285 Terraforming Mars — Part 3

DIARY ENTRY SOL 22,031

The living, dangerous ferropods were an astonishing surprise setting the Mars program back six Earth years. A half-centimeter in diameter, these nearly perfectly round structures, made of primarily iron in an alloy mixture of silicon, zinc, and a hundred other trace elements, were a presumed natural resource used wherever ball bearings were needed in the colony. They were perfect as far as I was concerned.

They had additional perfection as bearings: they were self-lubricating, covering themselves with a non-degradable slick originating from deeper concentric layers.

We all thought they were inert and non-viable. Easily available, they littered the planet’s surface—just centimeters below—in the canyons and calderas. I’m as guilty as the rest of the engineers in recommending all novel industrial designs for Mars use the ferropod’s dimensions as the construction standard for ball bearings. It certainly made sense. Why import from Earth what lay around for the picking, free?

Why pose as the perfect widget long enough for us to complete the entire Phase I, using what we had as the stable platform to launch Phase II? Why the grace period? Why be so agreeable and then declare war?

Little fuckers!

Perhaps it was achieving an ambient temperature above 40º or maybe a humidity self-sustaining at 2%—or a combination of these and other man-made Martian corruptions.

All of our little ferropod workers in the colony went on strike; they no longer functioned as ball bearings. We suddenly lost environmental and indoor climate control, refrigeration, flywheel use, turbines, transport steering, axles, universal joints, cantilevers, graviton cones, and engines of every sort. All we engineers could do was stick our thumbs up our asses.

The colony collapsed.

When the tightly stratified little balls came back to life and weren’t happy in whatever niches, crevices, or interfaces we had placed them, the whole settlement had to be retrofitted. Like one of your body parts rarely thought about until it is missed, something as mundane and unseen as a ball bearing threatened a whole world by abdication. The problem was so devastating that the colony population was halved within four months as evacuees to Earth exchanged with massive crates of ball bearings of the inanimate type.