MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  He tried not to think about the feelings he had bottled up about Philippe and Annie. And where had they gone? Off to dinner together according to Becky. At a time like this.

  Well, hell, this was no time to start a fight or give in to ... He didn't like the word "jealousy." Fighting violent impulses, Carter prepared to go back to the cartographic lab for another attempt to track Stafford even farther west.

  When Philippe woke early from his own fitful sleep, he thought about calling Annie but abandoned the idea. Better to let it lie, he thought. There was Stafford to think about. Philippe had no guilt over his attraction to her, the things he had said to her during their time together at dinner, that island of time away from all this tension. She was a beautiful woman. But there was a limit of decency, considering the circumstances. He owed Carter some help, whatever that might be.

  Of the three of them, he thought, his role was least clear. What was his real reason for being here, Philippe asked himself. Carter's right-hand man, sure. Eyes and ears. Well, he had tried, not that he had turned up very much. It was part of his theory of himself that he was just as much a reporter as Annie. His medium and timescale were different, and whether he was "a good artist" was for other people to judge, but he was certainly a reporter of what he had experienced. He could not be the artist—the person—he wanted to be without seeking interesting events and new sights.

  Well, it was time to seek a few more, explore the place, find breakfast, to find Carter, and no doubt to find Annie.

  An hour later, Annie called Philippe's room and found no one home. She wandered down to the war room and found Carter seated at the console with his back to her. Becky was standing to one side, fussing over him. He looked tired. His broad shoulders in a gray and tan flecked sweater looked ... warm was the word that came to her. She watched him for a minute without saying anything. When Annie said "Carter," softly, he twisted quickly with a forced smile that disoriented her.

  "Have you learned anything new?" she asked.

  As Carter started to answer, Philippe appeared at the door behind Annie, and put his hand on her shoulder. She felt Philippe's presence, and at the same instant saw a fleeting grimace flit across Carter's face and disappear. It was a reaction, she saw, that he tried to reject. Things were more complicated than she had realized.... And in the middle of all this...

  The extended answer Carter had been about to give suddenly faded away. "Not much..." He collected himself so quickly that only she could have seen what had happened, as if his reaction had been a message meant just for her. He was cool, she thought, she had to hand him that. He added, "I spent a lot of the night here. There's a disturbed area out there. I don't know what was going on, but I can tell you it wasn't there on the photos from February 42. It means Stafford was there after the forty-second. I sent the coordinates of the spot to Braddock."

  "How could Braddock have missed this stuff?" Annie asked.

  "It seems like they believed they couldn't see anything like this, so they just didn't."

  "Like the old expression," Philippe said, " 'I'd never have seen it if I hadn't believed it.' "

  "Braddock's people should be there by now," Carter finished, ignoring Philippe. "They can probably land a hopper. If Stafford's there, they'll find him. If he's alive, they'll get him out."

  "There's no tracks beyond there?"

  "That's the problem. I found multiple tracks in the area, going different directions. Like a big spiderweb. I haven't been able to project and search in every direction. Last night, and this morning, I looked and looked and still I can't trace him beyond that spot. There's various trail segments, but they don't seem to link up with anything. It's a big mess. Braddock's crew's probably there by now, and I don't know where to send them next. There's only a day left, and I feel helpless."

  "You've done more than anyone could have expected," Annie said.

  "I feel like we ought to be out there," Carter said, suddenly realizing with a shock that he had included Annie in the "we."

  They spent much of the rest of the morning dancing around each other, an ever-changing constellation of three stars, going over the images. They were exhausted by late afternoon when Becky told them that a call had come in. It was Braddock on the other end. He wanted them up in his office.

  "He says there's been a new development."

  When they arrived in Braddock's office he was standing with Elena Trevina beside his desk and two other young men, one muscular and the other beefy and red-haired. Both were wearing suit undergarments. They looked hot. The office was spartan, with bits of equipment lying around. It reminded Carter of the office in a hundred cycle repair shops where he had taken his bike in extremis, Earthside. The beat-up desk lacked only a couple of wrenches and an oily rag and a couple of holograms of near-nude women on the wall.

  "This here's Kevin and Red"—he gestured toward the men—"just came in from outside. They were in the search party out in Hellespontus. They found that disturbed area you sent us to last night. We sent a hopper out there this morning. They found something." He turned back to the two men and nodded. He didn't seem to think any other introduction was necessary. "Go ahead and tell them."

  Their story unfolded. They had worked their way to the point where Carter had detected the last of Stafford's track. They had come out of some dark, hilly country onto a broad plain, in the direction in which Stafford had been heading. They had spotted something unnatural. They thought they had found Stafford. Instead it turned out to be...

  "We don't know what the hell the damned thing is," Braddock interrupted fretfully. Braddock seemed not to like the thought that there was anything in or near Hellas he did not have under control. "Some damned big metal ball with, like, wings and rods sticking out." The existence of something unknown threatened him. "They brought the thing back on the hopper."

  "It's some piece of space junk," Red added.

  "But the important thing," Braddock added, "is that Stafford had been there on his little jaunt. They found one of Stafford's cutsie medallions." He tossed the disk on the table where it made a ring like a nineteenth-century coin on the hard acrylic. It promptly rolled off onto the floor.

  Philippe picked it up and appraised it critically, turning it this way and that.

  "Cutsie?" Annie asked. "Have you got something against Stafford?"

  "Naw. It's just that, well, he got to be a little much sometimes, with his bending the rules and all. You never knew what he was going to do next. We couldn't very well cross him. Had too much reputation. Thought Hellas revolved around him."

  "I thought you were the one who bent the rules to let him go out."

  "Yeah, well. He leaned on me pretty hard. Had a lot of clout with Mars Council. Sometimes it's more trouble to turn down someone like him than to change the rules. Know what I mean?"

  Carter took the disk from Philippe. "'Alwyn Bryan Stafford explored here.' "

  Philippe: "I think those disks are a good idea. Humanity in the desert."

  "Yeah, yeah," Braddock said. He fished around on the table. "This was with it," he added, slapping a little piece of imprinted foil in front of Carter.

  Carter picked it up. "2031, February 43," he read.

  "The point is," Braddock harrumphed, "what are you going to do about it, Jahns? You've tracked him this far. Everybody seems to think you know how to find him."

  "No sign of his buggy?"

  "Hell, no."

  "Dust activity?"

  "Oh, yeah. It's been blowing out there. We saw dust devils in the distance. Spooky damn things."

  "Couldn't tell where he went, though." Red spoke up. "His tracks were all over, like he drove all round the site. But we couldn't follow anything very far away. We kept thinking we were onto him, you know. Then we'd lose him in the rocks, or where some dust devil had crossed the track and messed it up. We had three tractors, couldn't tell where he went next. And the more we drove around, the more confusing it got."

  Carter: "Between the Helle
spontus Road and that site, did it look like he knew where he was going, like he headed straight out there?"

  "Whoever made the track we were following—well, I guess it had to be Stafford—went right to where we found this machine. Oh, yeah, he was looking for that thing. I think he knew it was out there. He knew roughly where it was."

  Braddock: "He should have come straight back before he ran out of air."

  "Wouldn't he have wanted to tell everybody if he found something interesting?" Annie asked.

  "Yeah. You'd think so," Red said.

  "Not necessarily," Carter said. "That wasn't his way. He liked to leave those medallions where people'd find them a hundred years from now. He had a quirky sense of history."

  "Eccentric old coot," Braddock said.

  "And you saw no sign of a return track between there and here?" Carter said.

  "If he had come back anywhere near that route, we'd have seen it. Our vehicles were pretty spread out sometimes."

  Carter spread his hands palm down on top of Braddock's desk. He tapped his fingertips, nervously, like a medium summoning a spirit. "So ... to sum up ... we know he went out on Thursday, the fortieth. We know he reached this old probe or whatever it is on the forty-third. Then he disappeared."

  "And now it's the forty-seventh," Braddock added, "and what are we going to do about it?"

  Braddock's phone pipped.

  "Yeah? Braddock here.... What? ... Oh, hell." He hung up.

  They all looked at him expectantly.

  "Seems this metal beach ball of yours was pretty dented up and sandblasted; but they found another plaque on it. Some sort of design. Sounds Russian, from the way they describe it. Soviet. As if things weren't complicated enough already. That means it's last century."

  Philippe: "So what's the matter with that?"

  "Probably means there's some historic regulations we'll have to hunt up. Probably have to turn it over to their delegation officially. There's some treaty about that."

  Philippe: "There is also some treaty about leaving historic space vehicles in place. The Russians landed the first devices on this planet back in the 1900s. This thing is historic. You got a problem as soon as you moved it."

  "It'll be months before some do-gooder decides to raise a flap about that. Hell, that's the least of my problems."

  "It was partly buried in the dust," Red said. "Looked like it had been there a long time. The way the dust was banked up against it..."

  "You say you brought it back?" Carter asked.

  "Off-loaded it at the dock," Red said. "Heavy sucker. Four hundred kilograms or so. Damn thing must be a meter across. Some of the guys put it on a dolly and took it to the shop to clean it up and have a look at it."

  "Clean if up?" Philippe repeated.

  "Oh, hell," Braddock wailed again.

  "The rest of your people are still out there looking?" Carter asked him.

  "Oh, yeah," Braddock said. "They're not going to find anything. He must have wandered off and run into a dust devil. Lotta dust devils out there. That's my theory."

  "There ought to be a vehicle."

  "Maybe he hit a sand sink or something."

  "You're not giving up?"

  "What do you want me to do?"

  "Fly us out there tomorrow morning."

  "Oh, hell, Carter."

  "What's the matter with that?"

  "Tomorrow's the critical day. Tomorrow he runs out of goddamn air. I don't want to be out flying around the goddamn planet. I want to be here, ready to respond to anything."

  "It's not all over the planet. It's his last known position. He could be out there. Somewhere. I want to be looking, damn it."

  "Yeah, well, I don't want my hoppers tied up flying out there when he could turn up anywhere."

  "Look. I'm supposed to be in charge of the investigation of this accident and I want to be out there."

  "Well, I'm supposed to be in charge of the goddamn search itself."

  "Braddock, I've got Mars Council backing me up. Who do you have backing you up?"

  Braddock stared at him incredulously. "I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll fly you out there Saturday. We'll look around all you want. Tomorrow, we'll wait it out here, ready to fly out anywhere at a moment's notice if we have to. I'd even risk landing at an unprepared site if we get word from Stafford."

  Carter looked around the room. Annie and Philippe were watching him expectantly. Lena Trevina was staring at the floor.

  "Shit," he said.

  Braddock started angrily shuffling papers on his desk. "I'm not giving you a hopper and I'm not giving you a choice. I'm in charge and I'll fly you out there Saturday. For now I want you in the photo lab, and I want the hoppers ready to go if anything turns up."

  Carter's instinct to fight was muted by the small voice that told him he was the only one who was likely to turn up any evidence of Stafford's tracks on the pix. It didn't make sense, but it seemed to be true. So he'd wait it out in the lab, but at least he could try to do something.... "One more thing," Carter said, finally.

  "What's that?" Braddock looked up angrily.

  "Could we take a look at that ... thing they brought back?"

  "Take them down there and show them, Kevin."

  Kevin had taken them down to the receiving dock at the freight airlock. Carter noted that the room had seen a lot of wear. Some of the ceiling tiles were missing, exposing arteries and veins of pipes and ducts. The paint was chipped on the railings of the platform where the object sat. It was silvery, old-looking, more than a meter across, full of old-fashioned wiring and archaic-looking instruments as worn as the room itself. Pay dirt, Carter thought to himself.

  "Takes up a lot of space," Kevin was telling them. "See, this is the way it was sitting when we found it. These big petals are hinged. Spring-loaded. They were sticking out on three sides, like they deploy on landing to turn the thing upright. Clever design. This one over here, see, it's missing. Like it broke off. Maybe a bad landing or something. Stafford's medallion was attached over on this side. And, see, over here is the little medallion that Braddock says is Russian."

  Carter examined it closely. On the little pentagonal plaque a hammer and sickle were inscribed in a wreath of leaves or wheat sheaves. "Soviet," Carter said. "Definitely last century. My mom used to show me this stuff. Soviet coat of arms. They used to inscribe it everywhere. This baby is old."

  Philippe and Annie circled the strange object. Philippe was waxing ecstatic. "Recovering one of the old probes! Finally—archaeology on Mars! Annie, you must report this."

  "Don't know about archaeology or whatever," Kevin said laconically. "But I'll tell you, it was hard to move." He tapped one side of the object. "It was pretty beat-up, but not all of these dents were here when we found it. We added a few."

  Kevin went on describing their adventures in trying to hook the old probe to the crane on the hopper, and Philippe talked excitedly. Annie pulled out her minicam and started dictating notes as she shot the device from several angles. But Carter wasn't listening. Their voices faded. Pay dirt, he kept thinking. He was interrogating his own 'corder.

  "Encyclopedia," ho said.

  "Encyclopedia," the tiny screen displayed.

  "Space probes. Mars. 1900s. Early robotic probes. Landings on planet Mars."

  The screen logged the key phrases. "One moment, please."

  Finally the machine started chattering back to him in its tiny letters. "Encyclopedia Britannica service. Seventeen artificial robotic probes hit the surface of Mars before the first human landings. First device to reach the surface of Mars was Mars-2. Launched from the Soviet Union. An earlier probe in the Soviet program failed on launch. Mars-2 parachuted into Hellespontus at a reported position of 44.2 south and 313.2 west. Date: 1971, November 27. It failed before it could send back any data. Cause of failure: unknown. There was a heavy global dust storm raging at the time. Experts stated that the winds may have twisted the parachute, or..."

  "Jeez," Carter exclaimed. "
Do you know what this thing is? It's the first human artifact to land on Mars! The very first contact." He repeated the story that his 'corder had related.

  Kevin, Philippe, and Annie fell silent. "My God," Philippe breathed. It was as if the receiving dock had been transformed into a church, and this was the silver chalice.

  "Is this the first thing to reach any other planet?" Annie asked. The gleam in her eye betrayed the story beginning to take shape.

  Carter consulted the 'corder and found that the Soviets had landed probes on Venus a few years earlier. Venus comes closer to Earth and was easier to reach. Mars was the second planet to be reached by robotic probes. "But this machine in front of us is the honest-to-God first manmade object on Mars."

  Annie consulted her own 'corder for a few minutes, and eventually began speaking softly into her minicam as she scanned the object again. "Today we are witnessing a tremendous discovery. The object you see before you is the first human-made device to reach the surface of Mars. Its name is Mars-2. Sixty years ago, humans were reaching out with the first tentative steps across the seas of space. A few years before humans first walked on the moon, scientists in the Soviet Union had already built and launched robotic probes to Venus. Then they built and launched this device to make the first explorations of the surface of Mars. It was called Mars-2, Mars-1 having failed during launch. The device you see here sailed across space for months. In 1971, only two years after the first footsteps on the moon, it entered the atmosphere of Mars and parachuted toward the surface. But something went wrong. Transmissions stopped before its instruments could relay any useful surface data. However, that event marked the first time that an emissary from Earth touched this distant planet, Mars. Its calculated landing position was only a few tens of kilometers from the site where this artifact was discovered today in the desert.

  "The identification as Mars-2 seems certain. This battered machine is as important as the first boat that carried humans across the seas to an unknown island or continents. It is the Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria of Mars, all rolled into one. Imagine the sense of victory and frustration in that control room in Russia in 1971 when those men and women—or perhaps it was just men in those days—realized they had reached Mars, but then at the last minute lost contact with this, their robotic ambassador. They lived the rest of their lives and died without ever knowing what happened to the craft you see before you. Today we have contacted it again, and now we know what took Stafford out into the desert.... Somehow, Stafford must have realized there was a chance of finding this historic object...."