Mars Life (13 page)

Jamie had spent the morning out at the dig, actually helping the learn patiently excavate Carleton’s pit, using modified laser drills to break up the rock floor and then old-fashioned whisk brushes to carefully, tenderly clean eons of dust from the fragments. Most of the pieces they uncovered were meaningless lumps of stone, as far as Jamie could see, but every once in a while Carleton would exclaim:

“This could be a knee joint!”

Or: “Looks like the end of a handle to me.”

The anthropologist was amassing a small but growing collection of what could be fossils and ancient artifacts. The geologists dated them all to between sixty-seven and sixty-three million years old, the right approximate age for the time when the meteor bombardment had wiped out almost all life on Mars. Jamie wondered if the dating was accurate. Sometimes even the most unbiased of scientists saw what they wanted to see, instead of what was before their eyes.

He thought of Percival Lowell, the wealthy Bostonian who built an observatory in the clear mountain air of Flagstaff, Arizona, and spent the rest of his life studying Mars. Lowell saw canals on Mars and wrote popular books about the possibility—the
certainty,
as far as he was concerned—that Mars was inhabited by intelligent engineers who built a planetary system of canals to save their cities from global drought. Lowell’s canals turned out to be mostly eyestrain, and his own zealous desire to prove that intelligent Martians existed.

They did exist, Jamie thought wryly, sixty-some million years before Lowell’s time. But they weren’t clever enough to build a global network of canals. It wouldn’t have helped them, anyway. The catastrophe that wiped them out would have buried their canals along with their villages and every trace of them, except for the cliff dwellings.

Yet Lowell was right in one sense, Jamie knew. Mars is dying. A long, slow, agonizing death. The hardy little lichen that have made an ecological niche for themselves inside the rocks strewn across the valley floor are dying away. The atmosphere’s faint trace of moisture is dwindling. Unless we step in and intervene, the lichen will go extinct, just like all the other life on the cold, dry surface of Mars.

But long before that we’ll be gone, Jamie thought. Our funding is petering out. We’ll have to leave Mars. Leave the planet and let it die.

Trying to shake off his feelings of impending doom, Jamie left his cubbyhole and went to the infirmary to take Vijay to lunch. Afterward he repaired to his shoebox of an office and pulled up the latest messages from Selene. The distance between Mars and the Earth/Moon region made two-way communication impossibly awkward. Even traveling at nearly three hundred thousand kilometers per second, it took light about four minutes to span the distance when Mars was closest to Earth. At the moment, the oneway lag in transmission was almost nine minutes, which meant eighteen minutes between hearing “Hello” and the next words sent from the Earth or the Moon.

So one side talked while the other side listened. Then they reversed roles. At the moment, Jamie was listening to Douglas Stavenger.

“We have a good deal of experience in developing life support facilities out of local resources,” Stavenger was saying. His handsome, smoky-skinned face was smiling genially. “The key to Selene’s success has been building a self-sufficient community out of what’s available here on the Moon.”

Jamie nodded to himself. During its war for independence, Selene was cut off from all imports from Earth. The embargo was brief, but it taught the lunar inhabitants a crucial lesson: they had to survive on their own resources.

“From what my engineer friends tell me, you’ve got an easier situation on Mars than we do here on the Moon. You’ve got an atmosphere, and it’s got some oxygen and nitrogen in it. All we’ve got is vacuum: we have to bake oxygen out of the soil— er, I mean the regolith.” Stavenger’s smile turned slightly embarrassed. “The tech guys would pound me if they heard me call it soil.”

Soil contains living creatures, Jamie knew. The powdery crust of the Moon was absolutely lifeless. And waterless, except for reservoirs of ice in deep craters near the poles where comets had crashed eons ago.

“Anyway, I’ve asked a few friends to put together a study on how you can make your base self-sufficient—or as close to self-sufficiency as possible. They’re mostly retired engineers and geologists, so it won’t cost you much. They’re glad of an interesting project to occupy their minds.”

And I’m glad it won’t be expensive, Jamie thought.

“They’ll be pestering you with questions,” Stavenger went on. “In time, one or two of them might actually want to come to your base and see the conditions there for themselves. I presume that will be okay with you. That’s all I’ve got for you at the moment. I’ll wait for your answer.”

Jamie activated his computer’s microphone and replied, “I’m delighted that you can help us, and I’ll be willing to field any questions your people send. I’ll get our most competent people to provide any information you need. One thing: remember that the, um, regolith here on Mars is loaded with superoxides. We can get plenty of oxygen from it, but we also have to bake the superoxides out of the soil if we want to try growing plants in it.”

He talked for another ten minutes while the computer typed out his words on its display screen. Jamie read the message, made a few corrections, then finally tapped the transmit key.

It’s all in the numbers, he told himself. Whether we leave or stay, whether we live or die, it’s all a matter of numbers.

But then the Navaho side of his mind corrected, It’s a matter of spirit, as well. Who will have the courage to stay on this red world? Who will dare to stand against Coyote and his devilish tricks?