“Champagne!” Dennis shouted as he popped the cork.
The others welcomed his gesture, beating their PVC cups on the table. The euphoria reached its maximum. They had entered Station Alpha a little less than half an hour before and they already felt at home. After the long months spent in the confined spaces of the Isis, that place, in comparison, seemed like a royal palace. They had trained for years to live in a perfect replica of that habitat, so they already knew where to go and what to do. In the coming days they’d have to settle in, check that all equipment worked as expected, and start planning their life on Mars. But there was no hurry now. The sole fact they were there, safe and sound, was a success. They had arrived where no other human being could.
“We’ve gone down in history!” Robert exclaimed, and gulped the contents of his cup. After an abstinence that seemed never-ending to him, that little bit of alcohol went straight to his brain and he started shouting for joy.
The rest of the crew replied in a chorus with a loud, “Yeah!”
But then he gestured them to be quiet. He hadn’t finished with his speech. “Brothers and sisters, let’s enjoy this wonder, because it’s the last time we can drink it in our lives!”
A general boo welcomed those last words.
“Well,” Anna stepped in. “Unfortunately we won’t for sure be able to plant vineyards on this planet. At least not for the next … two hundred years.”
Another joking boo.
“But!” she continued, hushing them. “We’ve got some beautiful potato tubers, which are destined for the greenhouse. And we could use a part of the harvest for something different other than simple nutrition.”
“Vodka!” This time Michelle was the one who spoke.
“I love you, Sister,” Robert exclaimed, putting both hands on his chest in a theatrical gesture addressed to Anna.
“I love you too, Brother!”
Rock music was heard coming out from the loudspeakers in the meeting room, followed by Hassan’s serious voice. “I’d like to inform you that for the last two minutes we’ve been transmitting in real time a video to the guys in Houston.” Then his mouth stretched in a smile. “With a little luck, they’ll be already drunk, when they receive us.” He laughed. “I’ve heard they keep aside a lot of strong stuff for these occasions at mission control, so we can let loose.” Right after that he increased the volume.
Michelle knocked her cup back, threw it away, and rushed to the middle of the room, following the rhythm of the music. With a sensual gesture she motioned for her husband to get closer, but Dennis shook his hands to decline the invitation. That made Robert laugh out loud. Their commander was shy around others. But she didn’t get discouraged and turned her attention to Hassan, who didn’t need to be asked twice. He grabbed her hand and made her spin around. Then he seized her before she fell to the floor, simulating an awkward dip.
Robert watched them, amused. The blonde geologist and the young surgeon were perhaps the worst matched pair in the history of ballroom, but in that very moment they showed such joy and harmony; it was a pleasure to see them having fun.
“You do know, sweetheart, that I’ll be able to blackmail you for life with this video,” Dennis joked. “If you don’t do whatever I order you, I swear I’ll send it to your parents.”
She laughed loudly, but kept on dancing with her partner.
The only one who appeared to have at once stopped having fun was Anna. Her gaze fixed on the two dancers. Robert scrutinised her expression, a mix of annoyance and sadness.
“Wanna dance with me, Sister?”
She started and turned to him, surprised. Maybe she hadn’t heard him approaching because of the loud music. But when their eyes met, she smiled again.
There was a kind of comradeship between him and the other guys, while there was respect and a deep, mutual trust, even affection, with Michelle; Anna was something different. They understood each other with a glance. They covered each other. They were accomplices. He’d wanted them to be something more, but he had soon become her confidant, ending up in the so-called friend zone, and he’d never had the courage to make a pass at her, as he knew she still loved another man. Maybe, with the passing of time, things would change. In the end they had an entire lifetime to spend in that place. He took comfort from that thought, which little by little became stronger in his mind.
But there was a sullen sensation in the bottom of his heart, which bothered him. Something that her previous expression had aroused.
“How can it be they haven’t confirmed the launch date yet?”
Anna’s voice was muffled by anguish. As days, months, many months passed, a snaky sensation of powerlessness had materialised in her thoughts, transforming into something real and oppressive. The dejected gazes of the others seated around the table, mechanically swallowing the umpteenth breakfast, demonstrated she wasn’t the only one to feel like that. Only Dennis tried to keep a semblance of optimism, but over time his acting capabilities had worsened, to say the least.
“Please, refrain from your usual drama,” he implored her.
“Drama?” She stood up. Her appetite was gone. “It’s exactly what they said the last time. Then the launch window closed and we remained here, empty-handed, and with the prospect of waiting another Martian year, before getting to know whether next time they would sent us the equipment we need.” She looked at her colleagues, one by one, before stopping at the commander. “Maybe you haven’t realised that, but we are stuck here. We keep on doing the same things and we find nothing. We must be able to go farther.”
“Anna, you’re being unfair now,” Michelle stepped in, promptly siding with her husband, in her usual protective manner. “We knew full well since the beginning that the chances they’d let another mission be launched after only two years were low, but the political situation has changed now—”
“I don’t give a damn about the political situation!” Anna had always believed what the officials from NASA used to say, or at least she had forced herself to do that, to avoid admitting she had made the wrong choice, when she decided to leave Earth to start that adventure. But her enthusiasm had lessened by now, and the lack of new incentives had increased her sense that they had been abandoned. “We’ve been in this fucking desert for a thousand days now.”
“Nine hundred and ninety-five sols,” Hassan pointed out distractedly with a full mouth, looking everywhere but at her. He was the only one who didn’t seem perturbed by her scene. As usual, in front of the others, he pretended she didn’t exist at all.
Anna went on with what she was saying. She had learned to ignore him as well. She’d had enough and wasn’t going to let that man humiliate her. “We are sick and tired of listening to the same excuses again and again. We need new equipment, and rovers with a wider range. Other habs need to be put into operation, we need more people joining us to start a real colonisation. If only the five of us remain, do you know what will happen? We’ll end up killing each other. That’s what will happen!”
Dennis snorted.
Robert stood, moved close to his friend and placed a hand gently on her arm. “Come on, Sister, we all understand how you feel. We’ve gotten the same concerns, but shouting at each other does no good. We’re family, do you remember?”
Touched by his words, Anna turned to him. Robert used to be the one who understood her, who knew how to treat her, but this time even he couldn’t make her calm down. She felt trapped. She had built herself a prison with her own hands and left the keys with some people hundreds of million kilometres away. Yet at the beginning the idea of living on the Red Planet had seemed perfect to her. What could she want more than an entire planet to explore, fantastic discoveries to make? But now they were stuck in such a small area, where apparently there was nothing at all. She’d journeyed this far in search of even just a hint that Mars had hosted life in the remote past. She wanted some concrete proof there was life outside of Earth, something to confirm her many years of studies. And maybe that proof was there somewhere, but she couldn’t reach it; perhaps it was just one kilometre beyond the maximum distance she could travel.
“Anyway it isn’t like the other time at all,” Dennis continued. “There’s a definite project now. The Isis 2 mission is ready. The allocated money has been spent, there’s no reason why NASA should postpone it anymore. You’ll see that in thirty, sixty days at most, we’ll have a launch date, unless anything unexpected happens.”
“Unexpected …” There was sarcasm in Anna’s voice, while she pronounced that single word, but at that point she didn’t have any strength to discuss it. She sat, following Robert’s invitation; he had never stopped holding her arm. She put her right hand on his and looked him in the eye. ‘I’m alright, don’t worry.’
“So.” Hassan resumed speaking, as if nothing had happened, after Anna’s outburst. “We were discussing the sortie schedule for the next days.” He sipped some coffee. “Today Michelle and I should go back to sector H to make another drilling attempt.”
“Again?” Anna exclaimed, irritated, but Hassan did nothing but raise his voice to outdo hers.
“Yesterday, on our way back, we passed over an area that gave possible positive responses to the instrumentation, but it was too late to stop then.” He activated the wall screen, on which a topographic map appeared depicting an area of the planum thirty kilometres east of Station Alpha. “Here it is.” A bright pointer was indicating a specific zone on the chart. “There is no doubt; at a depth of seventy metres, the terrain has a different density. It’s worth finding out what it is.”
Hassan’s annoying professional tone became almost imperceptible once Anna left the room, letting the door close behind her.
She stalked across the laboratory in a fury, feeling breathless. She opened the greenhouse door and a moment later, she found herself among her plants. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The smell of the leaves pervaded her nostrils, giving her the illusion of standing in open country. That was enough to allow her to calm down at last. She knew that little corner of paradise inch by inch. She had planted, nurtured and coddled every single plant, as if it was a child. She felt at home there.
An insect buzzed before her nose, making her shake her head to shoo it away and forcing her to open her eyes. Together with the seeds and some small plants, they had brought sacks full of humus rich soil from Earth, to ensure they had the necessary nutrients to make them develop as well as the bacteria to trigger the decomposition process, essential for the recycling of nutritious elements. Unfortunately, the eggs of insects and spiders came along for the ride. They were a bit less useful, but helped make the illusion of home more real.
She heard a rustle among the foliage of a bush; it then spread to the adjacent plant, until she saw a small, white stain peeking out from behind the leaves, convinced it was perfectly hidden. Anna moved closer with a stealthy pace. She weighed about fifty kilograms, but with a reduced gravity of a little more than one third of the Earth’s she had almost learned to fluctuate over the ground, without causing any noise.
With a sudden jerk of her hands she seized it. “Hi, Moln!” She talked to the rabbit as if it were a child. She had called it Moln, which in Swedish means cloud, because it was white like Earth’s clouds. At first the poor thing struggled to free itself, then, once it recognised her, it calmed down. Anna could feel its small heartbeat, as she placed the animal against her chest and stroked it.
They had brought with them a few pairs of rabbits and various chickens with the intention of letting them reproduce; some of them would be used for food. For this reason, she had always tried not to grow fond of them. But that bunny was special. She was there when mummy rabbit delivered and, among its many siblings, it seemed the more vulnerable one. The others always succeeded in dominating it and, since she was afraid it could die, Anna had decided to adopt it. So she could feed it and save it from certain death, she’d managed to build a small baby bottle using some material retrieved from the laboratory. Now Moln had become her rabbit and the rest of the crew knew well it would never end up in a saucepan.
She stayed there, seated on the ground cuddling her godchild for who knows how long, so absorbed in her thoughts that she did not hear the footsteps behind her.
“Hi, gorgeous,” a mellow voice whispered in her ear. Anna froze as she recognised it. The rabbit perceived the contraction of her arms and struggled until it escaped.
“Can I play the old MacDonald’s farm with you?” Hassan laughed at his own joke. He was kneeling just behind her. Anna could feel his presence, but he carefully avoided touching her.
“Do you need something in particular or are you here just to annoy me?” She tried to keep a neutral tone. She’d rather ignore him, but she knew well he wouldn’t stop teasing her until she replied.
He had been behaving like that for many months now. She had made a mistake with him, a serious mistake. Since then Hassan hadn’t stopped getting back at her. He systematically ignored her when they were together with their crewmates. He behaved as if he didn’t hear her words, or as if they were an annoying background noise. Even when he looked at her, he seemed not to see her, as if he was focusing his gaze on an object behind her.
Things were different when they were alone. He sneaked up with the intention of frightening her. And then he addressed her with a friendly tone, too friendly. It seemed he enjoyed keeping her under examination.
That wicked game had gone on for such a long time that it had worn down her nerves more and more. She had never mentioned it to Robert, because otherwise she would’ve been forced to explain what had caused that cold war. She just couldn’t tell him.
Anna wondered when it would end, if it would ever end. Hadn’t she already paid enough? What did he expect from her? She should have faced him. She kept on repeating that to herself, but every time she found him in front of her, she felt paralysed.
“I’d rather come just to annoy you,” he replied, mocking. “But actually I’m looking for the sterilised probing pipes. I can’t find them in the laboratory.”
“There’s a set of them in the Rover One. Robert had prepared it for our sortie. You’d better take that one, it’s ready.”
If he just needed a piece of information, he was going to go away now.
“Ah, okay …” he commented, but didn’t move.
‘Just as I thought.’
Anna didn’t dare to turn. She wondered whether to stand up and move away from him. In the end, Hassan would get tired and leave her alone. But she actually feared what he would say or do, if she attempted to move.
Robert should have joined her at the end of the briefing. Why wasn’t he there yet?
At once she felt a blow of air on her shoulders. Hassan had stood up. Perhaps he had gone. She couldn’t help but turn around, but he was still stood there, looking at her. And smiling at her.
“Anna, Anna, from here you seem so small and vulnerable. What you are, instead …” Then he offered his hand to help her stand up.
She could refuse, but she didn’t want him to understand her dread. She saw he was studying her now, judging her. She took his hand and let him lift her.
Hassan helped her with gentleness, without yanking her. Then he just released his grip. “See you around, gorgeous.” He flashed another one of his enigmatic smiles to her and walked away.
A blue line generated by the augmented reality on the rover’s interactive windshield formed an ideal border in the surrounding landscape. As usual, everything else was red, dusty, and above all flat as far as the eye could see. Anna was watching it, dejected. They had pushed themselves as far as they could, but she was sure there was nothing in that area. Its conformation was identical to the hundreds of others they had already visited. Beyond the limit, however, there was something interesting.
“According to the satellite photograph there’s a formation twenty kilometres further south, which looks like a dry riverbed.” She recalled the satellite image to the screen. By zooming in, she could distinguish a slight depression in the terrain. It seemed to be smoothed by the slow flowing of a river, some million years before.
“Pity that it’s too far,” Robert commented, with little conviction. He looked distracted.
“Let’s go there!” Anna said that in a quiet tone, as if it were normal. She was pleased with that decision. Why not?
Instead, the guy’s reaction was, “Are you nuts? If we go down there, we’ll be driving for at least two hours in the dark when we come back. To do something like that, we need Dennis’s authorization.”
“If we ask him, he will no doubt say no.”
“You got it!”
“But if we decide to go, he won’t be able stop us.” She turned to her crewmate, who looked tempted by her proposal.
“Hmm.” Robert shook his head. “Sister, it isn’t a good idea at all. We could go there in a month, when the daylight is longer. Why risk it now?”
“They found an ice sac yesterday.”
“Maybe they found an ice sac. Up to now they’ve just detected a slight increase in water concentration in the regolith.” He yawned. He had snoozed for most of the journey. “They gotta go back there a third time to understand what it is.”
“Well, something like that has never happened before.” Anna bit her lip, nervous. “It’s something big.”
“Wait a moment.” Robert’s head whirled around to face her. “I didn’t know we were competing!”
The woman stole a conspiratorial glance at him.
The day before, Michelle and Hassan had returned to the same area of their previous sortie. Although they had drilled as long as possible, they had struggled to reach depth seventy-metres. The substratum had proved harder than expected, but as they had gone down the instrumentation had detected water concentrations about half a percentage point higher than the maximum reading of 4% they had found until then. And that rocky mass with a different density, which they suspected, or hoped, was ice, was located just about another twenty metres deeper. If the theory could be confirmed, it would be so exceptional that the Isis crew would hold the winning card in obtaining a definitive launch date for the Isis 2, without further delays.
It was great news, which should have swept away any dread from Anna, but she hadn’t actually been that happy about it. Sure, she wanted the colonisation project to go on, but she didn’t like the idea that the credit didn’t belong to her, too.
No, Anna was by no means satisfied. A situation not helped by the fact that Hassan himself was involved in the discovery, even if the main credit belonged to Michelle. Such detail wouldn’t improve her mood at all.
“What are you afraid of?” she dared him. “I’ll drive in the dark, if you don’t feel like doing it. We know the area around the station inch by inch. I could do it with my eyes closed.”
“Oh, yeah …” Robert kept staring at her. He seemed to be searching for a sign of concession, for which he would wait in vain.
An hour later they were on the edge of the ancient river. They had parked their rover and gone out wearing their suits. The slope to the riverbed descended at quite a steep angle, on an anything but smooth plane. They’d had to tie the motorised corer trolley to the rover by means of a steel cable, and to prevent it from tipping over, they accompanied its movement down for about ten metres. By the time they’d reached the first suitable position for a sampling, noon had already long passed and they weren’t even halfway through their job.
Anna felt her sweat dripping down her brow and, by instinct, she raised a hand to her head, only to be stopped by her helmet. She snorted, annoyed, and changed the settings to her suit life support to have more ventilation. She was regretting that she’d got carried away by her competitiveness. What idiocy. This way they would be late back to the station, empty-handed, and would get a good telling-off from Dennis.
“What’s this?”
Robert’s voice roused her from her thoughts. She turned to him and saw he was pointing a finger to the ground, but she couldn’t understand what he wanted to show her.
“What?” She just had the time to phrase her question, when she noticed the white stain. It was a stone which, despite being partially hidden by shadow, stood out for its white colour in all that red.
Anna crouched down and touched it with her glove. Her fingertip became slightly white. At once focused on her job again, she took a sampler from her kit, collected a tiny piece of the mineral, and placed it into the portable analyser.
“It’s gypsum,” she murmured, even before obtaining a confirmation. Her lips stretched in a wide smile. In an instant, she had forgotten about her former bitterness.
Her colleague watched her with a perplexed stare. Perhaps he wondered what was so fantastic in a piece of gypsum.
“I’ve seen images of similar findings by those old NASA rovers, but this is the first time we’ve found one in person.”
That explanation did not appear to enlighten Robert.
“It’s the proof that water was really here!” It was so obvious.
“Ah …” he commented, but he didn’t seem convinced yet. “But didn’t we already know that there was water here in the past? It’s a dry riverbed.”
“Well, we supposed that, but this is real proof.”
“Ah …”
Anna started laughing. A thousand days on Mars and you still had to explain everything to him. The fact she knew more than the others, her ability to create amazement in the people around her was something she had always liked so much. She loved to amaze. But among her colleagues, maybe the only one with whom that game still worked was indeed Robert. He was just a technician, doubtless, the best one they could have, but he wasn’t a scientist. Perhaps that was one reason she got along so well with him. He made her feel important.
“Come on, I want to take some samples round here.” She felt caught by a sudden enthusiasm and she hoped it would last. “I’m curious to find out about the chemical composition.”
“Yes, ma’am!” Robert jeered at her, whilst standing up, but when he stepped back, his foot found a gap. “Christ!” he exclaimed, whirling his arms to regain balance.
That drew Anna’s attention. She reached out and seized him by the hand. “Would you please be careful?!” Then she noticed the reason for his almost-fall.
Robert turned as well and they both gaped for a while at a long crack on the ground. It ran along the riverbed for more than a hundred metres, according to what was promptly reported by the augmented reality of their helmet. They crouched down to have a closer look at it. It was about twenty centimetres wide, but it appeared deep.
“It seems recent.” Anna was already placing an elongated sampler inside it and was scraping the rocky wall.
“Are you saying there was a … marsquake?”
“I’m not an expert, but here the rock has split neatly and collapsed, thus creating this dip.” While speaking, she was pointing out to her colleague the strip of the crack they were on, which was just a bit lower compared to the adjacent one. That step had almost caused Robert’s fall. “Indeed, it seems the result of seismic movement. Maybe it happened many years ago, but not long enough for the dust to conceal it.”
She pulled out the sealed vial from the sampler. Within it were the fragments of rock drawn from inside the crack. As she turned it, she noticed an unusual reflection produced by the sunlight.
“Oh … do you see that, too?”
Robert bent down to place his gaze at the same height of the vial. As Anna moved the glass container, sometimes you could detect some azure reflections, which stood out from the rust-coloured remainder of the sample.
“I daresay we’ve never seen this kind of glitters,” he commented.
“Yeah.” She sighed. “After drawing a core down there, we must move the corer here.”
“Oh God, another sample? It’s so late. You really wanna drive in the dark, don’t you?”
“What d’you want to do?” Anna’s look threw daggers at him. “Complain or finish sooner?”
Michelle’s silvery laughter resounded in the corridor, just as Anna and Robert were entering it. They had returned after nine o’clock and were starving, but they had at least to take the samples to the laboratory. And maybe take a good shower. After a day spent in the confined spaces of the rover and of their pressurised suits, although they were designed to give the best comfort, you would inevitably feel sticky.
When they heard the seductive tone in Michelle’s voice, they looked at each other, amused. Robert was dragging the trolley with the pipes containing regolith cores, followed on his heels by Anna, who was carrying the kit with some smaller samples and the leftovers of their packed lunch. The gym door was ajar, projecting a strip of light on the floor in the semi-darkness of the corridor. They already envisaged finding the woman with her husband, occupied in something private, convinced that nobody would pass by at that very moment. Disturbing them seemed such an amusing idea.
Anna was still wearing a mischievous smile on her face, when she caught sight of Robert’s dismayed expression, as they came by the door. He turned his gaze to her and then he made a sign of denial with his hand, while walking away, as if he meant he didn’t want to know any more about the situation. His reaction paralysed her, erasing even the slightest hint of the good mood she’d had. She knew what she would see, if she turned around. She knew she wouldn’t like it at all. But she couldn’t help but look.
They were there, beside the treadmill. Michelle was leaning with her back against the wall, relaxed, her gaze conspiratorial, her right hand’s fingers placed on her mouth, while she was listening with attention to what was being whispered in her ear. She was so absorbed that she hadn’t heard the noise of the trolley, or realised there was an onlooker. Hassan was in front of her. He was holding his T-shirt soaked with sweat and was standing there, as if nothing particular was going on, with his bare chest at about ten inches from the commander’s wife, his friend’s wife. His other hand was resting on the wall, brushing against her hair. His head tilted, while he whispered something to her.
The air was impregnated by an evident sexual tension, a complicity Anna had already seen many times between the two of them during the journey on the Isis and then during the many months of their stay on the planet. When she had talked about it with Robert, he had told her she could see intrigues everywhere and made fun of her. Michelle was used to getting very close to both men and women, even more so since they lived within a small community, which had become family over time. But now, faced with such a blatant situation, not even he could deny the obvious.
Michelle laughed again, placed a hand on her head and started rolling a lock of hair with her fingers. Hassan moved away a bit to look her in the eye. It was her turn to speak. He was the one listening to her with attention now; he almost hung on her words. Anna was unable to hear what they were saying. They were using a very low tone and were in the other side of the room. But, despite that, she could not stop watching them, while little by little she was assailed by a mix of rage and sadness, which prevented her thinking in a lucid way. She couldn’t decide whether to interrupt them or just walk away. She didn’t know which of the two would have hurt her less.
In the end it wasn’t her business. Who cared? Yet she cared.
All at once, as if he knew she was there, Hassan raised his gaze. He didn’t seem perturbed to see her. There wasn’t the least astonishment on his face. He kept on listening to Michelle and brushing against her hair with his fingers. But he looked at Anna, with a half-smile.
Feeling caught out she lowered her head, guilty, and ran away.
“Why are you still here? Aren’t you hungry?”
Robert had appeared at the laboratory door, but Anna almost didn’t react to his words. Her stomach was closed and the last thing she wanted was to spend her time staring at the kitchen wall, while chewing some insipid food. And thinking. So she had returned to her domain, she had donned her white coat and had started to work on the samples right away. She wasn’t required to leave the station tomorrow, so she could stay up until late that evening.
She was preparing a tiny portion on the sample taken from the crack, to observe it under the microscope, located inside a Plexiglas sterile unit that had a similar internal atmosphere to the Martian one. Handling glassware by means of the rubber gloves protruding into that big transparent box wasn’t an easy task and required a huge amount of concentration. The risk of altering the material with the air in the station, or contaminating it with the bacteria they’d brought from Earth on their bodies was high; therefore before she could watch it closely and touch it with her own hands, she wanted to analyse all its properties in an environment not too different from where she had collected it.
While moving it under the artificial light, the azure reflections had started dancing before her eyes. It was an optical effect of extraordinary beauty. Those points were so small, scattered on the surface of the stone. According to the analyser, it was a crystal containing beryllium, whose azure colour was due to a high concentration of iron. In short, it was common aquamarine. What made it peculiar were the tiny dimensions of the crystals and their arrangement that formed separated, round stains of various size, which sometimes merged. They reminded her of something she knew well, but the theory did not fit the context where they took the sample.
“Can you hear me?”
“I can hear you,” Anna murmured, trying not to perform abrupt movements, while placing the slide under the lens. “I’m busy now.”
“Look, those stones were out there for millions of years, they won’t get offended if you let them wait for another half an hour.”
“I’m not hungry.” Right now, she just wasn’t in the mood for playing around.
“Come on, Sister, at least keep me company. Don’t send me there alone. What if I meet them? I guess I wouldn’t be able to hold back the laughter. At least, if I am with you, I can pretend I’m laughing at you!”
And, goodbye concentration. Anna raised her frowning look at Robert, hoping that this way he would understand she didn’t really fancy joking about.
“Perhaps we misunderstood, after all they were just talking,” he continued in full flow. “Truth be told, I’m not even quite sure of what I saw.”
“I am,” she replied, curt, while slipping her hands out of the gloves. Then she activated the wide screen installed on the wall in front of her. At first, the image of the sample was as it appeared visible to the naked eye. By moving a finger on her folio, Anna put one of the small, azure crystals in the middle of the field and zoomed in. As the image entered the crystal, the latter seemed to break up in smaller, separated pieces. “What the …”
“What are we looking at?” Robert came closer to her, intrigued.
“One of those glitters on the rock sample taken from the crack.” She ensured she was recording all that was displayed on the screen. “From the analyser it turned out this is what you commonly call aquamarine … but it’s strange. I thought each of them was a single crystal, maybe small, but single. But it isn’t the case.”
“They’re a lot of pieces, so tiny.”
“Correct.” She kept on zooming in gradually. “They aren’t just tiny, they are microscopic.” She moved to one of the microcrystals and zoomed up to the maximum optical magnification. As it became bigger, that mineral formation acquired an even more elongated shape.
“Oh, Christ …” was his comment.
Anna, instead, stared at the screen, incredulous, wondering whether she was dreaming. The image before her was a rod-shaped structure, inside of which were many small, azure microcrystals arranged in a uniform way.
“Hey, guys, you were late.” Michelle burst into the room, drawing their attention on her. “Have you found something in—” Her words trailed off as she saw the screen.
“Michelle, do you see what I see? Or am I hallucinating?” Anna asked, as she resumed watching the subject of her study. She wasn’t really in the mood to look at her face in that moment, but it was also true that her scientific expertise could come in handy.
“Where did you take it?” The geologist, or better areologist, as she liked to define herself, moved as close as possible to the screen. “Which magnification is it?” she asked after some seconds of silence, during which she had stared open-mouthed at the image.
“That thing is ten micron long. And those points you see inside it are microcrystals of beryllium and iron.” Although she tried to hide it, Anna’s voice betrayed a certain amount of excitement.
“Wait, Anna, let’s not jump to hasty conclusions now.” Michelle turned to her colleague with a grave tone. Their eyes met just for a moment. Anna was the first one to look away.
Robert let a chuckle escape, which he hastened to transform into coughing, thus earning a nasty look from his friend. Both had linked that statement to something else.
The other woman observed them with curiosity then, with a professional attitude, resumed examining the enlarged image. “At first glance, it would actually seem to be a fossil bacterium, but how have beryllium crystals ended up inside it?” She turned to Anna again, with a slight smile, in which the latter couldn’t help but glimpse arrogance. “It is surely a mineral formation that resembles something else, that’s all … sure, the fact that the crystals are so dispersed, instead of being aggregated together, is odd and deserves a careful study.”
She had much to say for someone who didn’t wish to jump to hasty conclusions. It almost seemed she wanted to close that business as soon as possible, even though her words meant the exact opposite.
Without replying, Anna zoomed out one-step at a time, thus showing the many rod-shaped structures that grouped together to form a big azure stain, located beside other stains of various sizes. “Yet this arrangement strongly reminds me of the colonial growth of bacteria.” It was far too evident and Michelle could not deny it.
The silence was at once interrupted by the sound of broken glass, which made the two women turn.
“Holy Christ!” Robert exclaimed. At his feet was one of the sealed vials, drawn by means of the sampler from inside the crack, and it had shattered in a thousand pieces. Many tiny stones had scattered on the floor, projected by their fall, whilst a thin film of red dust was settling and forming a wide patch. “Sorry, Sister, I was so absorbed looking at that colonial stuff, or whatever the hell it is, that I bumped the counter.” He crouched down. “I’ll clean up, don’t worry.”
Michelle started laughing.
“Rob, let it go,” Anna said. “I’ll take care of it later.” Luckily, they had extracted a one-metre core from the ground, so nothing important had been lost.
“Ah.” Robert pulled back his hand. “Goddamned glass.”
“I told you to let it go.”
“You’re right, Mom,” he replied, imitating a childish voice.
But some blood was copiously dripping from his fingers, while he was standing up. “Let me see,” Michelle stepped in, getting closer to him. “You’ve cut yourself, wash it under the tap.” And she headed for the laboratory’s emergency kit.
“Sister, you sure I won’t get landed with tetanus or something like that in this dust?” He was sniggering, while letting water flow on his hand. He was playing the fool, as usual.
“At least of this, yes, I’m sure,” Anna said with a fake reproachful tone. “Whatever that stuff we’ve found is, if it ever was alive, that happened million years ago. And it surely isn’t Clostridium tetani.”
“Let me see.” Michelle was back with a swab soaked in disinfectant and had unceremoniously grabbed Robert’s hand, to check his wound.
“Ouch!”
“It’s a deep cut. It’s better that I take you to Hassan to let him put in some stitches.” She wrapped up his finger with a gauze bandage. “Press here. Let’s go.” And she dragged him towards the door.
Robert turned to Anna a moment before they left. “She takes me to Hassan.” And he winked at her.
Once she was alone, Anna’s smile disappeared.
One of the things he couldn’t stand about Mars was the utter darkness during the night. When the external lights of Station Alpha were turned off and everybody went to sleep, just a single, immense gloominess remained out there. Yes, you could see thousands of stars from your window, especially if you stayed long enough to allow your pupils to dilate at their maximum to gather that little light coming from the sky. But it was not sufficient. Deimos almost mingled with them. Phobos, instead, when over the horizon, moved too much in a rush. It looked like a foreign, artificial object.
He was missing the Moon. He was even missing light pollution. Who would’ve thought it? The dark oppressed him, disoriented him. That entire world, which all looked the same, didn’t give any reference even during the day. He didn’t even know in which direction he should pray. In the beginning he had used the position of Earth, but in the end it seemed nonsense to him. So he had pretended to be still there and had oriented eastward. Then, without realising it, he started skipping some prayers. He had vowed to himself to respect Ramadan and he had done that, until he had completely lost the sense of the Earth time. After one thousand sols on Mars, you get used to months with the name of constellations, double-lasting years and seasons. Inexorably you realise that certain conventions lose their meaning and in the end, what remains without them?
At night, when he took refuge in his quarters and lay down on his bed, immersed in a darkness that was interrupted only by the blue LED of the life support sensor, in those moments his faith wavered, but just for that brief time between wakefulness and sleep.
He realised he had fallen asleep only when a noise awoke him. Or was it maybe a dream? With reluctance, Hassan opened his eyes. A silhouette stood out against the glow of the LED. It was motionless, beside the bed, just a couple of steps from him. As he made it out, he started.
“Sshh …”
He swallowed, letting his heart, hastened by fright, calm down. It was happening again. He sat up slowly, but he knew the blue light would reveal any move of his.
Who knew how long she had been watching him in silence?
He reached out towards the lamp switch, but another, quicker hand moved to his.
“No, no light.” Nothing more than a whisper.
That touch, that voice took his breath away. He stretched out his other hand, grabbed her by her waist with both, and dragged her to his bed. She followed him docilely, removed the blanket and climbed on him. In the half-light, he saw her taking her dressing gown off. She wasn’t wearing anything else under it. Then he felt her hands running on his chest, the taste of her mouth, the warmth of her body.
Perhaps he was dreaming, but he had no desire to wake up.
While he explored her skin, he could envisage her features illuminated by the sun. The scent of her hair reminded him the way it fell on her shoulders.
“I missed you,” he dared to murmur, but she welcomed him inside her almost at once, like a stormy sea. And there weren’t any more words, but only whispers, warmth, humours, pleasure.
He was already falling into the drowsiness that follows passion, when he perceived her body withdraw. He tried to stop her, but that skin, beaded with perspiration, slipped away from him in a moment.
“Anna, wait!”
He reached the switch, but when the light turned on, she wasn’t there anymore.