Jim Baen's Universe

In My Opinion

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The Tiniest Assassins

Written by Mike Resnick

Okay, boiled down, it comes to this: the Martians come here, do a little serious devastation, scare the hell out of us, and then catch colds and die.

Never gonna happen. For one thing, given the weaponry that H. G. Wells and the movie give them, they'll never have to emerge from their ships before they've destroyed every last one of us and the battle is over—and as long as they stay in their ships, they're immune to the one indefensible weapon we have: our peculiarly human viruses.

And there's something else to consider. Let's not forget that Wells lived before the era of modern medicine. I think it's only logical to assume that any creatures, benevolent or hostile, that can traverse the void and reach planet Earth have doubtless developed their science—and especially their medical science—to the point where they can pinpoint and identify any dangerous germs in our atmosphere, and either develop some form of immunization to them, or create some way to annihilate them at the source, which is to say Earth, before invading us.

It's just common sense. You wouldn't invade the waters off the coast of Australia unless you had some protection against the great white shark. You wouldn't wander through a pride of hungry lions without protection. Hell, we don't send our soldiers into battle these days without protection against bullets, chemical agents, biological agents, everything we can think of.

So I think it's fair to say that our germs are not going to kill any extraterrestrial invaders once they get here.

Nope. We're going to kill them long before they get here. And by the very same means that we (or Earth, if you prefer) used to kill Wells' Martian invaders.

How?

Well, as likely as not, it'll be by accident.

You see, in recent years NASA has been examining ships, rovers, orbiters, everything that we send into space.

And guess what?

Neither the cold of space nor the heat of re-entry nor the direct gamma radiation from the sun kills every living thing on those objects.

Oh, there's nothing there that'll bother us—at least not so far. But that doesn't mean an alien race with an alien physiology isn't looking down a barrel loaded with newly-identified microbes from good old Planet Earth.

We've even got names for them.

For example, there's Bacillus Odysseyi, which has been found on the Mars Odyssey orbiter. Why is this noteworthy? Because the damned thing has been orbiting Mars for close to four years. It survived the 40-million-mile trip, it survived three years in orbit, it survived gamma radiation, and it's doing just fine, thank you.

Now, no one's ever been killed by B. Odysseyi, and probably no one ever will be. But that's not to say that it couldn't wipe out a squad of Wells' Martians or Edgar Rice Burroughs' green Tharks in an afternoon, depending on what particular germs they're vulnerable to.

Then there's Bacillus Safensis. This baby is not only found in the Jet Propulsion Lab's Spacecraft Assembly Facility (known as SAF, which gave it its name), but it is alive and well today on Spirit and Opportunity, the current Mars rovers.

So what do these—and a dozen other viruses that have survived the heat and cold and radiation of spaceflight—actually do?

Nothing much. They tend to go forth and multiply, like every other living thing, but they're not harmful to us. Hell, they've even been found in the water supply of the Mir space station. Astronauts drank it. They all survived.

But they're human astronauts, not Martian or Centaurian or Antarean astronauts. Or citizens.

Right. Citizens. Don't forget: we've sent out a few deep space probes, and we'll send out more. A couple have already left the solar system. They're not traveling fast, not by galactic standards, and it could take them a hundred thousand or even a million years to make planetfall somewhere out there—but they're going to arrive with a zillionth generation of perfectly healthy microbes and bacilli ready to find new homes.

Maybe the planet they touch down on won't have any life on it at all. (Which is okay by the fellow travelers; they can wait