“FYI, Fw: University of Washington team leads Martian life discovery,” read the subject line in Dr. Levitt’s email. “Meet in conference room, 1 pm,” she ordered, above a press release from Cosmic American “embargoed until 9/14,” which meant we had a few days before the story itself went live. News outlets are usually on the receiving end of press releases, but this news was so big Cosmic American apparently felt it needed to send an embargoed, preemptive, loud-and-clear message: “We broke this. It’s our scoop. And if our competitors have an ounce of journalistic integrity, their inevitable follow-up stories will read, ‘as originally reported in Cosmic American.’” Good luck with that. Every space, science, and news clog on our planet had been running this story for months, albeit without the details Molly Cukor unearthed. All the clog coverage had made Crimsy’s discovery like a smoldering fire. The embers never ignited and we had lulled ourselves into falsely believing they never would.
I went down the hall, clicked on the conference room lights, and called up the 3D projection from DSG for my morning report. I reviewed the appearance of the two experimental colonies. The green coloring was about the same. “No discernible change,” I noted. I reviewed the gas concentrations. No increase in oxygen levels down to parts per billion, which meant if Crimsy was becoming photosynthetic, she was keeping that talent under wraps or hadn’t developed it enough to show it off.
“You’re not gonna like this,” Nathaniel Hawthorn announced at our emergency staff meeting, short Dr. Brando, who was somewhere, and Dr. Marcum, who was on his way to the White House. “But the plan is to deny everything.”
I looked right at him, but he avoided eye contact.
“What’s in this for us?” Dr. Shonstein said. “We’ve kept our mouths shut for how long now, and Crimsy is still up there. Now we’re supposed to say nothing ever happened?”
“It’s the only hope we have of bringing your discovery home,” he said.
“You’ve said this before,” Cooper said. “Why don’t you stop being cryptic and explain what the hell you mean.”
“I agree with Dr. Cooper,” Levitt said. “Cut the bullshit.”
“I can’t really say anything else,” Nathaniel told us. “I’m trying to protect you guys, protect your work. That’s what my bosses want. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Who are your bosses?” Shonstein said. “The university? I can’t believe they’d support all this fact-fudging.”
“Why can’t we just refuse to comment, like we’ve been doing?” Cooper asked.
“At this juncture, refusing to comment is as much as an admission,” Hawthorn said. “We call it a ‘stipulation’ in court.”
I was barely out of the conference room and Nathaniel was already stepping aboard the elevator. Dr. Levitt stopped me on the way into the post-doc room.
“You gave us a scare,” she said.
“I’m sorry. I felt like I ruined the evening.”
“I got the jump on you there,” she said. “I’m the one who should be apologizing.”
“No worries. I had a great time. I know Dr. Marcum—”
“Poor Bill. I felt so bad. The public proposal was his idea.”
“So—are you guys ever gonna tie the knot?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t know.”
I got to know Parada better when she visited JPL during what I nostalgically call “sample week,” or more accurately “BiolEyeT week,” when our combined teams—the Levitt Lab, NASA, and JPL—made the momentous decision to drop anchor, as it were, where the MarsMicro rover had skidded to a dramatic halt against the bank of a frozen lake. The landslide and the dust storms it created forced the decision upon us: steep cliffs surrounded the rover, leaving one open path, where the dust cloud would take weeks to settle. We were stuck for the duration, so why not make the best of it? The only thing left to do was get permission from the Planetary Protection Officer (PPO) to drill through the dirt and ice and sample any liquid water that might be lurking beneath it. Parada joined Drs. Brando and Shonstein on their flight down to meet with the PPO, who was supposed to assure we didn’t cross-contaminate any potential sources of Martian life with hitchhiking bacteria (or viruses) from Earth. The flight was delayed and there was a rental car screw-up—Brando and Shonstein were left without a car—so Parada drove them to the meeting. She would have dropped them off, but Dr. Levitt insisted she come in, to the JPL conference room where the rest of us were gathered.
We had an additional complicating factor, the PPO explained: the bio-engineered viral phages MarsMicro brought to light up any bacteria we might find, using the BiolEyeT technology I adapted. How could we assure those phages wouldn’t create their own Martian pandemic?
“The phages remain wholly contained during every step of our tests,” Shonstein said.
“No chance of spillage? No chance of escape?” the PPO asked.
“No. None.”
“They’ve been integral to the mission from day one,” Brando said. “Why worry about this now?”
“I don’t think anyone expected to find a lake,” the PPO said. “An accidental release of those phages on dry sand is a much different situation than their release in an aqueous setting.”
“At most, we might find a pocket or two of liquid water,” Cooper said. “And that’s if we’re really, really lucky.”
“Why just a pocket and not an entire lake?” the PPO asked.
“Erratic freeze-thaw cycles,” Cooper said. “Parts of the lake thaw, then refreeze, depending on the season. The thin atmosphere, all the dry ice from the carbon dioxide. The valley walls, how well they insulate the valley. Varying salt concentrations that affect the freezing point. Lots of variables means little pockets.”
“But a virus could still contaminate a water pocket,” she said. “Still seems like too much risk.”
“A virus would have no chance of surviving,” Parada said unexpectedly. “They’re fragile enough on Earth. In that kind of environment, only something very tough could survive.”
“That is true,” Brando said. “Our sampling protocol is tightly regulated—temperature, salt concentration, moisture levels. But the environment in that lake—no way. Too harsh.”
“Are you—” the PPO asked Parada.
“I’m a physician,” Parada told her. “Visiting.”
“An M. D.?”
“Yes.”
“Is anyone else here an M. D.?” she asked.
We were a tentative go, pending a couple more perfunctory permissions. Parada, in my estimation, had swayed the day.
Four stabilizers anchored the MarsMicro rover against the bank on one side, the dirty-icy lake on the other. On a mission control monitor, we watched it unfurl the larger of two robotic arms, and spin a drill head into place, on what I’d describe as an interstellar Swiss Army Knife: drill, laser, vacuum, and other gear on a head that rotated to the tool of choice. The spinning bit bored through the frozen ground, kicking up frost tufts and frozen mud curls as it penetrated. We did hunt-and-peck explorations along the lake’s perimeter for over a week. SHARAD and spectrographic data suggested better places to bore. Dr. Marcum plugged the data into an algorithm he designed that narrowed down our choices even further. But we were still back in Seattle before we got the news.
“They found water!” Dr. Shonstein yelled in the hallway, her head craned outside the conference room door.
And there it was on the 3D monitor, the rover’s robotic pincer holding a small plastic vial with a few drops. Being the science nerd I am, I noticed the water at the top of the tube didn’t have the traditional dip it does on Earth. Less gravity on Mars. It was also tightly capped, so it wouldn’t evaporate. Above ground, Martian ice sublimes—turns directly to vapor. Liquid water doesn’t stand a chance unless it’s buried under layers of ice and dirt. The rover’s smaller robotic arm—for “fine motor skills” as Shonstein liked to quip—punctured the vial’s sealed top with a slender syringe, injecting the phages. If bacteria were in the vial, the color-reading spectrometer on the rover would—if our Earth science was right about Mars life—detect it.
But that news was not to be had today.