Rescue Mode

by Ben Bova

  His elation melting, McPherson said, “We won’t have much time to look around, let alone drill for ice in more than one or two spots.”

  Catherine opened the panel in the Fermi’s side that covered the core sampler. “It’s a shallow crater. We’ll carry the mole over its rim and rappel down the inner slope.”

  “I’ll carry the mole,” McPherson said, taking the portable rig in his gloved hands. “You take the climbing stuff.”

  Even in the gentle Martian gravity the core sampler felt heavy. But McPherson hefted it onto one shoulder and started off for the distant hills, with Catherine scampering to come up beside him.

  Nearly two hours later they both stopped and stared. Even though they were expecting to see them, actually walking up to the weathered tracks made by the Curiosity rover filled them both with awe.

  “Look,” said McPherson, letting the sampler slide from his shoulder to the ground. “It’s still here.”

  The ridged tracks made by the old rover were clearly visible.

  “After all these years,” Catherine murmured. She sank to her knees, inspecting the tracks closely.

  “Like the tracks of an old wagon train, out west,” McPherson said.

  “How far away is the rover?” asked Catherine

  “Too far for us to get to it.” He pointed toward the hills rising over the horizon.

  “Quel dommage,” she murmured. What a pity.

  Hi stretched his hand to her and pulled Catherine to her feet. Then he shouldered the core sampler again and said, “We’d better keep moving. Still got a lot of ground to cover.”

  Reluctantly, they left the tracks behind them, carefully stepping over the rutted trail so that they wouldn’t disturb them. They started a slow descent down a slight grade, heading for the shallow crater that Mission Control had identified. Catherine fell silent, and McPherson mused that even if they found ice in the crater and could liquefy it with power from a set of solar panels, it might be too far from the Fermi to pipe the water back to the habitat.

  He shook his head. Find the water first. Then we’ll figure out a way to get it to the habitat.

  Following the GPS signals from the network of satellites orbiting Mars, they found the crater about twenty minutes later. It was indeed shallow: McPherson thought they would be able to descend into it without using the mountaineering gear. But he remembered what had happened to Ted with the NaK and decided not to take any risks that they could avoid.

  “Catherine, I’ll unlimber the mole while you set the anchors for the climbing rope.”

  “Are you still comfortable going down there with the drill?” she asked.

  “As long as you’re at the other end of the rope, I’ll make it down there and back.”

  He connected the segments of the core sampler and lifted the ungainly looking rig onto his shoulder once more.

  He grinned at Catherine. “I feel like Queequeg.”

  “Who?”

  “The harpooneer in Moby Dick.”

  “Ah,” said Catherine. “But there are no whales here.”

  “No, and this isn’t a harpoon,” Hi said, as he stepped over the rocky rim of the crater.

  “Hiram,” Catherine said as she clipped the climbing rope firmly around his waist, “perhaps we should both go down. Together.”

  “No,” he said firmly. “Somebody’s got to stay up here and work the winch, in case I fall.”

  She sighed audibly, but did not argue.

  McPherson lifted his left hand to glance at the digital clock set among the instrument cluster on his wrist. I’ll only have about forty-five minutes before we have to start back, he thought. Not enough time. Never enough time.

  He reached the bottom of the crater. “Give me some slack,” he called to Catherine. “I need to move around.”

  He unlimbered the core sampler, set it up on the hard-pan ground and unfolded the solar panels that provided its electrical power. With its usual bang-banging noise, the mole dug into the ground.

  Ten minutes. Fifteen. McPherson scanned the crater bottom as he waited for the sampler to reach its maximum depth. The motor shut off automatically. Hiram put the motor in reverse and waited for the mole’s head to emerge from the rust-red-colored surface.

  “Anything?” Catherine’s voice made him wince. She was forgetting that she didn’t need to shout, despite the distance between them.

  Fingering the dust-dry, crumbling dirt that the drill had brought up, Hi shook his head and answered. “Dry hole.”

  Her silence spoke louder than words.

  “It’s pretty flat down here,” he said. “I’m going to disconnect the rope and head over there.” He pointed to a jumble of smallish rocks in the shadow of the crater’s slope. “Looks interesting.”

  “I don’t like you disconnecting,” Catherine said. “What if you fall?”

  “I can do it without falling, dear. Even if I did, do you think you could pull my weight?”

  “If I had to,” she answered, her voice firm, sure.

  He unclipped the rope despite her fears and, hauling the sampler onto his shoulder once more, made his way carefully to the shadowed area.

  As McPherson set up the mole again, he saw that its solar panels just caught the sunlight. In another half-hour, as the Sun sank toward the horizon, they would be in shadow and the drill would shut down.

  Hell, he thought, in another half-hour we’d better be on our way home or we’ll run out of air.

  He turned on the sampler, fidgeting nervously as it bit into the ground. Not enough time for it to get down to its maximum depth, he knew. I’ll have to pull it out. Give it another five minutes.

  He looked up at Catherine, standing on the crater’s rim. Even in her excursion suit she looked taut, strained.

  “We’ve got to start back in ten minutes,” she said.

  “I know.” He stopped the mole, then reversed it.

  The sampler head came up. McPherson pawed at the crumbling dirt, pebbles, and . . .

  “Paydirt!” he bellowed.

  “What?”

  Holding several small chunks of ice in his gloved hands, he yelled, “It’s ice! Look!” He raised both hands over his head like an ancient gladiator, victorious.

  “It’s ice, Cath! We did it! We found it!”

  Hiram left the mole where it lay, clipped the rope around his middle once more, and hauled himself up the slope of the crater—after carefully placing the ice chunks in one of the storage pouches on his belt.

  Once he got back to the rim he grabbed Catherine and the two of them pranced around in a frenzied jig of triumph and joy.

  All the way back to the Fermi they jabbered with Ted and Amanda about their discovery.

  “Don’t worry about how far it is,” Ted reassured them. “We can cannibalize pipes from the lander, and if that’s not enough to reach us, then we’ll take out the lander’s goddamned tankage and use the tanks as a water dump, close enough for us to get to every day.”

  “But the tanks are contaminated with propellant,” McPherson objected.

  “I already checked with Houston. We can open up the tanks and leave them on the ground for a day or two. Any residual propellant in ’em will evaporate.”

  “Really?” Catherine asked.

  “Really.”

  Amanda was more cautious. “First let’s make sure what you found is really water ice.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  McPherson called, “Mandy, don’t throw cold water on our discovery.”

  Connover laughed and added, “Yeah. Don’t rain on our parade.”

  It was well past sunset by the time Catherine and Hi got back to the habitat. As soon as they came through the airlock, Amanda reached for the pouch on McPherson’s belt.

  “Let me see it. I’ve got to test it.”

  She opened the pouch and plucked out the three pieces. “Cold enough to be ice,” she said as she hurried toward the bio lab.

  “It’s water, all right,” Amanda said, the w
idest, brightest grin any of them had seen splitting her happy face.

  “There’s probably some minerals in it, of course. I’m testing for that now.” With a giggle, she said, “Maybe we could sell it as the Martian equivalent of Perrier.”

  McPherson asked, “What about microbes? Bacteria? Viruses?”

  Amanda shook her head. “I’ve got the electron microscope scanning the samples. Should be finished its run in a couple of minutes.”

  Ted went to the comm console. “Bee will want to know about this.”

  “And the geniuses in Houston.”

  Up the chain of command their report went: Nathan Brice at Mission Control, then Robin Harkness and finally Bart Saxby in his hospital room.

  “The president will want to know,” Saxby said, his face beaming.

  “You tell him,” Connover replied, knowing that his words wouldn’t reach Earth for half an hour. “We’re going to celebrate. It’s Christmas, after all!”

  While they waited for a reply from Saxby, Catherine said, “We should drink a toast.”

  “We don’t have any booze,” Ted lamented.

  “Ah, yes, that is true. But we have water.”

  Laughing, Amanda headed back to the bio lab. “I’ll pour enough for a toast.”

  She ducked into the minuscule lab and reached for the sample of melted ice that was being automatically scanned by the electron microscope.

  Her hand stopped in midair.

  Amanda stared at the microscope’s screen, her heart thumping beneath her ribs. She swallowed hard, then slowly turned and stepped back into the central room of the habitat.

  In a near whisper, she said, “The water’s contaminated.”

  McPherson frowned at her. “You mean we can’t drink it?”

  Her voice shaking, Amanda said, “It’s contaminated with microbes.”

  “Microbes?”

  Catherine gasped. “Life? Living organisms?”

  “Come and see for yourselves.”

  Connover jumped to his feet, McPherson and Catherine half a step behind him. The bumped into each other at the narrow doorway to the lab, making Amanda giggle.

  Crowding the lab, the four of them stared at the microscope screen. Tiny blobs of protoplasm were wriggling and pulsating in the water sample.

  “They’re alive!” Connover shouted.

  McPherson leaned each of his arms around the shoulders of the two women. “It’s a Christmas miracle.”

  Amanda smiled knowingly. “It’s Martian life. There must be a whole ecology out there living off the permafrost.”

  “My God,” Connover said, his voice hollow. Then he grabbed Amanda and gave her a heartfelt kiss on the lips. “You did it, girl! You did it!”

  Amanda grinned and said, “We did it. The four of us.”

  “We’ve found life on Mars,” said Catherine, her voice trembling with wonder.

  McPherson straightened up. “But this means we can’t drink the water we get from the permafrost.”

  Connover said, “But we need that water.”

  Her eyes never leaving the microscope’s screen, Amanda told them, “We’re not going to drink from this sample, that’s for sure. But there’s no reason why we can’t dig up more ice and distill the water so it’s drinkable.”

  “But won’t that kill the Martians?” Catherine asked.

  McPherson said, “Can’t be helped. We need the water to survive.”

  “Better than killing us,” said Connover.

  Amanda nodded and said softly, “We’ve got to see how big the permafrost deposit is. I’m guessing that it’s big enough to provide us with drinking water and plenty of microbes to study.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear,” Catherine murmured.

  Even behind his bandages, the grin on Connover’s face was obvious. “Come on, let’s send word to Houston. Give ’em a Christmas present from Mars.”

  Later that night, on the dark windswept plain of Elysium, a new sound rose from the alien habitat standing on Mars. Above the sighing wind, four human voices sang:

  “Silent night,

  “Holy night,

  “All is calm,

  “All is bright . . .”

  And the stars, in all their glory, continued to shine.

  THE END