Red Planet Blues

by Robert J. Sawyer

  I didn’t see what he was referring to. “Yes?”

  He sounded disappointed in me. “Right there—see? A circle, forty meters in diameter?”

  I tried to make it out, and—

  Ah. It was almost exactly the same ruddy color as the surrounding terrain and it was covered with dust—but nothing else; it lacked the usual litter of small rocks, and had no little craters marring its surface.

  I said, “How do we get at the descent stage?”

  “Well, it can’t be very far down; the permafrost gives way to bedrock at a depth not much greater than the height of the descent stage, and its engine couldn’t blast through that. Its top is probably just below the surface.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “There were two hatches in the descent stage,” Rory said. “One was on the outside of the hull for getting out onto the surface, and the other was on top, for connecting to the ascent stage. The upper access hatch should be right in the center of the circle.” He’d brought along his geological equipment, including a big pickax. “The descent stage is circular in cross-section, and about ten meters wide.” After taking a bead on a couple of distinctive rocks outside the circle, he assuredly made his way to its exact center.

  I followed behind him. If I understood what Pickover had said, this whole round area had briefly been a massive quagmire of soil and water twenty mears ago. The footing didn’t seem any different from the rest of the plain.

  He swung his pickax. The point only went in maybe ten centimeters before it clanged against something metallic. Pickover dropped to his robotic knees and started digging into the permafrost with his bare hands. I wasn’t strong enough to be of any use, so I simply watched, gloved hands on my surface suit’s hips.

  It took him a few minutes to expose a circular metal hatch about eighty centimeters wide. It was slightly convex and had a wheel set into its center. Pickover gestured at it. “Be my guest, Alex.” I gripped the wheel with both of my gloved hands and tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge; it was either locked from the other side, or the works were gummed up with Martian dust.

  Pickover loomed in and grabbed the wheel with his naked fingers. It was odd watching a man exert himself without, you know, visibly exerting himself. He didn’t grunt or screw up his face; he just calmly did what I’d been incapable of doing: turning the wheel. He spun it through 180 degrees, then pulled on it to swing the hatch open.

  It was dark inside, but a ladder with rungs that curved to match the circumference of the opening descended into the ship. He scrambled down into the blackness. I was startled a moment later when light started coming up at me. I hadn’t seen him take a flashlight with him, and—

  No. It wasn’t portable lighting; it was the spacecraft’s internal system. Well, excimer batteries did hold charges for a long time . . .

  I looked around for something to keep the hatch from closing. There wasn’t anything suitable at hand but, then again, the Martian zephyrs couldn’t possibly blow it shut. I made my way down the ladder.

  The interior of the descent stage was maybe five meters tall, with that height divided into two levels. The ladder continued all the way down to the bottom, which is where Pickover was, so I got off on the upper floor and started looking around. This floor was a disk divided into six pie-shaped wedges.

  The first wedge contained cupboards and lockers filled with mining equipment and medical supplies. I checked for the map, but it wasn’t there.

  The second wedge—moving to the right—was a small galley, but the cupboards here were bare; well, running out of chow was one of the reasons their expedition would have come to an end.

  Wedge three was a sleeping compartment with a wide foam mattress on the floor. I looked around, but, again, no map.

  Wedge four was a toilet of a kind I had no idea how to use.

  Wedge five was a little work area, with tools for cleaning fossils, much like the stuff I’d seen at Ernie’s shop or in Rory’s apartment.

  I’d thought wedge six might be the other stateroom, but I guess that was down below; it was a storage room. A white space suit, streaked with Martian dust, was slumped way over on a chair. I tried to pick it up to get at the cabinets behind it, and—

  Oh, my God! “Rory!” I shouted. “Up here!”

  I felt the deck plates vibrate as he scrambled up the ladder from below. He was soon standing behind me, looking over my shoulder.

  “It’s not empty,” I said, pointing at the space suit. “There’s a body inside.”

  The suit was an old-fashioned one, with a gold-mirror-finish helmet visor that had been flipped down. There was no nameplate on the suit, nor any national flag or logo. “It must be Willem Van Dyke,” I said. “He’d have known they were planning to bury the third lander, maybe. When he came here to plant the land mines, he must have taken refuge down here—maybe there was a dust storm, or something?”

  Rory loomed in and looked for the release that would let him flip up the visor to expose—what? Rotted flesh? A skull? I didn’t know what to expect after all these years. He found the release, and—

  Rory gasped and staggered backward. I peered at the face—which seemed to be remarkably intact. The eyes were closed, and the chestnut hair was disheveled—but it was all still attached to the head. True, the skin was an ashen shade, but I’d seen people who were alive with worse complexions.

  “My . . . God,” said Rory. He was now holding on to a ledge jutting from the wall. “My God.”

  “What?” I said.

  Rory’s mechanical eyes were wide. “That’s not Willem Van Dyke.”

  “Then who is it?”

  Rory shook his head slightly, as if he himself couldn’t believe what he was saying. “It’s Denny O’Reilly.”

  I looked back at the corpse. “But—but he died on re-entering Earth’s atmosphere . . .”

  Rory’s voice became a little sharp. “That’s O’Reilly, I tell you.”

  “You mean . . . he was marooned here?”

  “Apparently.”

  “By Simon Weingarten?”

  “It sure looks that way.” Rory pointed at a thick cable going from a red connector on the front of the suit to a similar connector on one of the straight walls. “He was plugged into the ship’s life-support system.”

  “Surely they weren’t on bottled air all the time they were on Mars,” I said. “Shouldn’t he have been able to recycle it, or manufacture more?”

  “Yes,” said Pickover. “For a time. The equipment was rated for months of use, but it would have given out at some point.” He shook his head. “Poor blighter.”

  I don’t think I’d ever actually heard anyone say that before, but it certainly applied here. It must have been terrible for O’Reilly: abandoned alone for weeks, or maybe even months, on Mars, and then finally asphyxiating.

  Suddenly there was a great clang audible even via the thin Martian air as—

  Jesus!

  —as the hatch overhead came crashing shut.

  I looked up and saw the wheeled locking mechanism on this side of the hatch rotating. We were being sealed inside the same metal coffin Denny O’Reilly had been left in all those years ago.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Iscrambled for the ladder—as much as one could scramble in a surface suit—but Dr. Pickover, unencumbered by such a thing, beat me to it. Probably just as well; he was stronger than me.

  Pickover struggled to keep the locking wheel from being turned any further, but, damn it, whoever was on the other side managed a massive jerk of the wheel, knocking Rory off the ladder. He was now dangling from the wheel by both arms, with a two-story drop below. The twisting of the wheel had put the ladder behind him, and he seemed to be having trouble re-engaging with it. The wheel jerked once more, and—

  Holy crap!

  —Pickover was dislodged or let go, but either way, he came falling down the shaft in Martian slow motion.

  I thought about reaching out to grab him, but there didn’t seem to
be much point; it’d probably just bring me tumbling down on top of him. He hit the floor, bending at the knees as he did so, but he still collapsed into a heap.

  “Rory!” I called, and I slid down the ladder. When I reached the bottom—my first time on the lower level—I helped him to his feet.

  Newcomers to Mars often did themselves injuries because they felt superhuman but were still flesh and blood. But Pickover was superhuman. Still, it was a nasty height to fall from, even here. Pickover’s plastic face winced in pain as he rolled up his pant leg to expose his right ankle. Biological injuries were easy to spot: blood, bruising, swelling. There was no sign of any of that as Pickover probed the ankle with his fingers. “It’s bent,” he said, at last. “I can barely flex it.”

  I thought of Juan’s Mars buggy up on the surface. Even if we could get out of here, if whoever had sealed us in had stolen or wrecked the buggy, there was no way Pickover could run me all the way back to New Klondike this time. I looked at my wrist air gauge; Rory could stay in here indefinitely, but I couldn’t. We’d been sealed in by somebody stronger than Pickover, meaning it was either a transfer or a biological who’d had something to help him turn the wheel. Even if we could undo the seal, anyone on the outside with a gun could easily pick me off as I tried to haul myself up out of the hatch.

  “Is it Lakshmi again?” asked Pickover, as he rolled his pant leg down. “Or do you suppose someone else followed us this time?”

  I’d been alert while we were leaving the dome, and hadn’t had my visor polarized on this trip. “No one could have,” I said. “I’m sure of that.”

  He looked up at the hatch. “Could they have tracked Juan’s buggy?”

  “I don’t see how. He said he’d swept it for bugs before we picked it up. And it’s a lot harder to track vehicles here than people think; there’s no GPS equivalent, and . . .”

  “Yes?”

  I blew out air—a luxury I might not have much longer. “And I’m an idiot,” I said. I reached into my equipment pouch and pulled out the switchblade I’d gotten from Dirk. I pushed the button that caused the blade to spring out. Rory looked alarmed as I turned the knife around so that the blade was aiming toward my chest.

  “Hang on, old boy!” Pickover said. “We’re not done for yet.”

  But I was just maneuvering the knife to hand it to him. “You’ve got super strength,” I said. “Can you break the haft open?”

  He took the knife from me, looked at it for a moment, and indicated that he was going to snap the wine-colored handle by flexing it with his hands, as if to give me a chance to stop him. But I nodded for him to go ahead, and he did so.

  The handle broke in two, and Rory split the pieces open. There was the channel for the blade, the spring mechanism—and the tracking device. I reached over, prized the little chip out, let it drop in slow motion to the deck, and ground the heel of my boot into it until it was crushed. Dirk, or whoever had hired him, had known it would be impossible to plant a tracking device on me—but having one in a knife I’d be bound to seize was another matter.

  “Lakshmi Chatterjee must have hired the punk I got the knife from,” I said. “That’s how she managed to follow us out here in the dark, but . . .” I frowned.

  “What?” said Pickover.

  “Well, I—hmmm. How’d she know that I would be heading out to the Alpha? Did you tell anyone you were hiring me, Rory?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Still, you could have been seen coming to my office. Back when half your face was missing, you’d have been quite conspicuous.”

  “I—I hadn’t thought about that,” Rory said. “I’m not used to being clandestine.”

  “Well, what’s done is done,” I said.

  Pickover was trying hard to be unflappable, but, despite his reserved face, his voice had become higher, and he was darting his eyes about nervously. “So, what now?” he asked. “We seem to be prisoners.”

  I looked around the lower level. It had a smaller interior diameter than the upper one, implying there was a donut of equipment or tanks surrounding us. “What about blowing the hatch?” I said. “Aren’t spaceship hatches supposed to have explosive bolts?”

  “I’ll check,” said Pickover. He headed up the ladder, hauling himself up with his arms and letting the foot with the damaged ankle dangle freely. Once he was at the top of the shaft, he looked around. “I don’t see any controls for that,” he called down. He tried the wheel again, but it didn’t budge.

  I moved off the ship’s centerline into one of the four compartments on the lower floor, found a bucket seat, and dropped myself into it. I looked down at the deck plating, pissed at myself for having been so easily duped with the switchblade. Pickover was banging around up at the top of the shaft, trying various things to get the wheel moving again.

  After a time, I looked up. The chair I was in was facing the curving bulkhead in front of me, but it was on a swivel base, and I slowly rotated it toward the central shaft; my instincts wouldn’t let me keep my back to people, even though there was no one here but dead-as-a-doornail Denny and stainless-steel Rory. I looked more or less in the middle distance, at where the ladder began, but after a time my attention fell on the opposite bulkhead—which had a red door with a locking wheel in its center. Of course: the other exit—the one that would have led outside had the lander been sitting on the surface. But, damn it all, it wasn’t sitting on the surface. It was buried in the Martian permafrost.

  What goes down must come up.

  “Rory!” I said into my fishbowl’s headset.

  “Yes?”

  “Come down here.”

  It didn’t take him long. “What?” he said, when he was standing between me and the red door.

  “This is the descent stage, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “So beneath our feet,” I said, tapping the hull plating with my boot, “there are fuel tanks.”

  “They’re actually in a torus around this level.”

  “Ah, okay. But below us, there’s the descent engine, right? A big engine cone; a big landing rocket?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, assuming there’s any fuel left, what happens if we fire that engine?”

  Pickover looked at me like I was insane. I get that a lot. “The engine cone is probably totally plugged with soil,” he said.

  “Would we blow up, then?”

  He frowned in a subdued transfer way. “I . . . I don’t know.”

  “Well, let’s find out. There’s got to be a control center.”

  “It’s here,” said Pickover, pointing to his right. I came over to the room he was standing next to. It had a curving control console, following the contour of the outer bulkhead. There was a bucket seat in front of it identical to the one I’d just vacated. I looked at Pickover.

  “I don’t know how to fly a spaceship,” he said.

  “Neither do I. And I bet Weingarten and O’Reilly didn’t really, either. But the ship should know.” I waved my arm vaguely at the ceiling lights. “The electrical system is working; maybe the ship’s computer is, too.” I lowered myself into the seat, and Pickover took up a position behind me. I scanned the instruments, but Pickover spotted what I was looking for first and reached over my shoulder to press a switch.

  There was a big square red light on the console that flashed in what looked like a random pattern—but I knew it wasn’t; it was one of those lights that robots in old sci-fi flicks used to have that flashed in time with spoken words, once per syllable. Such lights didn’t really serve any purpose on robots, but they were handy to indicate that a computer was talking in a spaceship cabin that might or might not be pressurized. There wasn’t much air in the lander, and all of it was unbreathable, but it was sufficient to convey faint sound. I cranked up the volume on my suit’s external microphones. “Repeat,” I said.

  “I said, can I be of assistance?” replied a male voice; in the thin air, I couldn’t say much more about it than that, altho
ugh I thought it sounded rather smug.

  “Yes, please,” I said. “Can you open the hatch?”

  “No,” the computer replied. “Both egress portals are manually operated.”

  “Can you blow the top hatch?”

  “That functionality is not available.”

  “All right,” I said, crossing my arms in front of my chest. “We’d like to take off.”

  “Ten. Nine. Eight.”

  “Wait!” I said, and “Hold!” shouted Pickover.

  “Holding,” said the voice.

  “Just like that?” I said. “We can just take off? You know we’re buried in Martian permafrost.”

  “Of course. I engineered the burial.”

  “Um, is it safe to take off?” asked Pickover.

  “Well, safe-ish,” said the computer.

  “What kind of answer is that?” I asked.

  “An approximate one,” replied the prim voice.

  “I’ll say,” I said. And then it occurred to me to ask another question. “Do you know how long you’ve been turned off?”

  “Thirty-six years.”

  “Right,” I said. “Do you know why Simon Weingarten marooned Denny O’Reilly here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Spill it.”

  “Voiceprint authorization required.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mr. Weingarten’s or Mr. O’Reilly’s.”

  “They’re both dead,” I said.

  “I have no information about that.”

  “I can show you O’Reilly’s body. It’s upstairs.”

  “Be that as it may,” said the computer.

  I frowned. “What other information has been locked?”

  “All navigational and cartographic records.”

  I nodded. If the lander ever was moved, no one but Simon or Denny could ask the computer how to get back to the Alpha. “All right,” I said. “We need to get out of here. That door”—I pointed to the other side of the ship—“is it an airlock?” I couldn’t see the computer’s camera, but I was sure it had one, and so it should have known what I was indicating.

  “Yes.”