The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  “Damn! The leak's growing.”

  She could see it now. The stalk stuck out from the corner where the box met the wall. It moved visibly, forcing itself through.

  Falling into the crack?

  She refused to believe it was moving on its own.

  Why grow toward the edge?

  The Mars plant had stuck through the tough plastic and into the greenhouse. The end of it was pointed, leathery. It had poked out through the absolute worst place, breaking out to Martian pressures and the greenhouse at the same point.

  Automatically she reached for it. Cold, wet, slick, tough. She pulled at it. Rubbery resistance.

  “Trying to patch,” she reported.

  But with what? Her hand slipped around it, air rushing past. She couldn't stem that flow with her palm.

  She drew in a deep breath. Or tried to.

  Time slowed. Her heart thumped in her ears.

  Quickly she glanced around. Across the greenhouse all the plants were whipping in the wind. Her kit—

  It was on the other side of the box. And the patches in there probably wouldn't handle this awkward split, anyway.

  Screaming wind. She grabbed a sample bag and crammed it into the corner. It stuck, but only over part of the crack.

  Get more.

  She leaped up and moved around the box. Marc's voice squawked at her from her comm. The damned sample bags were blowing around. She snatched for one, missed. Her ears popped again.

  She caught a bag and started back toward the breach. Something tripped her. She fell in slow motion. Reached out, grabbed. Hand on the box edge. Caught herself, jerked upright. Went on. Something tapped her on the head.

  She looked up. The ceiling was falling. No more pressure to hold it up.

  She dropped down, struggled toward the breach. It was like an angry mouth, screaming. She slapped the bag over it, but—

  Not enough. Where are the rest? Losing air fast.

  Only then did she think about her helmet.

  Idiot! Where did you—

  She stood up and the collapsing heavy plastic smacked her in the face. Crouching, she waddled around, trying to remember where she had put the helmet.

  Usually by the lock, on the workbench.

  She duck-walked toward it. She was breathing hard but nothing was coming in. It took forever to cover the ten meters. Before she got there the ceiling settled down over her. She pushed up but it was surprisingly heavy. She could raise it a foot or so but no more.

  Where's that helmet?

  She couldn't see in the foggy air. The density was dropping fast and water condensed out in thick clouds.

  She blinked to clear her eyes. Her eyelids were slow.

  Freezing? Drying out?

  Helmet!

  The idea came to her and without hesitation she knew it was right. The helmet was somewhere around here but already her eyes were getting a gluey feeling. She was not going to find it in time. Too hard to see.

  Got to get to the hab.

  The lock is right here!

  She rolled sideways. The lip of the lock was easy to see. She felt upward under the still settling plastic.

  There. The release was simple, a lever. She pulled.

  The hatch swung open under the fading greenhouse pressure. The shrieking was thinner now, running out of air. Just like her.

  She crawled through into the short space. Fumbled up for the outer hatch release. Found it. Pulled.

  Her shoulder shoved it open. Dimly she remembered what they had said a few thousand years ago about low pressures.

  Don't try to hold your breath.

  She got to her feet and shoved the hatch open the rest of the way. It seemed heavy.

  No sound at all now. But her heart hammered in her throbbing ears.

  Keep the main air passages open and the pressure will not build up, she remembered that much. Opening her throat let a gush of air out, expanding so much she felt the rush of it.

  Brilliant light all around. She blinked again. Something like sand in her eyes.

  The sun was a hard bright ball on the horizon. Lancing light struck her face. Full UV. And cold.

  She made herself run. The prickly sensation in her face was swarming down over her whole body and some part of her mind struggled to understand it. Never mind.

  The blazing sunshine helped, framed each detail. She had never realized how much of Mars she was missing, seen through the helmet.

  Go. Her legs pumped and her throat boiled with suppressed air. The one lungful of air was foaming out of her, a stream of vapor condensing into tiny crystals that glinted in the blaring light. Above the collapsing greenhouse a mushroom of rising vapor was turning into snow.

  Her lungs still felt full. The last dregs of air expanded under the hundredfold pressure drop outside.

  She set her course. Around the hab, first.

  Each step seemed to take forever.

  The skin makes a pretty fair space suit, a lecturer had said once, somewhere, somewhen.

  Pressure wasn't the problem. Her pounding head could not think very well but it reminded her to keep her mouth open. Let the gas laws work for you.

  She had gone ten meters and her legs were like logs, thumping her feet down. Coming around the round hab walls, she studied the landscape with a floating curiosity.

  All details were sharp, hard. She was still exhaling, a fog falling from her, ice crystals shimmering in it. Her face was starting to hurt. Lips freezing.

  Time for another blink. Her eyelids slid down and wanted to stay there. Run blind?

  Thump, thump, thump, went her feet, so very far away.

  An idea there—? Keep eyes closed, stop the corneas from freezing.

  Maybe the eyelids will freeze to the corneas. Hard to open them then. Thump, thump.

  Cranking up the eyelids was like lifting weights. Gravel in the gears somewhere.

  She was farther along the curve of the hab now. Here came the lock, looming on the hab horizon like a tarnished promise.

  Stiff, slow, her legs churned. No more helpful air boiled out of her. Nothing but a hollow feeling left. Something biting hard in her throat. She tried to force out a last packet of air, first shout ever on Mars, but there was nothing, nothing.

  The lock. She saw it coming toward her, wobbly as it came, like a child bounding out, glad to see her.

  The exterior buttons were sharp and clear and all she had to do was bring her arms up to punch the green CYCLE button. It took a long time, though, long enough to wonder why everything was taking so much effort.

  Her arms were not working right. It was dark all of a sudden except for a narrow tunnel of filmy light, straight in front of her, a flashlight beam. In it she watched her right hand come up and punch for the CYCLE and miss it.

  Try again. Can't be that hard … Missed again …

  Her hand would not do what she told it to.

  Try the other? No, it would not get here anytime soon.

  Something else. Movement. Not her hand.

  The lock.

  Opening out.

  So fast, too. She stepped back and tried to get her breath and felt something pop in her chest.

  Marc. He looked so big in his green suit.

  But he tilted back and fell away and the sky was there. Soaring.

  A dark hole at the top of it. Black on pink. Beautiful.

  25

  JANUARY 25,2018

  SHE FELT FRAGILE, JUST LYING IN BED LIKE A RAG DOLL.

  She lay still and listened to the hab warm up. It stretched and groaned as the metal expanded, a slow long clamor that marked both dawn and dusk. Not the sighing of soft breezes through drooping paper-bark trees, but it would have to do.

  She'd slept restlessly, moaning and thrashing intermittently, according to Viktor. He'd looked at her with a solemn, searching expression, a furrow between his eyes. Later he'd insisted that she just rest up the whole day, and part of her wanted to do just that.

  A quiet throbbing ran do
wn her throat and into her chest. At times she felt that she carried the medals of a Soviet field marshal on her chest, pinned not to a uniform but to her skin. Her lips were swollen from their near freezing and the dehydrating effect of the tenuous atmosphere. Her eyes still felt sandy, an effect Earthside medicos found intriguing—which meant they didn't understand it. Nobody had ever survived a “vac event,” as space station jargon called it. Sure, there had been suit ventings, quickly patched, but nobody had run for their life before. The external cameras had caught most of her frantic, slobby sprint—big, loping strides in the low gravity, a wreath of pearly fog trailing her head the whole way.

  And with the video had come her terse descriptions of Martian life ripping through industrial-strength plastics. The audio had gone out to Earthside, too.

  She tried not to think about it, and of course failed.

  But after a good sleep and an hour of lounging around past breakfast, she got restless. In her robe she ventured forth, to find that Raoul and Viktor were long gone for the ERV. Viktor had checked on her earlier, and she had drifted off immediately. “Oh?”

  “You were asleep, prob'ly didn't notice,” Marc said, offering her some tea. She had thanked him profusely as soon as he got her into the lock, and the wonderful sensation of filling her lungs again had passed. He got embarrassed if she brought it up any more.

  She eased into her acceleration couch, the best place to snuggle.

  She had a deep facial sunburn, eyeballs showing red veins, dead skin on her earlobes, and overall felt as delicate as antique porcelain. “I must still be a little rocky. Mmm, it's warm in here.”

  “Yeah, Viktor turned up the hab temperature for you.”

  That meant heating the water jacket. They had ample power reserves in the nuclear thermal generator they carried down near the work level, so everything was pleasantly warm to the touch. The walls radiated it, the water shielding out the cosmic radiation, providing the vital fluid of their entire biosphere, and warming them. It was always a source of quiet reassurance to her that at night, sleeping together, she and Viktor were each blocking for the other some small fraction of the background radiation that lanced down from the skies here. Human shields against the unrelenting danger of the universe beyond Earth.

  “You're the big media star, now,” Marc said. “Axelrod sent you a congrats message. Here, I'll play—”

  “Belay that. I'm not strong enough.”

  “Yeah, he's going over the top a lot now.”

  “The test?”

  “Remember Viktor's crack about there being an ‘i’ in ‘win’? Well, that ‘i’ is Axelrod, for sure.”

  She smiled wanly. “He's worried his billions might slip away.”

  “You should a seen him last night, after you'd nodded off. Going over all kinds of details with the folks simulating the test, asking Raoul questions about the pressure levels. Man!”

  “Does he understand it all?”

  “Doubt it. He obsesses over it, though—knows how to do that.”

  “They think they can do the test today?”

  “If everything looks right to Raoul, yeah. He'd much rather be out there working than in here listening to Axy yammer on.”

  She might as well get it over with. “How'd the greenhouse footage go over?”

  Marc's mouth twisted. “Couldn't cover it up. You were yelling about the Mars life and that got onto the audio. We didn't know it until the autofeeder had sent the whole segment Earthside.”

  “Oh.”

  “Axelrod loved it, action scene and all. Aired it right away.”

  “He didn't hold off?”

  “He—hell, everybody—thought it was just an accident. But the audio gave it away, once you played it through carefully.”

  She grimaced. “And only a million or two people bothered with that.”

  “Right. At the Consortium, nobody realized the implications until too late.”

  He thumbed on a stored video: SPECIAL MARSCAST. Massaged by the Consortium staff, the probable number in the audience was inserted at the bottom: 1,856,000,000. She often wondered how reliable these new smart estimator programs were, but the import was clear— the bulk of humanity that could watch was tuned in.

  There she ran, looking like an idiot, mouth yawning and legs churning, eyes bulged out. Voice-over by a solemn commentator: “The greenhouse was punctured by a form of Mars life the team had not reported to anyone but the Consortium bosses. That is the only possible deduction from conversation mistakenly leaked by the Consortium itself, in the hubbub after Julia Barth's heroic miracle run—”

  “Off, off.” She waved it away.

  “Look, it had to get out,” Marc said.

  “Not now.”

  “No kidding. Look at this.”

  A jump cut to: “Already dozens of activist groups—led by the Protect Earth Party, PEPA, Mars First! and the newly formed, fast-growing Earth Only Movement, seen here in their Paris offices—have moved to legally compel the Consortium to not allow a liftoff of the Earth Return Vehicle. This would—”

  “Lotsa luck,” Marc said dryly.

  She chuckled. “A lawyer in Paris trying to stop Viktor from hitting the firing button, from a hundred million miles away?”

  “They write out a writ or whatever, those guys think they've got the world by the tail.”

  “That world, maybe. Not this one.”

  “Hey, don't look so sad, gal. This is just media fluff.”

  She hadn't realized that her expression was so easy to read. “I don't like word getting out this way. MARS LIFE ATTACKS JULIA.”

  “We went back over there and had a good look from outside. That spike, it's still alive.”

  “Surviving on the surface?” She blinked, eyes rusty.

  “Tough sonofabitch. I gave it a yank, couldn't pull it out.”

  She nodded. “It's attached to all the rest of the mat in there. That figures. It's adapted to move in on any warm, wet site and exploit it to the full. What organization! To grow that fast—”

  “Don't put it that way to Earthside. They'll all gang up on us.”

  “Ummm … It's tough, all right—but an anaerobe. Oxygen would kill it right away.”

  “Why didn't the greenhouse air do it in, then? The stuff in the vent was awfully sensitive to our oxy.”

  She frowned. “Good question. Probably a concentration effect. Our tanks carry pure oxy, under pressure. Stuff we're breathing here isn't. And also, the piece that broke through looked awful rugged. Maybe it's a specialized structure, with a nonporous skin, for exploring. That would let it tunnel through anything to get towards water.”

  “That's where it was headed?”

  She snapped her fingers. “Of course! It grew towards the light, then vectored in on the seam, where water collects best and runs down to pool. The thing must have a water sensor that's very selective.”

  “So by pure bad luck, that's the place where it could burrow through—tough little bugger!—and breach both the outside wall and the seal on the greenhouse.”

  “Absolutely the worst luck,” she agreed. “On the other hand, we learned a lot from it.”

  “You damn near learned how to push up daisies.”

  “Ummmm, true. Look, that spike can defend against oxygen for at least a minute or so, or else it would've wilted. It only needed to hang on until all the air was gone from the greenhouse.”

  “Yeah, but it's going to scare a lot of people.”

  “Ummm, right. Not me, though. A few minutes on Earth and all that life would be finger food for every microbe around.”

  Marc shrugged good-naturedly. “So we're caught, I figure. Airbus wants to beat us home and plenty of other people don't want us back at all.”

  She curled her lip. “So we consent to a quarantine after we land.” “Maybe. Listen to this—”

  He fast-forwarded and started the video again. “—some are saying the Airbus crew should prevent the launch of the ERV if it carries the slightest tr
ace of this revolutionary discovery, a form of life unknown to Earth. Terming it ‘a dire threat to all Earth,’ PEPA spokeswoman—”

  “Good grief!”

  Marc grinned. “The price of fame.”

  “No, the price of the unknown.”

  “You ready to hear Axy-boy?”

  “No. Viktor said he was leaning pretty heavily on the test.”

  “The Consortium investors’ board has gotten into it pretty thick,” Marc said soberly. “Kinda funny, picturing a bunch of investment types poring over orbital mechanics tables.”

  With a sinking feeling, she said, “Let me see.”

  Axelrod looked both frazzled and energized. His tie was knotted too tight and his eyebrows kept jumping around like insects looking for some place to settle. He scowled with almost comic ferocity as he said, “Julia, this is just for you. You and me, we been through a lot, and I was never so proud as when I saw you making that run. What a woman!”

  “Fast-forward,” she said.

  As the tape sped Marc asked, “Sure you want me to hear this?”

  “Sure. We can't be keeping secrets from each other.”

  Axelrod finished his praise with a flourish, leading a toast on camera from the Ground Control team. Then he said, “I want you to know that I'm covering for you here, to the hilt. I'll take the blame for not releasing the news. We need a little statement from you, laying out how you were trying to get definitive word on just what this stuff is and so on. Maybe drop a little hint about your findings? Just an idea.”

  “More ammo for PEPA, sure,” she said.

  Axelrod frowned theatrically, a false note that put her on guard. “It's a firestorm down here. Just catch the news, see how they're playing it. Real live life on Mars—and dangerous, too—plus the race. I don't mind the extra income we're gettinbg from coverage, of course. We're playing you as the heroine of it all. You were keeping the whole discovery under wraps until you could tell if it was any kind of threat, see. But there's this panel of biologists, U.S. National Academy of Science and all. They're saying you've been exposed now, touched that nasty thing that caused the accident.”

  Axelrod paused, eyeing the camera as if he could see her.