MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  When Carter looked up, he saw that the others were also straining to peer at the ground. In their faces, he could read the same thoughts.

  They drifted quietly over a vast hazy circle, a crater whose width must have equaled their altitude. Inside it was another little, sharp-rimmed crater. Inside that, a landslide had tumbled parts of the wall into a rubbly apron that had slithered halfway across the crater floor. Details within details; you could never escape it.

  "Look." Philippe pointed out his tiny window. Annie leaned across him to look and Carter turned to his own window.

  Ahead, the crater-peppered landscape ended in a band of whitish haze that stretched along the horizon. They were sliding toward it. As they approached, they could see that the cratered terrain ended at the summit of a line of broken cliffs, which descended onto a bright foggy plain. The edge of ancient, mighty Hellas, largest impact basin on Mars. The huge, bright circular patch had been mapped and named two centuries earlier by the nocturnal eccentrics who found cold pleasure in squinting at distant red Mars through antique telescopes.

  They were flying now above the haze, and they could see through it as if it were gauze. At the foot of the cliffs only a few broken ridges protruded from the sea of sandy sediments that had filled the vast basin. Somewhere down there was Hellas Base, offspring of Mars City.

  Finally Carter spotted it below them, tiny in the distance, growing. Eight half-cylinder Quonsetlike modules radiating from a geodesic-domed center, like spokes on a wheel. Brave little Hellas Base.

  It was a seed from which some larger settlement, like Mars City, might grow someday. Whereas Mars City was a complex accumulation of modules, levels, additions, towers, repairs, and retrofits, Hellas Base still showed its rough simplicity. A long circular hall, like the tire on a wheel, had been added to surround the Quonset mods in a ring, with entries into the outer end of each. Additions of new mods into the outer edge of this ring had begun in one sector so that the city was fanning out to the northwest. In plan, it looked like a textbook illustration of an organic molecule. Or a spiderweb abuilding...

  While Mars City had been sited among billion-year-old lava fields and puzzling dry riverbeds, Hellas Base dealt with mysteries much older. It lay near the edge of the giant 3.8-billion-year-old impact basin, and below the hulking upland hills, pocked and scarred with four-billion-year-old craters, rim upon rim. The stark and violent reality of the craters was softened only by the cosmetic of powder—hundreds of meters of dust dropped in the crater floors by capricious winds. What celestial rain of stones crashed onto Mars in its first days to make these craters that the shuttle coasted across so effortlessly? Were seas, lakes, and rivers present throughout that first billion years, or just sporadic? Whence the bacterial life that had eventually emerged by three or three and a half billion years ago? These were the questions that drove scientists into the southern hills, into those tiny buildings below.

  Suddenly the telltale whine of airflow could be heard. Reentry. They were no longer drifting lazily above Mars. They were screaming through the pink air toward Hellas Base at more than a kilometer per second. Newtonian science incarnate and triumphant. Startling bumps along the way: What invisible violences did the shearing Martian winds commit at this altitude? All in all, it was an ordinary landing on an extraordinary day.

  One of the Quonset spokes of Hellas Base contained a series of little studio apartments for visiting staff: a fold-out bed, desk and chair, closet, lamp, tiny bathroom. Carter was assigned one down the hall from the two given to Annie and Philippe. In Hellas, these simple little nests seemed homey, private, away from everything. If only there were time to enjoy isolation.

  By the time they were checked in, it was Tuesday afternoon. Midday by Mars City time; they felt disoriented by jet lag. Their clocks had advanced six hours during the short flight.

  Stafford had three more days left.

  Carter sent Philippe and Annie to scout the lay of the land, talk to people. Carter himself headed up to Braddock's office. He encountered a grim-faced aide. A little pin she wore said BECKY. She seemed nervous. "I'm so sorry about everything, Mr. Jahns. We really liked Mr. Stafford when he came around here. A great old guy. He used to tell us about the old days."

  "He was here a lot, then?"

  "Oh, yes, he'd come and go. Said he was working on several projects."

  "Out in the desert?"

  "I think so, out in the desert, yes. And back and forth to Mars City. His visits here were usually only a few days. But I got to meet him when he'd come around Mr. Braddock's office."

  "Well. It's Braddock I need to see now."

  "Sorry, Mr. Jahns," she said. "He's out in the field to coordinate the search. He told me to tell you how terrible everybody feels. They're out there now. He took the hopper out to the end of Hellespontus Road this morning. He knew you were coming, and he said I should set up a meeting tomorrow just after lunch, when he comes back. He wants to help you with your report, but, you understand, the search comes first."

  "I'm here to help."

  "He left this for you. What we've got so far." She handed him a data button. "You can check it out at your leisure."

  There was not much to learn when he slotted the button into his screen. On February 40, Stafford had checked out a dune buggy, as usual. "As usual" for him meant filing that minimum travel plan, reporting that he was heading northwest into the Hellas rim country of Hellespontus and Noachis, where he had been prospecting off and on for the last few months. "Prospecting" for Stafford was a euphemism for poking around. Looking for mineral specimens, enjoying sunsets, photographing dust devils, turning over rocks to see what was under them (no scorpions), and brewing tea with Martian ice when he could find it (no germs).

  One of the recommendations Carter would have to make was already clear. Carter didn't look forward to telling Stafford there would be no more sketchy travel plans, no more solo wandering. If he ever saw Stafford again.

  The mention of Carter's own name came not under the travel plan but under "People to notify in case of emergency." There it was: "Carter Jahns might be able to find me."

  What was that supposed to mean? It made no sense. Stafford had said nothing to him about this trip or where he might go. Had he written it just to satisfy the rules?

  Becky volunteered to show him the pictures he wanted to see. She had arranged a status report and briefing session for early evening. As they headed down endless halls, Carter tried to sense the mood of the place.

  Hellas Base wasn't so bad, in its own spartan way. It was the provincial outpost of Mars City. Unlike Mars City, its cluttered hallways looked like any research station's hallways. Instruments bereft of adequate storage space; boxes of data cubes. None of the malls or decor panels of Mars City; no clumps of vegetation. Only a solitary potted plant here and there, looking like a guilty afterthought. Metal walls with notes held by magnets. Dense, old plastic office furniture with the vinyl peeling off the seats; castoffs from Tycho and Mars City. Some of them even looked as if they had come on the first ships from Earth. No one here had put through any purchase orders to replace them. When it came to precious cargo, the Hellas staff would rather import new seismometers than new seats.

  In the hallways, he also passed subdued men and women, the scientists, with their furtive manner. It must have been the loss of Stafford that threw a pall over everything. Their gazes never seemed to focus on a visitor. They could be seen through doorways, hunched over screens in little cubicles, perusing the kaleidoscope glow of geologic maps, talking about magnetic contours and consulting charts on their walls. A screen that Carter saw through a doorway blinked and glowed with a new map, ragged swaths of green and purple spiraling out from the south pole, cut by the bull's-eye of Hellas and its concentric rings. The abstract expressionism of a newly mapped planet.

  The staff at Hellas Base had quirks that seemed to get worse, month by month. An iconoclastic and linear-minded lot, they were famous for the perverse pride they took i
n keeping humans in the data analysis loop. They'd hold out to the last that robotic exploration might be okay for Earth, but not for Mars. Machines could only deal with what you already knew was there. They wanted to believe there were undiscovered wonders out there. And that wasn't all. Crusty veterans of the frontier, they looked on Mars City like the Israelites looked on mighty Babylon. Mars City, gleaming jewel of the red desert, with its towers and minarets, center of easy living and decadent kitsch.

  The staff at Hellas gloried in their toughness. Sometimes their talk had biblical overtones. They shepherded their myths of God's fiery destruction raining down from the sky to make the craters, and the Great Flood: the mythic forty days and forty nights, long gone, when the icy Martian soil warmed, and water gushed forth, engulfing the desert, swirling rocks and molecules before it. The Great Flood, which had been not a destroyer of life, but perhaps a builder. Even after Stafford's work, they were sure there was more to say about ancient water and ancient life. At Hellas Base they had strange dreams, these ragged-faced pioneers. The scuttlebutt in Mars City was that they were all crazy. Too much desert.

  Late Tuesday evening. Becky had arranged for Carter to use a conference room in the imaging center, the "war room," as Philippe called it. Two huge screens dominated the wall. Twenty thousand pixels on a side. Only one screen was lit; it displayed a rust-colored image of the region of Stafford's disappearance. "It was taken on Saturday," Becky said. "He was out there somewhere."

  Her briefing did not tell him much new. She reviewed the arrangement with Stafford, how Stafford had been seen on the Hellespontus Road, et cetera, et cetera. The lust radio fix had placed him at the geophysics array at the end of the Hellespontus Road ... where the desert was scarred by a hundred dune buggy tracks going off in different directions into the hills—testimony to a hundred expeditions, VIP tours, and unauthorized joyrides by researchers and adventurers (only in the best cases were they the same, Stafford had told Carter once). They all wanted to say they had been out in the virgin Martian desert.

  Becky marked the spot on the wall screen with a yellow circle. The image had nowhere near enough resolution to show the road or the tracks.

  When Stafford had not radioed in on Sunday, February 43, and had not returned on schedule that night, the rescue had been organized at once. Crews who were already out in the desert, tending the seismometer at the end of the road, set out into Stafford's unknown country to the west. A hopper had flown from Hellas to the end of the road this morning, carrying Braddock himself and backup equipment. Braddock was out on the trail, now, in one of the buggies trying to find Stafford's tracks.

  If only they hadn't cut out the funding for the Mars Airplane, Philippe had interrupted. What they needed was the ability to cruise over the terrain, back and forth, thin air or not. The stupid ballistic hoppers could fly only on a single arc to a safe site that had been prepared in advance.

  More news had come in from Braddock. One of his crew thought he had found Stafford's fresher tracks among the hydralike maze at the end of the Hellespontus Road. They had followed the tracks twenty kilometers, but lost them in the rocky terraces and ridges that led up the empty cratered highlands. The hillocks of fossilized dunes, and the outcrops of ancient, Arizona-colored strata, were covered with only thin layers of track-holding dust. Storms of recent years had swept the region, cleaning off the sheetlike surfaces. It was hard for the desperate search teams, surrounded by empty pink horizons, to be sure anyone had ever come this way, ever. Teams that ventured farther in hope came back in silence.

  Braddock would be coming back to Hellas Base tomorrow, midday, as planned.

  In short, nothing new.

  After the briefing he sent Annie and Philippe to socialize with the workers from the airlock, who had come to the briefing to report old news about Stafford's checkout with his buggy a few days before.

  "Find out if they know anything else," he whispered to Annie.

  "Right, chief," she whispered back. Was she making fun of him?

  Later, Carter bent over the desk Becky had told him was his. On the screen, the blowup of Hellespontus still glowed. The yellow circle, where Reeky marked Stafford's last known whereabouts, looked lonely and morbid.

  Photos.

  Becky had assured him that new satellite mapping photos had already been obtained, emergency priority. In recent days, three sets of images had been made. The first two were routine weather and mapping images—resolution, thirty meters. Discouraging. One set had been made on the thirty-fifth, five days before Stafford set out; additional coverage crossed the area by chance on Saturday, the forty-second, two days after he had left—while he was out there. By luck, both days were relatively clear.

  On Monday at dawn a third set had been made—high-resolution blanket coverage, ordered on an emergency basis when Stafford had failed to show up. The geometry was not ideal; the satellite orbit required that the photos be made at an oblique angle, and there had been some very thin cirrus as well as a dust pall. But routine image enhancement should beat the low contrast and they should have four- or five-meter resolution of much of the area—not good enough to show an individual dune buggy, but better than the earlier views. At four meters, Stafford could have marked out some distress signal in the desert that might be visible....

  "Braddock looked at these photos?" Carter asked Becky.

  "Before he went out."

  "See anything?"

  She gave him a shrug. "They didn't find Stafford, if that's what you mean. Braddock took a set of blowups with him to the end of the Hellespontus Road."

  "I may want to have new photos made."

  "You might have to wait to get them back."

  "Wait?"

  "We were lucky. We could get the pictures back in a few hours. Doesn't always work that way. Satellite orbits ... Reprogramming ... They relay through Phobos. The orbits have to be lined up ... When it comes to images, you take what you get. That's my field, meteorology imagery, when I'm not gophering for Mr. Braddock."

  Annie and Philippe came back from the transport bay. They looked tired.

  "What did you learn?" Carter asked them.

  "Nothing," Annie said. "They saw him go out. Perfectly routine. One buggy. Packed with his stuff. No manifest. Just the sketchy travel plan saying he was going out toward Hellespontus. That's it."

  "Couldn't you ... Did you get a sense of what was going on with him? Between the lines?"

  Annie was shaking her head. "We talked to them for an hour. Talked to the guy that outfitted Stafford. Said there was nothing unusual. He took along his usual extra airpacs. They say its not enough to last beyond Friday. We already knew that. We talked to everybody we could find."

  Philippe: "We even separated them. Engaged them in separate conversations. How do you call it? We grilled them. Third degree. Nothing."

  Annie: "Everybody was friendly, of course. But nobody seemed to know anything specific about his plans. We did the best we could."

  Carter: "Okay. Look, Becky, tomorrow I want everything you've got here. All the images. We'll go over it all with a fine-tooth comb."

  "I'll have it all here, but you won't see much."

  7

  FEBRUARY 46, WEDNESDAY

  Dawn over Hellas. Carter, Philippe, and Annie were up early. They met in the war room. Jet lag still enshrouded them like fog. It was midnight back in Mars City.

  Becky had ordered in coffee and rolls. "I've got the high-res photos from Monday, and the early photos," she said. "Let me show you." She seemed most at ease when talking about the new images.

  She took them through the long hallway around Hellas Base, to the war room. This time, Carter noticed a sign on the door that said CARTOGRAPHIC, and there was evidence that a second word, once mounted below this, had fallen off.

  Philippe nosed around in the corners behind equipment, as if looking for something hidden. "You analyze satellite photos?" he asked Becky.

  "When I'm not fetching things for Mr. Stafford,
I study cloud formation patterns and motions."

  "Okay," Carter told her. "Let's review the situation. On Saturday the thirty-fifth, you got photos of the whole Hellespontus region. Let's see those."

  "What are you looking for?" Annie asked.

  "I don't know yet. I'm just looking."

  "You've only got thirty meters resolution," Becky said. "You're not going to find anything."

  "You already said that, last night."

  At the console in front of the screen Becky shrugged with irritation and punched in some coordinates and file numbers. A mosaic of photos came up in oranges and ochers, a near-vertical view of old, worn ridges and a field of secondary impacts caused by debris thrown from some major impact site, offstage. Low sunlight slanted in from the left. The mosaic was almost seamless. Here and there a blank, brickish-tan trapezoid, matched to the color of the adjacent background, indicated a gap in the coverage. Carter had a fleeting thought: What if the solution to the whole mystery fell into one of those bland little holes?

  "Hey, craters!" Philippe said. It was supposed to be a joke. Nobody laughed.

  "Zoom in and scan," Carter asked. "I just want to get the feel of the place."

  Becky fiddled and the image blew up, the montage growing into a single frame, a random area fifteen kilometers across. There were some windswept hillocks, rounded by the wind into streamlined forms like inverted boats set out on a vast beach. Becky leaned back with her head tipped to one side. The scene slowly slid to the right, like a view from an airplane. The bowllike hills grew more densely crowded. A few kilometers farther on, they merged into a desiccated low plateau, which eventually gave way to featureless desert.

  Carter stirred. "Whoa!"

  Becky stopped the scan.

  Now they were seeing an expanse of open desert with faint dunelike ripples, loose dust on ancient, hard sediments. The field was peppered with half a dozen hundred-meter craters. Among the craters and dunes were amorphous lighter patches bordered on their right sides by long, dark patches: long shadows. The shadows were often triangular, narrow at the contact with the light patch and fanning out from there.