Perpetual Winter: The Deep Inn (10 page)

              “Mariah, Mariah,” she called using the communication system. “Come look what happened. We’re going to publish in Nature by ourselves at twenty-one.
I can’t believe it.
” She ran to the lichen trays almost in tears. “It worked. We did it.”

              Passing the moss trays, she knocked one off.
I’ll get it,
she thought, not noticing that she had ripped her suit. The discrete whistle that she could barely hear quickly became a hiss. Sofia suffered a rapid depressurization.

              “No!” she shouted.

              Outside, Mariah heard her shout and rushed to the greenhouse. Sofia, struggling for her life, ran to the intermediate chamber. She felt her visual field narrowing, both laterally and vertically. She remembered having read about this strange tunnel vision that preceded losing consciousness. An excruciating headache was crushing her skull. She tried to cry out for help again and her saliva boiled in her throat when she opened her mouth because the pressure was so low that water entered into ebullition at the body’s normal temperature of 37 degrees. In terror, she lost control, tripped on a moss tray on the ground and fell. The ripped suit caught on a spiculated metal support and she was stuck. During the fall, she scratched her left wrist and, instead of running, her blood was boiling. Sofia collapsed.

Chapter 9

The Great Leap

Sofia, lightheaded, dreamed that her blood was boiling in her veins.
What a stupid death. To die on Mars just a few miles from Myrtle Beach,
she thought, before her mind vanished.

              She did not die. Mariah had activated the emergency repressurization system, restoring survival conditions. When 911 arrived, she was sitting on the floor, emotionally devastated but almost physically reestablished.

              “Don’t even think about putting me in the red desert. Let them terraform the Sahara or even the Antarctic, where you can freeze to death, but at least your spit doesn’t boil,” she said, laughing and crying at the same time, hugging the friend who had saved her.

              Two weeks later, when she went back to Mars, which is what she called the greenhouse, the oscillation of pressures from the pressurization had silenced the genes of some lichens, favorable to adaptation to an inhospitable climate, without killing them. The plants were more alien than ever: they had survived earth’s pressure as well as extraterrestrial conditions. That was what gave birth to the most ambitious project of bidirectional, rapidly reversible evolution. They were on the verge of something historic. Before the accident, they’d had some success in inducing new mutations in the moss they’d bought from Max Planck in Germany and, principally, the lichens that had come from MIT, the famous Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Their main idea was to develop organisms that could survive on Mars, which they had achieved when those new lichens thrived.

              They now proposed breeding organisms that could survive on Mars, but would still thrive when that planet’s conditions were modified after the initial terraforming phase. Pluripotent organisms, with several pre-prepared states of evolution in their genes that would manifest themselves to the extent environmental stimulation evolved. There would be no need to send successive waves of new species when Mars’s environment changed. Nor would they have to keep hoping for them to be lucky enough that, in a mere two centuries, the plants would be able evolve on a planet undergoing accelerated artificial change. After all, the Foundation was committed to a “quick” solution which, in two hundred years, would let new Martians walk about the planet without spacesuits or masks. These would be multiplanetary plants.

              In the greenhouse, they ran cycles of very low pressure, little oxygen and extreme cold and cycles of greater pressure, more oxygen and less cold, with very wide oscillations. The plants and the lichens had to keep the genes that let them adapt to both conditions, the Mars of today and the one of the future, after terraforming.

              Mariah’s neighbors detested the idea of having a Martian greenhouse across the street. Things got worse, not surprisingly, when a new version of the movie
War of the Worlds
came out. “Be careful so, instead of transforming Mars into a new Earth, you don’t transform Earth into a new Mars,”
the pastor told them, somewhere between joking and being serious, bringing them a message from the neighborhood. Philip Dexter responded that fear combined with ignorance makes for a poor counsellor. When the film
Jaws
was released, Mariah’s father reminded him, some people feared going to the bathroom, afraid that a huge shark would come up from the sewer and attack them. The pastor could only produce a forced smile.

              The ongoing polemic about China and the United States’ space race and conspiracy theories about the American government’s secret interest in building an interplanetary empire found no resonance in that rich city.

              “The future is in the future and will be better than the past. It’s there that we must keep going,” their uncle said, and people agreed. However, having mutant plants in your neighborhood was another story, as biological hazard signs painted on the transport trucks taking samples from the greenhouse to the University warned.

              The two friends were known in the neighborhood as the Martian mermaids, until one day when a group of boys crossed paths with Sofia and tossed her a line, “Mermaid, dear, I wanted to dream about you last night, but I have a question about the scenario. Are you from the Atlantic or from Mars?”

              “There’s no liquid water on Mars, just ice, which is why Martian mermaids are frigid,” Sofia told them. “Your dream’s not a big deal, champ.” They then became only Martians, despite having long hair and being as pretty as mermaids.

              Sofia had a rare talent for mutagenesis, which depended upon directed evolution, as well as an uncommon “spatial vision.” She was able to imagine proteins and other biological molecules, visualizing them in space, turning them, fitting them in, altering them, without needing 3D modeling software. She worked very quickly and used many ideas from comparative biology that Philip Dexter brought from his field work. She was the company’s star.

              “Hello, Mariah. Hello Sofia,” said Crane. You two are my favorites. I heard about your latest results. Admirable. You were born for this Sofia and we, to find people like you. Instead of publishing, you should consider patenting this or, if you want to take a chance, registering your ideas with NASA as an industrial secret,” he suggested.

              “If they hadn’t invented computer modeling of proteins, it looks to me like I wouldn’t be good at anything,” Sofia responded, accepting the praise. “It’s the only thing I know how to do.”

              “No, Sofia,” Crane retorted. “Many of our athletes who enchant the multitudes wouldn’t be anything if their sport had not been invented. What would baseball’s greatest genius be if there were no baseball? Work at McDonald’s, maybe. But you’re different. You can imagine complex forms in space, move and manipulate them in your head. If you didn’t do what you do, you would still be enormously successful in another profession. You would be better at doing what I do than I am.”

              Sofia smiled and blushed lightly. Crane was a genius at life support system integration and designing manned vessel interiors; his praise warmed her soul.

              “Just don’t ask me to put my feet on that red dust,” she joked.

              “How old are you?”

              “Twenty-one,” Sofia answered.

              “You’re too old now, my dear. You are aware that I know nothing about biology, but a question has besieged me. Your lichens and perhaps your moss will be able to survive Mars Landing Day Zero, LD zero, but when you had that emergency pressurization, conditions were like those on Earth. Why didn’t the plants die? Could it be because it lasted only a few hours?

              Mars LD Zero was Mars’s natural situation, which will last until the first terraforming mission’s Landing Day. LD one hundred would be the situation one hundred Martian years later—nearly two hundred earth years, since Mars’s orbit is twice that of Earth’s and one Martian year lasts almost two earth years.

              “No,” Sofia explained, “the strains manifest three different phenotypes for the three conditions of pressure, temperature and oxygen—Earth’s, which is of no interest, LD one hundred and LD zero. We are achieving spontaneously reversible evolution for the three levels of conditions. But reversion to the earth phenotype has an energetic disadvantage and so we’ll do a knock-out of those genes.”

              “Excellent,” Crane agreed. “But send me samples of the specimens with the capability of earthly adaptation preserved. It’s a good idea to save a few of those.”

              “There’s an abundance of lichens and moss adapted to Earth around here,” countered the young scientist.

              “You know, Sofia, the Foundation thinks the same plants’ ability to adapt to diverse environments is an advantage. There are situations in which adaptability is more valuable than energetic efficiency.”

              “I can send them all to you. In the project agreement, we want to optimize conditions in the LD Zero to LD One Hundred range.”

              “Agreed,” Crane confirmed. “Last week I spoke about your work to the Foundation, thinking that I’d be presenting them with something new, but you two are already famous there. News spreads quickly.”

* * *

The Earth Two Foundation sprang up from an American private initiative, after the Dutch Mars One competition has been an unexpected success. Despite living from people’s and businesses’ contributions, first small ones but later multinationals, it was able to generate millions in funds, making a campaign to colonize Mars and financing scientific and technological research to that end.

              Some older private enterprise, that hoped to mine asteroids or transport small asteroids to the Moon or to the Earth’s orbit—nominally those designated type M, rich in rare metals—publicly defended the idea that NASA and ESA’s (the European space agency’s) “Mars Objective” was the wrong strategy. That was the case of Planetary Resources, founded in 2012, by the cinematographer David Cameron and the executive Larry Page, of Deep Space Industries and of Kepler Energy and Space Engineering. But when various giants of earth mining, the aerospace industry, self-replication and robotized tool manufacturers, and energy corporations, among others, began defending Mars as a consensual objective, the matter was resolved. They were the global economy’s heavyweights, supporting NASA and massively financing the Earth Two Foundation.

              Mars’s lower gravity and less dense atmosphere would allow sending asteroids to its water-rich frozen poles for on-site exploitation and purification. The mining titans’ technology was easily adaptable to Mars’s moderate gravity, dispensing with zero gravity extraction, which they had not yet mastered. Osmium, rhodium, platinum, palladium, magnesium and other materials essential for industry, threatened with scarcity by large consumers like India and China, were abundant on asteroids. Those metals, and even lead, zinc, copper, and iron itself, are only found on the Earth’s crust due to earth impacts millions of years ago. These metals did not originate on Earth, as the primordial ones had sunk to the earth’s core millions of years ago when the planet was liquid hot. They are a finite resource offered by these celestial bodies that fell a long time after our planet initially solidified and will be depleted within forty to seventy years.

              There was a second problem. China dominated the extraction of another family of metals: the rare earth elements. Without rare earth elements (REEs), there would be no high technology in communications, batteries, automobiles, aviation, or electronics. What would happen to the west if one day they and the Russians closed the door on those REEs over which they both almost had a monopoly? Wasn’t that what the Chinese had threatened to do to Japan in 2010? What would the United States, Germany or Japan be without the neodymium, lanthanum, yttrium, or gadolinium that came from the country of the Yellow River, just to name a few?

              Officially, the space race began again when North Korea constructed missiles capable of striking the Pacific coast and American intelligence services learned that Iran had produced its first atomic bomb. The Pentagon revived the old Strategic Defense Initiative, known as Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars, based on the dream of positioning an anti-missile defense system in orbit, to which they added the need to defend Earth from collision by a cosmic object.

              Since the United States had excluded China from the old international space station, the latter had increasingly invested in space. Many Americans thought excluding China was foolish. They had come to an understanding with the Soviets during the previous century, not because we needed them, but in the name of peace when they were a threat and, unexpectedly, that understanding would later save the ISS when the space shuttle stopped flying. As the old Portuguese saying goes,
God writes straight even when using crooked lines
or, rather, the Lord works in mysterious ways
.
And now the Chinese had been excluded? If China were to become a military threat, would they then create joint programs to promote peace? It didn’t make sense.

              Contrary to what had happened during the first space race, the public initially had not supported the rivers of money pouring into NASA and the Pentagon’s Star Wars. NASA had lots of money. The Pentagon was swimming in it. The Foundation itself was pouring out money. But all of this was pale in comparison to what would come. Years ago, Crane, in a dinner conversation at the Dexter’s first house, had said that it would not be divergence with another country that would lead to the government investing in NASA on a large scale and private initiative entering the race. That decision would come after an internal debate, a change of heart, the impetus of an endogenous movement in the United States that would precipitate the giant to colonize space, involving the government and competition among private businesses when the right time arrived. He had hit the nail on the head.