by Baen Books
Nodding, O’Connor replied, “They weren’t touched, thank God.”
“So recharge your batteries by day and use minimum power at night. We’ll come and get you as soon as we possibly can.”
“Right.” O’Connor clicked off the radio connection.
“They’ll come and pick up our frozen bodies,” Bernstein grumbled.
Faiyum looked just as disappointed as Bernstein, but he put on a lopsided grin and said, “At least our bodies will be well preserved.”
“Frozen solid,” O’Connor agreed.
The three men stood there, out in the open, encased in their pressure suits and helmets, while the drill’s motor buzzed away as if nothing was wrong. In the thin Martian atmosphere, the drill’s drone was strangely high pitched: more of a whine than a hum.
Finally, Bernstein said, “Well, we might as well finish the job we came out here to do.”
“Yeah,” said Faiyum, without the slightest trace of enthusiasm.
The strangely small sun was nearing the horizon by the time they had stored all the segments of the ice core in the insulated racks on the hopper’s side.
“A record of nearly three billion years of Martian history,” said Bernstein, almost proudly.
“Only one and a half billion years,” Faiyum corrected. “The Martian year is twice as long as Earth years.”
“Six hundred eighty-seven Earth days,” Bernstein said. “That’s not quite twice a terrestrial year.”
“So sue me,” Faiyum countered, as he pulled an equipment kit from the hopper’s storage bay.
“What’re you doing?” O’Connor asked.
“Setting up the laser spectrometer,” Faiyum replied. “You know, the experiment the biologists want us to do.”
“Looking for bug farts,” Bernstein said.
“Yeah. Just because we’re going to freeze to death is no reason to stop working.”
O’Connor grunted. Rashid is right, he thought. Go through the motions. Stay busy.
With Bernstein’s obviously reluctant help, Faiyum set up the laser and trained it at the opening of their bore hole. Then they checked out the Rayleigh scattering receiver and plugged it into the radio that would automatically transmit its results back to Tithonium. The radio had its own battery to supply the microwatts of power it required.
“That ought to make the biologists happy,” Bernstein said, once they were finished.
“Better get back inside,” O’Connor said, looking toward the horizon where the sun was setting.
“It’s going to be a long night,” Bernstein muttered.
“Yeah.”
Once they were sealed into the cockpit and had removed their helmets, Faiyum said, “A biologist, a geologist, and Glory Hallelujah were locked in a hotel room in Bangkok.”
Bernstein moaned. O’Connor said, “You know that everything we say is being recorded for the mission log.”
Faiyum said, “Hell, we’re going to be dead by the time they get to us. What difference does it make?”
“No disrespect for the mission commander.”
Faiyum shrugged. “Okay. How about this one: a physicist, a mathematician and a lawyer are each asked, ‘How much is two and two?’”
“I heard this one,” Bernstein said.
Without paying his teammate the slightest attention, Faiyum plowed ahead. “The mathematician says, ‘Two and two are four. Always four. Four point zero.’ The physicist thinks a minute and says, ‘It’s somewhere between three point eight and four point two.’”
O’Connor smiled. Yes, a physicist probably would put it that way, he thought.
“So what does the lawyer answer?”
With a big grin, Faiyum replied, “The lawyer says, ‘How much is two and two? How much do you want it to be?’”
Bernstein groaned, but O’Connor laughed. “Lawyers,” he said.
“We could use a lawyer here,” Bernstein said. “Sue the bastards.”
“Which bastards?”
Bernstein shrugged elaborately. “All of them,” he finally said.
The night was long. And dark. And cold. O’Connor set the cockpit’s thermostat to barely above freezing, and ordered the two geologists to switch off their suit heaters.
“We’ve got to preserve every watt of electrical power we can. Stretch out the battery life as much as possible,” he said firmly.
The two geologists nodded glumly.
“Better put our helmets back on,” said Bernstein.
Faiyum nodded. “Better piss now, before it gets frozen.”
The suits were well insulated, O’Connor knew. They’ll hold our body heat better than blankets, he told himself. He remembered camping in New England, when he’d been a kid. Got pretty cold there. Then a mocking voice in his mind answered, but not a hundred below.
They made it through the first night and woke up stiff and shuddering and miserable. The sun was up, as usual, and the solar panels were feeding electrical power to the cockpit’s heaters.
“That wasn’t too bad,” O’Connor said, as they munched on ration bars for breakfast.
Faiyum made a face. “Other than that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?”
Bernstein pointed to the control panel’s displays. “Batteries damned near died overnight,” he said.
“The solar panels are recharging them,” O’Connor replied.
“They won’t come back a hundred percent,” said Bernstein. “You know that.”
O’Connor bit back the reply he wanted to make. He merely nodded and murmured, “I know.”
Faiyum peered at the display from the laser they had set up outside. “I’ll be damned.”
The other two hunched up closer to him.
“Look at that,” said Faiyum, pointing. “The spectrometer’s showing there actually is methane seeping out of our bore hole.”
“Methanogens?” mused Bernstein.
“Can’t be anything else,” Faiyum said. With a wide smile, he said, “We’ve discovered life on Mars! We could win the Nobel Prize for this!”
“Posthumously,” said Bernstein.
“We’ve got to get this data back to Tithonium,” said O’Connor. “Let the biologists take a look at it.”
“It’s being telemetered to Tithonium automatically,” Bernstein reminded him.
“Yeah, but I want to see what the biologists have to say.”
The biologists were disappointingly cautious. Yes, it was methane gas seeping up from the bore hole. Yes, it very well might be coming from methanogenic bacteria living deep underground. But they needed more conclusive evidence.
“Could you get samples from the bottom of your bore hole?” asked the lead biologist, an Hispanic American from California. In the video screen on the control panel, he looked as if he were trying hard not to get excited.
“We’ve got the ice core,” Faiyum replied immediately. “I’ll bet we’ve got samples of the bugs in the bottom layers.”
“Keep it well protected,” the biologist urged.
“It’s protected,” O’Connor assured him.
“We’ll examine it when you bring it in,” the biologist said, putting on a serious face.
Once the video link was disconnected, Bernstein said morosely, “They’ll be more interested in the damned ice core than in our frozen bodies.”
All day long they watched the spikes of the spectrometer’s flickering display. The gas issuing from their bore hole was mostly methane, and it was coming up continuously, a thin invisible breath issuing from deep below the surface.
“Those bugs are farting away down there,” Faiyum said happily. “Busy little bastards.”
“Suns’ going down,” said Bernstein.
O’Connor checked the batteries’ status. Even with the solar panels recharging them all day, they were barely up to seventy-five percent of their nominal capacity. He did some quick arithmetic in his head. If it takes Tithonium five days to get us, we’ll have frozen to death on the fourth night.
&n
bsp; Like Shackleton at the South Pole, he thought. Froze to death, all of ‘em.
They made it through the second night, but O’Connor barely slept. He finally dozed off, listening to the soft breeze wafting by outside. When he awoke every joint in his body ached and it took nearly an hour for him to stop his uncontrollable trembling.
As they chewed on their nearly-frozen breakfast bars, Bernstein said, “We’re not going to make it.”
“I can put in a call to Tithonium, tell ‘em we’re in a bad way.”
“They can see our telemetry,” Faiyum said, unusually morose. “They know the batteries are draining away.”
“We can ask them for help.”
“Yeah,” said Bernstein. “When’s the last time Glory Hallelujah changed her mind about anything?”
O’Connor called anyway. In the video screen, Gloria Hazeltine’s chunky blonde face looked like an implacable goddess.
“We’re doing everything we can,” she said, her voice flat and final. “We’ll get to you as soon as we can. Conserve your power. Turn off everything you don’t need to keep yourselves alive.”
Once O’Connor broke the comm link, Bernstein grumbled, “Maybe we could hold our breaths for three-four days.”
But Faiyum was staring at the spectrometer readout. Methane gas was still coming out of the bore hole, a thin waft, but steady.
“Or maybe we could breathe bug farts,” he said.
“What?”
Looking out the windshield toward their bore hole, Faiyum said, “Methane contains hydrogen. If we can capture the methane those bug are emitting...”
“How do we get the hydrogen out of it?” O’Connor asked.
“Lase it. That’ll break it up into hydrogen and carbon. The carbon precipitates out, leaving the hydrogen for us to feed to the fuel cell.
Bernstein shook his head. “How’re we going to capture the methane in the first place? And the how are we going to repair the fuel cell’s damage?”
“We can weld a patch on the cell,” O’Connor said. “We’ve got the tools for that.”
“And we can attach a weather balloon to the bore hole. That’ll hold the methane coming out.”
“Yeah, but will it be enough to power up the fuel cell?”
“We’ll see.”
With Bernstein clearly doubtful, they broke into the equipment locker and pulled out the small, almost delicate, welding rod and supplies. Faiyum opened the bin that contained the weather balloons.
“The meteorologists aren’t going to like our using their stuff,” Bernstein said. “We’re supposed to be releasing these balloons twice a day.”
Before O’Connor could reply with a choice, Fuck the meteorologists, Faiyum snapped, “Let ‘em eat cake.”
They got to work. As team leader, O’Connor was glad of the excuse to be doing something. Even if this is a big flop, he thought, it’s better to be busy than to just lay around and wait to die.
As he stretched one of the weather balloons over the bore hole and fastened it in place, Faiyum kept up a steady stream of timeworn jokes. Bernstein groaned in the proper places and O’Connor sweated inside his suit while he laboriously welded the bullet-hole sized puncture of the fuel cell’s hydrogen tank.
By mid-afternoon the weather balloon was swelling nicely.
“How much hydrogen do you think we’ve got there?” Bernstein wondered.
“Not enough,” said Faiyum, serious for once. “We’ll need three, four balloons full. Maybe more.”
O’Connor looked westward, out across the bleak frozen plain. The sun would be setting in another couple of hours.
When they finished their day’s work and clambered back into the cockpit, O’Connor saw that the batteries were barely up to half their standard power level, even with the solar panels recharging them all day.
We’re not going to make it, he thought. But he said nothing. He could see that the other two stared at the battery readout. No one said a word, though.
The night was worse than ever. O’Connor couldn’t sleep. The cold hurt. He had turned off his suit radio, so he couldn’t tell if the other two had drifted off to sleep. He couldn’t. He knew that when a man froze to death, he fell asleep first. Not a bad way to die, he said to himself. As if there’s a good way.
He was surprised when the first rays of sunlight woke him. I fell asleep anyway. I didn’t die. Not yet.
Faiyum wasn’t in the cockpit, he saw. Looking blearily through the windshield he spotted the geologist in the early morning sun fixing a fresh balloon to the bore hole, with a big round yellow balloon bobbing from a rock he’d tied it to.
O’Connor saw Faiyum waving to him and gesturing to his left wrist, then remembered that he had turned his suit radio off. He clicked the control stud on his wrist.
“...damned near ready to burst,” Faiyum was saying. “Good thing I came out here in time.”
Bernstein was lying back in his cranked-down seat, either asleep or... O’Connor nudged his shoulder. No reaction. He shook the man harder.
“Wha...what’s going on?”
O’Connor let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“You okay?” he asked softly.
“I gotta take a crap.’
O’Connor giggled. He’s alright. We made it through the night. But then he turned to the control panel and saw that the batteries were down to zero.
Faiyum and Bernstein spent the day building a system of pipes that led from the balloon’s neck to the input valve of the repaired fuel cell’s hydrogen tank. As long as the sun was shining they had plenty of electricity to power the laser. Faiyum fastened the balloon’s neck to one of the hopper’s spidery little landing legs and connected it to the rickety-looking pipework. Damned contraption’s going to leak like a sieve, O’Conner thought. Hydrogen’s sneaky stuff.
As he worked he kept up his patter of inane jokes. “A Catholic, a Moslem and a Jew – ”
“How come the Jew is always last on your list?” Bernstein asked, from his post at the fuel cell. O’Connor saw that the hydrogen tank was starting to fill.
Faiyum launched into an elaborate joke from the ancient days of the old Soviet Union, in which Jews were turned away from everything from butcher’s shops to clothing stores.
“They weren’t even allowed to stand in line,” he explained as he held the bobbing balloon by its neck. “So when the guys who’ve been waiting in line at the butcher’s shop since sunrise are told that there’s no meat today, one of them turns to another and says, ‘See, the Jews get the best of everything!’”
“I don’t get it,” Bernstein complained.
“They didn’t have to stand in line all day.”
“Because they were discriminated against.”
Faiyum shook his head. “I thought you people were supposed to have a great sense of humor.”
“When we hear something funny.”
O’Connor suppressed a giggle. Bernstein understood the joke perfectly well, he thought, but he wasn’t going to let Faiyum know it.
By the time the sun touched the horizon again, the fuel cell’s hydrogen tank was half full and the hopper’s batteries were totally dead.
O’Connor called Tithonium. “We’re going to run on the fuel cell tonight.”
For the first time since he’d known her, Gloria Hazeltine looked surprised. “But I thought your fuel cell was dead.”
“We’ve resurrected it,” O’Connor said happily. “We’ve got enough hydrogen to run the heaters most of the night.”
“Where’d you get the hydrogen?” Glory Hallelujah was wide-eyed with curiosity.
“Bug farts,” shouted Faiyum, from over O’Connor’s shoulder.
They made it through the night almost comfortably and spent the next day filling balloons with methane, then breaking down the gas into its components and filling the fuel cell’s tank with hydrogen.
By the time the relief ship from Tithonium landed beside their hopper, O’Connor was almo
st ready to wave them off and return to the base on their own power.
Instead, though, he spent the day helping his teammates and the two-man crew of the relief ship attach the storage racks with their previous ice core onto the bigger vehicle.
As they took off for Tithonium, five men jammed into the ship’s command deck, O’Connor felt almost sad to be leaving their little hopper alone on the frigid plain. Almost. We’ll be back, he told himself. And we’ll salvage the Viking 2 lander when we return.
Faiyum showed no remorse about leaving at all. “A Jew, a Catholic and a Moslem walk into a bar.”
“Not another one,” Bernstein groused.
Undeterred, Faiyum plowed ahead. “The bartender takes one look at them and says, ‘What is this, a joke?’”
Even Bernstein laughed.
© 2013 by Ben Bova
Multiple award winner and SF master Ben Bova’s new novel, Mars, Inc. is at booksellers everywhere.
The Virgin of Hertogenbosch
by David Drake
AUTHOR’S INTRODUCTION
Manly Wade Wellman is now best known for his stories of John the Balladeer (Silver John), a minstrel who wanders the mountains of Western North Carolina fighting supernatural evil with his silver-strung guitar. The John stories are wonders, mixing folk tales and folk music with just plain folks. They have a permanent place in American fantasy and (I believe) in American literature.
Before Manly and his wife Frances moved to North Carolina, they lived in or near New York City. There in the 1930s and '40s, Manly wrote stories about other ghostbreakers (psychic detectives): educated, urban (and urbane) men like Judge Pursuivant, John Thunstone, and Professor Enderby. The heroes of these stories were of a type familiar in the pulps of the day, but they prefigure John in displaying their author's love of real legend and history.
Shortly after Manly died, I wrote my Old Nathan stories as a sort of homage (not pastiche) to him and to John the Balladeer. I had never written a classic ghostbreaker story, however.
Tony Daniel asked me to do a story for the Baen website to be put up in conjunction with the mass-market release of Night & Demons, my fantasy/horror collection. Tony (and Toni) gave me free rein for my subject, but I wanted something in keeping with the collection.
