The meteorite that José was alluding to, as I have mentioned earlier, is called by the rather unpoetical name of ALH 84001, kids, and it’s 4.5 million years old, and the deepest layers of the Valles Marineris are, apparently, almost precisely its coeval, and perhaps this is how it came to be that scientists wanted to look in the canyon for sister bacteria, and thus, apparently, the reason for our change of venue.
The morning after Brandon stole the rover (and we had to drive back to the Excelsior in one of the open Martian cargo transport vehicles, on our ventilators, in not a little bit of danger of freezing solid, since the sun was going over the horizon), I was shaken awake, on my modest bed, by José. He had a kind of mad look in his eye. He was chewing on a piece of chocolate that I had been saving for weeks. Which was irritating. I could hardly complain about the chocolate, when he was so excited about whatever he was to tell me.
“M. thanatobacillus. M. thanatobacillus!”
“It’d be less of a mouthful if you weren’t eating my chocolate bar. Those chocolate bars have a three-year shelf life.”
“The bacteria. That’s the name of the bacteria.”
“The bacteria from the meteorite?”
Jim followed him in, carrying a mug of battery acid coffee, and soon the three of us were sitting there, like a Martian coffee klatch. The sun shone in the salmon-fishery sky. All was quiet, except for the hum of capsule life support.
“It’s a gram-positive bacteria, it has flagella, it has an S-layer, and it can consume phenols, so it’s good for industrial accidents. And it has characteristics almost exactly like Earth bacteria.”
To Jim, I said, “Are you following?”
“His memory,” Jim said. Jim’s beard was now moving toward an Old Testament type of tonsorial styling, and he stroked it meditatively when considering the larger implications. You had to try to read into the few abbreviated remarks that did get uttered.
“Are you implying that we somehow exported our own bacteria to Mars?” I asked.
“Or bacteria came from somewhere else and was exported to both Earth and Mars through some interstellar transaction,” Jim said.
“And you remembered all this?” I said to José.
“And my Social Security number, from back when I was a kid. Not that it will come in handy now.”
“Nope.”
I don’t need to go into what Social Security was. Anyway, Social Security is irrelevant to the further revelations of this conversation, because once it was established that José could remember a few things from his past, such as the condition of his financial accounts, the web code of his long-term debt-repayment plan, and the name of his pet snake from childhood, he parted with the following scrap of info from his level-five mission briefings:
“The thing about the M. thanatobacillus is that, like some other gram-positive types of bacteria, it causes illness. Serious illness. I guess the closest relative would be B. anthracis, or maybe the resistant S. aureus, except that M. thanatobacillus goes into a kind of feeding frenzy in the presence of certain carbon-based life-forms, at least when it’s heated to the right temperature. A temperature that’s rare on Mars. Basically, it causes bodies to sort of… disassemble.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s not an airborne type of infection because it doesn’t do well when it’s not really hot, and it stays dormant in the hundred-degree-below-zero-type temperature range. But in a tropical or semitropical environment, like the one you might get in a period of generalized greenhouse emissions, it thrives. It eats its way through bodies.”
Jim, tugging on his beard: “The flesh-eating germ.”
José: “Maybe a little bit worse.”
Jim said, “You’re saying that you were briefed by NASA about coming to Mars in order to harvest cultures of a bacterium that is so dangerous to human life that it causes human bodies to break down upon contact? What would we be using that for?”
“We’d be using it on our military enemies.”
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“I’m guessing,” I said, “that you weren’t informed about which enemies they were talking about.”
José said, “The critical phase doesn’t happen immediately, the disassembling part. It takes a little while. The gestation of a full-blown infection is several weeks. You have to come in bodily contact with an infected party. It’s not airborne like with B. anthracis, which I guess suggests it can’t be aerosolized, although I don’t really know if they tried that yet.”
“Where did they do all this research?”
“I know they let the bacteria infect a sheep farm. They had a population of sheep in a lab they were borrowing from the Kiwis, I think. South Island of New Zealand. It was closer to McMurdo that way, and they could transport the bacteria on military aircraft more easily, while it was in its BDP. They could fly it into the PST bases, Los Angeles, Phoenix, places like that. So they introduced the germ into this sheep population near Dunedin, and the results were grisly. Even though the whole project is need to know, like Brandon was saying. They were going to great lengths to impress on us the kind of precautions we needed to take while mining.”
“And this is why we’re going into the canyon.”
“This is why Brandon may be heading there already,” Jim said.
How did Jim know this? That Brandon was already there? Well, there were homing beacons on the rover, because of the danger of getting lost on Mars (no magnetic field!). It was therefore not hard to track the movement of our lost vehicle. Brandon had likely attempted to strip off the beacons without success. Or perhaps he was simply unconcerned about our tracking him. Brandon needed to drive about four hundred kilometers from our landing zone in the Chryse Planitia to get to the easternmost end of the Valles Marineris, where the evidence of water leaving the canyon was plain for all to see. In fact, he had already taken a couple of exploratory missions to the edge of the canyon, where he had no doubt beheld the 14,000-foot cliff face that I was explaining about earlier. In each of his exploratory maneuvers, Brandon had ventured farther west, according to Jim, coming back at night to his base camp to recharge the rover. He was camping near the remains of an old unmanned mission — there were almost twenty junk sites on Mars, and no shortage of them in Chryse — and he was using some of its solar panels and its old computing equipment while trying to stay warm during the Martian nights.
What to do about all of this? What to do about Brandon, and how seriously should we take the search for M. thanatobacillus? If he did manage to locate a sample of the bacteria, he would then be faced with the problem of returning with it to Earth. With seven of us resisting him, he was going to have a hard time. He couldn’t just walk off with the Earth Return Vehicle and leave the rest of us here.
“The risk of infection is certainly unappetizing,” Jim said.
“I think NASA, at the service of the DOD, felt a number of us could be expended in the effort to procure and incubate the bacteria. This loss would be offset by the military application back on Earth,” José said. “And the public-relations part of it would be easy to finesse. Since this is a dangerous mission.”
“That’s just what Brandon said on the Geronimo, according to Abu,” I said. “And I hate to break the news to you, but he specifically threatened you, José. He was already working hard to cover up the whole story of the military acquisition of the bacteria.”
José attempted to seem unperturbed.
“I say let’s fly in there and be ready when he comes. We can take the ultralight, launch it off the cliff wall, which may be why we carried it all this way anyhow. I mean, I don’t have any FAA certification or anything. You guys will have to do the flying. But, come on, I smashed my skull on the fuselage of the damn thing! I feel like I want to get every bit of value out of the ultralight before we leave it sticking out of a dune somewhere.”