“Do you need any help?” she asked.
Watching the centrifuge slowly spinning down to a complete stop, Ilona answered, “Monique was supposed to be here by now.”
“She’s off tending to her plants. Some of them are beginning to sprout already.”
“Yes. I know.” The centrifuge stopped altogether. “If everything goes well, I’ll be able to give her Martian water for her precious sprouts.”
Joanna watched as Ilona detached a vial from the centrifuge and held it up to the overhead lights. The vial was divided into two sections; its top was clear liquid, the bottom section much murkier.
“You see? The water is clear now. I’ve separated out the dissolved minerals.”
“It looks bubbly,” Joanna said.
“Carbon dioxide, absorbed from the atmosphere. If all the permafrost could be melted, we’d not only cover half of Mars with water, we’d outgas enough CO2 to make the atmosphere as thick as Earth’s, almost.”
Ilona decanted the clear water into a plastic beaker.
“Aren’t you going to analyze it?” Joanna asked.
“The mass spectrometer is off-line again.”
“I thought Abell…”
“Paul said he fixed it, but I don’t trust the calibration since he’s had his hands on it. I’ve got to go over it myself, and I haven’t had the time for it.”
Joanna said, “The geology lab has a mass spectrometer.”
With a sudden smile, Ilona answered, “Good thought.”
The men were still arguing, almost shouting, when the two women came around the partition and stepped into the geology lab. The argument snapped off into silence.
“We need to use your spectrometer for a few minutes,” Ilona said. “Do you mind?”
Naguib said, “No. Of course not. Is that local groundwater you have there?”
“Yes.”
“Unprotected?” Patel asked. “With no cover atop it?”
“It’s only water, Rava. It can’t hurt you.”
Joanna added, “We have run it through every test we know; there are no organisms in it. It is completely sterile.”
“Not now,” said Patel. “You have exposed it to our air, to our microbes.”
Ilona shrugged grandly, as if the Hindu’s observation meant nothing whatsoever to her, and stepped over to the mass spectrometer sitting on the lab bench between an assortment of small stones and the thick sheaf of an operations manual. On the other side of the manual was a desktop computer, its screen blank.
“I’ve got to make a call up to Dr. Li,” Jamie said, getting up from the stool on which he had been sitting.
“Don’t go,” Ilona said. “This will only take a moment or two.”
Jamie hesitated, glancing at the other two men, then at Joanna.
“Please stay,” said Joanna.
He stood uncertainly for a moment, then gestured Joanna to the stool.
Ilona’s test of the water took longer than a moment or two. Monique Bonnet showed up, apologizing for spending so much time with her garden. “The legumes are beginning to unfurl leaves,” she announced. No one but she seemed to care.
Tony Reed sauntered past the lab, saw the group, and asked, “What’s going on? A cabal?”
Ilona looked up from the computer screen that now displayed the spectrometer’s output.
“Come in, Tony. Come in. The medical officer should be here for this experiment.”
“Experiment?” Reed asked, stepping inside the lab area. “What experiment?”
“We are about to sample the local wine,” Monique said.
Reed saw the beaker of water sitting on the bench and immediately understood. “Nothing injurious in it, is there?”
Ilona replied, “As far as the mass spectrometer is concerned, it’s nothing but water with some carbon dioxide dissolved in it and a barely detectable trace of a few minerals.”
Reed went over and studied the display screen. “I’ve seen worse in London’s water supply. Much worse.”
“I can begin to use native water on the garden plants, then?” Monique asked.
“After the ultimate test,” said Ilona. And she raised the beaker to her lips.
Utter silence as she sipped. She looked thoughtful for a moment, ran the tip of her tongue over her lips, then handed the beaker to Tony.
“See what you think,” she said.
Reed took the beaker and made a show of holding it up to the light and then sniffing it, as if it were a fine wine.