My Favorites

by Ben Bova

  Rohr shook his head. “You guys are crazy. Who the hell’s going to build tunnels all over the country?”

  “There’s a lot of tunnels already built,” I countered. We could adapt them for the SSST.”

  “SSST?”

  “Sure,” I answered, grinning for the first time in weeks. “Supersonic subway train.”

  They stared at me. Rohr pulled out his PDA and started tapping on it. Wisdom got that faraway look in his eyes. Kurtz shrugged and said, “Why the hell not?”

  I got up and headed for the door. Supersonic subway train. That was my ticket. I was going back to Washington, I knew. And this time I’ll bring Lisa with me.

  Introduction to

  “Mars Farts”

  Inspiration is where you find it.

  The robotic spacecraft we’ve sent to Mars have found some surprising things, including the fact that the Martian atmosphere includes occasional whiffs of methane gas. The methane appears seasonally, then disappears, only to show up again the next year.

  Methane is composed of one atom of carbon and four of hydrogen: CH4. Sunlight in the thin, clear Martian atmosphere quickly dissociates the compound into individual atoms. The hydrogen—lightest of all the atoms—rises to the top of the atmosphere and eventually wafts off into space. The carbon atom presumably becomes part of the scant Martian atmosphere, which is predominantly composed of carbon dioxide.

  Okay, we know where the CH4 goes. But where does it come from?

  One possible explanation is that it comes from microscopic creatures living deep beneath the surface of Mars. On Earth there are “bugs” living deep below the surface that eat dirt and even rocks—and excrete methane. Similar microorganisms may exist deep beneath Mars’s surface.

  Mars farts?

  MARS FARTS

  “A Catholic, a Jew, and a Muslim are stuck in the middle of Mars,” said Rashid Faiyum.

  “That isn’t funny,” Jacob Bernstein replied wearily.

  Patrick O’Conner, the leader of the three-man team, shook his head inside the helmet of his pressure suit. “Laugh, and the world laughs with you, Jake.”

  None of them could see the faces of their companions through the tinting of their helmet visors. But they could hear the bleakness in Bernstein’s tone. “There’s not much to laugh about, is there?”

  “Not much,” Faiyum agreed.

  All around them stretched the barren, frozen, rust-red sands of Utopia Planita. Their little hopper leaned lopsidedly on its three spindly legs in the middle of newly churned pockmarks from the meteor shower that had struck the area overnight.

  Off on the horizon stood the blocky form of the old Viking 2 lander, which had been there for more than a century. One of their mission objectives had been to retrieve parts of the Viking to return to Earth, for study and eventual sale to a museum. Like everything else about their mission, that objective had been sidelined by the meteor shower. Their goal now was survival.

  A barrage of tiny bits of stone, most of them no larger than dust motes. Once they had been part of an icy comet, but the ice had melted away after God knows how many trips around the sun, and now only the stones were left when the remains of the comet happened to collide with the planet Mars.

  One of the rare stones, almost the size of a pebble, had punctured the fuel cell that was the main electrical power source for the three-man hopper. Without the electrical power from that fuel cell, their rocket engine could not function. They were stranded in the middle of the frozen, arid plain.

  In his gleaming silvery pressure suit, Faiyum reminded O’Connor of a knight in shining armor, except that he was bending into the bay that held the fuel cell, his helmeted head obscured by the bay’s upraised hatch. Bernstein, similarly suited, stood by nervously beside him.

  The hatch had been punctured by what looked like a bullet hole. Faiyum was muttering, “Of all the meteoroids in all the solar system in all of Mars, this one’s got to smack our power cell.”

  Bernstein asked, “How bad is it?”

  Straightening up, Faiyum replied, “All the hydrogen drained out during the night. It’s dead as a doornail.”

  “Then so are we,” Bernstein said.

  “I’d better call Tithonium,” said O’Connor, and he headed for the ladder that led to the hopper’s cramped cockpit. “While the batteries are still good.”

  “How long will they last?” asked Bernstein.

  “Long enough to get help.”

  It wasn’t that easy. The communications link back to Tithonium was relayed by a network of satellites in low orbit around Mars, and it would be another half hour before one of the commsats came over their horizon.

  Faiyum and Bernstein followed O’Connor back into the cockpit, and suddenly the compact little space was uncomfortably crowded.

  With nothing to do but wait, O’Connor said, “I’ll pressurize the cockpit so we can take off the helmets and have some breakfast.”

  “I don’t think we should waste electrical power until we get confirmation from Tithonium that they’re sending a backup to us.”

  “We’ve got to eat,” O’Connor said.

  Sitting this close in the cramped cockpit, they could see each other’s faces even through the tinting of the helmet visors. Faiyum broke into a stubbly-chinned grin.

  “Let’s pretend its Ramadan” he suggested, “and we have to fast from sunup to sundown.”

  “Like you fast during Ramadan,” Bernstein sniped. O’Connor remembered one of their first days on Mars, when a clean-shaven Faiyum had jokingly asked which direction Mecca was. O’Connor had pointed up.

  “Let’s not waste power,” Bernstein repeated.

  “We have enough power during the day,” Faiyum pointed out. “The solar panels work fine.”

  Thanks to Mars’s thin, nearly cloudless atmosphere, just about the same amount of sunshine fell upon the surface of Mars as upon Earth, despite Mars’s farther distance from the sun. Thank God for that, O’Connor thought. Otherwise, we’d be dead in a few hours.

  Then he realized that, also thanks to Mars’s thin atmosphere, those micrometeoroids had made it all the way down to the ground to strafe them like a spray of bullets, instead of burning up from atmospheric friction, as they would have on Earth. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, he told himself.

  “Tithonium here,” a voice crackled through the speaker on the cockpit control panel. All three of them turned to the display screen, suddenly tight with expectation.

  “What’s your situation, E-three?” asked the face in the screen. Ernie Roebuck, they recognized: chief communications engineer.

  The main base for the exploration team was down at Tithonium Chasma, part of the immense Grand Canyon of Mars, more than three thousand kilometers from their Excursion Three site.

  O’Connor was the team’s astronaut: a thoroughly competent Boston Irishman with a genial disposition, who tolerated the bantering of Faiyum and Bernstein—both geologists—and tried to keep them from developing a real animosity. A Muslim from Peoria and a New York Jew: how in the world had the psychologists back Earthside ever put the two of them on the same team, he wondered.

  In the clipped jargon of professional fliers, O’Connor reported on their dead fuel cell.

  “No power output at all?” Roebuck looked incredulous.

  “Zero,” said O’Connor. “Hydrogen all leaked out overnight.”

  “How did you get through the night?”

  “The vehicle automatically switched to battery power.”

  “What’s the status of your battery system?”

  O’Connor scanned the digital readouts on the control panel. “Down to one-third of nominal. The solar panels are recharging ’em.”

  A pause. Roebuck looked away, and they could hear voices muttering in the background. “All right,” said the communicator at last. “
We’re getting your telemetry. We’ll get back to you in an hour or so.”

  “We need a lift out of here,” O’Connor said.

  Another few moments of silence. “That might not be possible right away. We’ve got other problems too. You guys weren’t the only ones hit by the meteor shower. We’ve taken some damage here. The garden’s been wiped out, and E-one has two casualties.”

  Excursion One was at the flank of Olympus Mons, the tallest mountain in the solar system.

  “Our first priority has to be to get those people from E-one back here for medical treatment.”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “Give us a couple of hours to sort things out. We’ll call you back at noon, our time. Sit tight.”

  O’Connor glanced at the morose faces of his two teammates, then replied, “We’ll wait for your call.”

  “What the hell else can we do?” Bernstein grumbled.

  Clicking off the video link, O’Connor said, “We can get back to work.”

  Faiyum tried to shrug inside his suit. “I like your first suggestion better. Let’s eat.”

  With their helmets off, the faint traces of body odors became noticeable. Munching on an energy bar, Faiyum said, “A Catholic, a Muslim, and a Jew were showering together in a YMCA . . .”

  “You mean a YMHA,” said Bernstein.

  “How would a Muslim get into either one?” O’Connor wondered.

  “It’s in the States,” Faiyum explained. “They let anybody in.”

  “Not women.”

  “You guys have no sense of humor.” Faiyum popped the last morsel of the energy bar into his mouth.

  “This,” Bernstein countered, “coming from a man who was named after a depression.”

  “El-Faiyum is below sea level,” Faiyum admitted easily, “but it’s the garden spot of Egypt. Has been for more than three thousand years.”

  “Maybe it was the garden of Eden,” O’Connor suggested.

  “No, that was in Israel,” said Bernstein.

  “Was it?”

  “It certainly wasn’t here,” Faiyum said, gazing out the windshield at the bleak, cold Martian desert.

  “It’s going to go down near a hundred below again tonight,” Bernstein said.

  “The batteries will keep the heaters going,” said O’Connor.

  “All night?”

  “Long enough. Then we’ll recharge ’em when the sun comes up.”

  “That won’t work forever,” Bernstein muttered.

  “We’ll be okay for a day or two.”

  “Yeah, but the nights. A hundred below zero. The batteries will crap out pretty soon.”

  Tightly, O’Connor repeated, “We’ll be okay for a day or two.”

  “From your mouth to God’s ear,” Bernstein said fervently.

  Faiyum looked at the control panel’s digital clock. “Another three hours before Tithonium calls.”

  Reaching for his helmet, O’Connor said, “Well, we’d better go out and do what we came here to do.”

  “Haul up the ice core,” said Bernstein, displeasure clear on his lean, harsh face.

  “That’s why we’re here,” Faiyum said. He didn’t look any happier than Bernstein. “Slave labor.”

  Putting on a false heartiness, O’Connor said, “Hey, you guys are the geologists. I thought you were happy to drill down that deep.”

  “Overjoyed,” said Bernstein. “And here on Mars, we’re doing areology, not geology.”

  “What’s in a name?” Faiyum quoted. “A rose by any other name would still smell.”

  “And so do you,” said Bernstein and O’Connor in unison.

  The major objective of the Excursion Three team had been to drill three hundred meters down into the permafrost that lay just beneath the surface of Utopia Planita. The frozen remains of what had been an ocean billions of years earlier, when Mars had been a warmer and wetter world, the permafrost ice held a record of the planet’s history, a record that geologists (or aerologists) keenly wanted to study.

  Outside at the drill site, the three men began the laborious task of hauling up the ice core that their equipment had dug. They worked slowly, carefully, to make certain that the fragile, six-centimeter-wide core came out intact. Section by section, they unjointed each individual segment as it came up, marked it carefully, and stowed it in the special storage racks built into the hopper’s side. “How old do you think the lowest layers of this core will be?” Bernstein asked as they watched the electric motor slowly, slowly lifting the slender metal tube that contained the precious ice.

  “Couple billion years, at least,” Faiyum replied. “Maybe more.”

  O’Connor, noting that the motor’s batteries were down to less than fifty percent of their normal capacity, asked, “Do you think there’ll be any living organisms in the ice?”

  “Not hardly,” said Bernstein.

  “I thought there were supposed to be bugs living down there,” O’Connor said.

  “In the ice?” Bernstein was clearly skeptical.

  Faiyum said, “You’re talking about methanogens, right?”

  “Is that what you call them?”

  “Nobody’s found anything like that,” said Bernstein.

  “So far,” Faiyum said.

  O’Connor said, “Back in training they told us about traces of methane that appear in the Martian atmosphere now and then.”

  Faiyum chuckled. “And some of the biologists proposed that the methane comes from bacteria living deep underground. The bacteria are supposed to exist on the water melting from the bottom of the permafrost layer, deep underground, and they excrete methane gas.”

  “Bug farts,” said Bernstein.

  O’Connor nodded inside his helmet. “Yeah. That’s what they told us.”

  “Totally unproven,” Bernstein said.

  “So far,” Faiyum repeated.

  Sounding slightly exasperated, Bernstein said, “Look, there’s a dozen abiological ways of generating the slight traces of methane that’ve been observed in the atmosphere.”

  “But they appear seasonally,” Faiyum pointed out. “And the methane is quickly destroyed in the atmosphere. Solar ultraviolet breaks it down into carbon and hydrogen. That means that something is producing the stuff continuously.”

  “But that doesn’t mean it’s being produced by biological processes,” Bernstein insisted.

  “I think it’s bug farts,” Faiyum said. “It’s kind of poetic, you know.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You’re a sourpuss.”

  Before O’Connor could break up their growing argument, their helmet earphones crackled, “Tithonium here.”

  All three of them snapped to attention. It was a woman’s voice, and they recognized whose it was: the mission commander, veteran astronaut Gloria Hazeltine, known to most of the men as Glory Hallelujah. The fact that Glory herself was calling them didn’t bode well, O’Connor thought. She’s got bad news to tell us.

  “We’ve checked out the numbers,” said her disembodied radio voice. “The earliest we can get a rescue flight out to you will be in five days.”

  “Five days?” O’Connor yipped.

  “That’s the best we can do, Pat,” the mission commander said, her tone as hard as concrete. “You’ll have to make ends meet until then.”

  “Our batteries will crap out on us, Gloria. You know that.”

  “Conserve power. Your solar panels are okay, aren’t they?”

  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,” Bernst
ein 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.