People of Mars (4 page)

She heard a rustle
among the foliage of a bush; it then spread to the adjacent plant,
until she saw a small, white stain peeking out from behind the
leaves, convinced it was perfectly hidden. Anna moved closer with a
stealthy pace. She weighed about fifty kilograms, but with a
reduced gravity of a little more than one third of the Earth’s she
had almost learned to fluctuate over the ground, without causing
any noise.

With a sudden jerk of
her hands she seized it. “Hi, Moln!” She talked to the rabbit as if
it were a child. She had called it Moln, which in Swedish means
cloud, because it was white like Earth’s clouds. At first the poor
thing struggled to free itself, then, once it recognised her, it
calmed down. Anna could feel its small heartbeat, as she placed the
animal against her chest and stroked it.

They had brought with
them a few pairs of rabbits and various chickens with the intention
of letting them reproduce; some of them would be used for food. For
this reason, she had always tried not to grow fond of them. But
that bunny was special. She was there when mummy rabbit delivered
and, among its many siblings, it seemed the more vulnerable one.
The others always succeeded in dominating it and, since she was
afraid it could die, Anna had decided to adopt it. So she could
feed it and save it from certain death, she’d managed to build a
small baby bottle using some material retrieved from the
laboratory. Now Moln had become her rabbit and the rest of the crew
knew well it would never end up in a saucepan.

She stayed there,
seated on the ground cuddling her godchild for who knows how long,
so absorbed in her thoughts that she did not hear the footsteps
behind her.

“Hi, gorgeous,” a
mellow voice whispered in her ear. Anna froze as she recognised it.
The rabbit perceived the contraction of her arms and struggled
until it escaped.

“Can I play the old
MacDonald’s farm with you?” Hassan laughed at his own joke. He was
kneeling just behind her. Anna could feel his presence, but he
carefully avoided touching her.

“Do you need something
in particular or are you here just to annoy me?” She tried to keep
a neutral tone. She’d rather ignore him, but she knew well he
wouldn’t stop teasing her until she replied.

He had been behaving
like that for many months now. She had made a mistake with him, a
serious mistake. Since then Hassan hadn’t stopped getting back at
her. He systematically ignored her when they were together with
their crewmates. He behaved as if he didn’t hear her words, or as
if they were an annoying background noise. Even when he looked at
her, he seemed not to see her, as if he was focusing his gaze on an
object behind her.

Things were different
when they were alone. He sneaked up with the intention of
frightening her. And then he addressed her with a friendly tone,
too friendly. It seemed he enjoyed keeping her under
examination.

That wicked game had
gone on for such a long time that it had worn down her nerves more
and more. She had never mentioned it to Robert, because otherwise
she would’ve been forced to explain what had caused that cold war.
She just couldn’t tell him.

Anna wondered when it
would end, if it would ever end. Hadn’t she already paid enough?
What did he expect from her? She should have faced him. She kept on
repeating that to herself, but every time she found him in front of
her, she felt paralysed.

“I’d rather come just
to annoy you,” he replied, mocking. “But actually I’m looking for
the sterilised probing pipes. I can’t find them in the
laboratory.”

“There’s a set of them
in the Rover One. Robert had prepared it for our sortie. You’d
better take that one, it’s ready.”

If he just needed a
piece of information, he was going to go away now.

“Ah, okay …” he
commented, but didn’t move.

‘
Just as I
thought.’

Anna didn’t dare to
turn. She wondered whether to stand up and move away from him. In
the end, Hassan would get tired and leave her alone. But she
actually feared what he would say or do, if she attempted to
move.

Robert should have
joined her at the end of the briefing. Why wasn’t he there yet?

At once she felt a
blow of air on her shoulders. Hassan had stood up. Perhaps he had
gone. She couldn’t help but turn around, but he was still stood
there, looking at her. And smiling at her.

“
Anna, Anna, from here you seem so small and
vulnerable.
What
you are,
instead …” Then he offered his hand to help her stand
up.

She could refuse, but
she didn’t want him to understand her dread. She saw he was
studying her now, judging her. She took his hand and let him lift
her.

Hassan helped her with
gentleness, without yanking her. Then he just released his grip.
“See you around, gorgeous.” He flashed another one of his enigmatic
smiles to her and walked away.

A blue line generated
by the augmented reality on the rover’s interactive windshield
formed an ideal border in the surrounding landscape. As usual,
everything else was red, dusty, and above all flat as far as the
eye could see. Anna was watching it, dejected. They had pushed
themselves as far as they could, but she was sure there was nothing
in that area. Its conformation was identical to the hundreds of
others they had already visited. Beyond the limit, however, there
was something interesting.

“According to the
satellite photograph there’s a formation twenty kilometres further
south, which looks like a dry riverbed.” She recalled the satellite
image to the screen. By zooming in, she could distinguish a slight
depression in the terrain. It seemed to be smoothed by the slow
flowing of a river, some million years before.

“Pity that it’s too
far,” Robert commented, with little conviction. He looked
distracted.

“Let’s go there!” Anna
said that in a quiet tone, as if it were normal. She was pleased
with that decision. Why not?

Instead, the guy’s
reaction was, “Are you nuts? If we go down there, we’ll be driving
for at least two hours in the dark when we come back. To do
something like that, we need Dennis’s authorization.”

“If we ask him, he
will no doubt say no.”

“You got it!”

“But if we decide to
go, he won’t be able stop us.” She turned to her crewmate, who
looked tempted by her proposal.

“Hmm.” Robert shook
his head. “Sister, it isn’t a good idea at all. We could go there
in a month, when the daylight is longer. Why risk it now?”

“They found an ice sac
yesterday.”

“
Maybe
they found an ice sac. Up to now they’ve just
detected a slight increase in water concentration in the regolith.”
He yawned. He had snoozed for most of the journey. “They gotta go
back there a third time to understand what it is.”

“Well, something like
that has never happened before.” Anna bit her lip, nervous. “It’s
something big.”

“Wait a moment.”
Robert’s head whirled around to face her. “I didn’t know we were
competing!”

The woman stole a
conspiratorial glance at him.

The day before, Michelle and Hassan had returned
to the same area of their previous sortie. Although they had
drilled as long as possible, they had struggled to reach depth
seventy-metres. The substratum had proved harder than expected, but
as they had gone down the instrumentation had detected water
concentrations about half a percentage point higher than the
maximum reading of 4% they had found until then. And that rocky
mass with a different density, which they suspected, or hoped, was
ice, was located just about another twenty metres deeper. If the
theory could be confirmed, it would be so exceptional that
the
Isis
crew would
hold the winning card in obtaining a definitive launch date for
the
Isis
2
, without further
delays.

It was great news,
which should have swept away any dread from Anna, but she hadn’t
actually been that happy about it. Sure, she wanted the
colonisation project to go on, but she didn’t like the idea that
the credit didn’t belong to her, too.

No, Anna was by no
means satisfied. A situation not helped by the fact that Hassan
himself was involved in the discovery, even if the main credit
belonged to Michelle. Such detail wouldn’t improve her mood at
all.

“What are you afraid
of?” she dared him. “I’ll drive in the dark, if you don’t feel like
doing it. We know the area around the station inch by inch. I could
do it with my eyes closed.”

“Oh, yeah …” Robert
kept staring at her. He seemed to be searching for a sign of
concession, for which he would wait in vain.

An hour later they
were on the edge of the ancient river. They had parked their rover
and gone out wearing their suits. The slope to the riverbed
descended at quite a steep angle, on an anything but smooth plane.
They’d had to tie the motorised corer trolley to the rover by means
of a steel cable, and to prevent it from tipping over, they
accompanied its movement down for about ten metres. By the time
they’d reached the first suitable position for a sampling, noon had
already long passed and they weren’t even halfway through their
job.

Anna felt her sweat
dripping down her brow and, by instinct, she raised a hand to her
head, only to be stopped by her helmet. She snorted, annoyed, and
changed the settings to her suit life support to have more
ventilation. She was regretting that she’d got carried away by her
competitiveness. What idiocy. This way they would be late back to
the station, empty-handed, and would get a good telling-off from
Dennis.

“What’s this?”

Robert’s voice roused
her from her thoughts. She turned to him and saw he was pointing a
finger to the ground, but she couldn’t understand what he wanted to
show her.

“What?” She just had
the time to phrase her question, when she noticed the white stain.
It was a stone which, despite being partially hidden by shadow,
stood out for its white colour in all that red.

Anna crouched down and
touched it with her glove. Her fingertip became slightly white. At
once focused on her job again, she took a sampler from her kit,
collected a tiny piece of the mineral, and placed it into the
portable analyser.

“It’s gypsum,” she
murmured, even before obtaining a confirmation. Her lips stretched
in a wide smile. In an instant, she had forgotten about her former
bitterness.

Her colleague watched
her with a perplexed stare. Perhaps he wondered what was so
fantastic in a piece of gypsum.

“I’ve seen images of
similar findings by those old NASA rovers, but this is the first
time we’ve found one in person.”

That explanation did
not appear to enlighten Robert.

“It’s the proof that
water was really here!” It was so obvious.

“Ah …” he commented,
but he didn’t seem convinced yet. “But didn’t we already know that
there was water here in the past? It’s a dry riverbed.”

“Well, we supposed
that, but this is real proof.”

“Ah …”

Anna started laughing.
A thousand days on Mars and you still had to explain everything to
him. The fact she knew more than the others, her ability to create
amazement in the people around her was something she had always
liked so much. She loved to amaze. But among her colleagues, maybe
the only one with whom that game still worked was indeed Robert. He
was just a technician, doubtless, the best one they could have, but
he wasn’t a scientist. Perhaps that was one reason she got along so
well with him. He made her feel important.

“Come on, I want to
take some samples round here.” She felt caught by a sudden
enthusiasm and she hoped it would last. “I’m curious to find out
about the chemical composition.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Robert
jeered at her, whilst standing up, but when he stepped back, his
foot found a gap. “Christ!” he exclaimed, whirling his arms to
regain balance.

That drew Anna’s
attention. She reached out and seized him by the hand. “Would you
please be careful?!” Then she noticed the reason for his
almost-fall.

Robert turned as well
and they both gaped for a while at a long crack on the ground. It
ran along the riverbed for more than a hundred metres, according to
what was promptly reported by the augmented reality of their
helmet. They crouched down to have a closer look at it. It was
about twenty centimetres wide, but it appeared deep.

“It seems recent.”
Anna was already placing an elongated sampler inside it and was
scraping the rocky wall.

“
Are you saying there was a …
marsquake
?”

“I’m not an expert,
but here the rock has split neatly and collapsed, thus creating
this dip.” While speaking, she was pointing out to her colleague
the strip of the crack they were on, which was just a bit lower
compared to the adjacent one. That step had almost caused Robert’s
fall. “Indeed, it seems the result of seismic movement. Maybe it
happened many years ago, but not long enough for the dust to
conceal it.”

She pulled out the
sealed vial from the sampler. Within it were the fragments of rock
drawn from inside the crack. As she turned it, she noticed an
unusual reflection produced by the sunlight.

“Oh … do you see that,
too?”

Robert bent down to
place his gaze at the same height of the vial. As Anna moved the
glass container, sometimes you could detect some azure reflections,
which stood out from the rust-coloured remainder of the sample.

“I daresay we’ve never
seen this kind of glitters,” he commented.

“Yeah.” She sighed.
“After drawing a core down there, we must move the corer here.”