The Martian Race Read Online Free PDF

it was pure fame rush, of course. Men on Mars! (Uh, and a woman, too.) They were household names now, the first Mars team, sure bets for all the history books. Hell, they might eventually eclipse Neil Armstrong.
    She was first author on a truly historic paper, the first submitted to Nature from another world. Barth, Bryant, Molina, & Nelyubov's “Fossil Life on Mars” described their preliminary findings: it would rank with Watson and Crick's 1952 paper nailing the structure of DNA. That paper had opened up cell biology and led to the Biological Century.
    What would their discovery lead to? There was already a fierce bidding war for her samples. Every major lab wanted to be the first to examine the fossils, maybe extract Martian DNA, if any, and determine the relationship between Martian and Terran life.
    With her small scanning electron microscope she'd gotten decent enough pictures to confirm that these were indeed fossils, and not just wavy compression features in the rock. They looked strikingly like stromatolite fossils, tough layer cakes of bacteria. Some of the bacteria in living stromatolites on Earth were photosynthetic cyanobacteria, and thus green, but the Martian rocks gave no color clues.
    She started on her favorite speculation: where did life start? Mars was smaller and so cooled first. Life could have arisen here while Earth was still a hot lava ball. Then it could have gone to Earth via the meteorite express.
    Organized life-forms from Mars seeding Earth's primitive soup of basic organic molecules would have quickly dominated. Martians invade, eat Earthly resources! H. G. Wells with a twist. We may yet turn out to be Martians. Pretty heady stuff for the scientific community, and it would change our essential worldview. Full employment for philosophers, too, and even religious theorists.
    The Martian meteorites with their enigmatic fossils had tantalized scientists for years. When first discovered, the big question had been whether the tiny shapes actually were fossils, because most people thought they knew that Mars was lifeless. Now we know about that part, at least, she thought.
    But deep down she realized she'd wanted to find life, not fossils, and even more than that, L*I*F*E.
    Marc was jazzed by the discovery of deeper deposits of fossils, separated by layers of sterile peroxide-laden sediments in the old ocean beds. That implied periodic episodes of a wetter and warmer climate.
    But so far she had not found anything alive. Even the first volcanic vent they had explored had no life, only peroxide soil blown into it from the surface, like a dusty old mine shaft.
    Before today, that is. And now they were about to leave, the subterranean reaches still unexplored. Damn!
    After five hours Viktor was doing well, had regained his energy and good spirits. They even managed a clumsy but satisfying slap and tickle when she stopped the rover for lunch. In the cramped, fishbowl world of the hab, they'd learned to use the privacy of the rover to great advantage. Today she felt nervous and skittish, but Viktor was a persistent sort and she finally realized that this just might do both of them more good than anything in the medicine chest back in the habitat.
    The route began to take them—or rather, her, since Viktor crashed again right after sex; this time she forgave him—through familiar territory. She had scoured the landscape within a few days of the hab. Coming down in the Gusev Crater, they got a full helping of Mars: chasms, flood runoff plains, wrinkled canyons, chaotic terrain once undermined by mud flows, dried beds of ancient rivers and lakes, even some mysterious big potholes that must have been minivolcanoes somehow hollowed out.
    Her pursuit of surface fossil evidence of life had been systematic, remorseless—and mostly a waste.
    Not a big surprise, really, in retrospect. Any hiker in the American west was tramping over lands where once tyrannosaurus and bison had wandered, but seldom did anybody