People of Mars Read online

  “Anyway it isn’t like the other time at all,” Dennis continued. “There’s a definite project now. The Isis 2 mission is ready. The allocated money has been spent, there’s no reason why NASA should postpone it anymore. You’ll see that in thirty, sixty days at most, we’ll have a launch date, unless anything unexpected happens.”

  “Unexpected …” There was sarcasm in Anna’s voice, while she pronounced that single word, but at that point she didn’t have any strength to discuss it. She sat, following Robert’s invitation; he had never stopped holding her arm. She put her right hand on his and looked him in the eye. ‘I’m alright, don’t worry.’

  “So.” Hassan resumed speaking, as if nothing had happened, after Anna’s outburst. “We were discussing the sortie schedule for the next days.” He sipped some coffee. “Today Michelle and I should go back to sector H to make another drilling attempt.”

  “Again?” Anna exclaimed, irritated, but Hassan did nothing but raise his voice to outdo hers.

  “Yesterday, on our way back, we passed over an area that gave possible positive responses to the instrumentation, but it was too late to stop then.” He activated the wall screen, on which a topographic map appeared depicting an area of the planum thirty kilometres east of Station Alpha. “Here it is.” A bright pointer was indicating a specific zone on the chart. “There is no doubt; at a depth of seventy metres, the terrain has a different density. It’s worth finding out what it is.”

  Hassan’s annoying professional tone became almost imperceptible once Anna left the room, letting the door close behind her.

  She stalked across the laboratory in a fury, feeling breathless. She opened the greenhouse door and a moment later, she found herself among her plants. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The smell of the leaves pervaded her nostrils, giving her the illusion of standing in open country. That was enough to allow her to calm down at last. She knew that little corner of paradise inch by inch. She had planted, nurtured and coddled every single plant, as if it was a child. She felt at home there.

  An insect buzzed before her nose, making her shake her head to shoo it away and forcing her to open her eyes. Together with the seeds and some small plants, they had brought sacks full of humus rich soil from Earth, to ensure they had the necessary nutrients to make them develop as well as the bacteria to trigger the decomposition process, essential for the recycling of nutritious elements. Unfortunately, the eggs of insects and spiders came along for the ride. They were a bit less useful, but helped make the illusion of home more real.

  She heard a rustle among the foliage of a bush; it then spread to the adjacent plant, until she saw a small, white stain peeking out from behind the leaves, convinced it was perfectly hidden. Anna moved closer with a stealthy pace. She weighed about fifty kilograms, but with a reduced gravity of a little more than one third of the Earth’s she had almost learned to fluctuate over the ground, without causing any noise.

  With a sudden jerk of her hands she seized it. “Hi, Moln!” She talked to the rabbit as if it were a child. She had called it Moln, which in Swedish means cloud, because it was white like Earth’s clouds. At first the poor thing struggled to free itself, then, once it recognised her, it calmed down. Anna could feel its small heartbeat, as she placed the animal against her chest and stroked it.

  They had brought with them a few pairs of rabbits and various chickens with the intention of letting them reproduce; some of them would be used for food. For this reason, she had always tried not to grow fond of them. But that bunny was special. She was there when mummy rabbit delivered and, among its many siblings, it seemed the more vulnerable one. The others always succeeded in dominating it and, since she was afraid it could die, Anna had decided to adopt it. So she could feed it and save it from certain death, she’d managed to build a small baby bottle using some material retrieved from the laboratory. Now Moln had become her rabbit and the rest of the crew knew well it would never end up in a saucepan.

  She stayed there, seated on the ground cuddling her godchild for who knows how long, so absorbed in her thoughts that she did not hear the footsteps behind her.

  “Hi, gorgeous,” a mellow voice whispered in her ear. Anna froze as she recognised it. The rabbit perceived the contraction of her arms and struggled until it escaped.

  “Can I play the old MacDonald’s farm with you?” Hassan laughed at his own joke. He was kneeling just behind her. Anna could feel his presence, but he carefully avoided touching her.

  “Do you need something in particular or are you here just to annoy me?” She tried to keep a neutral tone. She’d rather ignore him, but she knew well he wouldn’t stop teasing her until she replied.

  He had been behaving like that for many months now. She had made a mistake with him, a serious mistake. Since then Hassan hadn’t stopped getting back at her. He systematically ignored her when they were together with their crewmates. He behaved as if he didn’t hear her words, or as if they were an annoying background noise. Even when he looked at her, he seemed not to see her, as if he was focusing his gaze on an object behind her.

  Things were different when they were alone. He sneaked up with the intention of frightening her. And then he addressed her with a friendly tone, too friendly. It seemed he enjoyed keeping her under examination.

  That wicked game had gone on for such a long time that it had worn down her nerves more and more. She had never mentioned it to Robert, because otherwise she would’ve been forced to explain what had caused that cold war. She just couldn’t tell him.

  Anna wondered when it would end, if it would ever end. Hadn’t she already paid enough? What did he expect from her? She should have faced him. She kept on repeating that to herself, but every time she found him in front of her, she felt paralysed.

  “I’d rather come just to annoy you,” he replied, mocking. “But actually I’m looking for the sterilised probing pipes. I can’t find them in the laboratory.”

  “There’s a set of them in the Rover One. Robert had prepared it for our sortie. You’d better take that one, it’s ready.”

  If he just needed a piece of information, he was going to go away now.

  “Ah, okay …” he commented, but didn’t move.

  ‘Just as I thought.’

  Anna didn’t dare to turn. She wondered whether to stand up and move away from him. In the end, Hassan would get tired and leave her alone. But she actually feared what he would say or do, if she attempted to move.

  Robert should have joined her at the end of the briefing. Why wasn’t he there yet?

  At once she felt a blow of air on her shoulders. Hassan had stood up. Perhaps he had gone. She couldn’t help but turn around, but he was still stood there, looking at her. And smiling at her.

  “Anna, Anna, from here you seem so small and vulnerable. What you are, instead …” Then he offered his hand to help her stand up.

  She could refuse, but she didn’t want him to understand her dread. She saw he was studying her now, judging her. She took his hand and let him lift her.

  Hassan helped her with gentleness, without yanking her. Then he just released his grip. “See you around, gorgeous.” He flashed another one of his enigmatic smiles to her and walked away.

  A blue line generated by the augmented reality on the rover’s interactive windshield formed an ideal border in the surrounding landscape. As usual, everything else was red, dusty, and above all flat as far as the eye could see. Anna was watching it, dejected. They had pushed themselves as far as they could, but she was sure there was nothing in that area. Its conformation was identical to the hundreds of others they had already visited. Beyond the limit, however, there was something interesting.

  “According to the satellite photograph there’s a formation twenty kilometres further south, which looks like a dry riverbed.” She recalled the satellite image to the screen. By zooming in, she could distinguish a slight depression in the terrain. It seemed to be smoothed by the slow flowing of a river, some million years
before.

  “Pity that it’s too far,” Robert commented, with little conviction. He looked distracted.

  “Let’s go there!” Anna said that in a quiet tone, as if it were normal. She was pleased with that decision. Why not?

  Instead, the guy’s reaction was, “Are you nuts? If we go down there, we’ll be driving for at least two hours in the dark when we come back. To do something like that, we need Dennis’s authorization.”

  “If we ask him, he will no doubt say no.”

  “You got it!”

  “But if we decide to go, he won’t be able stop us.” She turned to her crewmate, who looked tempted by her proposal.

  “Hmm.” Robert shook his head. “Sister, it isn’t a good idea at all. We could go there in a month, when the daylight is longer. Why risk it now?”

  “They found an ice sac yesterday.”

  “Maybe they found an ice sac. Up to now they’ve just detected a slight increase in water concentration in the regolith.” He yawned. He had snoozed for most of the journey. “They gotta go back there a third time to understand what it is.”

  “Well, something like that has never happened before.” Anna bit her lip, nervous. “It’s something big.”

  “Wait a moment.” Robert’s head whirled around to face her. “I didn’t know we were competing!”

  The woman stole a conspiratorial glance at him.

  The day before, Michelle and Hassan had returned to the same area of their previous sortie. Although they had drilled as long as possible, they had struggled to reach depth seventy-metres. The substratum had proved harder than expected, but as they had gone down the instrumentation had detected water concentrations about half a percentage point higher than the maximum reading of 4% they had found until then. And that rocky mass with a different density, which they suspected, or hoped, was ice, was located just about another twenty metres deeper. If the theory could be confirmed, it would be so exceptional that the Isis crew would hold the winning card in obtaining a definitive launch date for the Isis 2, without further delays.

  It was great news, which should have swept away any dread from Anna, but she hadn’t actually been that happy about it. Sure, she wanted the colonisation project to go on, but she didn’t like the idea that the credit didn’t belong to her, too.

  No, Anna was by no means satisfied. A situation not helped by the fact that Hassan himself was involved in the discovery, even if the main credit belonged to Michelle. Such detail wouldn’t improve her mood at all.

  “What are you afraid of?” she dared him. “I’ll drive in the dark, if you don’t feel like doing it. We know the area around the station inch by inch. I could do it with my eyes closed.”

  “Oh, yeah …” Robert kept staring at her. He seemed to be searching for a sign of concession, for which he would wait in vain.

  An hour later they were on the edge of the ancient river. They had parked their rover and gone out wearing their suits. The slope to the riverbed descended at quite a steep angle, on an anything but smooth plane. They’d had to tie the motorised corer trolley to the rover by means of a steel cable, and to prevent it from tipping over, they accompanied its movement down for about ten metres. By the time they’d reached the first suitable position for a sampling, noon had already long passed and they weren’t even halfway through their job.

  Anna felt her sweat dripping down her brow and, by instinct, she raised a hand to her head, only to be stopped by her helmet. She snorted, annoyed, and changed the settings to her suit life support to have more ventilation. She was regretting that she’d got carried away by her competitiveness. What idiocy. This way they would be late back to the station, empty-handed, and would get a good telling-off from Dennis.

  “What’s this?”

  Robert’s voice roused her from her thoughts. She turned to him and saw he was pointing a finger to the ground, but she couldn’t understand what he wanted to show her.

  “What?” She just had the time to phrase her question, when she noticed the white stain. It was a stone which, despite being partially hidden by shadow, stood out for its white colour in all that red.

  Anna crouched down and touched it with her glove. Her fingertip became slightly white. At once focused on her job again, she took a sampler from her kit, collected a tiny piece of the mineral, and placed it into the portable analyser.

  “It’s gypsum,” she murmured, even before obtaining a confirmation. Her lips stretched in a wide smile. In an instant, she had forgotten about her former bitterness.

  Her colleague watched her with a perplexed stare. Perhaps he wondered what was so fantastic in a piece of gypsum.

  “I’ve seen images of similar findings by those old NASA rovers, but this is the first time we’ve found one in person.”

  That explanation did not appear to enlighten Robert.

  “It’s the proof that water was really here!” It was so obvious.

  “Ah …” he commented, but he didn’t seem convinced yet. “But didn’t we already know that there was water here in the past? It’s a dry riverbed.”

  “Well, we supposed that, but this is real proof.”

  “Ah …”

  Anna started laughing. A thousand days on Mars and you still had to explain everything to him. The fact she knew more than the others, her ability to create amazement in the people around her was something she had always liked so much. She loved to amaze. But among her colleagues, maybe the only one with whom that game still worked was indeed Robert. He was just a technician, doubtless, the best one they could have, but he wasn’t a scientist. Perhaps that was one reason she got along so well with him. He made her feel important.

  “Come on, I want to take some samples round here.” She felt caught by a sudden enthusiasm and she hoped it would last. “I’m curious to find out about the chemical composition.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Robert jeered at her, whilst standing up, but when he stepped back, his foot found a gap. “Christ!” he exclaimed, whirling his arms to regain balance.

  That drew Anna’s attention. She reached out and seized him by the hand. “Would you please be careful?!” Then she noticed the reason for his almost-fall.

  Robert turned as well and they both gaped for a while at a long crack on the ground. It ran along the riverbed for more than a hundred metres, according to what was promptly reported by the augmented reality of their helmet. They crouched down to have a closer look at it. It was about twenty centimetres wide, but it appeared deep.

  “It seems recent.” Anna was already placing an elongated sampler inside it and was scraping the rocky wall.

  “Are you saying there was a … marsquake?”

  “I’m not an expert, but here the rock has split neatly and collapsed, thus creating this dip.” While speaking, she was pointing out to her colleague the strip of the crack they were on, which was just a bit lower compared to the adjacent one. That step had almost caused Robert’s fall. “Indeed, it seems the result of seismic movement. Maybe it happened many years ago, but not long enough for the dust to conceal it.”

  She pulled out the sealed vial from the sampler. Within it were the fragments of rock drawn from inside the crack. As she turned it, she noticed an unusual reflection produced by the sunlight.

  “Oh … do you see that, too?”

  Robert bent down to place his gaze at the same height of the vial. As Anna moved the glass container, sometimes you could detect some azure reflections, which stood out from the rust-coloured remainder of the sample.

  “I daresay we’ve never seen this kind of glitters,” he commented.

  “Yeah.” She sighed. “After drawing a core down there, we must move the corer here.”

  “Oh God, another sample? It’s so late. You really wanna drive in the dark, don’t you?”

  “What d’you want to do?” Anna’s look threw daggers at him. “Complain or finish sooner?”

  Michelle’s silvery laughter resounded in the corridor, just as Anna and Robert were entering i
t. They had returned after nine o’clock and were starving, but they had at least to take the samples to the laboratory. And maybe take a good shower. After a day spent in the confined spaces of the rover and of their pressurised suits, although they were designed to give the best comfort, you would inevitably feel sticky.

  When they heard the seductive tone in Michelle’s voice, they looked at each other, amused. Robert was dragging the trolley with the pipes containing regolith cores, followed on his heels by Anna, who was carrying the kit with some smaller samples and the leftovers of their packed lunch. The gym door was ajar, projecting a strip of light on the floor in the semi-darkness of the corridor. They already envisaged finding the woman with her husband, occupied in something private, convinced that nobody would pass by at that very moment. Disturbing them seemed such an amusing idea.

  Anna was still wearing a mischievous smile on her face, when she caught sight of Robert’s dismayed expression, as they came by the door. He turned his gaze to her and then he made a sign of denial with his hand, while walking away, as if he meant he didn’t want to know any more about the situation. His reaction paralysed her, erasing even the slightest hint of the good mood she’d had. She knew what she would see, if she turned around. She knew she wouldn’t like it at all. But she couldn’t help but look.

  They were there, beside the treadmill. Michelle was leaning with her back against the wall, relaxed, her gaze conspiratorial, her right hand’s fingers placed on her mouth, while she was listening with attention to what was being whispered in her ear. She was so absorbed that she hadn’t heard the noise of the trolley, or realised there was an onlooker. Hassan was in front of her. He was holding his T-shirt soaked with sweat and was standing there, as if nothing particular was going on, with his bare chest at about ten inches from the commander’s wife, his friend’s wife. His other hand was resting on the wall, brushing against her hair. His head tilted, while he whispered something to her.