Green Mars(86)

Everyone at Biotique Burroughs went over to attend the meetings, hurrying back to Hunt Mesa if they had experiments running that they wanted to check in on. Sax was intensely interested in every aspect of the conference, naturally enough, and on its first morning he went down early to Canal Park and grabbed a coffee and pastry, and walked up to the conference center and was nearly the first in line at the check-in table. He took his packet of program information, pinned his name tag to his coat, and wandered through the halls outside the meeting rooms, sipping his coffee, reading the program for the morning, and glancing at the poster displays set in designated parts of the halls.

Here, and for the first time in more years than he could remember, Sax felt supremely in his element. Scientific conferences were all the same, at all times and in all places, even down to the way people dressed: the men in conservative, slightly shabby professorial jackets, all tans and browns and dark rust colors; the women, perhaps thirty percent of the total population, in unusually drab and severe business dress; many people still wearing spectacles, even though it was a rare vision problem that was not correctable by surgery; most of them carrying around their program packets; everyone with their name tag on their left lapel. Inside the darkened meeting rooms Sax passed talks that were beginning, and there too all was the same as ever: speakers standing before video screens that displayed their graphs and tables and molecular structures and so on, talking in stilted candences timed to the rhythm of their images, using a pointer to indicate the parts of overcrowded diagrams that were relevant. . . . The audiences, composed of the thirty or forty colleagues most interested in the work being described, sat in rows of chairs next to their friends, listening closely and readying questions that they would ask at the end of the presentation.

For those fond of this world, it was a very pleasant sight. Sax poked his head into several of the rooms, but none of the talks intrigued him enough to draw him in, and soon he found himself in a hall full of poster displays, so he kept on browsing.

“Solubilization of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Monomeric and Micellar Surfactant Solutions.” “Post-Pumping Subsidence in Southern Vastitas Borealis.” “Epithelial Resistance to Third-Stage Gerontological Treatment.” “Incidence of Radial Fracture Aquifers in Impact Basin Rims.” “Low-voltage Electroporation of Long Vector Plasmids.” “Katabatic Winds in Echus Chasma.” “Base Genome for a New Cactus Genera.” “Resurfacing of the Martian Highlands in the Amenthes and Tyrrhena Region.” “Deposition of the Nilosyrtis Sodium Nitrate Strata.” “A Method for Assessing Occupational Exposure to Chlorophenates Through Analysis of Contaminated Work Clothing.”

As always, the posters were a deliciously mixed bag. They were posters rather than talks for a variety of reasons— often the work of graduate students at the university in Sabishii, or concerned with topics peripheral to the conference— but anything might be there, and it was always very interesting to browse. And at this conference there had been no strong attempt to organize the posters into hallways by subject matter, so that “Distribution of Rhizocarpon geographicum in the East Charitum Montes,” detailing the high-altitude fortunes of a crustose lichen that could live up to four thousand years, was facing “Origins of Graupel Snow in Saline Particulates Found in Cirrus, Altostratus and Altocumulus Clouds in Cyclonic Vortexes in North Tharsis,” a meteorological study of some importance.

Sax was interested in everything, but the posters that held him the longest were those that described aspects of the terraforming that he had initiated, or once had a hand in. One of these, “Estimate of the Cumulative Heat Released by the Underhill Windmills,” stopped him in his tracks. He read it through twice, feeling a slight dampening of spirits as he did.

The mean temperature of the Martian surface before their arrival had been around 220°K, and one of the universally agreed-upon goals of terraforming was to raise that mean temperature to something above the freezing point of water, which was 273°K. Raising the average surface temperature of an entire planet by more than 53°K was a very intimidating challenge, requiring, Sax had figured, the application over time of no less than 3.5 X 106 joules to every square centimeter of the Martian surface. Sax in his own modeling had always aimed to reach a mean of about 274°K, figuring that with this as the average, the planet would be warm enough for much of the year to create an active hydrosphere, and thus a biosphere. Many people advocated even more warming than that, but Sax did not see the need.