle to remove the undergarments. He sat on the bench in front of his locker, hands on knees, head bent, silent. His left armpit felt raw, chafed. Suit’s rubbing there, he realized. I’ll have to pad it before I use it again. The pungent smell he had noticed on first taking off his helmet had dissipated now. Or we’ve all become accustomed to it, he thought. Maybe it’s the dust.