MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  "The important thing is, I want to help."

  "Why didn't he just radio in?" Annie Pohaku asked. "Couldn't it still happen, a radio message from him?"

  "If he were in his buggy, and conscious, he'd radio in. It's hard to imagine all his backup radios, everything, failed."

  "So...?" She paused, running out of questions.

  "Tomorrow I'll know something," Carter said.

  Philippe remained quiet, for once.

  Annie looked around as if searching for a brighter subject. "In a happier moment, I would like the colors in here...."

  "Everyone on Mars likes blue," Philippe said without enthusiasm. "Their optical nerves are starved for it."

  Carter woke before dawn. The lights hadn't come up yet. He looked around the dark room, almost in a daze.

  No it hadn't been a dream. Stafford was missing.

  Tuesday morning. Three days left for Stafford's air supply. A couple hours till the Hellas shuttle.

  In a stupor, he got up and took a bath. Water was one thing Mars City had plenty of, in spite of its being a desert. Water of hydration abounded in the minerals. The oxygen processors produced more than the city could use. As he was drawing the water and stripping off his sweater, he caught sight of a black spot in the tub, and for a moment thought it was a beetle. It shocked him, like hearing about Stafford. It was only a ball of black lint, of course. The great spaceships that floated like feathers around the sun from Earth to Mars were perfumed with deadly efficiency. The only bugs on Mars were in the computers.

  Remembering that Hellas Base was spartan by comparison to Mars City, he gave himself a long soak. A chance to think. He thought about Stafford, old Stafford who had been here like a fixture ever since Carter arrived. Stafford radiated crusty competence and his face seemed to hide a thousand secrets of the desert. Stafford, who always knew what he was doing, to whom nothing could happen. Carter soaked, waiting tor some stroke of genius.

  What had Stafford been up to? That's what they had to find out. Maybe he should interview some people, ask Annie to come along. She could poke around while he was gone, ask questions in her guise as journalist, report back to him in exchange for giving her interviews. Make her work for it. It bothered him, the way she had shown up in Nix-O. He had been conscious of attraction in those initial moments. Had the ensuing conversation been fully natural? Or had she taken advantage of his moments of loss? The questions had been hovering all along, at some subliminal level. Even now, he had trouble focusing on it.

  The water was cold. Well, show time.

  He toweled himself off.

  He was frightened for Stafford. But at the same time, he felt strangely alive. It surprised him. On an ordinary day, people would meet him in the hall, "How ya doin?" And he'd say, "Fine." But how long had it been since he had felt like this? After the office gloom yesterday, he felt reborn. Was it just the sense of challenge? Pride? Annie? He had always loved the way the mere presence of a woman—a woman who attracted him— could make him come alive. As if the life force had emerged from its cocoon. In a way he hated it, too, as if he had no control over his own feelings.

  On and on they went, Carter and Philippe, through the halls and plazas of Mars City. On the way to Hellas. In the blue-tiled concourse to the airlock, Carter preferred the walk to the little humming electric go-carts. With a flight time of less than an hour, the shuttle would arrive at 5:00 P.M. Hellas time, taking into account the time zone shift.

  It was a strange walk, this morning. The threat of death in the air made Carter see everything as if in a dream, as if he were some detached television monitor, floating high on some ceiling robot. They passed the fat cylindrical ornamented concrete pillars that supported the high roof, the upper floor, the mezzanines, the floating green lobbies. Past the trees, looking out of place like travelers in a new land. Some were forlorn and homesick, missing their friends, feeling transplaced, while others smiled behind their leaves, shouting in silent tree language for joy at their existence in a whole new landscape. Secretly, they seemed to await the day when they would burst out of Mars City and go marching, as trees will do, across the soil and carbon dioxide of the hills. ("If only there were a little more air, a little more ozone, a little more moisture ... then see what we'd do! We could make over the place so fast it would make your human heads spin!")

  Past children running from shop to office to salon—children who, in tedious fourth grades, would learn about the Ptolemaic, blue, central planet, which was still the central planet. The Washington Monument, the Bolshoi Ballet, Big Ben, the New Brooklyn Dodgers. They would learn it all from flickering holograms and ancient movies; rarely from precious books brought in spaceships, and read now by a first and then a second generation, in private, quiet corners. Books—whose pages, if taken outside, would dry up and break off and blow away, clattering like dry leaves back in Illinois in the fall.

  In one curious moment they found themselves trailing a couple of Earthside college boys parading loudly down the arcade. "I spent a whole semester up at Phobos University. Can't believe that place. What a rock! Alcatraz. Come all this way and they've got nothing to do. So I quit and came down here. God, it's even worse! Don't tell my parents. They'll go berserk."

  The kids turned off toward a sugar bar.

  Carter gave Philippe a disgusted look.

  "Forget it," Philippe said. "Earthside kids are a different species. The end of childhood is discovering the world beyond childhood. Most people, they never discover it at all. They remain unsatisfied kids. I'm not going to have any, you know."

  "Have any what?"

  "Kids. I'm happy the way I am in life."

  "That's what a caterpillar thinks before it turns into a butterfly."

  They passed a young Catholic priest, who Carter had seen off and on in the malls and avenues: he always looked lost, Carter thought, as if Jesus never really had a plan for Mars. Religions, perhaps, were only spawned one planet at a time, nontransferable.

  He was beginning to think that although he was raised an American, his Russian heritage was catching up with him, like a genetic disease. According to his mother, the Russians were always philosophizing and trying to build new systems: Marxism to achieve fairness from social structure, rampant capitalism to develop the country's resources. He was as caught up in trying to build a new Mars as a Soviet bureaucrat trying to build a new order. His American friends, by contrast, never seemed to be building anything, just going off in their own directions, pursuing one personal scheme or another. That's what Stafford had done, and now he, Carter, was going to have to set aside the abstract rules of community and come to grips with real life.

  The chips are down. Your bet.

  In the suiting room they found Annie Pohaku, struggling with a helmet and fittings. She looked up and smiled at them, enjoying their surprise.

  Carter felt an unexpected rush of irritation. "What's going on?" Part of his irritation was toward his own unpreparedness for this; it wasn't part of the plan.

  "I'm coming along." Judging his expression, she added, "You said you can use all the help you can get. And I know there's a story there."

  "But nobody said..."

  "Oh, Carter, don't be such a tightass." She was smiling at him. "You don't have to hate me because I'm a reporter." Was she teasing him?

  Oh, hell, Carter thought. He wasn't sure why he reacted this way. Reporting was supposed to wait until later, when they knew answers. Well, he had better decide something, fast. The press tagging along? Not that there was much press on Mars. Annie and her network from Earth had stumbled into the right place at the right time; it was a bombshell of a story and she knew it.

  "What... what would you do there?" he stammered lamely. He knew his eyes betrayed irritation.

  "Get a story." She flashed in anger. "You got a problem with that? Look, I'm as free as anybody to go to Hellas. There were still empty seats on this shuttle. Besides, Network has a lot of clout when it comes to tickets. I don't exactly need
a permission slip from you or the Council." She softened. "Besides, I could help."

  "Help?" He remembered his daydream of trying to enlist her.

  "Why not?"

  "You're a reporter. That's why not." It sounded stupid as soon as he said it.

  She smiled a wry smile. "Does that really make any sense to you? It's very traditional and all that, very ... Earthy. Know what I mean? But does it really make any sense to turn down help when your best friend is missing? When you're supposed to find out what happened, and you have only Philippe to help in the investigation?"

  It made no sense.

  "Besides, there's the reporter's golden rule: The more you learn, the more you earn. Is that crass enough for you? But I would help you," she added.

  "Welcome to our expedition," Philippe said. "I am sure we can use you." He smiled. "And no doubt you can use us."

  Carter fumed.

  Their attention was diverted when a Hellas-bound field construction team came in for the same flight. Five men and a woman, they talked jovially about Stafford as they broke their suits out of their lockers. "Never shoulda let him out on his own anyway."

  "Aw, the old guy's got a right. Wouldn't you like to go out there poking around someday when you got nothin' better to do? Nobody telling you where to go?"

  "Not bloody likely. I'm just on this rustball for the pay. You won't catch me outside when the old timeclock ain't tickin'. Gonna retire Earthside, soon as I save up for another coupla years. 'Swhat Stafford shoulda done if you ask me."

  "Too late now," the woman said. "He's a goner."

  "Martians got him, if you ask me."

  They laughed.

  "I say he got on a slope and flipped, just like those boys that flipped their buggy in the polar tunnel. You get careless, you pay."

  "It wasn't in the tunnel. Nobody's ever been killed in the tunnel. It was on their way back, on East Road, way I heard. They'd always get to going too fast out there. They were desert-crazy. Hit a boulder and tipped the tractor right over!" The man spoke with a drawl and affected a blue baseball cap emblazoned with absurd gold scrambled eggs on the visor. He tossed the cap in the locker. He spoke with enthused animation, as if describing football instead of death. "Decompressed. Killed all six of 'em right away. Everybody except the driver. He had his helmet right there."

  "But you know," another man replied, "it's a wonder they didn't lose a dozen people in those tunnels. Excavating all that volume. Huge, you know, in those damn soft sediments. Stuff would just as soon crumble and collapse on you as hold its shape. They were always shoring it up...." Two other construction men with beefy faces were nodding expressionlessly.

  "Hey," the first speaker turned to Carter. "Ain't you the guy heading the search for old Stafford?"

  "The search is already under way," Carter said brusquely.

  "Hey, sorry I asked, man."

  "I'm supposed to write it up. An accident report."

  "Well, tell them to keep dune buggies away from slopes and boulders."

  The workers turned back to their suits in silence.

  Clad in their puffy garments, Carter, Philippe, and Annie passed through the pressure check and left the suiting room. They headed down the main exit tunnel past the gray warehouses with the yellow flowers painted on their doors, where supplies entered Mars City after long flights from the orbiting ports of a white-clouded Earth. Toward the airlocks.

  "Hey, they say he's a tough old guy," the woman called after them. "Maybe it'll turn out okay."

  6

  FEBRUARY 45, TUESDAY

  The Hellas shuttle, a glorified hopper, was a metal biscuit on stilts, bristling with antennae, reaction jets, external cargo flanges. The main engine hung underneath: tubing and testicles of tanks containing liquid oxygen derived from the Martian air. Inside, ten removable seats with their worn webbing were dotted around the central cargo area. A sealed pilot compartment protruded on one side like a bay window, giving a view fore and aft.

  They had scarcely webbed themselves in when the pilot told them to hang on. As the shuttle rose from the Mars City pad in a storm of dust and pale flame, Carter caught a glimpse through his little window of the loading dock workers in the distance, going on about their incessant business: cartons and yellow tractors. The ground outside the window dropped away, pivoting like a trapdoor on an axis through the horizon. Normal launch. No one down there paying any attention.

  Now the engines stopped. The craft sailed silently in the sun above ruddy Mars, climbing east and south. The passenger and cargo area was pressurized, but the pilot ordered the occupants—Carter Jahns, Annie Pohaku, and Philippe Brach—to keep their helmets handy just in case. "Regulations," he said.

  A hundred kilometers below, the lost, broken valleys on the eastern outskirts of Valles Marineris slid by as if in a slow-motion silent movie. The land was not the rumpled bedspreads of mountainous Earthscapes, but rather a cracked tile floor, splintered into irregular blocks. Veins of faint dry arroyos laced the ocher desert. The scene reminded Carter of aerial photos of the California desert, after the ridges and arroyos had been smashed and twisted by the Big One in '14.

  Carter sat alone, webbed into his own cocoon seat against the tiny window, brooding. The cocoons were arranged around the wall of the cylindrical payload bay; cargo was stored in the middle. Human occupants here were an afterthought, which added to his sense of frustrated anticipation. He could not swing into action until they arrived at Hellas. Now, there was nothing he could do but listen to his own heartbeat counting out Stafford's last minutes.

  Annie and Philippe were cozy in the side-by-side seats two rows behind him.

  So ... Carter thought to himself, Philippe was already chatting up Annie, talking about where she grew up. As if they had somehow accepted that this trip was an isolated fragment of time, when they could do nothing to save Stafford, and were permitted to ... Why should he begrudge them their talk? He was the one who had to figure out what to do next, while they rested. He was the one in charge. He could hear bits of their conversation. Her soft voice.

  "...Hawaii. I've been here only a few weeks and I miss it already."

  "You are an ocean person, then."

  "The ocean ... it's always a presence ... flowers and rain ... petals on the sidewalks and moss on the rocks. The rocks here look naked."

  "You should come with me to the greenhouse sometime."

  "I'd like that. But this thing with Stafford..."

  Jeez, can't they take this seriously? Flirting while Stafford is ... Compulsively, Carter looked at his watch and checked his 'corder. Stafford was still missing, according to the latest updates.

  He tried to think ahead. When the shuttle arrived at Hellas, he would talk to the buggy maintenance crew, find out what he could about the condition of Stafford's vehicle when it went out. He also wanted to review orbital imagery of the area. Satellite images had been one of Stafford's favorite sources of inspiration; maybe they would be his salvation. Everybody knew that the orbiters couldn't resolve anything as small as a single buggy, and that the imagery covered any given region only every few days. Still, the images might give some clue....

  Carter tried to concentrate, but his mind fought back. Flowers and rain. How had she talked her way into this? Well, his other voice answered, what was wrong with it? The more help we have, the more chance of finding Stafford. But she's a reporter, the first voice said. Second voice: So? First voice: Who ever heard of bringing reporters along while an investigation is in progress? Second voice: This is Mars. We do things differently here. Besides, it's not really an investigation. It's a rescue. First voice: You're rationalizing everything. Second voice: Yeah, I know.

  Carter turned and faced them directly. "Philippe was right. This search needs all the help we can give it."

  Annie and Philippe broke off their conversation with a start.

  "We need to do whatever we can to find Stafford. We need a plan."

  "Plan away," Philippe said, still dis
gustingly jovial.

  Annie looked concerned. "Can we talk to the search-and-rescue teams when they come back?"

  "We'll talk to everybody. We'll start with Braddock. He's the manager at Hellas Base, so technically he's in charge of the search. But we're not gonna sit on the sidelines. The only way to carry out this assignment is to get directly involved, as much as Braddock lets us."

  "Tell me about Braddock," Annie said.

  "Crusty. I only met him once when he came through Mars City. Took the job, oh, a month or so back, when they expanded the research program. Administrator type. Everybody was talking him up. They say he's a tough hombre. They hired him directly from Earth. Headed some government lab there, I think."

  "Did he know Stafford?" Annie asked. "I mean before coming here?"

  "Who knows? They might have had some professional contact."

  "Did Stafford have close friends?"

  "He had a wife here. Kept to himself after she died."

  "And there was you."

  "Yes."

  "So he was a loner?"

  Carter paused. "There's a kind of person that can be a good friend and is still a loner inside."

  Philippe said, "What do you want us to do?"

  "Work with me. Keep your eyes open."

  "Whatever happens, we'll be with you," Annie said. She stretched forward and touched his shoulder.

  Mars slid by underneath holding on to its secrets. The shuttle coasted silently. It had passed far beyond the broken canyonlands, drifting over three thousand kilometers of cratered wilderness. Now they were coining in over Hellespontus, a tangle of eroded craters superimposed on ridges that defined the vast basin rim. Somewhere down there was his friend.... Carter strained to look through the little window, as if careful enough peering would reveal Stafford, standing by his stranded vehicle, waving up to them. But the smallest details he could see were craters the size of football stadiums....