Heavy Water: And Other Stories

by Martin Amis

  “Excuse me? Excuse me? Mr. Fitzmaurice, if you please. You will be turning this television off, I hope. The boys are not permitted to watch the news today. It’s an OO. An official order. From the Department Head.”

  The male nurses leered perfunctorily at each other and made no response.

  “This television will have to be disconnected.”

  Fitzmaurice sat up on his bench and shouted, “If I do that the whole fucking system goes down. Every TV in the fucking gaff.”

  Pop Jones, as a janitor, had to bow to the logic of that. He said, “Then he’ll have to be moved. It may be quite unsuitable for children. There may be some bad language.”

  With a cheerful squint Fitzmaurice said, “Bad language?”

  “You can turn the sound down at least. Nobody knows what’s going to happen up there. Anything could happen up there.”

  Fitzmaurice shrugged.

  “Car,” said Timmy.

  Pop looked at the TV. Mars now filled the screen.

  This day many questions would be answered. Not the least pressing (many felt) was: why now? What was the “tripwire”? How did you explain the timing of the Contact from the janitor on Mars?

  It seemed significant, or perverse, for two reasons. As recently as 2047, after many a probe and flyby, NASA had successfully completed the first manned mission to Mars. The Earthling cosmonauts spent three months on the Red Planet and returned with almost half a ton of it in sample form. Preliminary analysis of this material was completed and made public in the autumn of 2048. The findings seemed unambiguous. True, the layer of permafrost proved that water had once flowed on the Martian surface, and in stupendous quantities, as was already clear from the flood tracks in its gorge and valley systems. But otherwise the Sojourner 3 mission could come up with nothing to puncture the verdict of ageless sterility. So the question remained: why wasn’t Contact made then? In the interim 1,500 new telecommunications satellites had gone into orbit; as the janitor on Mars himself pointed out, in of one his earlier communiqués, Earth had practically walled itself up with space junk. Five hundred units had to be blown out of the sky to clear a lane for Sojourner 4.

  The second coincidence had to do with ALH84001. ALH84001 was the fist-sized, green-tinged lump of rock found in Antarctica in 1984, analyzed in 1986, and argued about for over half a century. But its history was grander, weirder, and above all longer than that. About 4.5 billion years ago ALH84001 was an anonymous subterranean resident of primordial Mars; 4,485,000,000 years later something big hit Mars at a shallow angle and ALH84001 was part of its ejecta; for 14,987,000 years it followed a cat’s-cradle solar orbit before crashlanding on Earth. Then, 13,000 years later still, a meteorite-hunter called Roberta Star tripped over it and the controversy began. Did ALH84001 bear traces of microscopic life? The answer came, finally, in April 2049—two months before the janitor on Mars made his move. And the answer was No. ALH84001’s organic compounds (magnetite, gregite, and pyrrhotite) were proven to be mere polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons—i.e., they were nonbiological. Apparently Mars couldn’t even support a segmented worm one-hundredth the width of a human hair. That was how dead Mars seemed.

  Let me remind you that these images… from the camera in the nose cone of the trailing vessel. Lacking an ozone layer… effectively sterilized by solar ultraviolet radiation. The atmosphere… thinner than our best laboratory vacuums. We can see Phobos, the larger… a mere 3,500 miles distant as compared to our moon’s… Deimos, the second satellite, is overhead… as bright to the eye as Venus.

  The TV-viewing armchair in Pop Jones’s terrible old Y-front of a bedroom (with its Bovril tins and clouded toothmugs) had become steeped in his emanations, over the years. Anyone else, settling into it, would have instantly succumbed to projectile nausea, and would have shot up out of it, as from an ejector seat. But not Pop: in his armchair he felt fully alive. Look at him now, his tongue idling on his lower teeth, as he watched the screen with the kind of awe he usually reserved for only the most sincere and accurate pedography, freely available from many an outlet in Shepherds Lodge (and quite regularly starring its inmates). He had seen this image before—everyone had: a Colorado made of rust before a strangely proximate horizon. But the planet was now in some sense a living Mars, and life invested it everywhere with menace. The thin mist looked like fat on the meaty crimson of the regolith, and shapes seemed to form and change in the shadows of the sharp ravines…

  For a second the picture was lost. Then the voice of Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume—warmly aspirated, extravagantly human—continued:

  In some ways Mars is a small world. Its surface area is only a third of ours, and its mass only a thousandth. But in other ways Mars is a big world. Its canyons… than ours, its peaks far higher. One of its gorges, the Valles… Grand Canyon to shame. And—yes: we’re approaching it now. This is Olympus Mons, sixteen miles high—three Everests—but sloping so gradually that it casts no shadow. It resembles the shield volcanoes in… I have just been told that this vessel is no longer under our control. He’s bringing us in. We… We…

  And you saw it: in utter silence but with sky-shaking effort, the mountain was opening—its segmented upper flanks now bending backwards like a nest full of titanic chicks with their beaks open wanting food. The leading vessel, Nobel I, strained above these battlements, and plummeted. Nobel 2, the POV vessel, followed. During its descent Pop felt that he was riding an elevator downwards, the innards of the edifice thrumming past you in the dark, but much too quickly: with all the avid acceleration of free fall.

  Every screen on Earth stayed black. Then these numerals appeared in a pale shade of green: 45:00. And started going 44:59, 44:58, 44:57…

  In fact it was twice that many minutes before anything happened.

  A weak light came up and the camera jerked around in consternation, as if violently roused from deep slumber. There were shadows, figures. You could hear mumbling and coughing. And one of their number was calling out in a strained and self-conscious voice: “Hello!… Hello?… Hello!… Hello?”

  Everything is fine here. We’ve been waiting in this… room. The vessels docked smoothly and we just followed the arrowed signs. One of the Laureates fell over a moment ago, but was unhurt. And for a moment Miss World had a minor problem with her air supply. We are wearing filament-heated mesh suits with…

  There had of course been enormous controversy about who would go, and who would not go, to meet the janitor on Mars. Everyone on Earth was up for it. After all, there was no longer anything frightening or even exotic about space travel. In the Thirties and Forties, before the satellites really thickened up, lunar tourism expanded to the extent that parts of the moon’s surface now resembled a wintry Torremelinos. Granted, the moon was a mere 250,000 miles away, and Mars, at the current opposition, was almost two million. But everyone was up for it. No ticket had ever been hotter. There were sixty-five seats. And seven billion people in the queue.

  They had to contend not just with each other but also with the janitor on Mars, who, in a number of communications, had proved himself a brisk and abrasive stipulator. For example he had at the outset refused to countenance any clerics or politicians. Later, when pressed by massive referenda to find a couple of seats for the Pope and the U.S. President, the janitor on Mars caused far more hurt than mirth when he sent the following E-mail to the New York Times (forcing that journal to break an ancient taboo: “print the obscenity in full,” he cautioned, “or I switch to the Post”): “Don’t send me no fucking monkeys, okay? Monkeys no good. Just send me the talent.” He wanted scientists, poets, painters, musicians, mathematicians, philosophers “and some examples of male and female pulchritude.” He wanted no more media than Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume (and her camera operator. She was also allowed to bring Pick). The haggling continued well into the countdown at Cape Canaveral. In the end there were twenty-eight hard-science Laureates on board Nobels 1 and 2, as well as several fashion models, Miss World, some NASA personnel, and va
rious searchers and reachers from various branches of the humanities. The janitor on Mars had been particularly obdurate about Miss World, even though the contest she had won was by now an obscure affair, disputed between a couple of hundred interested onlookers in the Marriott at Buffalo Airport.

  This weakness of the janitor’s—for harsh language and harsh sarcasm—was the focus of much terrestrial discussion, and much disquiet. Even those who shared this weakness seemed to sense a breach of fundamental cosmic decorum. The pop psychologist Udi Ertigan put many minds at rest with the following suggestion (soon adopted as the consensus view): “I see here a mixture of high and low styles. The high style feels programmed, the low style acquired. Acquired from whom? From us! Our TV transmissions go out into space at the speed of light. What we’re dealing with is a robot who’s watched too many movies.” Make no mistake, though: the janitor on Mars was for real. At first, the doubters doubted and the trimmers trimmed. But the janitor on Mars was definitely for real. His brief introductory tips about fuel-gelation had revolutionized aeronautics. And every couple of weeks he stirred up one discipline after the other with his mordant memos on such things as protein synthesis, the Coriolis force, slow-freeze theory, tensor calculus, chaos and K-entropy, gastrulation in developmental biology, sentential variables, butterfly catastrophe, Champernowne’s number, and the Entscheidungsproblem. The janitor on Mars had promised to disclose a formula for cold fusion (“I’m no expert,” he wrote, “and I’m having some trouble dumbing down the math”) and a cure for cancer (“Or how about prevention? Or would you settle for remission?”). “Your gerontology, he noted, “is in its infancy. Working together, we can double life expectancy within a decade.” On cosmological issues—and on Martian history—he usually refused to be drawn, saying that there were “some things you [couldn’t] talk about on the phone”; and, besides, he didn’t want “to cheapen the trip.” “But I will say this,” he said:

  The Big Bang and the Steady State theories are both wrong. Or, to put it another way, they are both right but incomplete. It pains me to see you jerk back from the apparent paradox that the Universe is younger than some of the stars it contains. That’s like Clue One.

  Iain Henryson, Lucasian Professor at Cambridge University, described the mathematics that accompanied this memo as “ineffable. In every sense.” The janitor on Mars was often petulant, insensitive, facetious and sour, and not infrequently profane. But Earth trusted his intelligence, believing, as it always had, in the ultimate indivisibility of the intelligent and the good.

  It was in any case a time of hope for the blue planet. The revolution in consciousness during the early decades of the century, a second enlightenment having to do with self-awareness as a species, was at last gaining political will. None of the biospherical disasters had quite gone ahead and happened. Humankind was still bailing water, but the levels had all ceased rising and some had started to fall. And for the first time in Earth’s recorded history no wars were being contested on its surface.

  Pop Jones settled back into his armchair, then, with all the best kinds of thoughts and feelings. If things did start to get rough he would go and see Davidge about getting Timmy moved at half-time—during the intermission demanded by the janitor on Mars.

  We are wearing filament-heated mesh suits with autonomous air supply, but according to Colonel Hicks’s instruments the air is breathable and the temperature is rising. It was close to freezing at first but now it’s evidently no worse than chilly. And damp. I’m removing my headpiece… now. Yup. Seems okay… Gravity is at 1 g. I have no sense of lightness or hollowness. We seem to be in some kind of reception area, but our lights don’t work and until a minute ago we’ve had only the faintest illumination. I can hear…

  You could hear the squawk of tortured rivets or hinges, and high on the wall was abruptly thrown a slender oblong of light, which briefly widened as a shadow moved past its source. Then the door closed on the re-established gloom. Pop Jones nodded in sudden agreement. Whether or not the janitor on Mars was a genuine Martian (and there had been much speculation earlier on: a hoax, no, but was he maybe a lure?), the janitor on Mars, in Pop’s view, was definitely a genuine janitor. Now kill the light again, thought Pop, and turn off the heat. He listened expectantly for the clank of buckets, the skewering of big old keys in cold damp locks. But all he heard was the slow clop of footsteps. Then, causing pain to the dark-adapted eye, the lights came on with brutal unanimity.

  “Welcome, DNA. So this is the double helix on the right-handed scroll. DNA, I extend my greetings to you.”

  When you could focus you saw that the janitor on Mars sat at a table on a raised stage: an unequivocal robot wearing blue-black overalls and a shirt and tie. His face was a dramatically featureless beak of burnished metal; his hands, clawlike, intricate, fidgety. The accent was not unfamiliar: semieducated American. He sounded like a sports coach—a sports coach addressing other, lesser sports coaches. But he had no mouth to frame the words and they had a buzzy, boxy tone: an interior sizzle. The janitor on Mars tossed an empty clipboard on to the table and said,

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I apologize for the condition of these modest furnishings. This room is something I threw together almost exactly a century ago, on 29 August, 1949: the day it became clear that Earth was featuring two combatants equipped with nuclear arms. I kept meaning to update it. But I could never be fucked… Human beings, don’t look that way. Miss World: don’t crinkle your nose at me. And dispense, in general, with your expectations of grandeur. There is such a thing as cosmic censorship. But the universe is profoundly and essentially profane. I think you’ll be awed by some of the things I’m going to tell you. Other emotions, however, will predominate. Emotions like fear and contempt. Or better say terror and disgust. Terror and disgust. Well. First—the past.”

  By now two cameras were established back-to-back at the base of the podium. You saw the janitor on Mars; and then you saw his audience (seated on tin chairs in an ashen assembly hall: wood paneling, drab drapes on the false windows; a blackboard; the American and Soviet flags). In the front row sat Incarnacion Buttruguena-Hume and her husband, Pickering. Tentatively Incarnacion raised her hand.

  “Yes, Incarnacion.”

  She blushed, half-smiled, and said, “May I ask a preliminary question, sir?”

  The janitor on Mars gave a minimal nod.

  “Sir. Only two years ago there were human beings on your doorstep. Why—?”

  “Why didn’t I make myself known to you then? There’s a good reason for that: the tripwire. Patience, please. All will become clear. If I may revert to the program? The past… To recap: Earth and Mars are satellites of the same second-generation, metal-rich, main-sequence yellow dwarf on the median disk of the Milky Way. Our planets seized and formed some four and a half billion years ago. Smaller, and further out, we cooled quicker. Which you might say gave us a head start.”

  With a brief snort of amusement or perhaps derision the janitor on Mars leant backwards in his chair and thoughtfully intermeshed his slender talons.

  “Now. We two had the same prebiotic chemistry and were pollinated by the same long-periodical comet: the Alpha Comet, as we called her, which visits the solar system every 113 million years. Life having been established on Earth, you then underwent that process you indulgently call “evolution.” Whereas we were up and running pretty much right away. I mean, in a scant 300 million years. While you were just some fucking disease. Some fucking germ, stinking up the shoreline. And I can promise you that ours was the more typical planetary experience: self-organizing complexity, with remorseless teleological drive. Martian civilization flourished, with a few ups and down, for over three trillennia, three billion years, reaching its (what shall I say?)—its apotheosis, its climax 500 million years ago, at which time, as they say, dinosaurs ruled the Earth. Forty-three million years later, Martian life was extinguished, and I, already emplaced, was activated, to await tripwire.”

  Miss World said, “Si
r? Could you tell us what your people looked like?”

  Nicely framed though this question was, the janitor on Mars seemed to take some exception to it. A momentary shudder in the thick blade of his face.

  “Not unlike you now, at first. Somewhat taller and ganglier and hairier. We did not excrete. We did not sleep. And of course we lived a good deal longer than you do—even at the outset. This explains much. You see, DNA isn’t any good until it’s twenty years old, and by the time you’re forty your brains start to rot. Average life expectancy on Mars was at least two centuries even before they started upping it. And of course we pursued aggressive bioengineering from a very early stage. For instance, we soon developed a neurological integrated-circuit technology. What you’d call telepathy. I’m doing it now, though I’ve added a voice-over for TV viewers. Can you feel that little nasal niggle in your heads? Thoughts, it might please you to learn, are infinity-tending and travel at the speed of light.”

  The janitor on Mars stood—with a terrible backward-juddering scrape of his metal chair that had Pop Jones frowning with approval as he reached for the tin of Bovril and the spoon. At this stage, Pop’s feelings for his Martian counterpart touched many bases: from a sense of solidarity all the way to outright hero worship. The air of brusque obstructiveness, the grudge-harboring slant of his gaze; and there was something else, something subtler, that struck Pop as so quintessentially janitorial. Alertness to the threat of effort: that was it. The day has come, he thought. The day when at last the janitors—

  “Now I don’t have all afternoon,” said the robot, rather unfeelingly, perhaps (his audience having spent four-and-a-half months in transit). In his black crepe-soled shoes the janitor on Mars was no more than five feet tall. Yet he filled his space with formidable conviction—a metallic self-sufficiency. He moved like a living being but he could never be mistaken for one, in any light. And while the face had an expressive range of attitudes and elevations, there was nothing human, nothing avian, nothing remotely organic in its severity. He approached the edge of the stage, saying,