Naguib and Patel looked at each other, dumbstruck, as if the idea had never occurred to them before.
Jamie grimaced and turned slightly on his stool. The display screen still showed the enhanced image of the rock formation: straight walls with some detritus at their base, set well back into the rock cleft, protected by the massive overhang of deep red iron-rich stone.
"Okay," he said calmly. "If you won’t back me on this I’ll just have to ask Dr. Li by myself."
The two other men groaned their displeasure.
Even over the whirring hum of the centrifuge Ilona Malater could hear the argument among the geologists growing into vehemence.
Ah, she said to herself, Jamie is showing some passion at last.
Joanna Brumado, a few feet away from Ilona at her workstation in the biology lab, heard the argument too. She looked worried, almost frightened as the men snapped at each other. She’s frightened for Jamie’s sake, Ilona thought. She cares about our Red Indian more than she is willing to admit. Perhaps more than she herself realizes.
Smiling inwardly, Ilona returned her attention to the whirling centrifuge and the work she was trying to finish. With the tedious, time-consuming care of the most conservative of chemists, she had spent the past several days tenderly baking the water out of half a dozen of the corings drilled out of the Martian ground. Only half a dozen, to start. The other core samples she left strictly alone, safe inside their protective boxes, as a control on her experiment.
The permafrost yielded its water easily enough. With Monique Bonnet’s help, Ilona had tested the water, analyzed it with every instrument the laboratory had. It was water, all right: H2O, heavily laced with carbon dioxide and minerals such as iron and silicon.
Jamie’s changing, Ilona thought as she watched the arms of the bench-top centrifuge spin blurringly. We all are. Mars is changing us. Even Tony is different now; he tries to maintain his air of English imperturbability, but I can see that something deep inside him has changed. He’s not the same man he was aboard the spacecraft. Something is eating away at him.
Is it Joanna? she wondered. Does Tony really care that much about bedding our Brazilian princess?
As if she sensed Ilona’s thoughts, Joanna looked up from the work she was bent over, right into Ilona’s eyes. For an instant Ilona felt flushed, caught red-handed. But just then the centrifuge finished its run and began to slow down, its thin shrill whine sighing to a fainter note, its arms slowly drooping as if exhausted from the work it had been doing.
Joanna slipped off her stool and came down the length of the lab bench to stand beside Ilona.
"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.
"No bouquet at all," he said.
No one even smiled.
Reed sipped, gave the beaker back to Ilona, then said, "It tastes rather like seltzer, actually."
Monique took an eager taste. "Mon dieu, it is like Perrier!"
They broke into laughter. All except Jamie, Ilona noticed, who looked as tense as a caged panther.
"Martian seltzer," Reed said. "We can bottle it and sell it! What a sensation back on Earth!"
"At a million dollars an ounce," Naguib said, laughing as he took his sip, then passed the beaker as if it were communion wine.
"Perhaps we could finance the next expedition in this way," said Patel, after his taste.