explorers.
He looked across the room to her. 'They’ve found living organisms on Mars. My daughter made the discovery!'
Edith yelled a Texas war whoop and ran to him and threw her arms around his neck. He held her around the waist and they kissed the way strangers do on New Year’s Eve.
Then, 'I’ve got to get a taxi. We’re expected at NASA headquarters.'
'I’ve got to tell my boss!' Edith said.
'All the media will be informed,' Brumado said, pecking at the phone with a trembling hand. 'They’re calling a news conference for midnight.'
While he paced the oriental carpet, impatiently waiting for the taxicab, Edith phoned the network vice- president at his apartment in Manhattan.
'You have reached…,' an answering-machine tape started.
Edith felt a moment of exasperation, then started laughing. When the beep sounded she shouted into the phone, 'This is Edie Elgin. I’m in the nation’s capital with Alberto Brumado and as soon as a cab can get here we’re goin’ to NASA headquarters. They’ve found life on Mars, buddy! And you weren’t home to take the call!'
Edith then phoned the network news office. The news director was at home, and the woman in charge at this hour of the evening had never heard of Edie Elgin.
'I’m a consultant to the vice-president’s office,' Edith explained.
'So?'
'I’ve got a story. I’ve got to get on the air from the Washington office here. Top priority.'
'What’s this all about?'
'It’s the biggest news break in the history of the business, honey!'
'Really?' The woman’s voice dripped suspicion.
Suddenly Edith hesitated. They’ll take it away from me, she realized. I’ll tip them off and they’ll call in the managing editor and the evening news anchor bastard and I’ll wind up in the cold.
'Can you give me the news director’s home number?' she asked.
'No.' Flatly.
'This is important, dammit!'
'If it’s that important you’d better tell me what it is.'
Edith took a deep breath. 'Okay,' she said sweetly. 'Just remember this call tomorrow when they fire y’all.'
She hung up the phone and turned to Brumado. 'Is the taxi here? Do I have a minute to go to the bathroom?'
In the hour and a half between their arrival at NASA’s headquarters building and the official start of the news conference, Edith used up four spools on her miniaturized tape recorder, talking to the men who had gathered together to drink champagne and smoke cigars. She was not the only woman at the impromptu party, but she was the only member of the media among the Mars Project people.
The news conference filled the building’s largest auditorium, even at midnight. Television crews elbowed one another for choice spots up front. The lights were blindingly bright, but nobody seemed to mind. Phalanxes of microphones and tape recorders were propped up on the long table at which the grinning NASA people assembled, shaking hands with one another, glowing with self-vindication. They sat Alberto Brumado in their midst.
Edith took a folding chair set up by the side wall, next to an emergency exit. She smiled to herself. She had her story, and she would continue to gather in all the details of the human side of this fantastic night. Even if she had to finish the job in bed with Brumado. That might not be such a bad way to end a night like this, she thought.
Although stodgy gray-haired NASA administrators officially broke the news to the goggle-eyed reporters, it was Alberto Brumado who ended up doing most of the talking. The soul of the Mars Project had his hour in the limelight. His smiling, triumphant face and voice were broadcast all across the world.
Life on Mars.
While Brumado answered the reporters’ myriad of questions and bantered happily with them, no one noticed that the physician in charge of the medical section sat at the very end of the table of NASA officials, looking tired and grim. No one asked him a question. No one paid him any attention at all. Which was just as well, because he had made up his mind to remain absolutely silent, no matter what. He was not the kind of man to rain on the organization’s parade.
SOL 37: EVENING
Dr. Yang Meilin gave a disdainful snort at the data on her display screen. Pushing her chair away from the tiny desk, she got to her feet and opened the accordion-fold door of her infirmary.
Dr. Li was up in the command section, of course, in the middle of a three-way conversation with the excursion team down at Tithonium Chasma and the mission controllers at Kaliningrad.
So they have found life on Mars, Dr. Yang said to herself. And they are all sick, perhaps even dying. Could there be a connection? No, that cannot be, she said to herself.
The passageway was empty, silent except for the hum of machinery. Everyone in the craft is packed into the command module, Yang realized. No one is paying any attention to this medical emergency. No one is paying any attention to me.
When she reached the command module, Dr. Li was at the comm console. Every one of the display screens was lit up. Alberto Brumado himself was beaming happily from the main display, while the other screens showed bigwigs in Kaliningrad, Houston, and what appeared to be Tokyo. Men, all of them. The TV link to the excursion team was out due to the storm, but Joanna Brumado was on the radio, trying to answer the volleys of questions.
She is beautiful, Yang thought, and the daughter of Alberto Brumado. Now she has found life on Mars. The center of everyone’s attention, everyone’s desires. I am nothing but a nondescript physician, the bearer of unhappy news. No wonder they want to ignore me.
Does Brumado know that his daughter is ill? Yang thought not. The mission controllers knew, of course, but so far they regarded the malady that was affecting the entire ground team as nothing more serious than a bout of flu.
It is more than flu. Yang was sure.
What if there are Martian organisms in the air? Viruses or microbes so tiny or so different that they escaped notice when the air was tested. What if they can infect human cells?
She shook her head, a motion that set her severely straight bangs whisking back and forth. Nonsense! Alien organisms cannot affect terrestrial cells. Their metabolisms would be completely different.
And yet, from the little that she had been able to glean about the lichenlike creatures Brumado and Malater had discovered, they were remarkably similar to terrestrial organisms. They must do a DNA workup, Yang thought. And a thorough chemical analysis.
A Martian plague. The very idea was too outlandish even to consider seriously. It was as unlikely as… as — she felt a tremor race through her body — as unlikely as being hit by a meteoroid.
Then she realized that she was standing in the hatch of a spacecraft orbiting the planet Mars, standing on tiptoes to peek over the shoulders of the crowd clustered around their leader, who was being congratulated now by the directors of the Mars Project for successfully finding the first extraterrestrial life forms ever discovered by humankind. What can be considered outlandish? she chided herself. What might be likely or unlikely?
How happy they all looked. Even Li, the human scarecrow who never allowed himself to relax, was smiling joyfully at the multiple screens facing him. They were all congratulating each other, man to man, like an overaged athletic team that had just won an unexpected victory, confident that this discovery would assure their futures.
But not if the people on the ground die. That will terrify everyone. And they are dying. Despite Reed’s
