People of Mars (9 page)

“There’s nothing more
for me here.”

Michelle stopped what
she was doing and sat back. Her concern seemed genuine. For the
first time in many months, Anna believed she glimpsed in her face
the dear friend she had once been.

“Forgive me. I didn’t
know you were feeling so bad.” She placed a hand on her arm. “No,
what am I saying? I supposed so, but I was so wrapped up in my
business that I preferred not to see.”

There was a long
waiting pause, but nothing happened.

“I’d like you to talk
to me.”

“There’s not much to
say.”

“Is it because of Jan?
Have you contacted him in the end?”

Anna shook her head.
“He made a new life for himself where there’s no room for me.”

“And so, why?”

“I want to breathe
again in an open place. Go about and meet other people.” The memory
of her first encounter with Jan forced its way into her mind, but
she shooed it to a remote corner. Instead, she concentrated on the
sea in front of Stockholm City Hall, the cries of the seagulls. “I
want some peace.”

“What’s happening?”
Anna’s words didn’t seem to convince the other woman. Even she had
realised it was an umpteenth desire to escape from something.

“You know very well
what’s happening!” She couldn’t pretend not to see. “We can keep on
saying we are family, but the truth is that life here is becoming
impossible. There was a little accident today and Robert accused
Hassan of trying to kill him.”

“What?!”

“The point is that
we’re becoming paranoid, we don’t trust each other. You can’t deny
that.” Michelle was about to speak, but Anna stopped her. “We have
secrets.” And she fixed her gaze on the other woman’s eyes.

Michelle’s hand moved
back. She looked around with evident embarrassment.

“Shouldn’t you make
dinner for your husband?” Anna asked, pushing her glass away and
standing up.

The other nodded and,
without saying anything, went back to the fridge.

The corridor light in
the lodging came on, as Anna was walking. She wished she were
sleepy, so that she could stop over-thinking for a few hours. For a
second she considered knocking on Robert’s door, but then she
didn’t feel like it. She still had his accusations ringing in her
ears. If only she’d had to go out with him tomorrow, they would’ve
had time to talk, clarify things. She didn’t want to lose her last
and only friend.

Instead, she would be
doing that sortie with Hassan.

Unwittingly, she
turned to the end of the corridor, where her enemy’s quarters were.
The previous night she had covered that distance lightly, without
thinking. That had made her feel good. It all seemed so unreal
now.

Sooner or later, she’d
be forced to clarify things with him, but she didn’t fancy that.
She felt she owed him no explanations, but she also felt he
wouldn’t let go.

The idea of telling Dennis what she had seen
flashed through her mind for a moment; she could warn him against
what was happening behind his back. Life at Station Alpha would’ve
become hell, but it would’ve been
amusing
to give Hassan a hard time. Anna smiled with
malice just thinking about it.

5

The rover proceeded
lazily at a steady twenty-five kilometres-per-hour, as it crossed
the monotony of Lunae Planum. After travelling for four hours in a
row, in complete and utter silence, Hassan felt wrapped by a sense
of drowsiness. His eyelids were becoming heavy. A sudden jerk woke
him from his lethargy.

He turned to look at
the woman beside him, as if he was ensuring she was still there,
still alive. Since they had left, she hadn’t spoken a single word.
She had kept on staring at the horizon with an expression of
content contemplation.

Hassan shifted his
gaze to follow hers. He had never ventured into that sector of the
planum before. Although at first sight the desert might seem all
the same, the more he’d watched it day by day, the more he’d learnt
to notice the slight differences, to recognise the white rocks
emerging from the reddish terrain. The light of the sun, already
high in the sky, made them shine with a rude beauty. That place, so
desolate, held a dark appeal in his soul. He missed Earth, but at
the same time, he realised that Mars was becoming a part of
him.

Another look at Anna,
who hadn’t moved from her position. His sleepiness was back and the
glare from the salmon-coloured sky was just worsening it. He
reached out to grab a bottle of water and sipped it; he needed much
more than that to stay awake.

He turned on the
augmented reality on the top of the windshield and he recalled the
enlarged picture of the environmental bacterium, whose cytoplasm
was adorned with tiny, azure spots. In vain, he was looking for a
plausible explanation for that phenomenon.

“I want to show you
something.” The first words from Anna since their departure.

The woman moved her
hand on the control panel and another picture appeared beside the
first. It looked similar, except that the structure containing the
crystals was rod-shaped and featured a less sharp outline.

“What’s this?”

“It’s a magnification
of a regolith sample taken from the crack. I was studying this one
under the microscope before Robert broke the other vial. It may be
a fossil bacterium; what d’you think?”

Determining if that
image in front of them was really a fossil bacterium was not easy,
because what remained of the original microorganism was no more
than a trace in the rock. No biological matter remained that would
confirm those kind of theories, just inorganic substances, which
might be the result of the presence of life in the remote past.
There was no certainty, just suppositions. In the past century,
there was a debate about the finding of what was believed to be
fossil nanobacteria on the HAL 84001 meteorite coming from Mars,
which had been found in Antarctica. The enthusiasm had driven
several scientists and even the then-president of the United
States, Bill Clinton, to state they had found a proof of
extraterrestrial life. However, subsequent studies had highlighted
that the structures seen at electronic microscope levels were due
to normal chemical, non-biological phenomena.

“At first I thought
the beryllium crystal formations were the result of a subsequent
mineralisation,” Anna explained. “But now, by comparing them with
the picture of the environmental bacterium, I’m not that
certain.”

“Living Earth
bacterium and what is presumed to be fossil Martian bacterium, both
accumulating microcrystals.” Hassan swallowed another sip of water
to clear his head. “Why would two microorganisms separated by
hundreds of millions of years and kilometres, generated by
completely distinct evolution processes, have the same reaction to
an external element?”

Anna shook her head.
“Indeed, it doesn’t make much sense. Besides, they are different in
shape, size. The odds that they have the same chemical affinity are
zero. I would understand it, if it was a simpler element.”

“Unless the crystal is
just a vehicle for something else we don’t see,” Hassan commented.
He didn’t share her ambition to find life on Mars at all. He wasn’t
sure if it would be a good thing.

“Perhaps we’ll learn
more from today’s samples.” Anna pointed at the change in the
terrain being outlined in front of them. The augmented reality
reported a distance of little more than five hundred metres to the
location she had visited with Robert two days earlier. “We are
almost there.”

The previous tracks of
the rover were still there. They were driving on them. Those marks
had somehow crystallised and would remain for a very long time. The
strong winds hadn’t been able to lift enough dust to cover all of
them.

“
But I don’t kid myself. There’s a lot of work to
do, we are too few and our equipment is insufficient. The arrival
of the new
Isis
will bring
some improvement, but to get some definite answers we need much
more. For instance, the ESA’s exobiology laboratory in
Paris.”

Hassan was parking the
rover on the edge of the dry riverbed as he listened to her.

“It’ll be nice to go
back there.”

At that statement, he
braked abruptly and turned to her.

Anna chuckled to
herself. “This time I might even learn some French.” Then her face
darkened.

“Do you want to get on
the return spacecraft?” He couldn’t conceal his disbelief.

“Yes,” she replied,
determined. She moved to the back of the vehicle to wear her
suit.

He started doing the
same. “Why? Are you already sick and tired of Mars?” He feared her
answer.

“I’m sick and tired,
but not of Mars.” She didn’t so much as spare him a glance and went
back to her seat. “Ready?”

“Ready,” he said in a
huff.

“I’m activating the
depressurisation.”

He heard a puff, then
the air started to go out. The process lasted for a few
seconds.

“Depressurisation
completed,” the on-board computer announced.

Closing his gloved
hand in a tight fist, Hassan hit the opening button and the
hatchback rose. He jumped down and took out the corer. He would’ve
been faster if she had helped him, but Anna was intent on reviewing
the data from the previous sortie.

He slammed the
hatchback, making the whole rover vibrate.

She let a sigh escape
her lips. Finally alone, at least for a few minutes. By moving her
fingers, she enlarged the image on the windshield. It indicated the
exact location of the previous sampling on a photo provided by one
of the orbiters, an observation satellite orbiting in a dynamic way
compared to the planet’s rotation. She followed the crack on the
ground for most of its length, looking for a spot wide enough for
the sampler to collect some material from deep down.

All of a sudden, there
was a slight disturbance in the augmented reality and the yellow
LED of the radio came on, as if there was an incoming transmission.
But she could not hear anything. Anna raised the volume of the
loudspeaker, with no result. Then she turned on the
transceiver.

“This is Rover Two.
Station Alpha, are you calling us?”

Dead silence. She
couldn’t even hear the usual background static. The LED was still
on, as if somebody was transmitting a message with no sound.

“Hassan?”

She looked around, but
couldn’t see him. He must have descended into the riverbed, out of
her sight.

“Computer, show me the
incoming transmission on the screen.”

A window materialised,
and a diagram representing high frequency sound waves appeared;
they exceeded the human audibility threshold. That was why she
couldn’t hear anything.

Seized by a flash of
inspiration, she turned on the connection to the Mars Positioning
System, the small experimental satellite network extending for most
of Lunae Planum southward up to the edge of Valles Marineris.
Although it was a wide mesh network, it was very useful to locate a
rover’s position, thanks to its transponder, and had an accuracy of
about one and half kilometres. That was more than enough given
that, in the rust-coloured unchanging nothingness, those metal
vehicles were easily discernable from huge distances and the
horizon was beyond three kilometres, in the flat terrain.

With the help of the
on-board computer, she tried to reconfigure the system, to see
whether she might be able to use it to identify the origin of the
transmission. Since the atmosphere was so rarefied, radio waves on
Mars passed through it with a certain ease and reached the nearest
satellites without any problem, even when the transmission power
wasn’t high. The precision in the identification of the source,
however, wouldn’t be comparable to that of transponders, but it was
worth trying.

“Come on, come
on.”

The LED had started
blinking rhythmically. The transmission was going on and off, as if
it was following a pattern.

A bump on the
windshield gave her a start.

“So, are you going to
sit there all comfy or are you going to get out and give me a
hand?” Hassan’s voice resounded clear inside her helmet. Then the
yellow LED went out, and she could hear the classic background
noise.

“Shit.”

“Is that supposed to
be your answer?”

“I’m coming, one
moment!” she shouted, gesturing with her hand.

“Transmission
located,” the computer’s unstressed voice sentenced. A map appeared
on the screen, within it a series of concentric circles outlined an
area covering part of Ophir Planum and extending into the canyon.
Each one of them indicated a different probability that the signal
source was included in it.

Almost feeling
hypnotised, she lingered on the image for some seconds more.

Bent over and
precariously balanced, with her arm inserted in the crack, she
checked on the augmented reality the sampling manoeuvre of the
device she was holding. The ground was being shaken by rhythmic
vibrations caused by the activation of the corer. About ten metres
from her, it was driving a one-metre pipe into the Martian
regolith. Her fingers hurt and she was afraid the sampler might
slip at any moment. It was tied to her suit with a safety lanyard,
but there was a risk she would damage it and the spare one was many
hours journey away at Station Alpha.

From her position she
couldn’t see the rover, parked higher on the edge of the dry
riverbed, and if she turned her back on Hassan, who was operating
the corer, she had the overwhelming sensation of being alone in the
desert, surrounded by boundless spaces cluttered with dust and
rocks. The very thought of it terrified her, while at the same time
made her feel in accord with the inhospitable environment.