16
Fossil
The six of them gathered around the rover controls as they examined one carbon spherule after another. Some were hopelessly crushed; a small number, attached to or wedged between sand grains, looked almost pristine. Some came in pairs or trios. After an hour of searching the rock they came across a ball of six spherules.
Questions began to flood in from Earth, especially from Paris and Moscow; it was 3 a.m. in Houston. Shinji was the biologist; he dictated descriptions of the objects, trying to avoid biogenically loaded language. Within an hour they were beginning to run out of new data to gather. “We’ve got to fly this sample back here,” said Shinji. “We can run a battery of tests on it that we can’t run at Gangis.”
“Okay,” said Laura. “Sergei, can you get the Sunwing here a bit faster? We had better change the methane and oxygen bottles so that it can fly faster.”
“Sure.”
Laura looked at Ethel. “The two of us can go our together, so we can get it ready to take off before sunset.”
“The high altitude winds should get it back to Gangis by tomorrow morning,” said Sergei.
They continued to search the sample millimeter by millimeter until sunset, which occurred about an hour later at Gangis than at the outpost. The rover’s fuel cells didn’t have much power left in them; they had to shut down their exploration until dawn. By then, Sunwing 1 had landed at the Outpost and Laura and Ethel had gone out to replace its spent methane and oxygen bottles. As the sun was setting at Aurorae, Sunwing 1 took off. It did not have the laser; it was on a sample return mission.
They all gathered in the great room for supper. “Well, today has been a historic day,” said Will. “We probably found proof of life on Mars.”
“No one will care about the issue of our team unity any more,” said Laura. “Still, I’m glad we hashed through the stuff we did. Now we’re in the position to move forward together.”
“What will this do to the talk about cutting Columbus 2?” asked David.
“We’ll see,” said Laura. “But if the data continues to support the idea that these are fossils, no one would dare talk about cutting Columbus 2.”
“They’ll need to add a biological facility to the cargo landers,” added Shinji. “There’s the issue of whether we should bring the sample inside here, assuming we can get it here, of course. There’s always the question of whether we could get sick, or the greenhouses could get contaminated.”
Laura looked at the others. “We were not looking at hibernating cells,” said Laura. “We were looking at smashed and desiccated remnants of life. Carbon and maybe a few complex organic compounds. There’s nothing in that sample to reproduce.”
“That’s my opinion,” said Shinji, nodding.
David and Will nodded as well. Sergei looked at them, then nodded. “That’s that,” said Laura. “We’ll be guinea pigs, but the result will be some confidence that the samples can be returned to Earth. I think the Sunwing’s going to be making lots of flights back and forth.”
“If we can get at the rocks,” exclaimed Will. “The problem is that the carbonaceous shale—I guess we can call it that—fragments very easily, so when pieces fall off the cliff, they break up and the slivers fall between the rocks on the talus slope. In consequence, the rovers can’t get at them. If we want lots of samples, someone has to drive there and walk around on the talus slope.”
“How far?”
“A thousand kilometers.”
Laura whistled. Then she shook her head.
“The rangers with portahabs have a range of fifteen hundred kilometers,” said Will. “We could send out landers with solar panels and tanks of methane and oxygen. The rangers could stop, set up the panels, refuel, and move on to the next lander. When they drove back they could pack everything up, except panels on the lander; after a few months it’ll have made enough fuel to fly back here.”
“I know the exploration plan,” replied Laura, with a scowl. “Look, we’re talking about a Columbus 2 mission. We have the equipment, but we need to check it out and make sure it’s working properly. That’ll take months.”
“We’ve got almost fourteen,” said David. “We’ve got fuel for two thousand kilometers of nominal exploration. But with both solar power systems working and the well working, we’re in the position to explore a lot more. Energy is not a limitation; we have access to all the oxygen and methane we could possibly need.”
“I understand that,” replied Laura. She was being very patient. “Look, I won’t exclude the possibility we can go to Gangis, but it’s premature to make a plan. We can get a few kilos of samples here by Sunwing. We have to do that, first. For all we know, there may be an outcrop of carbonaceous shale thirty kilometers from here. Noachian Lake Gangis drained right through here; there may be samples in the deposits in this area. Let’s exhaust a lot of other possibilities first.”
------------------------------
They all rose early the next morning. Columbus 1 was front-page news around the world; the possibility of life was electrifying. As predicted, the controversies about the Columbus 1 team were submerged, at least temporarily.
“Maybe now people will understand and appreciate the importance of this world,” said Will. “It takes something sensationalist to do it.”
“What do you mean, about Mars’s importance?” asked Ethel.
“Well, in a sense, it’s very simple. The moon tells us how the Earth formed. It provides a window into the first hundred million years of the Earth’s history. Mars tells us how Earth developed in the next seven hundred million years or so; how it was bombarded, how its crust formed, and now maybe it’ll tell us how life arose on Earth. There’s almost no crust left on Earth from that period, and the bits of crust are so smashed they can’t tell us almost anything.”
“And don’t forget Venus,” added David. “It may tell us about Earth’s future, as the sun heats up.”
“We do have the pieces of ancient Earth found on the moon,” said Ethel.
“Yes,” agreed Will. “But sometimes we can’t even date them reliably, and we have no idea where on earth they formed or what their crustal context was. Here, we have a different world, but we have huge stretches of ancient crust, so we have the context. And now we apparently will have fossils; maybe fossils that are older than anything we have on Earth. Mars may preserve precellular life; pre-prokaryotic life. Who knows.”
“Life could have originated here and been transported to Earth by meteorite,” added David. “Mars cooled faster than Earth and would have been hospitable to life sooner. It may very well be that we are really Martians after all.”
“Or Venusians; Venus probably had oceans and life in its early years, and life could have originated there even if Venus cooled last,” said Will. “It’s incredibly exciting! Moments like this allow us to explain it to large numbers of people.”
“And justify the expense,” added Laura. “So, where’s the Sunwing?”
“Almost all the way to Gangis!” replied Sergei. “I got it up into a westward airstream last night, and it was a strong current. Unfortunately, the Sunwing was also blown almost two hundred klicks too far north, so now I’m bringing it back to the landing zone. I’ve also found the boulder we need to use for the sample capture.”
“Boulder?” asked Will.
“I need a big, prominent, visible object to fly toward about thirty meters from the rover. There’s a boulder about fifty meters from the rover we can use. You’ve got to move the rover about seventy-five meters to get it in position.”
“Well, let’s go!” said Will. “I can finish my breakfast there. I bet the scientists are already gathering in Mission Control, even if it is 8 p.m. in Texas.”
They hurried to Habitat 2 and its computer screens. Sergei showed Will and David where to put the rover; they drove it there right away, then continued to examine the sample. The carbonaceous shale had rich spots with lots of spherules, but no spot had none.
By mid morning the Sunwing was ready to make its approach. Will transferred the sample to the recovery canister and raised its ten-meter whip into the air. It deployed correctly, to everyone’s relief. Sergei aimed for the boulder, cut back on the wind speed to twenty kilometers per hour—too low to keep the Sunwing in the air, so he had to activate the heated carbon dioxide thrusters to keep it from crashing—and brought its altitude down to twenty meters. He deployed a cable with a hook on the end. It skimmed along above the ground, one camera trained on the boulder to keep the forward direction roughly correct and one on the ring at the end of the whip. Will watched from the rover.
The first pass was a miss. Sergei turned the Sunwing around for another pass while David brought the various images together. “Altitude was perfect,” said David. “But you were forty centimeters too far to the right.”
“Okay, I’ll move left.”
Sergei brought the Sunwing around and made another pass, farther to the left this time. The hook lined up with the ring and caught it, yanking the sample canister from the rover.
“You got it!” exclaimed Will with a smile.
“Let me reel it in,” said Sergei. He pushed a button and the canister very slowly rose toward the Sunwing. In a few minutes it disappeared into the cargo pod; Sergei closed the door in the bottom. “Heading back to Aurorae,” he said. “It’ll be here tomorrow afternoon.”
“We had better resume our search for more shale samples,” exclaimed Will to David.
-----------------------------------
The next day was devoted to a continuous exploration of Gangis. There was no interest in exploring any other area of Mars; and they had rovers in three other localities, plus one wandering around Aurorae. Everyone focused on Gangis. Some of the work was carried live over cable to the public and millions tuned in, at least for a few minutes.
An hour before the Sunwing reached the outpost, Will received a most surprising email from a geology graduate student via mission control. He turned to his friend. “David, look at this! They’ve turned loose an army of graduate students on our existing body of data, and this kid says he’s found fossils in one of our catalogued samples!” Will clicked on the attached image.
David looked over Will’s shoulder as the picture popped up on the computer screen. It was a sandstone and it had a few very tiny black specks at the limit of resolution.
“Could be; those little black spots are the sort of thing we could have overlooked. Let’s see; we’re talking about sample 032521036. I’ll get it.” David jotted the number down on the screen of his attaché—an advanced form of personal computer and videophone—then hurried down the stairs to Habitat 2’s lower level, where samples were bagged and labeled. He hurried back up the stairs a minute later with a fist-sized chunk of grayish rock. They took it over to a stereoscopic microscope and put it on the tray, then looked. Will laughed. “I think he’s right!”
“Let me see!” David looked through the microscope, moved the rock around, then nodded. “I think so, too. Where did this come from?”
“I checked while you were downstairs. We pulled it off the gravel bar that the outpost is built on. So it could be from one of our mesas, or it may have been transported down the Mariner Canyon system from anywhere.”
“Except Gangis; those floods probably didn’t haul rocks over here.”
“Probably not. I’ll get this thing in the scanning electronic microscope; we might as well start getting a magnification of one of the black spots. By the time we get the sample from Gangis, we’ll have some data.”
They broke the sample into smaller pieces—it was too large for the scanning electronic microscope —and examined the slivers while one piece was in the machine. Sergei prepared to bring the Sunwing down; Ethel and Laura suited up to bring in the sample. With a fairly strong wind flowing eastward down the Marineris canyon system, Sergei was able to bring the gossamer craft down quickly and easily. The two women removed the sample and handed it to Shinji, who drove it over to the outpost. Laura and Ethel installed the laser sensor, replaced the methane and oxygen bottles to augment the Sunwing’s power, and checked a motor that had been overheating. Then they went inside and the Sunwing took off again, heading back to Gangis to provide more aerial data and drop the sample return canister. The rover would pick it up and, if all went well, would place it back in its resting place for future retrieval.
They were all up most of the night; the matter was too urgent. The small sample was broken into fifteen pieces and each one was slowly and carefully examined. Columbus 1 had brought six Prospectors, and the one deployed at Gangis was the only one they had sent out; the other five were still at the outpost. Earlier in the day, three of them had been set up just outside the outpost and plugged into its electrical system. Now their microscopic cameras and sensors were pressed into service. Since the spherules permeated the sample, there were hundreds—thousands—to image.
By dawn the scanning electron microscope was revealing even more details. The spherules appeared to have a cell wall and the remnants of interior structures, though what the structures were, no one could yet say. The remnants certainly looked biological.
They rotated who went to sleep so that the work could continue non-stop. For the next three days they scanned samples using every sort of instrument available to them and sent the data back to Earth, where hundreds of scientists participated in the analysis. A special issue of Nature magazine was prepared to get the initial results published by the official team, so that specialized research by others could be published as well.
Then Sunsol approached. Laura declared it a day of rest; no one would work at all that day because they were exhausted. The terrestrial scientists claimed to be disappointed, but it was a fact that they needed time to rest as well, or write.
Everyone slept late, then headed to the Great Room to eat and to the washing machine with dirty laundry. Will ran into Ethel there.
“How many loads ahead of mine?” he asked.
“Three. It’s been quite a week; lots of dirty laundry to wash.”
“It’s been unbelievable. We still don’t have Sunwing 2 assembled or any other rovers deployed; but we’ve probably found life on Mars.”
“It’s been exciting; almost too exciting.”
Will nodded. “I’m sorry we haven’t had time to talk. I haven’t been avoiding you; we’ve all just had so much to do!”
She looked surprised. “I didn’t think you were avoiding me, don’t worry. I didn’t say anything that mandated you to talk to me.”
“I’m sure that’s true, but I thought we should talk. Would you like to go for a walk later on?”
She smiled. “Sure. That would be nice.”
After lunch Will and Ethel suited up and headed to the top of Boat Rock. They hadn’t been up there for several months; the route had been cleared one afternoon by David and Shinji and was now easier, with actual stair steps broken into the two small cliffs. In twenty minutes they followed the path to the rounded top. A set of boulders near the prow gave a view of Face Rock, the crack separating it from Boat Rock, the Outpost, and the eastern expanse of Aurorae Chaos. They sat there admiring the view. Their communicators were set to each other’s cellular numbers, so they had a private line.
“Ethel, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about your comment last week that you thought you loved me. I feel bad having said I just admired you, because I really do feel attracted to you. I don’t know, maybe I love you, too. We haven’t dared find out.”
“No, we haven’t, and for good reason.” She looked at him. “But please don’t torture yourself about this, Will. I don’t want to hurt you and cause us to have some sort of emotional breakdown, which could be just as bad as sleeping together and having a falling out. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking in the last week, too, especially about my priorities in life. The fact is that I love my career. I didn’t apply for the astronaut corps to make it a temporary phase in my life; I want it to be a long phase, at least for another decade or so. Of course, it’s hard to say what will happen after we return to Earth; it may be awkward applying for stints at the International Space Station or Shackleton. I may be in demand for speaking engagements and such. And I suppose all of us will be pressured to retire from active duty and serve on various NASA and ESA commissions about space flight and Mars exploration and such. And you’ll always be the Moonman; radiation quota or not, you’ll want to go back to the moon. Now, all of this space travel has proved incompatible with marriage, at least for many astronauts. So, I look at the situation and say: Will, I love you, but I don’t think I had better marry you, because we’ll both just hurt each other.”
Ethel’s words cut Will, and he was surprised they hurt so much. He looked at her, then looked away a second to collect his thoughts and bring his voice under control. “Yes, you’re right. It’s certainly true that having a family would be impossible; we’d be flying too much. Of course, once we’re back from Mars, as you said, we will be in an unusual position; it may very well be that we can dictate our schedule to our space agencies.”
“Maybe. There are a lot of flights to ISS now; it might be possible to get short shifts there. But not the moon.”
“No, the moon will be served by long shifts for at least another decade or two. You’re right. Of course, there’s a lot I could do telerobotically.”
“True, but Will, you’re trying to abandon your career, or at least drastically modify it—something you love dearly—for something that might or might not work out. And I don’t have the same telerobotic options you have; most construction and manufacturing is done live.”
“I understand. But you’re abandoning something more drastic than career; you’re abandoning love.”
Ethel shrugged. “That’s true, but it hasn’t worked out as well as my career anyway. And maybe ‘abandon’ is too strong a word; ‘postpone’ may be better. In ten years or fifteen years I may feel differently.”
“Yes, that’s true.” Will thought. “So, you don’t see anything developing between us?”
“Not for a decade or so. I want to stay close to you, but I think as a friend, Will Elliott.”
“Okay,” said Will. He was not completely satisfied or happy about the idea, but he could see that Ethel had thought her position through.