Extinct Doesn't Mean Forever (17 page)

He put up his hand to stem the onslaught. “Casey. The date for the end of the mission is fixed. We have a relatively short launch window. So thanks to several extra stops and extra days at sites — that we took largely by your recommendation, I’ll point out — if we spend more time here, there’s a danger we’ll have to cut other sites altogether. I recognize your scientific reasons for wanting to stay, but there are also scientific reasons for wanting to check every individual site possible – look at the Moon.”

“The Moon has become the Vietnam of space exploration. It’s the ultimate reason to not do anything,” she said.

Not needing to hear her opinions on the failings of previous generations yet again, Commander West ordered her to go.

Anne Casey put what dignity was possible into her low-grav bounce out the cabin door.

“Don’t forget the restrictions Buggy A puts on us,” West called after her.

She came back and slammed the door because — well, because she could.

West stared out the porthole at the rim of the Secchi Crater, its ancient solid-stone formations dusted with undulating patterns of sand. In the depths of winter, like tonight, it sometimes snowed.

Here, flakes came from pink or black skies and individual crystals tended to cluster into huge colonies before gravity pulled them toward the ground. Usually, fierce winds, common on Mars, would shred them out of existence long before they touched the surface. But tonight was calm and the snowflakes drifted peacefully, tipsily, to Mars.

“Hey,
West
, what’s Casey on the warpath about now?”

With a sigh, West turned from the snowflakes. Standing in the doorway doing a fair imitation of a door was Aoki.

“Something about an anomaly in her latest readings.
How’s Buggy A?”

“After the refit it got, its engine systems should last longer than the ones on this buggy. But the electrical and life-support systems are still on the fritz. Schmidt’s working on an idea now.” After a pause, Aoki added, “I assume you’re hard up for time?”

“No. Finish what you’ve got to say,” said
West
.

“We don’t have to launch from Site 1. If we launch from Site 3, the trip will be more Spartan, but we’ll have an extra fourteen days we can put in on Casey’s stuff.”

“Did Casey tell anybody what the anomaly is?”

Aoki shook his head, so the Commander told him.

“Forget I said anything,” said Aoki as he left.

West turned back to the topsy-turvy snow. A breeze had come up, sweeping sand and snow into playful little piles. After a very long while he turned to the computer to bang out some more names for Martian features. That job was his and his alone, not to be delegated, or so the news always said. What it didn’t mention was that to name features, West had to use drop-down lists with names of people influential politicians owed favors to. As the features were cataloged, they were assigned to the appropriate lists already prepopulated with names for the first active volcano, the biggest cave, or whatever other natural formations were found. That was the real protocol.

West activated the hack and gave a few places some imaginative names. When there was nothing more he could do to stuff things up for the politicians back home, he checked the clock and made his way to the galley.

“Did everybody get hungry and ignore the schedule?”

The galley was crowded most times, an unavoidable consequence of the breakdown of Buggy A and the transfer of her crew to Buggy B. It meant there were fourteen people in a place designed for seven that could officially sustain only twelve. Everybody was on everybody else’s nerves, and the crew was dealing with a lot of unforeseen stress.

“Casey said there was a bug-hole in the numbers,” said Barry Schmidt. “True?”

“Chemical profiles of some samples have spikes we didn’t expect. Like the gold find, maybe we need to follow that up.”

“But it’s not gold, is it?”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Then we should move on to the next site and see if there’s something there that might make more money.” With that, Schmidt crossed his hairy arms over his hairy chest like the decision had been made.

“First of all, Schmidt,” West said, “you haven’t made dinner yet.
Hop to it.
Second of all — all of you — we’re scheduled to be here, testing and digging, for four more days. This is one of the big scientific digs. So there’s to be no talk of moving or staying until
that
four days is up. Now, those of you scheduled for rest, go get some sleep. Those of you with duties, get to them. And those of you scheduled to eat, stay seated.”

Of the ten, only four remained behind. Unfortunately, one of them was Schmidt. And another was Casey. “So I have four days—”

“To run any tests that protocols require, plus any additional tests protocols allow and for which you have the time and resources – without shortchanging any of the other test sites we’re scheduled to visit.”

“Can I have an extra assistant?”

“No, Casey, you work with what you’ve got. I’m not diverting any additional resources to you.”

Schmidt gave a condescending grunt. “Four days here, we could try to reopen Buggy A. Use it for something more than a mechanical pack mule.”

“So what do you plan to do? Replace the damaged solar panels with God-knows-what or repair the heating coils God-knows-how?”

Schmidt took a deep breath and put microwaved meals before the crew. “No one makes solar panels that big as a single unit. They’re actually a series of panels screwed onto a frame as part of a closed circuit. From reports and photos, I think there are at least two panels that can be brought online. That will at least provide light and run the scrubbers for a couple of people.”

“What about heat? The coils are gone.”

“We leave the shielding around the reactor but take the insulation off the drive engine. Instead of venting the engine’s heat to Mars’ atmosphere, we shunt it to the cabins. With the insulation gone, we should get to temperate conditions within a few hundred kilometers. At worst, we wear our thermal underwear 24/7.”

“How much power did you use to work that out?”

“One screen, twenty minutes, all on my personal ration.”

West looked down at his unappetizing meal. The air might be safe, but the smell of bodies eventually tainted everything. “What resources would you need?”

“I’ll cannibalize my down time; I can unscrew the panels by myself and hold them on the rails. I’ll need somebody to help put them in their new places. We’ll both need suits.”

“Start working on the panels.
Use Buggy A’s power as needed.
We’ll cable power or, if the cable won’t reach, beam power to the dig site from some other source. Give this project your full attention.
And Schmidt … this better work.”

“Commander, you can’t—”

“Shut up, Casey,” said
West
.

The rest of the meal was eaten in uncomfortable silence. The place still smelled like a gym with the air conditioning off. Getting even two people to Buggy A would be a boon, but they’d have to do something really good to be sent over there.

West finished his meal and went to his office. He passed Aoki standing in front of a vent, inhaling the least tainted air in the general access section. The crew had been chosen based on people with needed skills who could handle difficult situations. Even when there were standouts, the testing procedures had been kept long and arduous, so being selected still made them feel special. But no one had calculated on months of pressure like this. They were packed too tight, always tripping over one another, always feeling each other’s sweat and smelling each other’s bad moods. It wasn’t a day-by-day as much as a minute-by-minute grind.

Little wonder that West let people do things in their own way and blow off steam as needed. It took the cocooned Earth politicians to think reality out here naturally conformed to whatever was written on letterhead emails.

West opened the door to his office. Susan Green sat on the floor, legs outstretched, back to the wall, sound asleep. It was a rare place to be alone. West closed the door and tried to decide how to occupy the time before his sleep cycle.

“Schmidt’s suiting up,” he said to no one. He thought he could help, but when he got to the airlock’s antechamber, there was already a crew doing that.

“Commander, I have to talk with you now.” Casey’s urgent tone drew West’s attention.

“Get me some results, Casey.”

“I’ve got them,
Commander
. That’s why I have to talk with you.”

“Well, then,
Science Lieutenant Anne Casey
should—”

“In private.”

As if that wouldn’t feed the rumor mill.
He glanced at the six men and women suiting up. Some of them were skipping sleep to do this. West watched as they put on the thermal underwear embedded with hoses that carried fluids and circuits that carried information. The suit was armor over that, and it was designed to be put on fast. That had saved lives in the Buggy
A
disaster. Put on the
boots,
stand in the template and interlocking rings linked up around the body, using thread and screw to tighten to fit.

On top of that went each person’s customized helmet. A standard pack then latched itself onto the armor and connected itself for air, power, recycling, and sensors. All-in-all, it took maybe two minutes from boots to airlock. The suited-up crew all waved as they went out the hatch, and the people in the antechamber moved off.

Waiting for the crew to clear out, West wondered, not for the first time, why this room out of all of them had been left battleship gray.

“All right, Casey, the audience is gone. Now, what do you have to say?”

She pursed her lips. It was more like a pout than anything else. It seemed she was trying to not say something, which would make sense only if she was going to tell him less than the full story.

“The original anomaly was found in sand outside the main Secchi Crater. Instead of just repeating samples —”

“You broke protocol,” said
West
.

“Commander, if you get an anomaly in statistics you need to check with an absolutely fresh sample. If you include the original sample in the new one, you will still get the same anomaly because you polluted it—”

“Did you break protocol, yes or no?”

“I got a new sample that had an increased level of anomaly.
Greatly increased.
Do you have any idea what that means?”

West didn’t answer. Outside, through the viewing port, it was night and the stars were abundantly clear. In the dark, the
crew repairing Buggy A were
merely bouncing bobble lights. Buggy
A
itself sat in the shade of a hill. With no starlight to outline its position and no power of its own to put on any lights, it was invisible.

“Did you break protocol or not, Lt. Casey? If you don’t answer the question, I will have to suspend you without pay and conduct an investigation.”

“I’ll take it to Earth—”

“Go ahead, Casey, but if you do, you give your enemies in Congress leverage in the next election. Investigations there aren’t conducted to solve a problem or to get an answer but to affect an election outcome.”

There was a pause. Outside the bobble lights were bobbling in unison.

“I took a sample prior to surface tests — a bore of about two feet,” said Casey.

“About?”

“Twenty-two inches.”

“The von Erich Coefficient.”
West was secretly pleased at the look of surprise that crossed Casey’s face.

“Her work was —”

“I might have done the same. But —”

“I found … I found calcium carbonate and magnesium sulfate.”

“Ordinary constituents of Martian soil,” said
West
.

“Not in these concentrations. And not associated physically but not chemically. Naturally I broke protocol. Protocol is just Earth’s buzz word meaning
obey me
. By protocol, sand is taken, mixed, ground and then tested to get its chemical composition. Solid stone, like in a core sample, can be taken and cut into layers and the chemicals examined to see which ones are in some kind of association. We do that all the time to assay sediment soil to check how valuable a mine is likely to be. In this case, the calcium is next to the magnesium sulfate, and between those two deposits is phosphorus. The deposits are next to each other, but they aren’t mixed up together.”

She took out her tablet, the ones that under protocol only the lieutenants and the commander could have. Onscreen was a slide of core matter. There were several deposits of calcium carbonate, which were near phosphorus — but always physically separate. Likewise, on the far side of the phosphorus was nearly always a distinct deposit of magnesium sulfate.

West flipped through over fifty screens of core samples. They certainly didn’t seem random when looked at in that light, but Casey had just framed the whole thing for him. Having been told there was a
pattern,
he would look for it and possibly find it even if it wasn’t there. Hell, after decades of refutation, the images of scenery they sent back to Earth were
still
being analyzed for remnants of canals.