Go Big or Go Home by Will Hobbs

“You’re telling us these are actual Martians?”
    â€œBy the many thousands, from that nub off Fred’s bottom.”
    â€œThat’s impossible!”
    The professor was on his feet and dancing some kind of a jig. “Why, Quinn, why is that impossible?”
    â€œYou told us yourself. Fred has been flying around in space for millions of years. Even if the bacteria were eating on Fred when he was still on his home planet, how could they possibly have survived for millions of years in space?”
    â€œ Because they’re extremophiles! Life is surpassingly strange, my friends, and wonderful beyond imagining. All that time these microbes were dormant, and now they’ve come back to life!”
    â€œDormant for millions of years and they’ve come back to life? Has anything on Earth ever done that?”
    â€œAbsolutely, and I’ll give you an example. Bacteria from the Permian Age, over two hundred million years old, dehydrated and dormant in a New Mexico salt bed, came out of their dormancy and caused the decay of fish that had been packed with the salt!”
    Quinn nodded approvingly. “That’s insane, Dr. Rip. So what exactly did you do with Fred’s nub?”
    â€œTo begin with, I ground his nub into a fine powder. I tried water and a nutrient at first—table sugar—with no result. I conjectured that water in its pure and ordinary form might be drowning the little Martians, so I tried again with spit and no sugar, solely my own saliva. I guessed it might prove conducive, and it worked! Theycame to life! What you see through that microscope is nothing less than the Holy Grail of astrobiology—proof positive of life beyond the planet Earth. This might even mean the Nobel Prize!”
    Suddenly, Quinn was looking at me strangely. I had to stop and think what that was all about. It wasn’t a look that meant, Go ahead and tell him that Fred’s on the bottom of the lake. It was a look that said, I know what’s gotten into you and where it came from.
    â€œOne caution,” the professor said. “Some of us astrobiologists, myself included, have theorized that the history of life on Earth has occasionally had its course altered by the arrival of dormant microbes from space. The ones that fell on fertile soil, so to speak, sprang to life and survived. We have no way of knowing what species may never have existed, including ourselves, without extraterrestrial influence.”
    â€œThat’s an extreme idea,” marveled Quinn. “But why is that anything to worry about?”
    â€œExtinctions of species! The history of first contact with exotic microorganisms can be rather frightening. Consider the host of diseases that the Europeans brought to the New World, smallpox being the deadliest. On the heels of the Spanish conquest, millions upon millions of people died, up to ninety percent of the population of Mesoamerica. It may have been the greatest die-off in human history. The native people had no immunities against germs their bodies had never fought before. This is why the astronauts returning from the first moonlanding were quarantined for a period of time, to ensure they didn’t come down sick from exposure to extraterrestrial microbes.”
    â€œAmazing,” I said.
    â€œTheoretically, a disease brought from the moon could have spread through the entire human race.”
    â€œIn that case,” Quinn said with a grin, “how come you’ve been studying Fred here in your office, instead of some high-tech containment lab? I mean, were you even wearing a mask?”
    â€œYou’ve got a point,” Dr. Ripley replied. “Here’s why I wasn’t concerned. After the moon landings, the world’s scientific community learned that moon rocks and Mars rocks occur naturally on Earth, having been ejected from the moon and from Mars by asteroid impacts and such. We all set aside our fears of