348 Terraforming Mars Part 12

The sixty years of Phase III brought the colony population to 2,700, and it was designated now a compound, although politics even began pushing the designation "camp." Terraforming did the hard way what tempconciliation—it was anticipated—might do easily: provide the atmospheric conditions of a prior time, allowing the awakening from ancient dormancy flora and fauna, like what had happened with the Chantū and the ferropods. The xenobotanists tackled the Chantū, Ares arboreta; the xenobiologists focused on the ferropod, Ferropodia conglobinans. And the promise of tempconciliation would bring the rest of it, hopefully.

Ferropodia conglobinans was so named because its exoskeleton was made of ferromagnetic chitin, the iron content, due to the magnetic property, exhibiting varying valences; and because of its ability to assume an almost perfectly spherical shape.

When the right climatic tumblers lined up just so, there ended a dormancy that would shame a 17-year locust, not to mention all of the red-faced engineers who were suddenly without the roly-poly natural ball bearings that had helped build their new world. Previously it was assumed that the worst that would happen upon stepping on one was slipping and falling on one’s ass, the ferropod then unravelling and snapping happily away. Even the clichéd banana peel joke evolved to include the slippery ferropod. But now that there were three victims who had not so funny endings, the engineers gladly handed off the ferropod to the xenobiologists while they undertook the massive job of replacing them in the machinery upon which terraforming maintenance depended.

The Cultural Psychology Committee was just as engaged in ferropod research. Inexplicably, a retained ferropod in the brain did not result in the expected trajectory of rippling physical trauma to the central nervous system. But there were psychophenomena, a condition collectively called ferrism: the reliving many past events simultaneously in the present, major thought disorder, or at worst, a syndrome of physical and psychic suffering that could prompt expedient suicide rescue with whatever was handiest, e.g., heights, ballistics, blunt and sharp objects, or falling purposely into heavy machinery. Any neurosurgery would be too devastating to be of use, and no ferrocide toxins—if there were any—could be attempted without the fear of killing the host.