People of Mars (8 page)

Anna placed her hands
on her hips. It seemed absurd to be joining forces with Hassan, but
as long as it turned out to be useful, she couldn’t see any down
side. Within the group dynamics, his point of view was the
important and second only to Dennis’s. And the commander always set
great store by his opinion.

“Have you analysed the
crystal in the original sample?” Hassan turned to her.

“I’ve handled the
content of the first vial during the observation under the optical
and the scanning electron microscopes. Although I’ve worked in a
sterile environment, I cannot exclude any possible contamination,
given the small quantity. I was going to use the other one for the
chemical analyses.” If Robert hadn’t disintegrated it.

“You said there was a
sample from a probing pipe,” Michelle said.

“
Yeah, but it doesn’t come from exactly the same
spot as the other two. There were some beryllium crystals, but
their concentrations were so low compared to the other elements in
the regolith, that the analyses I’ve performed weren’t quite
conclusive. In general I haven’t identified other
strange
substances …” The sentence
remained mid air.

“But …” Hassan
prompted her.

Anna looked at him,
and then she turned to the screen occupied by Michelle’s head and
shoulders. “But … in the deepest layer, where there was a slightly
higher quantity of crystals, I detected some traces of carbon
compounds.” She pronounced the last words in an almost reverential
tone.

“Organic molecules?”
Michelle asked with scepticism.

The other woman
hesitated, watching an undefined point in front of her. “Biological
…” She just whispered that.

“Biological?” Hassan
asked, surprised.

“Nucleobases,
mostly.”

“In how many
samples?!” he urged her.

“Just one.”

“Ah!” Michelle
exclaimed, pleased. “It’s surely an artefact. You’ll have touched
the inside of the pipes without gloves, maybe Robert did, and some
DNA coming from his skin remained there.”

“I didn’t say I’ve
found some nucleic acids, but just some components of them,” Anna
protested. Michelle wasn’t listening and was making every effort to
contradict or belittle her. That got on her nerves.

“Okay, you have found
some degraded DNA,” the other woman said, hushing her up. “So you
haven’t properly sterilised the equipment. That’s all. In other
words, the entire sortie was a disaster.”

“I have found traces
of adenine, guanine, cytosine, and … uracil. And, before you ask
me, no, there was no trace of thymine, therefore it cannot be
degraded DNA.”

“Degraded RNA,” Hassan
commented.

Anna shrugged. The
ribonucleic acid contained uracil instead of thymine, hence, at
least in theory, it might have been degraded RNA.

“It’s quite unusual to
contaminate something by mistake only with your RNA, unless your
DNA ends up there, too. But we are talking about traces, it might
still be a less than an ordinary artefact …”

That latest statement
made Michelle gloat.

“Or …” Hassan
continued, placing a hand on Anna’s shoulder, who had to rely on
all her strength not to retract from that uninvited contact.
“Someone here has just found the building bricks of life on
Mars!”

It sounded more like a
mockery than a serious assertion, but it made her feel strange to
hear someone else say it out loud, particularly a qualified person.
It seemed almost real, surely much more important than finding an
ice sac. It was for her and that was the only thing that
counted.

But Michelle let a
laugh escape, which nobody followed.

She didn’t want to
give in. Was it envy, a sense of competition, jealousy? Anna didn’t
know whether she should worry more about Michelle’s stubborn
aversion or about Hassan’s public support. He neither said nor did
anything without a well-defined ulterior motive.

“Excuse my
interference,” Dennis’s voice said out of sight. A hand peeked out
from the right side of the screen and touched something. The
picture enlarged to include him.

“I’m afraid this
discussion is becoming a bit sterile. As I understood, the
collected samples can’t be considered completely reliable …” Anna
was about to open her mouth, but Dennis raised his tone. “Whatever
the reason. Things like this happen. Anyway, to avoid further
doubts, you can do another sampling at the same site, maybe
collecting many more samples, after making sure you’ve sterilised
all the equipment. A diagnostics of the steriliser may help, just
to be sure. One way or the other, if it doesn’t work properly, it
might jeopardise all the work we are doing, whatever you may have
found or not found.”

“I’m going to do that
right now,” she exclaimed, with renewed enthusiasm. She would check
it bit by bit, to dispel all doubts. And she would re-sterilise
everything at least twice.

“If you are able to
finish it by today, you may do another sortie tomorrow.”

As she heard those
words, Anna remembered what had happened earlier. “Talking of
Robert,” she started, but Dennis cut her off with a hand
gesture.

“Have you fixed the
west turbine?” he asked Hassan.

The latter shook his
head. “It wasn’t possible: it was too windy.”

She looked at him,
incredulous. He had no intention of reporting the accident and
didn’t appear at all worried about it.

“Let’s do it like
this,” Dennis continued. “I’ll take care of that with him tomorrow.
You can go with Anna.” It wasn’t a question.

Anna’s mouth gaped.
“Pardon?”

“Please, don’t start.”
Dennis rolled his eyes and snorted. He didn’t notice his wife was
staring at him in anything but a friendly way. “You need someone to
accompany you and help you do the sampling. Hassan is more than
suitable for this purpose.”

“Tomorrow’s going to
be interesting,” Hassan commented with a sneer fixed on his
face.

Michelle turned to the
camera. And she didn’t look at all pleased.

She was sitting alone, staring at the half empty
glass on the table, just in front of her. The drumming of her
fingers was the only sound in the room. The implications of her
discovery, supposing that it was confirmed, were enormous. The
entire
Isis
mission was
born with the purpose of proving the existence of present or past
life on Mars, and perhaps she was about to achieve it. But that
wouldn’t be the end of it, if she did. Such a success would mean
new missions with more sophisticated equipment and more staff to
carry on the research.

It was supposed to be
a thrilling thought, but then, why wasn’t Anna feeling
thrilled?

There was of course
the dread that everything would burst just like a bubble, that what
she had discovered wasn’t anything but an unusual contamination,
but that wasn’t what unsettled her.

Truth was that she
felt nothing. She had decided to go to Mars to make history and
she’d already succeeded. But she had also done it to start a new
life, a life on a new planet. What better opportunity to make a
clean sweep of the past? And she’d succeeded in that purpose as
well. The life she had lived on Earth was so remote, it was just
like an old story she’d read somewhere. The memory of herself like
she’d been then had almost faded, like she had never really lived
before coming to Mars. Even Jan felt like part of a beautiful,
distant dream. There were days when she didn’t even think about him
at all, but when she did, the pain didn’t grip her as it did in the
past.

Yet she wasn’t
satisfied with her new life. She had thought the feeling was due to
the dread that no new launch would take place, but now the finding
of an ice sac by Michelle would suffice to confirm it. No, there
was more.

The cohabitation
inside that prison surrounded by an immense desert was becoming
more and more unbearable. The entire world out there was in fact
prohibited to them. And in there, in Station Alpha, all was too
narrow, monotonous, repetitive and it did nothing but amplify her
deep loneliness, pushing her to perform silly and dangerous actions
just to feel, for a few moments, the sensation she was still
alive.

A noise coming from
outside made her turn to the window. The hatch of a rover was
closing. Two persons were walking towards the entry to the station,
carrying a big container.

The sun had just set,
but it was already dark. Only she had stayed up, waiting for them.
She hadn’t seen Robert since that afternoon. She wanted to talk to
him, but perhaps it was better to let him cool down, for today. And
Hassan, who knew what he was plotting?

A deep clangour
announced the opening of the heavy airlock door, not too far from
the kitchen, followed by a cheerful shouting and the sound of
steps; Michelle’s laughter, getting closer and closer.

Anna swallowed another
sip and yawed. By now, they were accustomed to wake up before dawn
and go to bed not long after dusk to reduce the energy consumption
to minimum in the absence of light. It would’ve been nice to spend
all that time sleeping, dreaming of being elsewhere, of being a
different person.

“Hey,” Michelle
started off, as she entered the room. “Is it only you? We were
expecting a welcoming committee.” She had a happy expression, she
seemed not to notice Anna’s dejection. Or maybe she didn’t care.
Once they had been friends, but things had changed in an
imperceptible way, day by day.

“You look grim!”
Dennis walked around his wife and moved close to the table. He was
holding a jar with some soil at the bottom.

Anna gave a hint of a
smile. The commander was the only one who had always stayed the
same. Pity that he often kept to himself. The few times she had
talked to him alone, he had always succeeded in injecting new
enthusiasm into her.

“You’ll like this.” He
opened the jar and, triumphant, he showed some tiny condensation
drops on the inside of the lid.

At first, Anna didn’t
understand what he was referring to.

“We extracted this
sample from the layers just over the ice sac, and we took the
internal pressure to one atmosphere to avoid letting the crystals
sublimate.” He goggled, faking amazement. “And at room temperature,
it finally appeared.” The regolith contained in the jar was dark,
damp. “Behold the water of Mars!”

Michelle laughed,
while her husband let some drops drip on his palm and then he
rubbed it on his face, wetting it.

“Not just the few
drops we extract with difficulty around here, but plenty of water.
Over there the terrain fifty metres down is more and more soaked,
of course, it’s in its solid state, but if you go deeper, the
regolith is almost completely replaced by ice. It’s a very small
area, but it might be very deep.”

“It’s wonderful news.”
It was indeed, and Anna was doing her best to appreciate it.

“I do believe that in
a while we’ll have to squeeze together, to make room for the
additional crew.” Dennis kissed his wife. “Well, I’m going to do a
last report to Houston, but I’m starving.”

“Leave it to me,” she
said, caressing his face. It was such a tender family portrait, but
it struck no chord with Anna. She had the facts.

As soon as Dennis left
the kitchen, Michelle put aside her joyous expression. What a great
actress.

“What are you doing?
You shouldn’t drink alone.” Her voice tone sounded more sarcastic
than worried. “It isn’t a good sign at all. What’s going on with
you?” She took a glass, poured some vodka and sat beside her. She
was trying to play the friend role. “Aren’t you glad about the
news? You can relax now, the launch will be confirmed. A new crew
will arrive. It’ll be fun. Maybe there will be some nice guy …”

Anna shot an icy glare
in her direction.

“I mean, for you,”
Michelle specified and gulped the whole content of her glass. “I’m
good.” And she laughed again.

“Oh, yeah,” she got as
answer.

“Come on, I’m
serious.” Michelle poked at her with an elbow. “Aren’t you curious?
There were some remarkable ones during the training, weren’t
there?”

“I didn’t notice
that.”

“Well, of course,
Robert would become jealous.”

That latest statement
roused Anna from her apathy. “What the hell are you talking
about?”

“Hey, don’t act
scandalised. I see the two of you are buddy-buddy, I thought there
was something more …” She winked in a conspiratorial way.

“There’s nothing
between Robert and me.”

“Then what’s wrong
with me wanting to find you a fiancé?” And here she was laughing
again. “I know, I shouldn’t drink with an empty stomach. I guess
I’m already drunk.” She stood up. “I’ll better prepare something to
eat.”

“I’d like to go,” Anna
murmured.

“Go?” Michelle asked,
as she opened the fridge and started looking for something
inside.

“Back to Earth.”

The other woman turned
to her, perplexed.

“I want to ask Houston
for the authorisation to get on the return spacecraft.”

The
Isis 2
mission included a return spacecraft, to take back some
Martian rocky samples to Earth for the very first time. She was
remotely operated, but her interior was arranged with accommodation
for up to three persons, in case of the need to take someone home
for medical reasons. Actually, it was too early to ask to leave the
mission, although such option was contemplated in exceptional
circumstances. Lately Anna had reached the decision to try it
anyway. She was sick, perhaps not physically, but surely at a
psychological level. She was going to suggest that she kept on
working on the mission on Earth. Maybe they would listen to her.
She had to try.