Gregory Benford The Sunborn

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

had lost a fair quantity of blood and taken penetrating wounds at hip, right
shoulder, and left side. The suit had absorbed a lot of the blast, and its
tight-woven threads stopped the wound from rupturing out into the low
pressure. He sat up in the crisp white sheets and shrugged off questions about
how he was feeling. The point, he gruffly let her know, was not to feel, but
to think.
Page 34
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
Julia knew this mood was the best signal he could give her about how he felt.
She said softly, "I'll talk to the mission analysis people-"
"You, we, never believe them," he said. "They have data, but we were there.
Big difference."
"Something went wrong with the capacitor, they're saying."
Viktor managed a dry chuckle, hands crinkling the sheets. "Voltage surge came
from iron layer."
"Um. Why?"
"You notice how mat looked?"
She closed her eyes, her method of recalling a scene in the field, learned
from long experience. "It...
fluoresced."
"Da.
What else?"
"Green sparks."
"Da.
I check, use physics tables, is right color for simple voltage breakdown in
water vapor and carbon dioxide, at low pressure."
She patted his hand. "You always do the numbers first."
"Keeps you honest. So, at the pressure we measure, what voltage breaks down
that gas?"
"Um, lots."
"Quantitative, is 640 volts per meter."
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htm (46 of
283)8-12-2006 23:50:21
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htm
"I'm supposed to be, what? Impressed?"
"I was sending couple volts into seam."
"No chance the capacitor just failed?"
He shook his head sadly at her ignorance. "Discharge came from seam, not
capacitor."
"So what went wrong?"
"Nothing. Somebody got, maybe, enthusiastic. Somebody trying to get through."
"To..."
"To answer, da."
The whole Praknor behavior pattern was another matter. Julia could see that
the woman had already rubbed a lot of the outpost staff the wrong way. She had
already spent a half year in narrow quarters on the way to Mars, and plainly
the stresses-despite plenty of Earthside training-had compressed an already
overcontrolled personality into strata of anxieties.
Confinement had a way of telescoping relationships and tensions. On Mars, if
the staff had had to stay inside for most of the time, it would have become a
barking asylum. That was why Earthside carefully studied possible crew
members; but the stress of passage to Mars was even worse, and far less easy
to project from Earthside simulations. The whirling stellar void visible on
interior screens, the looming prospect of aerobraking-knowing that two had
failed in the last twenty years, killing the crews-these unsettled the mind.
So why had Earthside sent this new-style manager type, whose specialty seemed
to be intimidation? Somebody didn't understand that explorers were not
corporate types, so they had risked random personal chemistry-
nitro, meet glycerin, you're going to have a blast.
She had a sudden hunch. Praknor had been sent as a special emissary. Axelrod
had probably smoothed the way for her, and now Gusev Outpost was paying the
price in crew friction.
Another piece of data: Julia checked with Outpost Control, and, indeed, they
were pumping extra-big volumes of water up from the ice sheets below Gusev,
filling the plastic-lined subsurface reservoirs they had labored for years to
Page 35
ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
install. Mars ran on energy from nuclear thermal units and plenty of water.
With those they could do all the chemistry they wanted. It also meant easy
refueling for a fast-turnaround nuke.
The incoming nuke was "corporate confidential," which meant that Axelrod had
yet another trick up his sleeve. There were a few more days before it landed,
ten klicks away, at the pumping station. So Julia
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htm (47 of
283)8-12-2006 23:50:21
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htm avoided
Praknor and worked away in the lab. It could be her last chance to do biology
that mattered.
The Stromatolite Empire.
Dreaming, she was standing on mud flats at low tide. Volcanic cones towered
over a haze of gray ash, the landscape lit by spurts of hot lava. Streams of
lava hissed into a shallow dark sea. Waves whipped by high winds pounded
basalt cliffs. Hummocks of basalt stood on the shoreline, glistening when the
fitful sun struck them with highlights of crystals. Gray-green life had begun
on these mounds, clinging, fighting for nutrients in a violent land. Clouds
parted for a moment, and she looked up, expecting to see the moon's pale face.
Instead, a blue-green sparkle danced in the turbulent air. A swollen crescent
moon leered at the yellow horizon. Earth.
And maybe Mars, even earlier.
The Stromatolite Empire.
She studied the research summary squirted up from Earth at her request. She
had not thought of looking at the data on stromatolites in this way before,
but as soon as she did, plenty of researchers were willing to help, so this
arrived within hours.
Life on Earth had taken off after an excruciatingly slow start. Though simple
cells began within about
400 million years after the planet had cooled off enough to allow it, they
took 2.3 billion years to get around to making complex ones-eukaryotes-with
machinery in a nucleus. Another 400 million years plodded by before simple
seaweeds arrived. Stacking cells together to make more complicated plants was
apparently a tough invention, taking 600 million years more. Only when all
this was in place, barely
600 million years ago, did the Cambrian explosion of species occur, and
complexity took off on its exponential rise.
But by the time all this runaway action started, the plants had flooded
Earth's atmosphere with oxygen, making things tough on the anaerobes. So they
had mostly retreated underground, where they still thrived down to depths of
several kilometers. Having a blanket of poisonous oxygen over the surface had
probably inhibited them. So she thought of looking back, at the microbial
communities which had survived through almost all the Earth's
history-stromatolites.
As an undergraduate in Adelaide she took a trip to see what they looked like
and was astonished that they seemed to be just like rocks. Irregular,
encrusted columns of rock.
For decades now she had seen just such bulging columns of microbial life, deep
in the Martian caverns.
Forms on both planets used DNA to pass on their genomes, but there were myriad
differences. Earthside biologists were still fighting over the implications of
this, most of the discussion going right by her at high velocity. She was an
author on dozens of papers, arguing both sides of the issue, with titles like
"Identity and Evolution of Martian Vent Endosymbiotic Methanogens." (After the
first few, Viktor did
file:///K|/eMule/Incoming/Benford,%20Gregory%20-%20The%20Sunborn.htm (48 of
283)8-12-2006 23:50:21
Page 36 [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Pokrewne