There were no spacesuits in evidence, but there were odd hatches in the walls that might have led to externally-mounted suits, like the rover’s. Equipment was stacked up here, what looked like spare parts and other gear for the rovers, and also a small science lab, and a medical area, a single bed surrounded by equipment, sealed off from the rest by a zippered plastic curtain. It was dark, and felt cold and dusty, as if not much used.
Yuri hurried them through a small airlock to another module:
“Can Five, science,” he said. Here there was another, more comprehensive lab suite, and a larger hospital area, and what looked like a small gym. It was brighter, with glowing panels plastered to walls that seemed to be decorated with scenes of mountains and rivers.
Bisesa murmured to Myra, “Why two lab suites, two medical bays?”
Myra shrugged. “To avoid contamination maybe. You come in from EVA, and can process your samples and treat injuries without breaking the seals to the rest of the base.”
“Contamination of the crew by Martians?”
“Or of Martians by the crew.”
In Can Five, Grendel Speth, small, neat, slim, her black hair speckled with gray, briskly took blood, urine, and cheek-swab samples from each of the visitors. “Just so the station can keep you healthy,” she said. “Testing for allergies, nutritional genomics, that sort of thing. Our food comes from freeze-dried stores from Lowell, and homegrown vegetables from our garden. We’ll add supple-ments to make sure your specific nutritional needs are met. You won’t even know they are there…”
Now Yuri hurried them through a third module — Can Three, evidently a sleeping area, divided up into pie- slice bedrooms, dark, evidently not used. They came to another module, Can Two.
Bizarrely this module had been fitted out to simulate a city-center hotel called the “Mars-Astoria.” But many of the internal partitions here had been torn down to give a more open, shared space, though the core section was dedicated to a small galley and a shower-toilet.
There were four beds in this round space, with small cupboards and chairs beside them, all of them cluttered with clothes and other gear. Softscreens had been plastered over the unregarded urban landscape, cycling through what looked like personal images of families, pets, domestic landscapes.
Myra said curiously, “You’re not using this as the makers intended, are you?”
Yuri said, “Wells was built for ten; there are only four of us.
The nights are long here, Myra. We prefer living like this, together.”
After that, Yuri apologetically led them down another staircase to a small surface dome, and then down steps cut into the ice.
“Sorry about this. You can see we only have the four beds set up, and we’ve pretty much shut down the modules we don’t use. We generally put up visitors down here, in our radiation storm shelter… If you’re not comfortable we can open up another of the cans.”
Bisesa glanced around as she descended. The cavern in the ice was a squat cylinder, sliced up by partitions into pie-shaped seg-ments. She recognized a galley, a comms station, a shower block, a cluttered space that looked like a lab or a medical station. The place was lived-in. There were ruts in the floor around the galley and the shower block, the walls and metal surfaces looked scuffed and polished with use and reuse, and there was a faintly stale smell, of air that had been cycled too often.
Some of the cavern wall was exposed, and she saw it was decorated with an odd design, a thin band marked with faint bars and a more general meter-scale wash of dark and light. This barcode frieze wrapped itself all around the wall’s curving surface like the flayed skin of a tremendous snake.
The room Myra and Bisesa were to share was just a truncated pie-slice, big enough for bunk beds, a table, a couple of chairs. Its back wall was ice, layered over with translucent plastic, and decorated with that odd barcode design that passed across the length of wall, from one side to the other.
As they sorted themselves out Yuri sat on the bunk. He took up a lot of space in the little room. “It’s kind of cozy up here at Wells, but we survive. Actually the polar cold doesn’t make much difference. On Mars, if you stepped outdoors at high noon in midsummer on the equator, you’d still freeze your butt off. The main issue up here is the dark — half a Martian year at a time, twelve Earth months. Polar explorers on Earth had the same challenges. We did learn a lot of lessons from those guys. Though more from Shackle-ton than from Scott.”
Myra said, “Yuri, I’m having trouble placing your accent.”
“My mother was Russian like my forename, my father Irish like my surname. I’m officially a citizen of Ireland, so of Eurasia.”
He grinned. “But that doesn’t count for much up here. Things get kind of mixed up, away from Earth.” He turned to Bisesa. “Look, Ms. Dutt—”
“Bisesa.”
“Bisesa. I know you’re here for the thing in the Pit.”
Bisesa eyed Myra. What thing? What Pit?
“But you need to know what we’re really doing here.” He passed a hand along the striped designs on the wall. The lines were faint, of irregular widths and colors. It did look like a barcode, or a spectrograph. “
Myra nodded. “An ice core from Mars.”
“Right. We drilled right down from here, from the top of the ice dome, and we got all the way down to two and a half klicks deep — Hanse Critchfield is going to enjoy showing off his rig. Of course it would have been three klicks if not for the sunstorm burning the top ice layers away.” He shook his head. “Damn shame.”
Myra ran her finger along the record. “And you can interpret this, the way they read ice cores from Earth?”
“Surely. The cap is built up layer by layer, year on year. And each year it captures a snapshot of the conditions at the time—
climate, dust, cosmic, whatever. Just as on Earth. Of course the detail is different here. In Greenland, say, you get an annual snowfall tens of centimeters thick. Here the residual water-ice layer is less than a seventh of a
“Look here.” He stood by the wall, where the long winding strip came to an end. “This is the top of the strip; the most recent layers are at the top, the last deposited, yes? This upper bit of the record was collected by the
On Mars, events occurring on different timescales were marked by different levels in the ice core. Ten centimeters down was to be found the trace of radiation washed over the planet by the Crab supernova a thousand years earlier. Every meter or so was a significant layer of micrometeorites, droplets of once-molten rock; every ten or a hundred thousand years Mars was hit by an object massive enough to spread debris even to the poles. And the big meter-scale striping corresponded to the most dramatic event in Mars’s current astronomical cycling, a nodding of its polar tilt that occurred every hundred thousand years.
Yuri said, “You can even find traces of Earth in this Martian ice — meteorites blasted off the home world, just as Mars meteorites find their way to the Earth.” He grinned. “I’m still looking for traces of the dinosaur killer.”
Myra studied him. “You love your work, don’t you?” She sounded envious, Bisesa thought. She always had been drawn to people with missions, like Eugene Mangles.
“I wouldn’t be stuck in this ice coffin otherwise. But we’re not
Bisesa thought that over. “I’m sorry.”
He laughed shortly. “It’s not your fault.”
Myra asked, “So what did you find?”
“You’re about to find out. If you’re done, I’m supposed to take you in to a council of war.” He stood up.
