Hasdrubal shook his head stubbornly. “Look, we gotta think about the long term here, centuries. That body already contains armies of microbes that’ll decompose him. Those microorganisms will eventually worm their way out of whatever container you put him in.”
Jamie almost grimaced at the word worm.
Quintana glared at the biologist. “Do you honestly believe that terrestrial microbes could survive in the superoxides that pervade the ground out there? Without water? Without oxygen?”
“We can’t take the chance. Hell, bacteria have survived for years out on the Moon’s surface without water or air!”
“I know that, but—”
Jamie broke into their growing argument. “The Vatican has asked that the body be shipped to Rome.”
Chang looked relieved. “Of course. He must have a family.”
“Or the Jesuits want him.”
“There is a resupply flight due in two months,” Chang said. “He can be sent home then.”
The last resupply flight for a long time, Jamie knew. Most of the base personnel will have to go home on that one. All except fifteen of us. Unless I can come up with some alternative.
“We can’t keep the body here for two months,” Quintana said. “We have no means of embalming him.”
“He’ll rot away,” Hasdrubal grumbled.
“That will be a health hazard inside the dome,” Quintana pointed out, tapping a finger on the cushioned arm of the sofa. “We’ll have to place him outside.”
“Can’t do that,” Hasdrubal countered. “It’s a contamination risk.”
“Better to risk contamination than endanger the health of everyone here.”
“No!” Hasdrubal insisted. “We have to protect the local environment. We can’t spread terrestrial microbes out there!”
“And I will not permit his body to be kept here,” Quintana declared, equally inflexible.
Chang scowled at them both. “The only alternative, then, is to burn the body.”
“The Vatican’ll love that,” said Hasdrubal. “Besides, burning might not kill off all the microorganisms in his body. If even only a few survive we’ll have problems.”
“You’re being foolish,” Quintana said to the biologist.
“I’m doin’ my job, lady.”
Jamie suddenly grinned, understanding what they must do. “Wait,” he said, raising his hands to calm them. “There’s another alternative.”
Chang turned toward him questioningly.
“Put the body in orbit until the resupply ship from Earth arrives,” Jamie said.
“In orbit?” Quintana looked doubtful.
“Place him in a cargo container and fly him into orbit in an L/AV. Leave the container in space. The cold will preserve the body, won’t it?”
A slow smile crept across Hasdrubal’s face. “Like dunking him in a vat of liquid nitrogen. Better, even.”
“Cryonic preservation,” Quintana murmured.
Chang nodded. “Thank you, Dr. Waterman. We should have seen that possibility earlier.”
Jamie grinned at the mission director. “Forests and trees, Dr. Chang. Forests and trees.”
Mars Orbit
Chuck Jones let his arms float weightlessly up from the lander/ascent vehicle’s instrument panel.
“Orbital insertion,” he said into the headphone clipped to his ear.
“Copy orbital insertion,” came the voice of the mission controller, back at the base.
Turning to his copilot, Kristin Dvorak, Jones grinned and said, “Okay, let’s unload the priest.”
Dvorak was a Czech, so diminutive she barely made the minimums for an astronaut. Like Jones, she was wearing a nanofabric space suit, although neither of them had pulled the inflatable helmets over their heads. Her hair was the color of straw, thickly curled. Jones kept his thinning brown hair trimmed down to a buzz cut.
She slid out of the copilot’s seat and floated toward the cockpit’s hatch. Jones went after her.
“Never thought I’d preside at a funeral,” he said as she slipped through the open hatch that led into the L/AV’s cargo bay.
“This is not a funeral,” Dvorak said, in heavily accented English. “We are merely placing his body in cold storage until the next flight from Earth arrives to take him home.”
The cargo bay was empty except for a solitary cylinder, ordinarily used to hold supplies.
Jones was almost too big to meet the specifications for an astronaut. He always thought about one of the first Americans to go into space, Scott Carpenter: when informed that the height limit for astronauts was six feet, he wrote in his application form that he was five feet, thirteen inches tall. And he got away with it.
As they unhitched the cylinder from the straps holding it to the deck and floated it into the airlock, Jones mused, “You know, maybe when I die I’ll have my body sent into space.”
“Not buried?” Dvorak asked.
“Nah. Why stick yourself into the ground when you can go floating out to the stars?”
“Recycling,” she said.
He shook his head. “I think I’d rather go into space.”
Dvorak smiled slightly. “It makes no difference, really. Once you are dead, nothing matters.”
As he swung the airlock hatch shut, Jones admitted, “Maybe so. But still…”
Once they sealed the inner hatch shut, Dvorak asked, “Will you return to Earth on the next resupply flight?”
Jones said, “No. I’ll wait it out.”
“We will all have to go back sooner or later.”
“I guess so.”
“I have applied for a job with Masterson Aerospace. At Selene.”
“You want to live on the Moon?”
“Why not? It would be more interesting. Not so many jobs for astronauts on Earth.”
“I’ll go back to Florida,” Jones said. “After a year on Mars, I want some sun and swimming.”
“More jobs at Selene,” Dvorak insisted.
“More women in Florida,” said Jones, with a leer. “In bikinis.”
She smiled back at him. “Higher ratio of men to women at Selene. Intelligent men, scientists and engineers.”
Laughing, they went back to the cockpit and launched the mortal remains of Dr. Fulvio A. DiNardo, S.J., into orbit around Mars.
BOOK IV
Lifebringer
The Old Ones knew that life is not rare, but precious; not fragile, but vulnerable. Life is as deep as the seas in which it was born, as strong as the mountains that give it shelter, as universal as the stars themselves.
Yet life is always in danger, threatened by the very forces that created it, imperiled by the whims of Coyote and the implacable workings of time itself. On the red world life was nearly extinguished by the howling Sky Demons. Yet life clung to existence. Life persisted. But slowly, slowly, the spark was guttering out. One day, inevitably, life would disappear from the red world forever.
Unless Lifebringer could return.
Tithonium Base: The Greenhouse
Jamie decided to hold the news conference in the greenhouse. He knew it was going to be grueling, but he wanted to show the viewers on Earth that the Martian explorers were safe and comfortable.
Edith Elgin had volunteered to moderate the news conference from Selene, for which Jamie was immensely grateful. She coordinated the reporters’ questions and acted as hostess for the show. She relayed the questions to Jamie, who planned to respond to each one in turn, then wait for backup questions to reach him on Mars. It was tedious, but when the various segments were spliced together the conference would appear almost seamless, almost as though it had taken place in real time.