Turning in her chair, Ilona gave him a bitter scowl. 'It’s inorganic.'
'You were right,' said Joanna. 'It is nothing more than oxidized copper.'
Even the normally cheerful Monique seemed downcast. 'No organic material at all, neither in the rock itself nor in the soil samples. No long-chain molecules.'
Jamie stood evenly balanced on the balls of his feet, as if ready to fight or flee, depending on the circumstances. They can give me the rock now, so I can determine its age and how long it’s been sitting on the surface.
'But there’s water,' he heard himself say.
'Yes, permafrost,' said Ilona. 'Starting at about one meter below the surface.'
Monique shook her head. 'The water is frozen, not liquid. That makes it difficult to use for biological reactions.'
'The soil is loaded with superoxides, as well,' Ilona added. 'Living cells cannot exist in such a corrosive environment.'
'Terrestrial living cells,' Jamie said. 'This is Mars.'
Ilona smiled thinly. 'I can’t imagine any kind of living cells existing in a pit of rusty iron.'
'Anaerobic bacteria do so on Earth,' Monique said.
'Without access to water?'
'Ah, yes, there is that.'
Jamie looked into Joanna’s eyes. He saw more than fatigue there; she looked defeated. Like a woman who had hacked her way through a jungle only to find that she had gone in a circle and was back where she had started.
'Well, it was just our first shot out there,' he said. 'None of us expected to find even copper, did we?'
Monique brightened. 'There must be organic materials somewhere in the soil! After all, the unmanned probes brought back rocks that bore organics.'
'The surface has been bombarded by meteorites for eons,' said Ilona, as if trying to convince herself. 'Some of those meteorites had to be carbonaceous chondrites!'
Nodding, Jamie agreed. 'Maybe the impact sites of chondritic meteorites are centers where life processes began.'
'If the organics in the meteorite are not destroyed by the heat of the impact,' Joanna nearly whispered.
'Yes. They might be, mightn’t they?'
'We must make impact sites a new priority on our list of objectives,' Monique said.
Ilona turned thoughtful. 'If life processes began at such impact sites they would have spread across the entire surface of the planet, wouldn’t they? After all, life is a dynamic process. It doesn’t stay in one place. It expands. It grows.'
'Only if it can find the nutrients and energy it requires,' said Monique. 'Otherwise…'
'Otherwise it dies out,' Joanna said in a low, drained voice. 'Or it never even begins.'
Jamie and the others fell silent.
'Even if meteorites bearing amino acids and other long-chain carbon molecules have been raining out of the sky for eons,' Joanna went on, her voice so low he could barely hear her, 'what do they encounter when they reach the surface? High levels of ultraviolet and even harder radiation, subfreezing temperatures every night, the soil loaded with superoxides, no liquid water…'
Jamie stopped her with an upraised hand. 'Wait a minute. Even a small meteorite, like the one we found in Antarctica, would hit the ground with enough energy to liquefy the permafrost if the ice is only a meter or so beneath the surface.'
'Yes,' said Ilona. 'But how long would the water remain liquid?'
'You saw what happened out there today,' Monique said. 'In this thin atmosphere the water boils away instantly.'
Jamie nodded reluctant agreement.
'There is no life on Mars,' Joanna said. 'None at all.'
'You’re tired,' said Monique. 'We all are. A good night’s sleep is what we need. Things will look better in the morning’s light.'
'Yes, Mama,' said Ilona, grinning.
'But first let us put a little water on our seedlings, eh?' Monique said. 'Then we can sleep.'
Joanna tried to smile at her, but did not quite make it. Jamie realized that she had wanted to be able to tell her father that they had discovered life. No one else mattered to Joanna, only her father. She wanted to give him that triumph. Now she felt that she had failed.
He wanted to put his arm around her shoulders and tell her that it was all right, that if she hadn’t made the great discovery there were still important and wonderful things to be done on Mars. Even if the planet were totally dead that information in itself could teach science vital knowledge about the needs and drives of life. He realized that he wanted to hold her, comfort her, lend her some of his own strength.
But Joanna had no room in her life for him. Her father owned her soul. Everything she did, she did for her father.
Jamie felt a smoldering jealousy for a rival who was a hundred million kilometers away, a rival he could not possibly fight.
WASHINGTON: THE WHITE HOUSE
In bygone years the Map Room had been used by Franklin D. Roosevelt as a situation room where he could follow the course of World War II. Located on the ground floor of the mansion’s central section, it was easy to get to from the Oval Office, even in a wheelchair.
Now the President used the room for his weekly private lunches with the Vice-President, a tradition neither of them cherished.
The first Hispanic to serve as President and the first woman to be Vice-President, the duo had inherited from the previous administration a Mars program that they would have canceled, except that it had gone too far to stop. Instead, they worked to win for themselves the credit for the first human landings on Mars while cutting expenditures for the program back to the bone. As political cynicism goes, theirs was almost trivial.
They made an odd-looking couple. The President was rotund and bald, with a dark moustache and large soft brown eyes. His skin was not so dark as to frighten non-Hispanic voters. On television he looked like a friendly smiling uncle or perhaps the easygoing guy who ran the hardware store. The Vice-President was wiry, ash blonde, and strident. When she raised her voice it took on the urgency of a dentist’s drill.
She was incensed.
'Do you realize how this looks to the media?' she asked, waving a gold salad fork in the air.
The President glanced past her irate face to the portrait of Franklin Pierce hanging against the cream- colored far wall. The least-remembered of all the men who had lived in the White House. The President cherished Pierce’s portrait: it served as a reminder and a spur. At least I can do better than he did.
'You’re not even listening to me!'
The President returned his attention to his veep. She had never entirely outgrown her origins as a public schoolteacher in New Jersey. She was quick to anger, slow to forgive.
'I understand the situation,' he said softly. 'All sorts of people have been hounding me about this Native American business, too.'
'Well, what are we going to do about it? If we let the media have that videotape interview he’ll look like a goddammed saint. If we refuse to release it to the media we’ll look like bastards.'
The President winced at her choice of words. He was essentially a gentle man. He felt relaxed among the luxurious burgundy draperies and lustrous Chippendale furnishings of the Map Room. Even the huge Persian carpet soothed him with its glowing colors and intricate geometric designs.
'I saw the video,' he answered. 'The young man simply said he wasn’t involved in politics. I don’t see how that can hurt us.'
