The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  They had attached a New York ETimes article about the latest antics of the Protect Earth Party and a new group, the Mars First! activists. PEPA had terrorized NASA for years with their fears that a menace from space would be brought back on a Mars rock—or even a Moon rock.

  In 1997, a National Research Council report on sample return from Mars concluded, “While the probability of returning a replicating biological entity in a sample from Mars is judged to be low and the risk of pathogenic or ecological effects is lower still, the risk is not zero.” That was enough for PEPA. “Not zero” equated in their eyes to a certainty.

  They—that is, the lawsuits—had made NASA agree to Chicken Little protocols to contain, sterilize, or abandon space samples from other planets. Robbie called PEPA the Andromeda Strain party.

  After the launch accident, PEPA had looked for fresh meat. With their favorite target, NASA, out of the game, their entire pack of lamprey lawyers had descended on Axelrod. They started by charging that sending a manned mission to Mars violated the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.

  “What the hell is that?” Axelrod had asked.

  One of his assistants read it to him. He was being charged with planning a mission that was going to “produce harmful contamination of a celestial body,” a treaty violation.

  His reaction had been unprintable. His lawyers found a copy of the treaty. They discovered, of course, that it was a set of flimsy protocols with no teeth. And that it didn't cover future violations. Bottom line: PEPA couldn't stop him from launching or landing on Mars.

  It had been a pleasure for Axelrod to grind their faces into this fact, in court.

  But then, the article said, PEPA had been joined by the Mars First! activists—who, conversely, didn't want Earth to contaminate Mars. Both groups wanted the two planets to stay strictly apart, for opposite reasons.

  “An unholy alliance of the absurd,” Axelrod was quoted as saying in the article.

  What, demanded MF PEPA, was being done to ensure that indigenous life on Mars is protected from the ravages of Earth bacteria?

  “Genocide, that's what it is,” their spokeswoman exclaimed. “The so-called discovery of the New World all over again. European explorers brought diseases like measles, syphilis, and flu to the Indians, who died by the millions. Now we're doing it again, to a whole planet!”

  They cited Ray Bradbury, whose fictional Martians died from earthly diseases. That it was fiction was a fine point they didn't appreciate.

  And of course they sued Axelrod also.

  Julia was amused by the article, but it also raised an interesting point. Did either planet threaten the other?

  Traditional menace-from-space scenarios assumed an Earth-centric attitude. Earth attacked! Outer space invaders! The Andromeda strain, the Triffids, various evolved Martians, and lots of squishy aliens loomed.

  And what was the fate of the fictional menaces from space? The Andromeda strain was done in by the pH of Earth's ocean after being rained out of the clouds. H. G. Wells's Martians succumbed to local microbes within a few days. The authors had reasonably assumed that a planet with a lively biosphere could put up a good fight.

  But that was only fiction. Was there any real data to suggest that Earth could be at risk from an incoming Mars microbe?

  First, it would have evolved in an oxygen-free, carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere—anaerobic. Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere would be the first challenge, vastly reducing where it could live. Oxygen is a potent poison even to many organisms on Earth.

  Then, Mars has lain beneath a thin skin of carbon dioxide, thicker in the past but always carbon dioxide, for four billion years. Even so diminished, it still contains much more carbon dioxide than Earth's atmosphere. Even if Martian metabolism were not immediately poisoned by our air, there might not be enough carbon dioxide to sustain it.

  And finally, Mars has been delivering rocks to Earth for billions of years, without any resulting Mars plagues. So far, Earthly diseases have all been from Earth. And that's reasonable, because vastly different life-forms wouldn't pose a biological threat to Earth life anyway.

  She remembered the Nauga, a stuffed monster toy invented by some ad agency to push a particular type of leatherlike vinyl cloth. The really interesting thing about vinyl was that it had been created in the lab by chemists, and it was a novel arrangement of atoms, a new molecule. After it was introduced, it was found to be inedible to all earthly life. There simply were no digestive enzymes that could attack the vinyl configuration of atoms.

  To truly alien life, Earth was filled with Naugas.

  She didn't think PEPA had anything to worry about.

  But what about the Mars Firsters?

  NASA had always tried to avoid cross-contamination. Spacecraft were assembled in a clean environment: an interplanetary condom.

  Any microbes accidentally sent on the various landed robots should have succumbed to the aerobraking heat, then the cold, dry, and chemically hostile surface.

  She remembered reading a short story about the first manned mission finding traces of microbial life on Mars, and then tracking it back to … a crashed Russian probe! A good story, and one NASA had tried hard to prevent from coming true.

  But a manned mission was different. In their hab, they had brought a microcosm of Earth: four humans with all their tiny fellow travelers. Although we think we are individuals, we play host to colonies of bacteria, from our skin to the inner recesses of our gut. Not to mention the little creatures living between our eyelashes.

  Four mobile Earth colonies and tons of food, frozen or dehydrated, carrying different microbes.

  Even being careful, it was impossible to keep from liberating some organic material. Airborne dust blowing out of the hab included shed hair, skin flakes, human commensal bacteria, tiny mites that feed on human detritus, their waste pellets, and their bacteria. The built-in vacuum system in the hab kept up with most of the dirt, but there was no way to eliminate it all. The crew could not operate like a clean room for eighteen months.

  And of course, when we arrived, we disposed of roughly a ton of frozen human waste, she thought. It's out there now, orbiting near Mars. Despite what Axelrod told the media, it's likely to come in for a landing sometime. When it enters the atmosphere, the plentiful microbes will most likely be incinerated crossing even Mars's thin atmosphere.

  But what if they aren't?

  Mars is covered with a reactive, peroxide-rich covering of busted-up crustal rock, sand, and dust that is essentially sterile.

  Due to the wispy, ineffective atmosphere, sunlight rich in ultraviolet bathes the surface of the planet. Microbial life would be torn apart by vigorous chemical jaws. If Mars were lifeless, this was definitely the unwelcome mat to any bacterial life-form attempting a landing—apart from the cold and dryness. A hostile shore for life, indeed. But if Mars harbors life within, it was the first line of protection against tiny invaders. A rusty, defensive skin.

  And what kind of life could exist on Mars? After four billion years of never having an oxygen atmosphere, it would definitely not be aerobic life. No, it would be anaerobic. But could we harm it?

  We still think of Earth as the water planet, the blue planet, the planet of the oxygen breathers. “All life is ultimately dependent on the sun,” children were taught. “Food chains begin with energy from the sun that is harvested by the green plants.” But once again, it was our ignorance speaking.

  Late in the twentieth century biologists found hydrothermal vents teeming with life deep on the ocean floor. The basis for the food chain was chemosynthetic bacteria, that had never seen the sun and couldn't use its light. Soon after came discoveries of life in boiling-hot springs, very acid water, coal mines, and even microbes living inside rocks. Life permeated Earth, didn't merely crawl its surface or swim in its seas.

  All of the underground microbes were anaerobes, unable to exist within the reach of oxygen. That the biologists expected. But the biggest surprise was their DNA. Their genes were only
60 percent similar to all other life on the planet. They were the ancient bacteria, the archaea, persisting underground billions of years after the rise of the oxygen lovers. Did they retreat underground as the only refuge free from the deadly oxygen atmosphere? Is Earth's deep underground a refuge, or the cradle of life?

  She paused to consider. There may be more life below ground than oxygen users on top. They have the whole interior of Earth, while we are confined to the thin biosphere on the surface. After all this time, billions of humans haven't touched the anaerobes on our own planet.

  How could we few harm Martian life? Hell, we haven't even found any. Well, there was always the vent, but how was she going to get back there?

  And she seethed with frustration again. She sent a private, coded e-mail to her parents.

  Hi Mums, Dad,

  Thanks for the ETimes article. Earth is as crazy as ever. (Except for dear old Oz, of course. Did I tell you I saw Australia last month, through the scope?)

  So far you Earthlings haven't had much to worry about from Mars, but… Don't think I told you my great news.

  Just before Viktor's accident, I managed to get a sample of organic stuff from the rocks around the lip of the vent. It was pretty dried-out and fragmented (it was frozen into some ice (!)). I've done a methanol extraction and run it through the GC and it's definitely organic.

  Of course I've got a million questions, and I want to confirm if it could have been contamination, because it seems pretty similar to Earth life.

  But the three mules won't delay the test even for a day!—and they won't really consider another EVA until afterwards.

  I mean, I want to go home as much as anyone, but mygawd we may have finally found it!! So here I am sitting on potentially the greatest discovery of the whole trip, and what am I doing? Hauling boxes!

  OK. Enough of that.

  Hope you liked the last vid. Dad, hope you're doing well. Viktor is getting along okay with the bum ankle, but it's touchy getting a pressure bandage tight enough to give him some support without interfering with his venous return. Mars grav doesn't help at all with that end of it.

  I keep wondering if he would've sprained it at all if we'd been under 1g all this time. Maybe we're more delicate than we think.

  Lots of grunt work getting ready for that #$%$ liftoff test. I feel like an Aboriginal woman. The guys are so caught up in it that they've forgotten everything else. If it weren't such an old joke I'd say they really ARE from Mars.

  Gotta go. My night to cook (that'll fix ‘em!).

  Much luv,

  Julia

  10

  OCTOBER 2015

  MARC ARRIVED, GRINNING MADLY FOR THE BATTERIES OF CAMERAS, AND fit right in.

  Julia looked at him across the room. After the space of several months, she was impressed again by his gorgeous profile. He looked like an astronaut with the right stuff. Wide, guileless grin, perfect teeth, square jaw. Blue eyes, of course, and dark blond hair, slightly tousled. No wonder Axelrod's PR gang wanted him on the crew. He had the kind of looks that could kill at fifty feet. If they had fan clubs, she figured his would get the most mail, hands down.

  And, of course, they did. But nobody let the crew see the numbers …

  Raoul was compact and muscular, striking in a dark, Latin way—hell, all the astronauts were easy on the eyes. No coincidence. NASA didn't train people the public wouldn't want to watch. Katherine had been a knockout, and Viktor—well, she just couldn't judge. To her he looked simply wonderful. Objectively she knew he couldn't match Marc, but she was so much more drawn to him. He caught her eye and winked. She felt a stab of emotion. Despite her training, she flushed.

  The new crew went out for beers and Mexican the first evening.

  “Axelrod didn't need to offer the million-dollar bonus, either, tell you the truth,” Marc revealed with a grin.

  “Don't ever tell him that,” Viktor said, smiling. Some part of him still liked the games and bargaining of what he called “late capitalism”—though what might replace it, he admittedly had no idea.

  Raoul slurped his Dos Equis with relish. “Yeah, it would make him grind his teeth down faster.”

  “You would have come back on even terms?” Julia asked.

  “Easy. I wasn't crazy about living in China, even at the top of the heap. Jammed, smelly, air so thick you could cut it.”

  “I hear you trained in Germany some, though,” Viktor said.

  “That was okay, but the leftover ESA gear they had was clunky. And the team Airbus had put together, it didn't jell.”

  “Chen?” Julia guessed.

  “Him and me, we never got along real well.”

  Julia had a fond spot for Lee Chen, who had helped train her in practical exobiology. “He's old school discipline,” she admitted.

  “Autocrat prima donna, more like it.”

  “More German than Germans,” Viktor snorted. He and Chen had not exactly hit it off, either, when they were all in the NASA Astronaut Office.

  “Too true. I missed this Dos Equis, that's for sure.”

  Raoul joined him in a long pull. “We won't be getting any for a while, might as well enjoy the best.”

  “Ol’ Chen-boy, he made it real clear. All his opera, and we're spear carriers.”

  “With Airbus supplying the Wagnerian music?” Julia asked lightly.

  To her relief, between her and Marc there was no trace of the anger he had shown when he stormed out months before. He probably still blamed her for bumping him in favor of Viktor—rightly, of course, even though she had not planned it that way. Sometime it would come out and she would have to be ready. Viktor, too; Marc would see it as completely logical that they had hatched up the whole scheme. She realized that the two of them probably enjoyed a reputation for sly maneuver that was quite undeserved.

  “Yeah, and the Germans hating living there so much, alcohol was one of the major food groups.”

  “Hard to keep sharp that way.” Raoul's tongue was getting a little sloppy, probably from the effect he was criticizing.

  “Yes. We heard there were plenty malfs,” Viktor prodded.

  “More than plenty, a surplus. From the first day, I had big doubts about the Chinese and Germans and French being able to put together a nuclear rocket in time. First time I saw their test-bed results, I was sure.”

  Julia dutifully drank some more of her light ale, aware that this was a male ritual she had better get the hang of, though knowing that some of the subtleties of barhopping would elude her. “They had all that old Russian data.”

  “Sure, and some from the old American Nerva project. Kept quiet about how they got that. But putting it all together with the avionics and control systems—not so easy.”

  “Data we have says are far more efficient rockets than LOX,” Viktor observed.

  “But still …” Marc leaned forward, almost whispering, “You wanna sit on top of that hot a pile?”

  “If it got me to Mars and back pronto, sure,” Raoul said.

  “If. They're having trouble getting the fuel flow—liquid hydrogen when they boost from two hundred klicks up—to go through that cylindrical plutonium pile they're using. It gets too hot, then it gives them back pressure, heats up some more, and—whammo—the whole damned shebang can run away into—well, they dunno.”

  “I could fix it.” Raoul looked bland, unconcerned.

  “Welcome to, my friend,” Marc toasted him.

  Viktor said carefully, “They are on schedule?”

  “No, that's the point,” Marc said. “Fallin’ behind every day now.”

  “Can they make the window?” Julia pressed.

  “Don't see how.”

  They all beamed at their new crewmate.

  Axelrod did too, the next day. He listened to all this technical detail with barely suppressed glee. “They won't be riding on our tail after all!” Handshakes all around.

  But five minutes later his attention was elsewhere.

  Now his PR people
were worried about the publicity impact. Would people hate Raoul? He tried this out on Julia, “looking for the woman's angle”—as if there would be only one. “After all, he's leaving behind his wife, and child, to come. He won't see the baby until it's two years old.”

  “Maybe never,” Julia said flatly, to see if Axelrod would react. Nothing. Well, maybe matters felt differently if your own rear was not going to be in an acceleration couch.

  Axelrod was right, however. Some commentators took this up. People magazine did a big weepy feature on the issue. But by now the Consortium had made firm connections to a lot of media figures, those distant enough to look objective. They ran a counteroffensive, following a plausible line: Raoul was portrayed as a modern Odysseus going off on a voyage into the unknown to fulfill his destiny, no matter what it cost him personally. (Never mind that Odysseus had gone to war, won, then gotten sidetracked on the trip back in his involuntary odyssey, taking decades to hole up on various islands of the Aegean, several times with women not his wife.) This line seemed to work with the public.

  Then the oddity of a lone woman going to Mars for two and a half years caught their imagination, deflecting attention from Raoul. The endless speculation—some quite ribald, and ignorantly assuming they would go to Mars in zero g—appalled Julia. She stopped reading the press entirely and never turned on the trivid anymore.

  Still, there was relentless attention, and Axelrod had to let a tiny fraction of it focus on her. If all humanity was going to Mars along with the four, “We must know our companions,” as one commentator put it. She was glad that she didn't have to get to know many on the immediate other side of the membrane, thank you, for she developed an instant dislike to most of the media mavens, who chose to wear their ignorance of Mars, space, and technology like a badge marking them as one with the Common Man.

  Julia had to admit there was some point to the interviews, profiles, even in the lapel-hugging shows like A Day in the Life Of, and the like. There had been so many faceless astronauts among the hundred-plus needed to keep the space station aloft. From the old days the public knew John Glenn and Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong and maybe Sally Ride, but from the station nobody remembered names, just grinning guys and gals riding rockets. Now there were only four to care about, and she was the singular figure.