MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Annie was always excited by an arrival, and excitement brought out her feistiness. "I just follow signs through airlock doors."

  The pilot flashed a smile of appreciation, a smile that established a fleeting bond between two strangers—a jaded pilot and a tired reporter with enough humanness to make a joke at the end of a day.

  It set Annie ruminating. Easier to get a smile from a stranger than from a lover.

  As soon as they got inside and the pilot left the airlock, Annie hunched down in a peculiar posture she had developed to keep her voice private, and began speaking to the 'corder.

  "Impression upon entering Mars City. Humidity, and a faint smell of humanity. A nice smell, as if friendship could have an aroma."

  She gave up. She didn't know where to go with the thought. Her 'corder was getting so full of disconnected fragments that it was getting heavy.

  She sighed. Philippe Brach's name was staring at her from the little screen in her lap. Nix Olympica Bar, eight o'clock, it said.

  In the Nix Olympica Bar, by eight o'clock, Philippe was smiling broadly and waving a pen. "You are about to see artistic inspiration, in the modest person of myself." He took out a reusable pad and began sketching. The aimless sketch began to take the form of a tree branch with leaves hanging down. "God, by the way, is the entity in the universe with which artists and scientists conduct dialogues."

  "Are you drunk, Philippe?"

  Philippe added a touch of pencil to the sketch and then shook his head. Presently he noticed a flicker of change on Carter's face. Carter was looking toward the door.

  Philippe followed his gaze.

  When Annie Pohaku appeared on the blue carpet in the fluted chrome art nouveau doorway at the end of the Nix Olympica Bar, she was framed unself-consciously for an instant in the vertical beam of the entrance ceiling lights. The intense lights excited her clean black hair into a resonant glow, both cool and warm at the same time.

  She paused inside the door, and spoke to a waiter, the light still framing her. The waiter nodded in their direction.

  "She's coming this way," Carter was whispering.

  "Of course she is," Philippe whispered mischievously. He drew a line through the sketch. "I told you there was a surprise. Ah, she is as beautiful as I predicted, based on her voice. Look at her hair. Look at her mouth. And so, you will be a good boy and run along after a few minutes. After all, she has come to interview me. Of course, I would have let you stay if she had not been so..."

  She strode confidently to their table. "You're the artist-in-residence, Philippe Brach.'"

  Philippe nodded.

  "Annie Pohaku: journalist for IPN." She said it with—was it an air of sadness?—and yet some trace of a smile that seemed to encourage friendship. "You said we could talk about your work, but now..." She turned and appraised Carter, with her grave smile.

  Philippe introduced Carter. "Assistant Director of Environmental Engineering. He's the one who decides how we're going to live."

  She extended her hand to Carter, and then to Philippe, who stood and took it with a slight bow.

  "Can I join you?" she continued.

  "Why?" said Carter. "Do you think we're coming apart?"

  He is trying to be cute, Philippe thought. He likes her.

  She sat with her inhibited smile. A rapport had been established, but her expression still had a hint of gravity.

  "Madame," Philippe continued his playful flourish, "welcome to our private table. And more importantly, may I buy you a drink?"

  The waitress, antennae at the alert for new customers, was already approaching.

  "May we buy you a drink," Carter corrected. The waitress hurried away with an order for three reds.

  In Annie's mind, some rudimentary attraction, directed toward both Carter and Philippe, skittered along the undersurface of her consciousness, like a bubble in water, hitting the underside of a restless surface. The thoughts did not surprise her, but she could not focus on them because of the news she carried.

  "I'd like to talk about your work, too, Carter. Sometime. I'm supposed to be gathering contacts for yet another Mars special. But now, with this news from Hellas..." She paused.

  "What news from Hellas?" Carter said, suddenly recalling his office screen, with a chill in his spine.

  "You haven't heard? Alwyn Stafford took a dune buggy out from Hellas Base and he hasn't come back," she said. "He's disappeared."

  BOOK 2

  Cold Days in Hellas

  [Through the media,] moments break loose of the gravity of history, which means that history ... is reduced to surrealism.

  —Steve Erickson, Leap Year, 1989

  4

  2031, FEBRUARY 43, SUNDAY

  East of Stafford's parked buggy, the cold sky was finally growing lighter. High, thin clouds began to catch the rays of incipient sunrise. And here he was, half-awake, sitting alone in the middle of the desert in his buggy. Crazy, crazy, crazy. He was at the point in his life where things that seemed valid and attractive by day seemed crazy and pointless in the hours before dawn.

  Outside, brown rocks seemed scattered on the sand like seashells on a foreign beach. Each rock seemed to have its own personality. He remembered a phrase from John Nichols, who pictured electrons spinning inside rocks. Stones, Nichols said, have heartbeats. Hell, did any of these kids read Nichols anymore? Who would be the poets of the Martian deserts? ... Maybe Carter's French friend, Philippe Brach; he seemed to take time to feel the pulse of the place.

  Elena Trevina had been in his half dreams. Lena. She cared about Mars. She had moved heaven and Earth—literally—to get the go-ahead for her polar research base. Bent a few rules in the process, out of love and curiosity. Capacities for love and curiosity were the dangerous, essential qualities that led to infatuation with flush-faced Mars. That much he admired in her. But he hoped she knew what she was doing.

  Suddenly he thought of her sex life, down there at the South Polar Station. She was attractive, in a remote sort of way. As if she wanted you to crack the shell... Who among the males there ... He, of course, was too old for her. Still, he sensed a real connection between them. She was divorced long before Mars, obviously knew a few things. A woman had once given him a rule of thumb: If you think you're getting a conversational come-on, you probably are. But Lena and himself?

  The question made him think of the place in his life where time had brought him. This filled him with unease. For most of the people on Mars, like his friend Carter, there was a clear role in life. Biological. Sexual. Unconsciously—he could see it now—they were all trying to lay up status points, trying to impress a potential sexual partner. Biologic programming—wasn't it great? After his own wife died, his own programming had waned; mortality had begun to loom in his own mind, tied to the question of his own sexual role. What was it? No longer procreation, thank God.

  No longer power or establishing status in either a male or general social pecking order; he had enough of that. Still, the relation to a woman like Lena took on some unfinished quality, like a problem to be solved.

  There he was, intellectualizing again. If sex was no longer instinctive, it was not really sex, and a vacuum had been created in his life. It needed to be filled, and the paradox was to fill it with something that fertilized life—like sex itself—and not something that fertilized death.

  And what about the rest of them; the tangled web they were weaving with their programs...? Maybe it didn't matter, as long as it gave him a chance to follow his dream. At his age, that's what he cared about.

  Still, he wondered how they were handling things, Trevina at the pole and Braddock back at Hellas Base. Braddock he had never figured out. The man was inscrutable, always citing some regulation that turned out to be in his own favor. They always seemed to have the rules on their side, Trevina and Braddock and the rest of them. Lately, Braddock had been invoking guarantees that went all the way back to the Russo-American accords that had fostered Mars exploration in the first place.<
br />
  The rules here had always seemed chaotic. Chaos was a sign of a dynamic society, Carter Jahns had said once. Or was it his artsy friend, Philippe, in one of those tongue-in-cheek, swaggering monologues of his? It helped that there were many bureaus back on Earth that wanted Mars City to grow in spite of unpredictable budget cuts: Live long and prosper. Be fruitful and multiply. As long as those rules applied, a lot of infelicities could be swept under the rug.

  The bureaus applied those rules to themselves, too, like ancient desert tribes.

  The confused international lines of political, governmental, military, scientific, and industrial connection between Mars City, Phobos University, and Earth grew more tangled every day. Mars Council issued policy edicts and did its best to pretend that the old accords still mattered; and at the same time it had to respond to the pressures of Russian-American, European, and East-Asian corporate conglomerates that held the Mars franchises. And there were the U.N. "directives" from Rio, to which all the companies paid lip service with condescending geopolitical correctness.

  Occasionally the Martians mutinied and said "no." And an unspoken idea ran like silent electricity through the back halls of Mars City: Who was to stop them from running their world as they liked, once they reached critical mass?

  Stafford yawned and stretched and put the seat upright. Back to reality. The sun was up now. He grabbed a breakfast bar and brewed up a little tea, scanning the landscape outside by habit. No sign of his objective. According to his calculations, the thing was supposed to be just ahead. Maybe it would be visible from the top of that highest ridge on the right.

  He fired up the buggy and headed that way, remembering how the rumor started, many weeks back, when he had been in Mars City. One night in the Nix Olympica Bar, a seismic crew member named Ivanov said he had seen something the previous winter when he was flying a hopper out from Hellas Base to one of the geophysics sites. Of course, he couldn't do anything about it; hoppers traveled ballistic trajectories, and the landing point was more than a hundred kilometers away. Something bright, flickering maybe, down in the red desert. He didn't even record the exact coordinates, except to note that it was somewhere along the rugged Hellas Rim at the edge of the Noachis desert. At the time, Ivanov had said nothing. He had not even been sure of seeing anything, so quickly had he passed over the area. Had it been some speck, a reflection in his window?

  Everyone at the bar laughed at Ivanov's story. Next time, they teased, he would tell them he had seen a Russian bear. Nix-O was a place to swap yarns. The Martian frontier had given the tall tale a new lease on life. Stafford remembered the time they got a greenhorn believing that a dust storm near Mars City had grown so thick they didn't have to turn on the retro engines in the shuttle coming down from Phobos.

  Stafford didn't laugh off Ivanov's story. He had the advantage of being an old-timer. Old-timers had heard a lifetime of stories. Every once in a while, two different stories fitted like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  There had been a fellow years before—a little bushy-haired fellow, Stafford couldn't remember the name—Castillo?—who had lived out at the Hellas Base for a year when it was little more than a single geodesic dome for the first geophysicists. One day, when Stafford had been promoting more polar drilling, he had talked to this fellow. How did it feel, living out there with unmitigated Mars only a meter outside the walls in any direction? What were the snowfalls like? How did the tractors hold up? That sort of thing. After the interview, the fellow had gone to a drawer and pulled out a scrap that looked at first like an old hankie. It was a piece of light-colored material with an odd sheen. Perhaps it had been metallized originally, and the metallic luster had worn off. "Ever see anything like this before?"

  Stafford said he hadn't.

  The bushy-haired fellow told Stafford how he had found the piece of material when he was out with some visiting geologists studying the Hellas rim structure. Out among the great stepped cliffs, between two ridges, caught on the projecting hard crystals of a wind-sculpted rock, was this bit of something that didn't belong.

  What had the geologists thought of it? Stafford asked.

  They thought it was a piece of junk, some scrap from a shuttle that had landed at the camp, or something that had blown into the desert from the Hellas Base.

  Maybe so, Stafford had said.

  But the geologists hadn't taken into account the wind. They hadn't lived there and seen the wind, blowing and blowing out of the desert of the Hellespontus rim country. This scrap must have come with the wind out of the Hellespontus desert, where no one had ever been. The bushy-haired fellow had said he couldn't prove it was anything special. It had looked like a bit of man-made debris, all right. He had put it in his drawer and told Stafford he always had thought it was the darndest thing.

  Years later, when Stafford heard Ivanov's story in the Nix-O Bar, he said nothing about the scrap. He just smiled. Went home, lay awake most of the night. Went down to the Image Processing Lab the next morning, and started poring over orbiter photos of Hellespontus and the Hellas rim. He plotted Ivanov's flight path, and drew prevailing wind lines paralleling the dust streaks east across the rim of Hellas, from the place the bushy-haired man had been.

  Given the uncertainties, the intersection of the flight path and the wind vectors corresponded to an area maybe fifty kilometers on a side. He accessed the high-resolution photos and sat there for hours, looking at one after another. There had been two high-res photo surveys covering the area in '12 and in '21. He compared the images.

  On the second day he found something. A triangular object, maybe ten, fifteen meters across—only a tiny white spot on the photos, a few pixels across at best. It couldn't be snow; the photos were taken in summer. It appeared in both photos. In the second, it had shifted position by twenty meters.

  There had been no Hellas Base in '12. Whatever it was, it wasn't litter from the Hellas Base.

  Stafford went home and brooded over enlargements of the photos, and sent through a request for a dune buggy out of Hellas Base. It would be a two- or three-hundred-kilometer run out to the site, but he had made jaunts that far before....

  By coincidence that was the same week when he received the strange note from Lena Trevina, hand-carried by the pilot of the monthly shuttle from the Polar Station. It was handwritten, in a carefully sealed envelope, marked PERSONAL. She had risked no electronic trail.... Maybe he should have tossed the damn thing.

  Stafford's dune buggy crawled to the crest of the ridge. If he had triangulated right...

  At first he didn't see it. According to the orbiter photos it should have been somewhere in the broad hollow stretching before him. There were only a few rocks. Then he did see it, as if it had suddenly materialized. It had snagged on a corner where a rock had been etched sharp by a thousand dust storms. From this distance it looked like a sheet of plastic tarp. But then he caught the dull silver gleam of an object lying beyond, in the distance. He knew what it was. By God, he was going to succeed! Today would be a historic occasion!

  He drove on past the tattered parachute fragment, toward the silvery object. He mumbled a little prayer of thanks to the long-lost, patient Martian gods. He parked the buggy, and turned on its short-range transmitter.

  He started to reach for his cavernous helmet, but then he remembered the medallion. He pulled it out of his pocket. It was a little brass medallion, inscribed on the front and back, and hinged on the side like a Victorian locket, or an old pocket watch. Medallion number 216, it was. Jesus, the places he had been, the sights he had seen. He popped it open. Inside was a piece of foil, which he placed carefully on his knee. Using a fine-tipped screwdriver from the tool kit pocket on his puffy legging, he incised carefully on the foil:

  2031, FEB. 43

  With more dexterity than patience, he laboriously inscribed his signature on the foil. He replaced the foil in the locket and snapped it shut with a smile. He put the screwdriver, which had always served him as an all-purpose tool, back in
its kit, and looped the medallion on its nylon cord through one of the Velcroed loops on his suit. He put on the helmet. He heard the comforting hiss of air around his face. The auto-elasticized inner suit tightened around him as he depressurized the buggy.

  Everything was working fine.

  He stepped out, tingling with anticipation. Through the suit he could hear his muffled footsteps crunching—a sound he loved. It sounded like his feet were in another room—in a toolshed with a crunchy dirt floor.

  The metal apparatus was resting in a little hollow.

  He walked up to the object and put his hand on it. It had waited sixty years for him. It was pretty beat up. He could feel little nicks or dents— pebbles blown into it during previous storms? He patted it. "Stout fellow," he whispered. "It wasn't your fault."

  There was a bent, broken rod protruding from one side of the device. He fished up the medallion and looped its cord securely around the rod, being careful not to disturb the device itself. The little brass disk gleamed as the sun grew stronger in the dusty sky. On the outside was engraved:

  Alwyn Bryan Stafford explored here.

  This is the 216th disk left by him at

  noteworthy sites on Mars. Date inside.

  On the reverse it said:

  Alwyn Bryan Stafford came to Mars one

  Mars-year after the first Martian landing.

  He landed in year 2010 by the Christian

  calendar. He was the 237th human being on Mars,

  and godfather of the first child born on Mars.

  Egocentric, for sure. But what the hell. A hundred years from now when people were finding his disks here and there, no one would criticize him for leaving this record of the first explorations.