Mission Mars

by Janet L. Cannon

  His chief had told him, “We have to find acceptable reasons to detain him and keep him locked up.” After interviewing the man, Forrest was to report directly to the Mars Office CEO that evening to give his summary analysis of Ciotti’s story. As Forrest was leaving his office, the chief barked, “And make damn sure that Ciotti does not speak to anyone before the Council has the chance to evaluate his discovery.”

  Forrest took a seat on the pedestrian belt moving toward the jail. After fifteen years on the force, he was no longer surprised by strange new assignments, but he had a feeling this one was likely to take the prize.

  He expanded the virtual screen on his wrist viewer, ran Ciotti’s file from headquarters, and rubbed at his mustache absently as he read. When Ciotti had first arrived from Earth, his head was full of ideas about corporate corruption on the home planet and the promise of Mars independence, but his wallet was clearly empty. As a result, he was assigned to one of the dozens of low-level jobs in waste recovery. Perhaps the least glorious job in the colony, thought Forrest—even if most of the direct contact with the waste was by machines.

  Ciotti eventually managed to get transferred to General Stores and Supplies—where his record as a clerk was undistinguished. Although he was affiliated with the Independence Party politically, he rarely attended party events. Forrest ran down the list: no listed relationships, long or short term; he kept mostly to himself when he could; and he played the saxophone, but was not part of any musical group. Classic loner profile.

  After Ciotti’s transfer, he continued to live in the hastily assembled First-Gen crew barracks, even though ordinarily he would have been given better housing for his GSS rank. At first, Forrest was surprised, but then he realized that Ciotti’s requests for better living quarters had come at a period when shiploads of colonists, all hungering after more independence and less corporate control, had put particular pressure on housing. Forrest remembered that his own promotion had not brought him and Anna a better place to live for another two years.

  It was during his fifth year as a supply clerk (and after his third request for a change in quarters had been rejected), that Ciotti apparently decided to take his unofficial excursion to the slopes of Arsia Mons. Forrest, a geology buff in his spare time, wondered what had put the thought of that particular volcanic cone into the man’s head. Forrest himself liked Arsia, with its majestic flanks and wide opening at the top. It was his favorite of the four giant volcanoes that towered on the Tharsis plateau, and he was intrigued that parts of the volcano’s walls showed evidence of having been eroded long ago by ice glaciers. But that was a personal preference, and he didn’t expect others to share it. Most tourists and colonists tended to prefer Olympus, the largest of the Martian volcanic giants.

  Forrest returned to the practical aspects of the case. Where did Ciotti get the vehicle and supplies he took with him? Forrest entered a screen-memo to check whether supply runs on Ciotti’s watch had greater-than-average reports of inventory shortages. Next, he listened to the report that the two-man rescue team had radioed back to headquarters when they had first responded to the clerk’s emergency signal.

  It seems Ciotti had driven from the main base to Arsia Mons in the Schiaparelli rover, a late-model, pressurized vehicle, built for longer-range excursions. Authorization for its use was always required, and the database showed proper sign-off by two levels of supervisors. He shook his head. It was another example of just how slack things had become. He decided to make a quick vid-call to one of the supervisors, and after he implied that heads could roll if he did not hear the truth the first time, the man was only too ready to explain.

  “Our department has been caught between personnel shortages and the need to keep three satellite Mars bases fully supplied. You can’t imagine how many supply runs we have to make. Some of those rovers are going day and night. And frankly, these days, few of us have time to pay detailed attention when rover requests come in.”

  Digging further, Forrest found that Ciotti had been asked to go along on several supply runs—to help load, unload, take inventory, and shelve the supplies more rapidly. So, although he was not a fully certified driver, his name was commonplace on the rover manifests, and approval of his solo trip request had been routinely granted.

  Slowly, Forrest was getting the picture. By the time Ciotti was ready to undertake his little “vacation,” it was clear he’d been planning it for a long time. He had been able to squirrel away an ample collection of gear, food, and medicine, certainly enough to keep one man going for a week or so of quiet spelunking. When his distress call came from the cave in Arsia Mons—Forrest figured this out even before he spoke with the man—he didn’t call for help because he was hurt or lost or hungry. He called because what he saw in that cave scared him witless.

  The uniformed security guard led Forrest to a small conference room as Ciotti was brought in through a different door. The guard escorting him was a muscular woman with a no-nonsense expression and spit-shined boots. Forrest suppressed a smile as Ciotti flinched when the woman pushed him into his seat. Ciotti turned out to be shorter and more unkempt than Forrest had imagined. His hair was cropped short, and he wore his grey GSS uniform without any marks of decoration or personalization. Although he seemed in good physical shape, he slumped in his chair and looked like he needed sleep.

  Both guards took up positions at the back of the room until Forrest motioned them out. He doubted Ciotti would be violent, and like the chief had said, the fewer people heard the man’s story, the easier it would be to control.

  “Now, I am not here as a prosecutor,” Forrest began, after introducing himself. “I’m simply investigating what happened after you took a rover out on a personal trip.”

  Ciotti shot back. “Hey, I had all the authorization papers for that rover.”

  Forrest raised an eyebrow. “Maybe, but you didn’t have papers to go on a vacation in Tharsis. So don’t try to kid me and we’ll get along much better. Listen, my job here is to help Mars Office decide what to do with you—and with what you found.”

  “Yeah, I found something pretty amazing, didn’t I?” Ciotti asked. “You can’t lock me up! Not when I made a goddamned major discovery.”

  “It’s not my decision,” Forrest replied. “Let’s just get to the facts. Why don’t you tell me what you did to get yourself to Arsia Mons, and how you made that discovery?”

  Ciotti had his story ready. “All right. I didn’t mean to get anybody into trouble taking the rover. I just needed a little space. That’s all, man. You don’t know what it’s like in those First-Gen dorms. Sleeping on bunk beds in shifts, people constantly around. You’re never alone. And the smell of all those sweaty bodies! Two-minute showers and that ridiculous recycling system, are never up to the job. I’d had it!”

  Forrest asked him about the psychological training that all Mars immigrants were supposed to have received Earthside.

  “Sure, we did those simulations in the pods back on Earth, and the psych people gave us tests about group living,” Ciotti said. “But it’s different when you are really here. You smell other people day and night, and there’s no place to go, no place to get away!” Ciotti put his elbows on the table and dropped his head on his hands. He let out a deep breath, and, before Forrest could ask anything else, said, “Listen, I applied for a better place over and over. Check the record. But they kept telling me there was no room in better dorms, even though I was on the list. I knew it wasn’t just me. Every place was more crowded than it oughta be. We just grew too fast. I got that. And the extra pay we got, that was fair and everything. But then, I just couldn’t take any more, being crowded in there with the noise and the smells. I had to go to some place where I could be alone.”

  Forrest stared steadily at the man, who was working himself into a self-righteous lather. He thought Ciotti was hoping for a word or gesture of understanding about stealing the rover, but he had no intention of obliging him. So, Ciotti continued to make his case, “On E
arth, no matter how bad the job, you get a vacation, right? That’s all I wanted, man. Just a vacation—not even from work so much, but from those godawful stinking dorms!”

  He took a deep breath and went on, “I have a friend in the tourism office. He looks after all the e-chures and instavids. He once showed me these skylights on the side of that big volcano. Said they were openings into a cave system. Some of ’em were listed in the early materials for tourists. But they eventually dropped the whole idea. Those cave systems … they were too deep and dark to be safe for Earthies. So, I decided that’s where I wanted to go. I figured there would for sure be no one there now. Just me by myself.”

  Forrest rubbed his mustache and then asked, “All the caves and tunnels on Arsia Mons start with a vertical drop. So why did you think it would be safe for you to go alone?”

  “I’d done some climbing and caving on Earth, so I knew what I was getting into. I got some climbing equipment, a pressure tent, and a comm-relay. I had oxygen and lights and food. All I could think about was all that sweet privacy. I didn’t care where those caves went. I was going to get my damn vacation. Of course, I didn’t know what was in that cave!”

  Forrest led Ciotti through the whole experience so his wristband could record it, starting with the time Ciotti checked himself out from Mars Base One and began the long drive southwest to Arsia Mons. Forrest did his best to keep him to the facts of the trip, even though Ciotti kept returning to how much he hated the crowded dorms. Eventually Ciotti arrived at the point where, having driven the rover slowly up the steep side of the volcano in a crisscross pattern, he found a cave entrance he liked and prepared to lower himself down.

  “I wasn’t takin’ chances,” Ciotti said, “I set up the comm-relay from the rover, in case of emergency. And I had a pretty good idea of how much I could carry in a backpack climbing up and down the terrain in Mars gravity. All I wanted was my week to be alone. I figured after all the years, I had it coming.”

  “So, when did you find the chamber with the evidence?” Forrest asked.

  “I’m getting there,” Ciotti answered, a little testy. He looked plenty nervous, sweating, despite the climate control. Forrest guessed that Ciotti still didn’t know whether he was in ordinary trouble, or in “they’re-going-to-throw-the-book-at-me” kind of trouble.

  I got to the bottom of that first lava tube no problem. And then I saw a horizontal tunnel. So, using my headlight, I just followed it. It was hard to stand up in there, plus I had cramps from all the bending over. About the time I was going to turn around, the tunnel opened into a bigger cave. That seemed like the right place to set up camp, even though my light showed me only a small part. So, I unspooled the comm-relay line and put all the gear down. I rested for a bit and then headed back up for the second backpack of gear.

  “Tell me about your discovery.” Forrest didn’t want to hear every minor detail.

  “I didn’t see them the first day. I was too busy setting up and pressurizing my tent. By the time I had everything put together, I just ate my dinner and fell asleep. I was good and tired, and it was so quiet, man! I was lovin’ it!”

  “Go on.”

  “It was the next day that I saw them—when I was shining lights around the chamber. I couldn’t believe it. I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. There were these pictures, all around that cave. In color, too. I thought maybe some tourists or early settlers made them. You know, before they stopped letting anyone down those skylights. But when I saw what the pictures showed, man, I freaked out.”

  Forrest interrupted, “So, you didn’t know the paintings were there? You hadn’t gone down there before on a scouting trip? People are going to say you knew and just kept quiet. That’s why you were stealing supplies. You wanted some time to explore that chamber on your own first.”

  Ciotti narrowed his eyes and leaned toward Forrest. “No. No way. It’s just like I’ve been trying to tell you. I wanted to get away. Sure, I planned the trip, but I hadn’t been down there before. How would I know I was gonna find those things?”

  Forrest wished he had a neuronal reader to see if the man was lying, but that could come later. For now he wanted to hear the rest of the story. “All right,” he said, “let’s assume you’re telling the truth. Tell me about the paintings in that cave.”

  “I was blown away. I mean, who’d expect pictures on the wall of a cave on Mars? And then I looked closer and saw that the pictures showed those … those creatures. And that they were acting like people. In the pictures, I mean. But man, they sure don’t look like people. Well, I just stared at them. I just couldn’t stop staring. It was so weird. I mean they looked like they were part dinosaur and part insect. They were like nothing I’d ever seen!”

  Ciotti took a breath and went on. “They were aliens. Paintings of aliens, like in the scifi vids we watched when we were kids. Aliens with spaceships and machines and who knows what else, doing things that we would do. And there wasn’t just one painting, there were dozens of ’em, on just this one wall.

  “First, they just seemed like a bunch of different pictures to me. But I moved my lights around the cave, and the more I looked at them, the more it was like there was a story there. The only thing I could think of was some kinda comic book on the wall. It took me like an hour to figure out where it started. And the story’s time went from right to left. I guess there’s no reason aliens should go from left to right like we do, huh?”

  Forrest restrained the impulse to tell the man that not all human cultures read from left to right. Instead he just said, “Go on.”

  Ciotti thought for a few seconds and then continued, “It was spooky, man, when I got an idea of what the pictures seemed to be telling me. There was this one alien who had this sort of black crest on top of his head. And it was mostly his story in the pictures.

  “First he lived in a big spaceship crammed full of those aliens. So many of them right on top of each other, it was really hard to look at. And then in one picture, the guy with the black crest is in a little ship, and he’s leaving the big ship. In the next picture, he’s here … on Mars. I could tell it was Mars by the color and the scenery. Later, this alien—it was just him now—he was acting like a Mars tourist. The pictures showed him at the big volcanoes, and Mariner Valley, and some of the dried-up river valleys our tourists like to go see. And you know, the art was pretty good. I actually recognized most of the places.”

  Forrest didn’t know if Ciotti had even stopped to take a breath, he was so intent on telling this part of his story. “Then, in other pictures, he … it—this thing—built himself a place to live inside some caves. There must have been air pressure, ’cause he wasn’t wearing the pressure suit anymore. And he had some kind of tube of food that he was eating from. So, this alien learned to survive on Mars, just like we do. That’s when I started to worry. I thought, man, what if the creature that made the pictures was still around?”

  “What do you mean, still around?” Forrest said. “Did you see any evidence that the cave was inhabited?”

  Ciotti replied, “No, not the cave I was in. I searched and there was nothing that looked like equipment or machines or anything, except what I had brought down. But I thought maybe he lives in a different cave. And what if it wasn’t just him but a whole pack of them dinosaur-insect aliens that still lived in them caves? That’s when I really got scared. And man, I don’t scare easy. Maybe they wouldn’t like anybody sharing their caves. If that was the case, I sure didn’t want to meet them by myself. That’s when I pushed the emergency signal to get me some backup.”

  Forrest reported to Mars Office CEO Sadao Nakamura in the late afternoon. By then, enough time had passed since Ciotti’s alarm, that the first team of experts had examined the cave and was back with a report. Nakamura told Forrest he was just going through it, and asked him to sit and wait a moment.

  Forrest had dealt with Nakamura before, on a case that involved a fairly high-level conspiracy to divert public supplies to private us
e. He had found the CEO rigidly self-controlled, but generally willing to listen and be fair. In his eleven years as the head of the independent Mars colony, Nakamura had earned a reputation as a skilled manager who could generally see the bigger picture, even when others got hung up on the details.

  When Nakamura was ready, he wanted to hear Forrest’s assessment of Ciotti, especially his mental state. Forrest summarized their conversation and said that, on the whole, he believed many details of the man’s story. There needed to be a much wider investigation, but everything so far led him to believe that the clerk was as surprised by his discovery as the rest of them were.

  Nakamura asked, “What do you think would happen if Mars Office had to detain Ciotti for a longer period of time?”

  Forrest didn’t have to think long about that one, “Just give him his own cell and make sure it doesn’t smell of people, and he’ll be all right.”

  Nakamura asked a few more questions, and then nodded with satisfaction. He asked Forrest to wait for him in the outer office. They would walk together to the Council Chamber, where Forrest had to be ready to answer any questions the Council members threw at him about Ciotti. Forrest had only seen Council meetings on the newsvids, and suddenly worried that his uniform was a little worn, and that his mustache was unruly, since he hadn’t trimmed it in a while.

  In the meantime, he used his wristband to edit some of the key interchanges during his interview of Ciotti, and create a short vid that he could show the Council if necessary. Then a clerk brought him one of the longest non-disclosure agreements he had ever seen. The lawyers had been busy, too.

  The group in the Council Chamber was restricted to Council members and top Mars Office management. Forrest was by far the lowest ranking colonist present, and he tried to blend into the background, sitting on one of the seats at the rim of the circular chamber. The only other person not sitting at the raised table reserved for the Council and senior staff was a rumpled academic type across the room. Given the age of the typical colonist on Mars, there was more grey hair assembled in that room than Forrest had seen since coming to the red planet. The meeting started only after a tech had come in to sweep the place for hidden cameras and microphones.