MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Philippe came to stand beside Carter. "Can you imagine that?" Philippe whispered. "Sending a machine all the way to Mars... before we came. You know, some of them still thought there was life on Mars in those days. Look. It has a lens. Probably they expected to see pictures of strange plants and creatures.... Mars-2. First probe on Mars. Why hasn't everyone heard this name? Every child in school should know about this machine, and yet I never heard of it. This is a historic relic! It must go into a museum!"

  "Yeah. So now we know what took Stafford out there ... but why didn't he come back?"

  10

  FEBRUARY 48

  Friday. Zero days left, even if Stafford had conserved his last air. Carter spent the day pouring over the pictures.

  The previous evening, in the presence of the Mars-2 probe, he had experienced a moment of hope. Mars-2 seemed to provide a glimmer of rationality at last. It revealed a goal, a destination, an explanation of Stafford's purposeful trek west from Hellespontus Road. Bits of a plausible story began to fit together. Perhaps Mars-2 had been an obsession of Stafford's for years. He could have looked up the twentieth-century tracking data that placed it somewhere in Hellespontus. Somehow, Stafford must have had some additional clue, since the tracks in the desert made a beeline to the general area of the artifact's landing site. Could he have spotted something on some earlier orbital photo? The craft itself was too small to show up, of course, but perhaps a lucky reflection when the sun was at a certain angle? Or the large parachute that had brought Mars-2 to the surface...? The idea that Stafford could spend years chasing such a dream, risking his life even, made sense. It fit his personality.

  But this morning the sense of rationality had faded. In truth, Mars-2 had explained nothing. Why had Stafford disappeared from there into the desert? Why his maze of tracks around the Mars-2 site? The situation was seeming increasingly surreal.

  Carter had begun to question his own involvement. Why had he been dragged into it in the first place? To help find Stafford, which he didn't know how to do, and to write a damn accident report, which was useless? What was his real role? (Why did the word "real" come into his mind?) Now, no matter what he wanted, it would not help....

  He jarred himself out of his paranoid musings. Stafford's chances were flatlining. Why hadn't Braddock's people been smart enough to find those thin traces a day earlier? One day might have made all the difference....

  He ordered up new hi-res orbital photography of the Mars-2 site. Maybe there would be something ... The message back from someone named Romero, at the Phobos Imagery Lab, said there would be no satellite in position until later in the day. Too late of course. But he wanted to see the images anyway.

  Philippe and Annie came by in the morning, looking glum, wanting to empathize. Carter shooed them away, said he wanted to wait alone for the hi-res photos to come in. They said they'd go off to the library workstation to research the history of the Mars-2 probe. Carter stared forlornly at the pictures. Every cell in his body felt like lead.

  They had all tried to avoid talking about Stafford's air running out, little by little.

  Nothing heard from Stafford.

  Afternoon came. Annie had come by to speak to him, and had burst into tears and left without saying a word. What had she wanted to say? There was a look in her eye.... Ever since she left he had been trying to put it out of his mind. But it left gloom that seemed to hang in the air like a cloud. Later in the afternoon, Annie and Philippe had come by to say they were going off to dinner again. "A wake," Philippe had called it. "We need to be together. We need to be human beings. You should come with us." Carter had told them he preferred to be alone, that he wanted to look at the images one more time.

  It was true, but the whole truth was that he didn't want to have to watch Philippe with Annie together again. At least he could admit that to himself, he thought with black satisfaction.

  Evening. Stafford's air had run out.

  BOOK 3

  Desert Secrets

  Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.

  —Benjamin Franklin,

  Poor Richard's Almanac, July 1735

  11

  2031, FEBRUARY 43

  Evening. Stafford's dune buggy sat parked against the crude wall of boulders under its protective shroud.

  The sun was just touching the far wall of the shallow volcanic crater. The warmth of the golden glow belied the coldness of the empty place. The empty buggy had been powered down, though Stafford had left the full charge of air, just in case.

  The sun sank below the crater rim. Inside the buggy, where there was air, you could hear the creaks and groans of the vehicle cooling down rapidly. A thin film of frost condensed on the windows and then all the interior surfaces. Outside, where there was not enough air, you could hear nothing.

  Beyond the crater rim the sun was setting and the sky overhead was beginning to take on its unfamiliar, violet-blue glow as the upper atmosphere scattered the last traces of sunlight. The violet hour was approaching. Stars were beginning to come out, moving slowly in the sky.

  The vehicle was waiting, but Stafford did not return.

  12

  FEBRUARY 48-49

  Annie had spent most of the afternoon walking and walking and stifling her tears. She was no stranger to tears. But her tears today surprised her. The tension and involvement had been building inside her. She had come to know Alwyn Stafford through Philippe and Carter. He was a real person, a friend almost, even though she had never met the famous man face-to-face. She had seen Carter suffering, even though he struggled not to show it. When she stopped to see Carter that afternoon, she had made everything worse. Now, with the fatal hours passing, and all of them impotent, the dam had burst. She had returned to her room and had a final purging through tears.

  Philippe had come for her and when Carter turned down their invitation to spend the evening together, he had asked her to spend the evening with him. It was time to move on with life, to see what the future would bring. As Philippe had said, they needed to be human beings again. She had said yes.

  Philippe's brain was always active. Sometimes he worried about himself. Other people seemed to be able to shut down for hours at a time. During a moment of pregnant silence, as they walked down the hall toward the Oasis, Hellas's gathering place, he found himself thinking: What did he really want? To understand how Annie felt. About Mars, Stafford, what she was doing here. About everything that she was thinking.

  They came to the Oasis Cafe. It was better than he had hoped; they found a table in the corner. Not bad, considering that the "Cafe" was a spartan dining room with a hand-lettered sign. Like attempting a romantic engagement in a college cafeteria. Is that what he was after? On a day like this? The place was as sterile as a military station. The music that usually played was turned down, in deference to the pall that had settled over all of Hellas Base. He should have waited to talk to her until they were back amid the comforts of Mars City. They ordered sangria.

  When they sat down, Philippe said, "Your piece on Newsnet, I read it. It was good."

  Annie smiled sadly. "Let's avoid talking about Stafford. So much has happened, I just want to get away from it for a bit."

  Philippe shrugged agreeably. "There is not much we can do now, anyway. And Carter will tell me when he needs help...."

  "Will Carter be all right? He looked so ... hurt."

  "Carter, he will be all right."

  "What does he think about, on ordinary days?"

  "In his job, he has to think about mechanical systems. In his own life, he thinks about people. Societies, I mean. How our Mars will evolve. Mars Council versus the technocrats who actually understand the infrastructure. Maybe he will be, you know, the Thomas Jefferson of Mars."

  "I thought Jefferson was a racist."

  "That's what they teach you in your schools while they try to keep the lid on the American melting pot. The reality was more complicated."

  She didn't want to talk politics. "You
know what I was thinking when Carter was talking about the dates, and the number of days left?"

  "What?"

  "I've never really understood the Martian calendar."

  "Do you want to?"

  "If I say yes, do I get a lecture?"

  "Is there any way to explain something without a lecture?"

  "Just don't make it condescending. You get five minutes."

  "I have studied it. I need only three minutes." Philippe cleared his throat ceremoniously. "We are very lucky on Mars. By chance, one rotation of the planet, which is called a sol, is only half an hour longer than on the Earth. So, our body clocks hardly notice the difference. But of course, if you keep your watch running on Earth time, you will get hopelessly out of phase with local time on Mars. Pretty soon your watch will read noon when it is really sunrise outside.

  "So, to keep your watch in synch with the sun, we make a new watch, a Mars watch. It runs about three percent slower than normal. So, we keep twenty-four hours in a sol, to keep it familiar, and we keep sixty minutes in an hour, but they are all three percent longer than hours and minutes on Earth. Voila. We are running on Mars time."

  "What's that have to do with a weird date like February 43?" She looked at her watch. "You've got two Mars-minutes left."

  "Ah. Now we have to decide what to do about the months. We have twelve of them just as on Earth. That way we can keep the same names. But it is a problem. Mars takes 670 sols, or Mars-days, to go around the sun. Nearly two Earth-years. So if we were going to have twelve months they've got to be nearly twice as long as on Earth."

  "But why not have nice thirty-day months like on Earth? I hare it being February for week after week."

  "Then you have to invent new names for all the extra months, January, February, Bacillus, Ambrosia, it would get confusing. Besides, the months are actually functional. They divide the year into twelve parts and these twelve parts, they tell us what the seasons are. Mars has, how would you say, stronger seasons than Earth. Earth, it stays about the same distance from the sun all year. Southern summer comes when Mars is closest to the sun, so the southern summer heating is quite pronounced." He drew an exaggerated ellipse, stretching his hand beyond the edge of the table and bumping a passing patron. "Anyway," he said sheepishly, "the extra heat in the atmosphere is why the dust devils are strong here in the south."

  "And the seasons..."

  "Same as on Earth. Summer comes in June in the northern hemisphere, and so on. Here in the southern hemisphere, we have summer starting in late December on the day of solstice, like Australia."

  "How did you learn all this? I mean, you're an artist, not a timekeeper."

  "Madame, in my youth I was a student of physics. Before art, physics. But the real reason is, when I started my Stonehenge project, I accessed all the information I could get. My Stonehenge works as a calendar, the same as the original. It is why you wanted to see me in the first place, yes? When this business with Stafford is all over, we will go there. I will show it to you. I love the place now more than when I started. It is like a ruin left by the ancient Martians."

  "It's a wonderful idea. I want to see it."

  "Someday, if they zero out our budget and we discover we have not reached critical mass, we will have to abandon Mars. But someone will come back centuries later and find my Stonehenge.... Maybe they will get a shock...." He took a sip of the sangria. "The fruits from the greenhouse, they are perfect. But they do not belong in wine. It is a Spanish abomination. Only grapes belong in wine."

  "Sorry, but I think it's wonderful."

  He stared into the liquid. Suddenly he felt morose. "I am between projects. To be more precise, I am not between projects. I have been working on a second project, but I am not sure about it."

  "What is it? Tell me."

  Philippe recoiled in mock horror. "But it is secret! Maybe it will fail."

  She wrinkled her nose at him.

  "I hope that someday they will make a committee and give a special interplanetary award for artists whose careers showed extraordinary promise at the start, and then collapsed into a sea of uncompleted projects. I am, how do you say, a shoo-in for this award."

  Annie laughed and held up her watch. "Back to the subject. When it's February here, it's not February on Earth, right?"

  It heartened him to see her smile. Conversation with a woman like Annie was like cultivating a garden ... She was one of the women who understood this, too, he was convinced. One could always tell... One of the great mysteries ... "Of course not," he said. "The two calendars are totally independent. A calendar is for the convenience of the people on the planet using it. A calendar is tailored to a planet. But we keep the number of the year the same as it is on Earth. 2031."

  "Very educational."

  "But you couldn't repeat it."

  She laughed and held up her finger in an obscene gesture. "I told you, no condescending! Besides"—she tapped her watch—you're ten seconds over the limit."

  "Ah, but we didn't agree on a penalty."

  "I could see what I can dream up."

  They smiled at each other conspiratorially over their glasses. "When I studied it all for my Stonehenge design, I thought: Those old English, four thousand years ago, they knew what they were doing. Solstices. Calendars. Everything. One last interesting thing. We want to keep the seven-day week—yes? So we can all sleep in on Sunday. And so the religious people ... you're not religious?"

  She gave her head a noncommittal tilt sideways. "Maybe I believe in the old Hawaiian gods. I think Madam Pele and Madame Poliahu visited Mars, you know."

  "...so the religious people get their sabbath once every seven days. With a seven-day week, we can have a perpetual calendar if each month has eight weeks. Every month starts on a Sunday. Twelve 56-day months make 672 days—two days too much for a year. So we knock two days out of the middle of the last week of December—a bonus of a short work week. Holidays are celebrated according to the schedule on Earth, where they originated. So we have Christmas when it's December twenty-fifth on Earth, which falls at various times here. That way we get to share all our holidays with Earth."

  "Except Founder's Day—or Mars Day as they're trying to call it now. I hope I can stay long enough to celebrate it."

  "You will stay. You are hooked."

  "No, I'll have to return to Earth. I am thinking of going back to the islands."

  "Then someday you will come back to Mars. Once you are hooked, once you have made love on Mars, you will always come back. Have you made love on Mars?"

  "That's rather personal, don't you think." She laughed. "Besides, it's superstition. You say you studied physics. You should know better."

  "It's not superstition. It's my own personal irrational belief. There's nothing wrong with a little irrationality. Peasants around the world know that if you intellectualize too much, it's bad for your mental health."

  "I never know what you're talking about and now I know you don't either...." She laughed again and took another drink, smiling at him with her eyes over the rim of her cup. She tossed her dark hair. "Do you think we should go back and find Carter? Maybe we could do something to help."

  "What can we do with him plugged into that machine? With that machine he has to work alone."

  She had told herself she would start work on a new report immediately after dinner. In the end, when he said he wanted to be with her that night, it did not really surprise her. It did surprise her that she said yes.

  Later, she played it over in her mind.

  They had made love that left her feeling, as usual, released, but at some level unsatisfied. Philippe had been ardent, full of cheerful enthusiasm. She tried to describe him to herself—obviously he adored the excitement of a new lover, a new place, a responsive woman whose shudders were, as with all women, different, new, and yet the same, old. When they had entered her room and closed her door, she had started to her bathroom to take her pill, but he said, "Wait." And he took her hands and put them on h
is shoulders and grasped the back of her neck and kissed her. When they started to make love, he insisted on undressing her, a little at a time.

  For her that night, there was something more than enthusiasm. Her hunger had surprised her; it was something she had been burying since she had arrived here. Philippe had reveled in himself as a lover; covered her with kisses, exploring her as if turning her inside out for her to feel herself. "We must forget everything now," he whispered to her. "What has happened has happened. We must re-create ourselves. For everything there is a season." He didn't have to say the rest. A time for death and a time for love and a time for beginning again.

  They made love as if they were two souls hiding in a bomb shelter with bombs falling all around; the visit from Death, beyond their control, seemed to necessitate an expression of life.

  He shared her body with her. She forgot everything. He almost preened with satisfaction at what he imagined to be his ability to excite her, excite himself, enter her, and feel her respond.

  And yet... Happy as she was, something in her mind, the hunger, told her that it had been only a doing with; he had smiled the whole time, as if it were a children's game. He had wanted her to smile the whole time. As if it was an exercise for him to assure her happy cooperation. Hence she had not fully opened to him. She did not feel owned by him, a thought that made no sense to her. Her subconscious whispered to her: There had not been a doing to.