Danny laughed and peered into her tray. “Tell me, Jane: how long until you start providing us with some real food?”
“Soon, Danny,” she nodded towards her experiments across the MLP. “Everything is set up.”
“Thank God for that. Is that really what you think?”
She looked at him strangely. “Of course, my experiments and material are all ready, so –”
“No,” he laughed as he interrupted her. “I mean, do you really think that we came here to simply look back at Earth?”
She shrugged. “Why else? Firstly, we are by nature curious creatures, peering into cupboards we’re told we can’t open, wondering where rivers start and mountains end, when and where we came from. But despite our desire to go into the unknown and explore, we have an overpowering sense of belonging; that we come from somewhere and that in a way we are a part of that place. Secondly, as well as being incurably curious, we are constantly trying to better ourselves, I think to improve on what our parents achieved, to perpetuate the advancement of the human race.”
“So you don’t believe that we came here to find life, or advance science?”
“Of course we did. We have a scientific role to play, a mission that is well defined and thought out, the result of decades of research and theorising by the best minds on Earth. But I believe that is our secondary goal. The underlying reason we came here is to gain a different perspective of our home.”
“I don’t agree at all!” he exclaimed. “You make it all sound so futile and superficial.”
“Captain Marchenko,” Montreaux interjected. “When you were a child, did you ever play outside?”
“Of course, everyone does.”
“And when you ventured further away from your home than ever before on your own, did you look behind you to see how far you had gone?”
Danny thought for a moment. “Yes, I guess I did. But I wouldn’t say I was inherently interested in what my home looked like from the top of a hill, I was probably more nervous about knowing how to get back and wanted to make sure that I didn’t go too far.”
“Yes, you are right about that, and there’s an element of that when we look for Earth in the Martian sky that comforts us when we find it twinkling above the horizon,” Jane agreed. “But I am sure that the desire to look back at your house is not just fuelled by concern, but by interest also. When you first visited the United States, did you feel that you had an increased interest in anything to do with Russia, sometimes even in things that you would not normally express an interest in?”
“I found myself reading stories about Russian politics, despite the fact that in Russia I do everything to avoid them,” he said.
“I personally find that when I am abroad, I am always listening out for any mention of America. But in the absence of America-related subject matter, I casually introduce trivia into conversations,” she admitted. “I don’t do it consciously, I just do it. It usually starts with the sentence ‘In America…’ and then I’m off. And do you know what I think?” She didn’t leave time for an answer, although Danny seemed ready to give one. “I think it’s because as humans we constantly act as advertisers for our homes, towns, counties, nations, beliefs. You name it, we advertise it. When we go somewhere, we are obsessed with knowing what people think of where we came from, or what we represent. If we don’t receive that input, I’m sure that we are predisposed to plant knowledge, spread the ‘good word’, so to speak, so that when the next person like us arrives, their curiosity is more satisfied.”
He looked down at his plate of unappetising food. “And do you not think we might do this to simply make these foreign places more like home, so that they seem less alien to us, eventually expanding the circle of what our unconscious mind defines as home until it includes the location in which we currently find ourselves?”
Captain Montreaux looked at the Russian and smiled. “Like the first settlers in America. They built themselves a little Europe, changing the plants, animals and even soil, until they no longer found themselves in the New World, but in a carbon copy of the old one.”
“Which is why Jane would like to plant a nice flag on Mars, isn’t it?”
“No!” she said indignantly. “I want to put a flag on this planet to prove our achievement. And I think that whilst there may be some truth in your argument when talking about moving home permanently, the root of our desire to go anywhere is to witness what our homes look like from outside our normal viewpoint. On the smallest scale like a carpenter standing back and admiring his new table, or a builder standing back and looking at the house he has finished, and on the largest scale like a mission to Mars looking back at a reassuring light in an alien sky.”
“You said reassuring. Does that mean you feel insecure?” Danny smiled.
Captain Montreaux shook his head and decided to concentrate on his meal.
Jane opened her mouth, and Danny saw from the look in her eyes that it was time to get back to his original point. “Anyway,” he started, noting the frustration on her face. The word ‘anyway’ could at times be the most annoying in the English language, and Danny always used it to great effect. “I think that covers why we came to Mars, but why we came here precisely. To this exact geographical location on Mars” He gestured vaguely to the outside world behind him. “Dust, rock and more dust, not forgetting the rocks and dust.”
“Is there much else on Mars?” Montreaux asked.
“We are here, precisely, because of the water, Danny, because Beagle 4 kindly confirmed the presence of water for us, and because had we landed anywhere else in the hope of finding water and had not actually found any, we would at present be the first human beings likely to die on any planet other than Earth.” Dr Richardson said.
“Which wouldn’t have been very reassuring,” he joked. “I know we came here for the water under our feet, not to mention the gigantic, geologically fascinating impact crater a few kilometres away. I’m just annoyed by all of this dust.” He rested his head on the back on his chair and closed his eyes.
Montreaux turned to look at the Russian.
“You’re tired, Captain Marchenko, have something to eat and get to sleep.”
Danny opened his eyes and looked at him lazily. “I’m mostly tired of the dust. The dust is everywhere! I wear a suit out there, but I feel I have dust and grit in my hair! How can I have grit in my hair?”
“Because over the past two weeks, we have managed to bring the outside world in, despite the airlock.” Montreaux said. “I guess we have to be thankful that dust and grit is all that we’ve brought with us.”
Jane scoffed. “And the jury’s still out on that one.”
They fell into silence at the thought.
If life existed on Mars, it was most likely in bacterial form beneath the surface, which was exactly where they had been extracting their water supply from. Every precaution had been taken to prevent possible contamination, but they all knew that even the smallest amount of the wrong kind of alien bacterium inside their habitable compartment could spell disaster. The headlines were easy to imagine: “Life on Mars! Kills crew!”
So their scientist took samples of the dust every day and screened them for any signs of life, and was convinced that it was not a matter of if she found something alive rather than when.
During the first few days, they had managed to keep the MLP absolutely spotless, using the airlock to clean and decontaminate their suits as it had been designed to do. But slowly, inexorably, as the days went on and the number of EVAs increased, a fine Martian dust had begun to settle inside the craft, for obvious reasons mostly around the airlock.