The Martians(131)

Life under a permanent blanket of snow. “Uh-huh.”

“Hey. Better than nothing, right?”

“Right. But this moss here was exposed.”

“Right. And therefore dead.”

They start down again. Roger hikes beside her, lost in thought. He smiles: “I'm having a déjà vu. This happened before, right? A long time ago we found some little living thing together, only it was dead. It happened before!”

She shakes her head. “You tell me. You're the memory man.”

“But I can't quite get it. It's more like déjà vu. Well, but maybe . . . maybe on that first trip, when we first met?” He gestures eastward—over the Amazonian Sea, she guesses, to the canyon country east of Olympus. “Some little snails or something.”

“But could that be?” Eileen asks. “I thought we met when I was still in college. The terraforming had barely started then, right?”

“True.” He frowns. “Well, there was lichen from the start, it was the first thing they propagated.”

“But snails?”

He shrugs. “That's what I seem to remember. You don't?”

“No way. Just whatever you've told me since, you know.”

“Oh well.” He shrugs again, smile gone. “Maybe it was just a déjà vu.”


Back in the iceboat's cockpit and cabin, they could be crowded around the kitchen table of a little apartment anywhere. The two newcomers, heads brushing the ceiling even though they are sitting on stools, cook for them. “No, please, that is why we are here,” Jean-Claude says with a big grin. “I very much like to be cooking the big meals.” Actually they're coming along to meet with some friends on the other side of the Amazonian Sea, all people Roger has worked with often in the last few years, to initiate some research on the western slope of Olympus—glaciology and ecology, respectively.

After these explanations they listen with the rest as Hans and Frances argue about the crash for a while. Frances thinks it was caused by the rapid brightening of the planet's albedo when the north sea was pumped out and froze; this the first knock in a whole series of positively reinforcing events leading in a negative direction, an autocatalytic drop into the death spiral of the full crash. Hans thinks it was the fact that the underground permafrost was never really thawed deeper than a few centimeters, so that the resulting extremely thin skin of the life zone looked much more well established than it really was, and was actually very vulnerable to collapse if attacked by mutant bacteria, as Hans believes it was, the mutations spurred by the heavy incoming UV—

“You don't know that,” Frances says. “You radiate those same organisms in the lab, or even expose them in space labs, and you don't get the mutations or the collapses we're seeing on the ground.”

“Interaction with ground chemicals,” Hans says. “Sometimes I think everything is simply getting salted to death.”

Frances shakes her head. “These are different problems, and there's no sign of synergistic effects when they're combined. You're just listing possibilities, Hans, admit it. You're throwing them out there, but no one knows. The etiology is not understood.”

That is true; Eileen has been working in Burroughs on the problem for ten years, and she knows Frances is right. The truth is that in planetary ecology, as in most other fields, ultimate causes are very hard to discern. Hans now waggles a hand, which is as close as he will come to conceding a point to Frances. “Well, when you have a list of possibilities as long as this one, you don't have to have synergy among them. Just a simple addition of factors might do it. Everything having its particular effect.”

Eileen looks over at the youngsters, their backs to the old ones as they cook. They're debating salt too, but then she sees one put a handful of it in the rice.


In the fragrance of basmati steam they spoon out their meals. Freya and Jean-Claude eat seated on the floor. They listen to the old ones, but don't speak much. Occasionally they lean heads together to talk in private, under the talk at the little table. Eileen sees them kiss.

She smiles. She hasn't been around people this young for a long time. Then through their reflections in the cockpit dome she sees the ice outside, glowing under the stars. It's a disconcerting image. But they are not looking out the window. And even if they were, they are young, and so do not quite believe in death. They are blithe.

Roger sees her looking at the young giants, and shares with her a small smile at them. He is fond of them, she sees. They are his friends. When they say good night and duck down the passageway to their tiny quarters in the bow, he kisses his fingers and pats them on the head as they pass him.