MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Stafford sat up and tried to look around. The entire landscape was a pearly tan haze. He shook his head, as if to clear his eyes. Why couldn't he see?

  My God, he thought, it's sandblasted my faceplate. He turned his head, as if that would help. I can't see anything. My God. Two hundred kilos from anywhere and I can't see!

  He knew from his orientation courses years ago, from the experiment they made every recruit perform in the name of confidence-building, that you could not shatter a faceplate with the strongest blow of rock or hammer. At most, you could make only a nick. But now, unwillingly, he had made another discovery: the facemask could be frosted in Mars' worst moments. He had become one of the long line of unsung pioneers whose fatal discovery could add to the survival lore that would allow other humans to persist in a new environment.

  Don't panic, Stafford urged himself. He felt at the mask. When he touched the misted glass he could see the gray fabric of his glove, but as soon as he moved his hand away, it vanished in a blur of suffused, pink Martian light.

  I've got to sit still, he said to himself. A tiny thought flitted through his mind: Over the last hundred thousand years, how many lonely men had sat still in the woods, in the mountains, in ocean storms, on the arctic ice caps, in the lunar lava tubes, wondering how to get back home, how to transmit the survival information they had just learned by some life-threatening accident? And what tiny fraction had made it? How many deaths did it take for each new bit of survival lore to be learned?

  This is no time for philosophy, he thought. Think this out. Don't lose orientation. The sun is over there, in the glare. I turned around, saw the devil. Did I turn away before I threw myself down? It doesn't matter; the sun is over there. That puts the buggy back to the right. How far was the buggy? A hundred meters, two hundred? God, I'll never find it blind.

  He wanted to rip the pearly mask away, to get an instantaneous glimpse of the buggy and run for it. It would be fatal, of course. Asphyxiation in the thin carbon dioxide. The young planetary engineers had not yet been successful enough that you could hold your breath and make a dash.

  He had maybe forty-five minutes of air left on his back. Plenty of time. He just had to think it out.

  He had to fight a compulsion to start walking. Somewhere. But if he did, he'd just get more hopelessly confused. Sit still and think.

  He reached out and felt around. He could feel the hollow that the whirling wind had scooped out around him. Little rock fragments had collected in the hollow and nestled against his body. With a shock he realized he had already decided he was going to die here.

  Carter tossed and turned. Part of his mind was trying to figure out how to save Stafford in the dream. Stafford would think of some clever solution, a la Jules Verne or one of the adventure holeos. If he could coat his frosted faceplate with liquid, perhaps, it would be clear and he could see through it. He would think of his urine bag, rip it off the suit, splash some of it on the faceplate, smear it around. It would evaporate immediately, of course, but if he could just catch a glimpse of the buggy. Only three or four applications ... That would be enough to get back...

  But Stafford had not come back....

  Carter woke up, drenched with sweat. The clock on the wall of the windowless room told him it was two in the morning. Saturday.

  What were those white bones in the desert? It was a stupid question—it was a dream, after all. But they had seemed so realistic and mysterious in the dream.

  Two A.M. craziness.

  Suddenly he felt an unexpected wave of relief. At first, he could not explain it to himself. More craziness. Then, he realized that for the first time, he no longer felt a captive of the desperate race to save Stafford. Gruesome uncertainty had ended; a morbid weight had lifted.

  He came more fully awake. He felt as if he were coming alive for the first time all week. Things would fall into place. In his calls of yesterday he had used all of the clout of his appointment by Mars Council to organize a ground search. He realized he divided time into two halves. Yesterday was before Lena.

  Anyway, by now, Braddock's field crew would have expanded the landing pad at the Mars-2 site. In a few hours, after dawn, they would take four hoppers out to the site, carrying two buses. With his new photos he would be able to direct them much farther west than Braddock's crew had penetrated....

  The feeling of desperation, which had compounded during the last few days, was being replaced by a sense of positive challenge: find out what had happened. The new feeling seemed to emanate from Stafford himself, still a ghostly presence lurking after the dream: he sensed the unblinking practicality of the old coot. Now, he could use his head without everything else getting in the way. His assignment was to solve a mystery.

  He got up.

  At five in the morning he was back at the war room, in some weird, fresh and alert postsexual state. He had almost forgotten about Philippe and Annie. When the thought of them became conscious, he was surprised that, for the first time, there was no jealousy. How long would that last? The little lights glowing all around him in the dim lab were comforting friends, like lights at Christmas. They seemed brighter than last night.

  He called up the pictures he had abandoned the night before when Lena had lured him away. Lured him away? Don't think about that; look at the pix, a hidden voice said. Find Stafford. The voice seemed like Stafford's, urging him on.

  Even the faint tracks in the images looked different to him now. They crossed the desert purposefully, west and then southwest. They led Carter's mind on, further and further, into new terrain ... What if there had been no dust devils, no accident...?

  Philippe and Annie went to breakfast at the Oasis.

  Odd, Philippe felt, that after they awoke and held each other and made morning love, after they got up, there was little acknowledgment of their time together. Annie was cheerful; she made enthusiastic small talk over their breakfast. Beneath the talk was comfortable affirmation of their bond. She seemed relaxed.

  Philippe had looked forward to the morning, expecting to be aroused by her closeness. Instead, he was surprised to find himself... contented. He laughed as they put down their napkins.

  "What?" she said.

  "I was thinking; this is the moment in a relationship when there are no problems."

  "Oh?"

  "I mean, we talked. We established a common ... um..."

  "The technical medical term is fucking."

  "Right. And if we moved apart now, there would never be any problems between us. The total of contact between us would have been joy. Two people who have made love could separate at this point; they would have had only the happy part. No pain. The world would be so much simpler."

  "And so much less populated."

  "...But if they keep seeing each other, there is so much trouble. He is late. She loses her keys. He gets angry...."

  "Don't worry."

  "Of course, on the other hand, we could keep seeing each other."

  Annie smiled at him, a long, quiet smile, her response to many things. "Let's go," she said. She got up from the table.

  Four hoppers, carrying the search team and two buses, made the flight out to the Mars-2 site.

  As they descended from the sky, they could see the maze of tracks that surrounded the site. Carter squinted through the window, looking down for the thin line he had seen heading off to the west. For a moment, the craft pitched over and he got a good look, but he could pick out nothing.... The hopper righted itself and the engine kicked in and jarred him too violently for him to see any details. Below was the large cleared area that Braddock's men had prepared for the vehicles.

  They bumped to the ground.

  "Woooo," Annie whooped. She sat with Philippe. The whole trip had lasted only twenty minutes and they felt cramped among the scuffed cargo packs.

  Annie loved getting out of the hopper. It was her first time outside, this far from habitation. She felt at last that she was seeing parts of Mars that were not familiar to her c
ompanions. Even Lena said she had never seen country quite like this, and Lena had been everywhere: the moon, even Antarctica.

  Annie would have only a few minutes outside here. Carter had made a point of coming over to talk to her, short range, after they stepped out of the hopper. He explained that when the buses were assembled and ready to go, they would head off to the southwest.

  "Why drive? Why don't we fly off to the last position where you saw Stafford's tracks?"

  "The safety rules, for one thing. You know they don't like taking hoppers to unprepared sites. But there's a more basic reason. All I can see on the photos is that someone has traveled on this route. I can't tell if Stafford went out to some end point, turned around, and started back. So we want to cover his route on the ground, see if we see the buggy anywhere along the way. For that matter, I'm not sure that the last point I can trace on the photos is really the final end point on his route."

  Carter went off to look at the Mars-2 touchdown site, but Annie walked quickly in the other direction, away from the hopper toward the edge of the maze of tracks. Here the desert was undisturbed. She simply stood, looking around at the vast plain. It looked as if you could walk and walk forever.

  She did walk, tentatively at first, beyond the edge of the maze of buggy tracks. Now she was where no human had ever been; this was the real Mars. Exposed in the soil were eroded lava surfaces, weathering into gravel. The scene reminded her of the empty eroded lava expanses of the Ka'u Desert, south of the dense green fern forests of Kilauea. Masses of twisted lava broke through the dust and gravel here and there, betraying the processes of its own formation from flowing, viscous, molten rock. She wished she could open her faceplate and smell the lava baking in the sun. She was sure it would smell like the flows in Hawaii—like baked cardboard, faintly resinous: the smell, somehow, of newborn rocks. It was as much a presence as an aroma.

  She set up a holeo recording rig and shot a panorama of the scene. The four hoppers glinted in the sun, seeming much more in their own element out here in the desert, and more elegant than when parked in front of the cargo-littered trash mound site of Hellas Base, where they seemed merely additional pieces of construction equipment or castoff debris from some project not quite finished. Philippe and Carter were over there, small figures through the viewfinder, talking to Braddock's crew. Annie finished the pan and clicked off the cameras but still stood quietly, savoring the strangeness of the vista. She gazed up at the bright sky and tried to imagine the alien parachute from planet Earth, opening high on a lazy afternoon— first contact with humanity after four billion years of loneliness. Sixty years ago.

  She made another slow pan with the cameras, this time vertically, from the violet-tinted zenith down across the nearly featureless apricot sky toward the brightening pink horizon, following the floating path that the emissary from Earth had taken so many years ago.... And finally down, across the horizon, to the machines and suited figures.

  Actually, the site was a mess, as Carter had complained. She could see how Braddock's crew had torn up the place with wheel marks and footprints. Someone had even thrown down a videotape wrapper. Work crews were the same everywhere.

  She felt disgust at the desecration of the historic site. Part of her wanted everything on Mars to be preserved in some pristine, "historic" state. But history, the other part of her whispered, never stands still. Health, her grandmother had told her, lies in looking into the future, not into the past.

  She walked forward, across the historic ground, into the future, to find Carter and Philippe.

  They spent too many hours poking around. Carter wanted to understand the broad pattern of disturbance he had seen in the orbital photos. Which of the looping tracks was Stafford's and which had been added by Braddock's crew? Why had Stafford driven so much around the site? Braddock was emphasizing how his men had looked everywhere for more footprints or tire tracks.

  "But you let your people destroy the evidence of Stafford's movements," Carter told him. "It's a mess."

  "Aw, quit your bitching," Braddock responded. "It was an emergency. You'd have done the same thing, circle around looking for exit tracks."

  "Anyway," one of the men said, "seems like Stafford had driven out, curved around, and come back—lots of times. We could see his tracks all over when we got here."

  "Maybe he was photographing it from different angles," Annie said.

  Carter had no answer to that. He herded them into the buses so he could push the search on to the southwest, where he had made out buggy tracks in the satellite photos. "Let's get as far as we can before night," he told them.

  The buses were ridiculous-looking beasts, like giant bright blue crustaceans. Evolution gone wrong. Their antennae gave them an alert appearance. Their puffy tires of enormous radius kept their bodies a meter off the ground, so they could clear scattered boulders, traverse dunes without bogging down, and even clatter over the rugged lava flows. For safety and redundancy, the driver occupied a separately pressurized forward compartment. Each half of the vehicle thus offered a refuge if the pressure seal failed. As they rocked and rolled over the gravel and hummocks, Carter marveled that the pressure seals didn't continually spring slow leaks.

  There was more room in the buses than in the hoppers. Again, Carter, Lena, Philippe, and Annie were in the lead bus with one of Braddock's drivers up front. Braddock himself, with four of his crew, rode in the second bus, following them like a shadow. The second bus gave them the security that Stafford had lacked. If they lost pressure throughout one bus through some weird accident, they could clear a landing site for a hopper, huddle in the other bus, and wait to be rescued.

  Carter rode up front with the driver, an enlargement of yesterday's orbiter photo spread in front of him. For the first hour, he triangulated among the hills and largest boulders, trying to put them in the area where he had glimpsed Stafford's supposed tracks.

  They were in a sandy area three kilometers from the Mars-2 site when Carter and the driver finally picked up the tracks. As the bus came off a rocky flat, they saw the indisputable tire marks where Stafford had crossed featureless drifts of fine red soil. They pulled up alongside so that they could study the tread marks recorded in the dust. The marks revealed an outbound vehicle, heading off to the southwest.

  We're on the way, Carter thought. He gave the driver the coordinates for the next point, and crept carefully through the door to the passenger compartment of the bus, where he had more space to spread out the photos.

  There were four single seats, two on each side separated by an aisle wide enough for a person in a full spacesuit. The seats were spaced well apart, so that they could fold back for sleeping, and giving room for each person's equipment storage including the oxy tanks. Lena sat in the front right seat. There was a three-person bench across the back, shared by Annie and Philippe, each by a window with a space between them. The back bench made a fifth bed, two more could sleep on the aisle floor if necessary.

  Carter started to take the left seat in front of Annie, thought better of it, and sat behind Lena where he could talk to her or turn back toward Annie. The others remained uncharacteristically quiet when he entered, as if acknowledging his need to concentrate on guiding the expedition. He spread out his photos on the seat across the aisle.

  They rode on to the southwest. The air inside the vehicles seemed to take on the smell of the fine dust, in spite of the pressure seal. The dust clung to the windows, in vertical rivulets, sliding down the windows like little streams of opaque fluid.

  It was the first time Carter had been in unexplored territory—unexplored, that is, except by Stafford. Once in a while Carter glanced back. Philippe was utterly relaxed, half dozing in his corner by the window. Annie looked slightly bored as Philippe nodded. Why wasn't he talking to her? Carter thought. He's here with her and he isn't even talking to her.

  The lava flows they encountered in the late afternoon made a new type of landscape: smooth swelling expanses and knobbed ripples lik
e twisted glass or coils of rope. The lavas were like poorly laid asphalt parking lots, broken here and there by tilted slabs.

  "Pahoehoe!" Annie called loudly. She elbowed Philippe. "Pahoehoe, just like home."

  "Huh?"

  "It's a Hawaiian word," she said proudly. "It means a kind of lava that flows out all smooth like molasses."

  The landscape around them now could indeed have involved frozen molasses. The Martian lavas had tended to be very fluid, and had flowed long distances from ancient cones and vents. In the area around them, there was no volcanic cone in sight, only a sea of undulating bare rock surfaces, gentle swells, little slopes where the lava had begun to harden and then backed up in semicircular coils. He saw Annie smiling curiously as they passed the formations.

  Moments later he felt a tap on his shoulder from behind. Annie leaned forward across the aisle. "It reminds me of landscapes around Kilauea," she said, as if she wanted him to know where she had come from.

  Then she sat back before he could say anything.

  Later they came to a different terrain, where squeeze-ups of lava loomed like ruins of ancient fortresses in the haze. A line came into Carter's head, distilled perhaps from old fairy tales of quests and knights-errant: "Then one day they came to a new and different kingdom."

  The lava flow made a broad, frozen sea. Carter had never seen so much lava. The lava fortresses were part of a flow that lay atop a smoother, older lava surface, which Stafford had driven onto. It fit the idea that was emerging in Carter's mind: Stafford had deliberately driven over the longest stretches of rock, where he would leave minimal tracks. Carter turned that idea over and over, but it led nowhere.