Marsquake! Read online

  “Well, the two of us found the first underground blueberries on Mars,” Sean said, yawning. “So maybe we’ll go down in the history books.” He reached for a water bottle and a ration pack without much enthusiasm.

  “How’s your finger?” Jenny asked. “How badly did you cut it?”

  Sean held up his forefinger, putting on a pained expression. “Stabbed to my very heart, I am. Scarred for life. My life’s blood flowing out like a mighty river. My tender young flesh forever mutilated—”

  Jenny was shining a flashlight on his fingertip and closely inspecting his skin. She snapped off the light. “Oh, shut up. I don’t see anything.”

  “There’s nothing to see,” Sean said. He rubbed his finger with his thumb, searching. It was hard even for him to tell exactly where the little prickle was located on his fingertip. “It’s right here,” he said finally. “Right where my thumbnail’s touching. See anything?”

  Jenny turned the flashlight on and practically touched his finger with her nose, frowning intently. “No,” she said after a moment. “How about your glove?”

  “I sprayed a little self-sealant in just to be sure, but I can’t find a rip. I’m not even sure the spike penetrated the glove. Maybe it just felt like I’d stuck myself.”

  “No blood?”

  “Gallons,” Sean said. He laughed again. “No blood, Jenny! I’m fine, really.”

  “Maybe you should report to—”

  “I’m fine,” he insisted. “I can walk around without falling over and everything!”

  “Okay, okay,” Jenny said. “I wouldn’t harp on it if I didn’t like you.”

  “I know. Get any good shots today?”

  Jenny rolled her eyes. “I’ve taken more than a thousand shots over the past week. I’m getting so I wouldn’t know a good picture if it bit me on the—”

  “Careful!” Sean warned, wagging his finger.

  “On the ankle, I was going to say,” Jenny finished with a flash of her eyes. “You know something? You’re pretty stinky.”

  “Hey, it was just a joke.”

  “No, I mean you really need a shower,” Jenny said. “But I do too. I hope they let us catch up on our water ration when we get back. I’d love to take a nice, long, hot bath!”

  “You’ll have to settle for a nice, short, tepid shower, like the rest of us peons,” Sean said.

  Jenny sniffed. “When I get to be queen of Mars, I’m going to have my own gold bathtub,” she said. “And bubble bath. Gallons of it. And I plan to stay in the tub at least four hours every day, until I get all pruny and wrinkled.”

  Sean held up a cracker. “I hope you’ll feed your loyal subjects better than this.”

  Jenny lifted her nose into the air. “We love our loyal subjects. They can have twocrackers each!”

  The trip back seemed shorter to Sean than their week of exploring. In a way it was: They didn’t pause nearly as much, and Ellman announced that he expected them to be back at the lift in four days’ time. Sean reflected that he hadn’t been away from Marsport that long since the summer, when he had helped with the pipeline project that had solved the colony’s water-supply problem, at least for the immediate future.

  When they came to the fossil, Miles had to stop and admire it again, as if he were half afraid it might come to life and skitter off into the darkness. But it was still there, long dead, frozen in stone, and waiting for a team of paleontologists to return and free it. By the third day of their ascent, Sean was feeling uncomfortable in his pressure suit. He complained to Jenny that his suit heater must be malfunctioning. He was feeling too warm all the time.

  She checked it, though, and told him that the thermostat reading was just what he’d set it for: twenty-four degrees Celsius. That should have been the equivalent of a warm spring day on Earth, but Sean felt as if it had been cranked up to thirty or more.

  Except for that, nothing much happened. They reached the lift area, then queued up for the trip to the surface. If the drop down had seemed long, the lift up seemed endless, with the lift cage creaking and groaning as the cable slowly raised it from the depths. Sean and Jenny were again in the last group, and when they emerged into the glare of a Martian winter day, they had to squint. The sky overhead was clear and deep blue, and the sun was almost at its zenith, though it still rode low in the northern sky. Haze obscured the top of Olympus Mons.

  At least Jenny and Sean managed to scrounge a place in the first rover truck for the trip back to Marsport. They had a view this time, and an exhausted Sean thought he had never seen anything more welcoming than the domes and hangars of Marsport, the sunlight gleaming on them. He wanted to sleep for about a week.

  But first he had to help unpack. It was lucky that gravity on Mars was so low, he thought as he helped hoist a huge container of rock and soil samples from the rover’s storage compartment. A fifty-kilogram burden on Earth—about a hundred pounds—weighed only nineteen kilograms on Mars. You still had to be careful handling things, though, because despite things weighing less, they had the same mass as they would have on Earth. You could pick up a hundred-pound container of rocks, but its volume didn’t change, and its momentum, once it started moving, was a function of its mass and volume, not just of weight. It could be, as Roger Smith had put it, “bloody awkward” to shift things around.

  It took a couple of hours to unload everything. To Sean’s surprise, they were instructed to leave all the containers outside the biohazard dome, the place where the early explorers had decontaminated everything they had brought in from the surface, on the off chance that some Martian life had survived.

  None had, as far as anyone could tell. But then, far underground—well, Sean supposed, there just might be a chance, so he could understand.

  What struck him as even odder was the fact that they all had to strip off their pressure suits in an outlying airlocked dome, take their showers there, and change to regulation clothing. And then they all had to have quick medical checks.

  Everything was fine. No one was running a temperature or showing any strange symptoms. No one had picked up any bizarre extraterrestrial diseases. Everyone received a clean bill of health.

  Or so it seemed at the time.

  CHAPTER 7

  Sean Hadn’t fully realizad what an enormous under taking the exploration of the tunnels had been. The ten exploring teams produced tons of information, and all of it had to be recorded in the computers, coordinated, compared, filed, matched, and crossindexed before it could be interpreted and understood. For the first few days after the expedition, Sean was busy with his own work. Finally, though, he stopped in Amanda Simak’s office to chat after he finished downloading and reviewing all of his photos—over the eleven days, he had taken nearly two thousand of them.

  Amanda told him he had been lucky to have drawn Ellman’s team rather than one of the others. “Your team just happened to be assigned to the lava tube that went deepest beneath the surface. Some of the others had traces of water erosion in them, but yours was the only one that had a strong indication of standing water. Your group made the most interesting finds, and their work is getting the highest priority.”

  “I know the stuff we found got Ted, I mean, Dr. Miles very excited,” Sean said with a grin.

  “It would, wouldn’t it?” Amanda asked with a fond look at her adopted son. “A fossil is really something. It’s been millions of years since there was abundant surface water on the planet. But the underground water is a different story. Dr. Miles believes that the tunnel you were exploring has been flooded often, and the last time might have been only tens of thousands of years ago, not millions. Life may have existed here much more recently than anyone believed.”

  “I know we were very deep when we got to the places where the water had collected,” Sean said. “We were way down below the level where you get permafrost. Is Dr. Miles going to go back? I know he wants to retrieve his fossil and see if he can find any more.”

  “Yes, he’ll return in a month or
so,” Amanda said.“He’s taking hydrologists along too this time—finding a flowing spring of water on Mars, even that far beneath the surface, is something no one expected.”

  “Not much of a spring,” Sean said. “More like a faintly oozing damp patch.”

  Amanda raised her eyebrows. “Still, that little ooze is something that has been found nowhere else on the planet.”

  “It was ice.” Sean nodded thoughtfully. “So how have things been here? How about the quakes?” he asked. “Have there been any more?”

  “No marsquakes, just a few routine tremblors, all force one-point-five or smaller—so small you can’t even detect them without instruments. They’ve happened often enough before, and no one even bothers with them.” Amanda paused, then added, “The fumaroles are worrying Dr. Wu, though.”

  “Is the planet still shooting out gas?”

  “Carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, and even some water vapor,” Amanda said. “And it’s hot—vapor in the form of steam, coming out of the vents at a temperature of more than three hundred degrees. Of course, it cools rapidly as it hits the outer air.” She fiddled with the controls of her office viewscreen. “Here, this is what it looks like. This is a real-time monitor. This view shows the whole active area.”

  Sean half turned in his chair to see the screen. At first, the image seemed to be one of a depressed crater, common in this area. When Olympus Mons had grown gigantic, the underground magma had occasionally forced other easier courses to the surface, creating volcanic caldera that in some cases were only meters across. Many times these looked like shallow basins, different from a meteorite crater because volcanic caldera lacked the fracturing, the central peak, and the rim of low hills that meteorites usually left as evidence of their crashing into the surface.

  Then something moved in the picture, and Sean realized he was seeing not just still pictures, but a live feed. The movement had been a sudden yellowish plume jetting out from one of several dozen low mounds. They looked like the caps of toadstools, but each one had a small central opening, and most of them seemed active. Sean could see shimmers over other fumaroles that weren’t giving out visible jets of steam. The rising heat, though, distorted the atmosphere, like heat waves dancing over a hot asphalt highway on a summer day back on Earth. The yellowish gas rapidly dissipated.

  Then another fumarole gushed out a billowing white cloud. It bloomed in the cold air, and a little drift of frozen crystals fell from it, though most of them sublimed away to nothing before reaching the ground “Whoa!” Sean said. “Water vapor?”

  “Looks like it,” Amanda said. “Of course, this particular feed is just visual. It doesn’t have any spectrometric measuring devices, so I couldn’t tell you for sure. Water vapor has been detected, though, and in substantial amounts.”

  “What does Dr. Wu think about the activity?” Sean asked. He tried to keep the edge of worry out of his voice as he added, “Is it time for us to pack up and move?”

  “Not yet, anyway,” Amanda said. “Dr. Wu thinks that there’s definitely an active magma pocket supplying heat a long way beneath the surface—even farther down than the lava tube reached. The quake probably opened up a fault line, letting subsurface water trickle down to the really hot layers of rock. That blasts the water into steam, and the steam erupts as these miniature volcanoes. Chances of a major eruption are small—one out of a thousand or even less, Dr. Wu estimates, so we’re hoping that means Marsport is safe enough for the time being.” As if hearing her own words, Amanda checked the time. “Sean, I’d love to chat some more, but I have things to do.”

  “I know,” Sean said, standing up. “Well, one good thing: Nobody on our team tried to slap anyone around. How did all that work out? Did the prisoners behave themselves?”

  “You know, all of them did. I think you were very astute, Sean.”

  “Very what?”

  Amanda laughed. “Very smart about human nature, let’s say. As long as everyone keeps busy, no one has time to brood or to argue. Now I hope these expeditions have given us a lot to keep us all busy and out of trouble. Let’s have dinner together tonight, all right?”

  “Sure,” Sean said. I’ll come back around five.”

  “Fine.”

  The people of the colony had not been taking it easy while three hundred explorers were off poking through tunnels. Sean found that the damaged greenhouse dome had been repaired during his absence, that the others had been reinforced, and that his job was ready for him again. Over the next week, he and Sam Mackenzie’s crew put in hour after hour starting soybean seedlings and transferring them to the giant cylindrical hydroponic frames. Mackenzie had decided to double the number of plants under cultivation to make up for the loss they had suffered, and at first it looked as if the greenhouse was heading for a bumper crop—a record crop for a Martian winter, at least.

  And then, on his ninth day back on the job, Sean noticed a yellow speck in one hydroponics frame, one he had planted himself. He inspected and found a single yellow leaf. He plucked it and discarded it without much thought.

  The next day he found a small patch of yellow, all around the place where he had taken out the dead leaf.

  Or—had it been dead? The soybean plants looked all right, but their emerald-green leaves had become a greenish yellow color. Sean called Mackenzie over.

  “Uh-oh,” McKenzie said, inspecting the affected plants. “I don’t like the looks of that.”

  “Whats causing it?” Sean asked. “Do I have the water levels wrong, or are the nutrients …”

  Mackenzie ran a diagnostic program on the computer that controlled the hydroponics cylinder. He shook his head as he looked at the results. “Well, this is just puzzling. Everything looks good on the readout. In fact, oxygen output is actually up a fraction in this planting. But that patch of plants sure looks sick. Let’s move them to an observation frame. We’ll isolate them and keep an eye on them to make sure there’s nothing genetically wrong.”

  The next day Sean found a much larger yellow splotch in the original cylinder. Mackenzie called him over to the sealed observation frame where they had put the other half dozen plants they had removed the day before. “What do you make of that?” he asked.

  Sean blinked. “Wow. What’s happened to them?”

  The plants, hardly more than a week old, looked half grown, bushy and perfectly healthy. Except their leaves were now a bright yellow, shot through with veins of the deepest green.

  “Beats me,” Mackenzie said in a worried voice. “They look like they’ve got some kind of blight, but they’ve nearly doubled in size overnight. And the readouts tell us these plants are using only about a quarter of the nutrients they should be taking in, while their oxygen output is twice what it should be. I don’t know what’s happened to their chlorophyll—they should be a lot greener than this—but they seem to be making efficient use of the light and the nutrients they’re getting. It doesn’t add up at all.”

  “Are they dying?”

  “I just don’t know,” Mackenzie admitted. “The yellow color makes it look as if they’re suffering from some kind of blight or fungus, but I can’t find any evidence of any parasite, any fungus, or any kind of infection. It’s incredible, but if they go on growing at this rate, these plants will begin to bear in a few days. I just don’t know whether anyone would dare to eat the soybeans they produce. I’m not sure I would.”

  Just to be safe, Mackenzie destroyed the other plants on the original frame. He kept the ones in the isolation frame under close watch.

  In three days they bloomed. Less than ten days later, they had produced a crop of beans. That was unheard of, even for the genetically-enhanced plants that the Mars colony used as a major source of food.

  The harvested beans looked healthy enough. Chemical analysis said they were just as nourishing as any other soybean.

  Except these beans were close to twice the normal size, and there were over twice as many of them as expected. The odd yellow-leaved soybean pla
nts were flourishing, giving off abundant oxygen, demanding little in the way of nutrients. Without seeming to take in energy sufficient to the job, they went along producing soybeans in abundance. “It doesn’t add up.” Mackenzie kept saying. “It’s as if something is making the plants operate at a higher efficiency. They use a quarter of the nutrients to produce twice the food, and they do it in record time.” He scratched his head. “And I sure can’t tell what’s causing it.”

  About that time, Sean began to notice a few other odd things as well. His appetite seemed off, for one. The others always joked about how voracious he was, even by Mickey’s standards. Sean was a high-energy guy, and he favored large helpings at frequent intervals. Recendy, though, he found himself skipping lunch. He simply didn’t feel hungry. And sometimes his breakfast was so spartan that Roger commented, “You’re wasting away, mate!”

  He wasn’t, though. In fact, he felt fine—better than he had in years. He had given Roger a shrug. “Maybe my appetite’s just settling down,” he said. “Back on Earth, when I was a runaway, I ate just about anything in order to survive. Heck, I’ve had rat stew before, and street-pigeon pie. Maybe my body’s finally got the message it doesn’t have to devour everything in its path to keep going!”

  His exercise sessions in the gym were also getting a bit weird. Because Martian gravity was only a little more than a third as strong as Earth gravity, all colonists had to put in a certain amount of exercise per week to maintain muscle tone and bone density. Most of them tolerated it, a few of them hated it, and a few liked it. As for Sean, he had always enjoyed being active, but now he found that he could run twenty kilometers at top speed without even getting winded. It felt as if he could run all day long, in fact. His workouts on the weight machines suddenly seemed far too easy. He experimented with heavier weights and soon discovered that he could benchpress twice what he thought he was capable of doing.