“No. It’ll be okay if you just suit up. If there’s any emergency you can pop out inside of a minute.”
“But the regulations…”
“Regulations permit an astronaut to go EVA solo, as long as there’s a backup suited up and ready for trouble. It’s just you poor little scientists who can’t go out on your own.”
Connors was trying to be jovial, but Jamie felt himself snarling inwardly at the astronaut.
“Oh yeah,” Connors added. “Reed wants another set of tests: temperature, blood pressure, pulse rate, and-the best comes last-more blood samples.”
“Not again,” Ilona protested.
“Now that we know there’s Martian life here, maybe we’ve caught Martian bugs,” Connors said. “That’s something new to worry about.”
“I’ll go first,” Joanna said, struggling to get out from behind the table.
“I’ll help you,” said Jamie.
There was no such thing as privacy aboard the rover, but at least they could conduct the medical tests in the lab module while Ilona and Connors remained in the command section. The lab felt intimate with just the two of them in it. Only the single strip of overhead lights was on, throwing muted shadows over the equipment they had used earlier, softening the lines etched into Joanna’s pallid, uneasy face. The wind sang its high, shrill note outside, but here in the lab alone with Joanna it was almost cozy.
Jamie made her sit down as he rummaged through the medical cabinet for the blood pressure cuff, thermometer patches, and hypodermic syringes. He carefully took her temperature, blood pressure, and pulse. All a little higher than normal.
As he was swabbing the crook of her arm for the blood-sampling needle, Jamie said, “I hadn’t thought about it before, but if there are Martian lichen then there must be other Martian organisms, too.”
Joanna nodded solemnly as she pumped her arm up and down. “Yes. Lichen may seem like a lowly form of life to us, but they are highly organized compared to protozoa and even alga colonies.”
Jamie hated needles. It almost made him sick just to watch someone, anyone, being stuck with one. It was an effort to keep his hands steady as he jabbed the hypodermic into the swollen vein in Joanna’s arm on the first try. She flinched slightly.
“Then there really are Martian microbes,” Jamie said as he drew her blood. “Germs and viruses and all.”
“There must be. The lichen cannot be the only form of life on the planet. There must be at least a primitive ecology.”
“Then why haven’t we found any?” He slowly eased the plunger back.
Joanna was watching the syringe fill with dark blood. “Either they don’t exist outside the canyon, or we did see them but did not recognize them as microbes.”
Pressing an adhesive bandage on the tiny wound, Jamie took Joanna’s wrist and made her fold her arm.
“You mean all those tests on the air and soil samples and rocks you did…”
But Joanna was already off on another tack. “Jamie, on Earth there are deposits of iron oxides that were produced by ancient bacteria. Do you think it is possible that the iron oxides on the surface here are the result of biological activity?”
He blinked at the new idea. “All the dust, all across the planet?”
“From millions of years ago. Hundreds of millions.”
“That could explain why the iron is still on the surface,” Jamie mused aloud. “Why it didn’t all sink toward the core; why the planet’s not differentiated the way Earth is.”
Then he looked into her dark weary eyes. “It could explain a lot of things, maybe. I never thought about the possibility of biology affecting the geology here.”
“It is possible, perhaps,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
Then he realized he was holding a syringe full of her blood in his upraised hand. Carefully, Jamie injected the blood into a stoppered tube in the automated blood analyzer. It sat on the far end of the lab bench, stainless steel and glass vials, smaller than the coffeemaker back at the dome and still gleaming new. They had not expected they would need to use it.
“How do you feel?” he asked as he pecked out Joanna’s name and the time on the medical computer’s keyboard.