Cramer didn’t think he was sick. He didn’t think he was crazy, Sure, he had some trouble sleeping, a few bad dreams. Nothing serious. Nothing that would have warranted discussion on Earth, let alone medical treatment. Everyone was too cautious up here.
But maybe caution hadn’t been the reason for Jaeckle’s order that he spend double time in the blister. People had warned him that Jaeckle’s polished manners concealed a snake’s cunning. Maybe he was less concerned with Cramer’s health than with the newly arrived Martian soil sample. Maybe Jaeckle was using these two-hour time blocks to analyze the samples without him. He was screwing around with Carla Sue Gamble, the backup biochemist. Maybe he’s giving the new soil sample to her!
Cramer dived out of the blister and back into the tunnel. He eased open the access door and peered into the laboratory section. His workstation was unoccupied. He closed the door and noted the time, deciding to check his workstation at fifteen-minute intervals. No one was going to discover life in that soil before him. Not Carla Sue. Not even Jaeckle himself.
The station crossed a thin band of green that was the coast of Morocco. Within minutes, the entire visible world dissolved into the burning browns and reds of the Sahara Desert Sand dunes corrugated the surface in the long shadows of late afternoon. A dust storm formed a blurry corkscrew. Station personnel agreed that the Sahara, with its animated tableaux of shifting sands, was the most spectacular sight visible from the blister. The Martians had a special affinity for the desert because it resembled so much the spacecraft photos of Mars.
But Cramer was not interested. He felt antsy as hell. He shot himself from one end of the blister to the other in a micro-gee version of pacing the floor. Two hours in the blister. One and a third orbits of the earth. Thirty-five thousand miles. Some people didn’t travel that far in their entire lives.
Cramer patted the breast pocket of his shirt. The tiny bottle felt hot to the touch, or was it his imagination? Three yellow rocks remained. One could make these two hours seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Thirty-five thousand miles in a second. Not quite the speed of light. But not bad, either.
He worked the bottle out of his pocket. It was less than an inch long and barely half that in diameter. Dark brown glass with a black plastic cap. He unscrewed the cap carefully. If the rocks jack-in-the-boxed out, they would be lost forever in the brightness of the blister.
Cramer had been stunned by Kurt Jaeckle’s refusal to release the news of the discovery of life in the Martian soil samples. He had spent a couple of days sulking in his sleep compartment and refusing to take exercise until he realized that he still held the key to his own success. He had found the microorganisms once; he could do it again.
He had thrown himself into the task, twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch at his workstation, wolfing down meals, skipping R and R in the blister. But he just could not repeat that one, slim result that had shown a trace of living cells in a sample of Martian soil. All the other soil samples were sterile, and the one glimmer of life he had found had been destroyed in the tests that showed it existed. All he had was a set of curves on a computer screen. Even that one soil sample refused to give any further positive results.
As his failures mounted he grew increasingly depressed. One night, while listening to music in Stu Roberts’s sleep compartment, he confided his troubles.
“I know all about it,” said Roberts.
“You do?”
“Sure. Everyone on the station knows you found living organisms in one of the soil samples. We’re all waiting for you to duplicate the results.”
“I can’t,” wailed Cramer. “I just can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
“I can’t, I tell you. I’ve done the experiment every way I know how. There’s nothing in that soil anymore.”
“You just need to think of things in a different way.” Roberts fished a pencil and a sheet of paper out of a compartment. He pressed the paper against the wall and drew a figure. “What’s that?”
“A hexagon,” Cramer answered.
Roberts drew another figure and asked Cramer to identify it.
“A snake,” said Cramer. “Eating its tail.”
“Remember your freshman chemistry?” Roberts asked. “The story about Kekule being stumped by the molecular structure of benzene and then dreaming about a serpent eating its tail? Then he proved benzene’s structure is hexagonal, right?”
“Yeah, but how does that relate to life on Mars?”
“You need to dream about a serpent eating its tail,” said Roberts. “So to speak, that is.”
“I don’t dream of anything,” Cramer said.
“That’s where this comes in.” Roberts wormed a small brown bottle out of his shirt pocket and let it hover in midair between them.
“What is it?”
“MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. It’s a mild stimulant and hallucinogenic. Just the thing you need to get over your experimental hurdle. It heightens self-awareness, enhances sensory perceptions, generally helps you see things in a different way.”
Cramer held the tiny bottle up to the light. Two capsules danced inside.
“Any side effects?”
“Not a one,” said Roberts. “Hell, this stuff was legal until 1985.”
“Where did you get it?”
“I use it when I’m stuck with my music. You know, I hit a block, can’t get the notes down right. Just one swallow and the next thing I know I’ve got half a ton of paper covered with notes. Good stuff, too. Better’n I write cold.”
Cramer licked his lips. “But it’s illegal, isn’t it? If anybody found out…”
“Hey, you don’t want it, don’t take it. I don’t give a shit either way.”
Cramer refused the capsules that first time. Roberts shrugged and changed the subject. But two sleepless nights later Cramer came back to the technician’s quarters and asked if he could “just try out one capsule.” Roberts gave him three.
With them he felt alert, brilliant, powerful. The hallucinations were mild, just as Roberts had said. An inanimate object might wiggle in the corner of his eye. Flashing circles might appear, only to vanish when he blinked. An occasional bad dream might disturb his sleep. But these were mere trifles compared to the benefits of a keen mind.
Yet despite his enhanced perceptions, the Martian soil samples remained stubbornly, stupidly barren. He knew that Jaeckle and all the others were laughing at him behind his back. He knew that Mars was holding its secrets away from him deliberately.
Cramer stared at the reddening desert as he worked saliva into his mouth. The rocks were drier than the capsules Roberts usually gave him and needed lubrication going down. He popped one well back in his throat and swallowed.
The effect wasn’t quite instantaneous. He had enough time for a second look at his workstation and Jaeckle’s office. Both were as before.
He returned to the blister and steadied himself as best he could in its exact center. He closed his eyes, folded his arms, and crossed his legs at the ankles. Then he proceeded to drift, feeling great waves of energy course through his body as the drug entered his bloodstream. Time refused to speed up, but he didn’t care. His senses grew, intertwined, then blossomed into pleasantly confounding combinations. He could hear the orange paint on the outer skin of the Mars module. He could smell the hum of the station ventilators. He could see the words of the other Martians oozing through the seam of the door like green gunk.
A flash of searing heat disrupted his fantasy. His eyes flashed wide. The Sahara was fiery red. Storms roiled, sending aloft great spirals of sand that buffeted the station like giant handfuls of gravel. A huge figure of a bearded man with long hair and a flowing robe loomed out of the clouds. He beckoned to Cramer with outstretched hands.