“How’s it going?”
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.