The station crossed a thin band of green that was the coast of Morocco. Within minutes, the entire visible world dissolved into the burning browns and reds of the Sahara Desert Sand dunes corrugated the surface in the long shadows of late afternoon. A dust storm formed a blurry corkscrew. Station personnel agreed that the Sahara, with its animated tableaux of shifting sands, was the most spectacular sight visible from the blister. The Martians had a special affinity for the desert because it resembled so much the spacecraft photos of Mars.
But Cramer was not interested. He felt antsy as hell. He shot himself from one end of the blister to the other in a micro-gee version of pacing the floor. Two hours in the blister. One and a third orbits of the earth. Thirty-five thousand miles. Some people didn’t travel that far in their entire lives.
Cramer patted the breast pocket of his shirt. The tiny bottle felt hot to the touch, or was it his imagination? Three yellow rocks remained. One could make these two hours seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Thirty-five thousand miles in a second. Not quite the speed of light. But not bad, either.
He worked the bottle out of his pocket. It was less than an inch long and barely half that in diameter. Dark brown glass with a black plastic cap. He unscrewed the cap carefully. If the rocks jack-in-the-boxed out, they would be lost forever in the brightness of the blister.
Cramer had been stunned by Kurt Jaeckle’s refusal to release the news of the discovery of life in the Martian soil samples. He had spent a couple of days sulking in his sleep compartment and refusing to take exercise until he realized that he still held the key to his own success. He had found the microorganisms once; he could do it again.
He had thrown himself into the task, twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch at his workstation, wolfing down meals, skipping R and R in the blister. But he just could not repeat that one, slim result that had shown a trace of living cells in a sample of Martian soil. All the other soil samples were sterile, and the one glimmer of life he had found had been destroyed in the tests that showed it existed. All he had was a set of curves on a computer screen. Even that one soil sample refused to give any further positive results.
As his failures mounted he grew increasingly depressed. One night, while listening to music in Stu Roberts’s sleep compartment, he confided his troubles.
“I know all about it,” said Roberts.
“You do?”
“Sure. Everyone on the station knows you found living organisms in one of the soil samples. We’re all waiting for you to duplicate the results.”
“I can’t,” wailed Cramer. “I just can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
“I can’t, I tell you. I’ve done the experiment every way I know how. There’s nothing in that soil anymore.”
“You just need to think of things in a different way.” Roberts fished a pencil and a sheet of paper out of a compartment. He pressed the paper against the wall and drew a figure. “What’s that?”
“A hexagon,” Cramer answered.
Roberts drew another figure and asked Cramer to identify it.
“A snake,” said Cramer. “Eating its tail.”
“Remember your freshman chemistry?” Roberts asked. “The story about Kekule being stumped by the molecular structure of benzene and then dreaming about a serpent eating its tail? Then he proved benzene’s structure is hexagonal, right?”
“Yeah, but how does that relate to life on Mars?”
“You need to dream about a serpent eating its tail,” said Roberts. “So to speak, that is.”
“I don’t dream of anything,” Cramer said.
“That’s where this comes in.” Roberts wormed a small brown bottle out of his shirt pocket and let it hover in midair between them.
“What is it?”
“MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. It’s a mild stimulant and hallucinogenic. Just the thing you need to get over your experimental hurdle. It heightens self-awareness, enhances sensory perceptions, generally helps you see things in a different way.”
Cramer held the tiny bottle up to the light. Two capsules danced inside.