To the south, the low butte of the cinder cone, lit softly by the midday sun, seemed to take on the color of brick dust. In that same direction, three cloud-topped dust columns hung uncertainly, like lost poplars that had wandered by mistake out of their forest grove.
Approaching the crater, they encountered a shallow arroyo Carter had spotted on the photos. It led out of the crater, and had all the earmarks of an ancient lava flow channel, perhaps modified later by water flow. It had a broad sandy bottom a hundred meters wide. Crumbling gravel formed the banks on both sides. Here and there in the silty sand were faint but unmistakable remnants of dune buggy tracks. Stafford had driven down the riverbed. They could all see his tracks.
"Voila," called Philippe, clapping Carter heartily on the back.
The drainage led toward the cone that now loomed ahead of them. It was bright red, even by Martian standards.
"Stay around on the right side of the cone," Carter told the driver. "Toward the opening."
They continued up the drainage on the crater's flank. The cone was surrounded by a smooth apron of ejected ash, consolidated into a firm smooth surface, like a field of dried mud. The faint gully led toward a breach in the north crater wall. Here they could faintly see Stafford's tracks again, following this course toward the narrow opening. Passage through the low, eroded gap led to a broad floor of hummocky lava, broken into cracks and hollows by the final stages of the cinder cone's collapse. Scattered boulders had rolled down from the walls. Tracks would be hard to find on that surface, Carter thought. Surrounding the floor, the steep interior rim walls of the crater rose sharply, cresting in ragged outcrops and tumbled architectures of stone.
There was expectant silence in the bus.
Carter's eye followed Stafford's faint tracks through the gap in the wall. If Stafford had entered the horseshoe crater ... It was like a box canyon. "Hold it a minute," Carter told the driver.
Lena studied Carter and said, "What do you think?"
Carter said, "Stafford went into this crater this gap seems like the only way in and out. I don't see any tracks coming back out of the crater. I think this may be the end of the road."
Annie had pulled out her minicam and started panning around the inside of the bus and then the landscape, aiming it through the windows first on one side and then on the other.
"Braddock wants to know what's up," the driver said.
Carter answered, "Stafford drove into this crater. I don't think he came out. We've got a kilo or so of rough floor there. Lotta boulders and land-slide deposits from the rim ... they could hide anything. We could drive in there but it would be hard to check everything. So I say we should stop here, and climb up the wall to the rim. Survey the floor from above. See if we can see anything."
Carter reached for his helmet.
They climbed the slope on the right side of the gap, at one end of the horseshoe. It was a low rise to the crater rim, perhaps fifty meters above the crater floor. It was not a hard walk; time and dust storms had worn down the rim's profile. While the inner crater wall dropped steeply toward the crater floor, the outer wall of ash sloped gently away, broken only by contorted exposures of brown rock.
The climb felt good; it freed Carter from inaction. It was a strange feeling, as if freedom and the possibility of death were a two-horse team, drawing them onward. Halfway up the hill, the radio resounded with their heavy breathing, loud enough to activate the audio circuits.
Carter turned to watch the others scrambling up behind him. Philippe paused below. "Look at this color." Philippe's voice was tinny and panting on the radio. Carter could see him stooping, picking up a handful of the fine red cinders, coarser than the usual Martian dust.
Carter called, "Come on."
Philippe stood and waved his arm around the panorama of the crater floor, which was opening out below them. "Look. You can see the shape of the eruption from the vent. Look at the symmetry of the bedding. Craters, they are wonderful. Everything in the landscape follows so directly from a single initial event."
"Come on," Carter called again. "We've got to get to the top."
As if he had suddenly got a second wind, Philippe made a low-gravity bound up the slope.
Where was Lena? Carter searched for her white helmet with its black stripe. There she was, climbing easily, with Braddock, off to one side of the group. Anxiously he pushed himself on to see what they could see from the top of the rim.
They reached the crest.
Below them, and stretching to either side, was a panorama of the horseshoe as seen from atop one of its tips. Their two buses, topped by white finder-flags on tall masts, were toys parked a few hundred meters away in the mouth of the horseshoe.
The crater floor spread before them, red as a wound. At the foot of one wall was a striking deposit of dark gray dunes, looking almost black against the fiery ash. The prevailing winds had burbled across the rim and through the arcane workings that only winds know, dropped a load of gray dust. "Anybody see anything?" Carter asked.
No answer. They scanned the panorama. Carter took out three pairs of high-relief binoculars, designed for use while wearing a helmet. He handed the second pair to Braddock and the third to Philippe.
Carter noticed that Annie had taken up a position behind him with her camera, and was shooting over his shoulder, with him in the foreground. "You don't mind, do you? It's what I do...." Carter tried to ignore the feeling of being further into her story at every turn. It was as if their efforts and discomforts for the sake of Stafford were more and more a drama just for the benefit of Annie's future audience and present career—a thought he didn't want to pursue, even if it were true. He glanced at Lena. Annie seemed careful not to be obtrusive or shoot near Lena; not risking a blowup? Lena seemed uncomfortable in any case, even through her suit. She stood rigidly, near Braddock.
Carter scanned with his binoculars, straining forward in his helmet to get his eyes near the faceplate and the lenses. Here and there, the dark dunes appeared, molded under the guiding hand of the Great Martian Sculptor, the wind. Swelling and falling, the dunes lapped against the inner crater walls, where boulders the size of houses had clattered down and lined the edge of the floor.
Against the southeast wall, movement. Instinctively, his heart leaped: a column of smoke, like the campfire you seek when a hiker is lost. No, ridiculous. It had to be dust. It had to be the wind.
"There's something!" Philippe said from behind his glasses.
Carter tried to follow the direction Philippe's glasses were pointing. At first, he thought Philippe had picked up the same dust. No; he was pointed more toward the south or southwest.
"Across the crater, on the dunes—about one o'clock. Now come forward from the wall itself. That high dune. The right side. It looks like more buggy tracks across the near face of it, sloping to the right. See?"
Carter saw.
The tracks rose across the lower slopes of the dune and disappeared, tantalizingly, over the top. Well, Carter thought, this is it. There was no way Stafford could have climbed the far wall of the crater. His dune buggy had to be on the other side of that dune, somewhere near the base of the far wall.
"Let's go!"
It took them a twenty minutes to return to the buses and another hour to reach the dune, where they followed the dust-blown tracks slantwise up the face of the dune. At the top they got out again.
They stood on the dune top, sliding into the sand, and followed the tracks with their eyes. They did not even need binoculars to see their destination.
In the distance the tracks led toward a hollow at the base of the crater wall. There, next to tumbled boulders the size of a house was a pile of rock that wasn't right. Not just a jumble. Artificial. A low wall, about five meters long, higher than a man, obviously piled up, piece by piece.
They all stood looking at the pile. No one wanted to speak. It was as if each disbelieved, and each wanted to hear it from someone else's lips.
"Let's walk it," Carte
r said. "Walk single file. I don't want to disturb this with vehicle tracks, like they did at the Mars-2 site."
Annie was at work with her camera again, the lens zooming in and out. Dancing around them, shooting Carter as he pointed, then shooting the whole group from a distance. Carter felt glad for the anonymity of his suit and helmet.
"C'mon," he said again. "Let's see what this is all about."
They trooped down the dune, toward the base of the crater wall. All around, the crater rim rose above them, an enclosing cliff. It gave the crater interior a sheltered feel, like a giant nest.
The crude rock wall was in front of them now. And behind it, was Stafford's dune buggy, neatly parked and wrapped tightly in a faded, dusty tarp. Sand-colored. Like camouflage. They tore the tarp away in minutes.
The buggy was empty.
The radio, engine, everything seemed functional. The white-flagged mast was neatly folded down and tucked in, so as not to protrude above the rocks that Stafford had piled up. There were no dust pits on the windshield, no dust damage.
Carter could see at once that the whole theory about dust devil damage, or a crash, was nonsense. The strange thing was, it came as no surprise. He felt like he had known it all along.
There were a few footprints around the vehicle, but they disappeared among the outcrops and tumbled slabs at the base of the crater wall. Carter could imagine Stafford, leaping lightly from rock to rock, leaving no prints. He could have gone in any direction, could have traveled miles, even on foot. How would they ever track him? There he was, in Carter's mind, hopping from one bare rock to another like a squirrel, chirping derisively at them as he disappeared.
And why did no one say anything? Braddock, Trevina, Pohaku, Brach—they all stood staring, mute as the stones.
"There must be a body somewhere," Philippe said finally. "Somewhere among these rocks. Perhaps he fell..."
Don't you see, Philippe? Carter wanted to say. Don't you see? We'll find nothing here. Stafford wanted to disappear. He planned this from the start and hid his tracks so we almost couldn't follow him. And now he's hidden his footsteps. We won't find a thing. But Carter said nothing. Annie's camera was recording everything. He had no desire to speculate, not on camera. Why show his cards? What was going on here anyway? He had to figure it out. He had to think instead of talk.
So he had them fan out. They searched the crater for the whole afternoon in near silence. Up, down, crossways. It was a thorough search. There was no trace of Stafford. There was definitely no body lying in the crater. Anywhere. They clambered around the crater floor until they had left tracks everywhere. The tracks were much to Carter's disgust, as if they were destroying evidence. But you couldn't look without covering all the ground, and you couldn't cover all the ground without leaving tracks in the dustier areas. Well, if Stafford had left tracks in the crater, the searchers had missed them and the tracks were gone now. It had been a gamble.
Carter directed the party to climb the crater rim above Stafford's buggy. They clambered up the cliff, which was stepped and broken on this side of the crater. They stood panting on top. They turned their back on the crater and peered across the broad smooth plains to the south. Nothing.
The sun would be getting low, soon. Carter announced that he would hike around the entire rim. "I just want to be able to look for tracks on the rim, and look around. Outside the crater, as well as inside."
"It doesn't make sense that he would drive into the crater if he were going to leave it," Lena said.
"Stafford could be anywhere," Braddock said. Ho waved at the vast horizon. "If he isn't inside the crater, we'll never find him out there."
"I'm just going to look. I need to get away from everything for an hour. I need to think."
Caught by surprise, they watched him trudge off around the rim alone.
The walk revealed nothing. The floor of the crater was empty as a clean mixing bowl, except for the antlike figures, returning to the vehicles, still searching fruitlessly. Outside, he peered to south, east, north, and west as he walked around the rim. The desert spread off to the horizon in all directions, featureless flat spots interspersed with dunes and boulders.
When he returned, the group had reassembled on the rim from different directions to meet him. Annie waved and called to him as he approached. "Well?"
Suddenly Philippe was shouting, "Look, look." He waved wildly toward the sky. A silvery hopper was descending on its pedestal of pale bluish flame. "I called it in," Braddock's voice said over their headphones. "I had the boys clear a spot out in the plain to the southwest while you were off on your little hike. It'll land out there. Then we can go home. We'll make some aerial survey images during takeoff. Maybe locate something. I'll send another crew out by hopper later."
Sure, Carter thought to himself. Braddock and his unilateral plans. Just go along with them for now.... "Make sure they cover the whole area with images during takeoff. High resolution. And make sure I get copies."
BOOK 4
Phobos
Haven't you heard of Einstein's Law? Pleasure turns into energy.
—Stephen Vizinczey,
In Praise of Older Women, 1965
16
THE LIGHTS IN THE SKY AREN'T STARS
2031, FEBRUARY 43
Afternoon. Stafford drove on toward the little cinder cone, where he planned to park the buggy. In his mirrors, Stafford could see a little dust devil listlessly crossing his path far behind him, whipping dust across his tracks.
"That's okay," he muttered to himself.
For the hundredth time, he found himself thinking it through. At the Mars-2 site, he had made a dozen false trails, turning far out across the sand, then crawling onto the dustless flat rock outcrops, where the buggy left no tracks, then looping back again. Sometimes he would backtrack along his own original trail. He made many loops, paralleling and crossing his own tracks until the pattern was a confused mess with many false start tracks, ranging a couple of kilometers into the desert.
Assuming that a rescue party tracked him as far as the Mars-2 site, he had the problem of keeping Sturgis happy. Sturgis, the smart-ass from Washington who had masterminded this scheme, would be pleased at his efforts, when his rescuers tried to figure out where he had gone next.
It was prudent to replay everything once again: the scenario he wanted them to construct if they made it this far in pursuit of him. In fact, it was more than prudent, now that he was nearing his final position, because his little inner voice was chiding to him again: This whole thing is a dumb idea. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Well, the hell with it. The temptation had been too much. He had bought their idea and he was committed now. Anyway, it would all be over in five or six weeks.
Chances were, Council would send a crew out after him. If he had played his cards right, it would be headed by Carter Jahns. If only his sponsors had brought Council in on the plan, then Council could have kept a lid on things, and there would be no need for these games. But Council was made up of international corporate types and political appointees who would smell publicity and profit. Sturgis had probably been right: Council would blow the cover of the whole project if they found out what was really going on. So Sturgis, who had got him into this in the first place, insisted that they would have to lie low; let the Council pick an investigation team on their own. Let them spin their wheels in consternation about Stafford's disappearance, while the project went on about its business. "Just make sure they can't track you, Stafford." That's the last thing Sturgis had said to him. "Just make sure they can't track you. And if they do track you, just don't leave them any clues about what happened."
Now he could see the little cinder cone up ahead. He smiled to himself about the double game he was about to play. If Council put Jahns in charge of the search, Stafford thought to himself, things should get interesting.
Well, sure, he would fix it so no one could easily trace his movements. But Jahns was clever. He had experience with using surveillance m
onitors in his job. If he just had the doggedness to push the orbital imagery to the limit ... Anyway, the main thing now was to get to work on what Sturgis was offering him....
To Stafford, the whole scheme seemed a risky gamble. He had stuck to the rocky outcrops and tried not to leave tracks, but he would have to be especially careful from now on. If they did track him as far as the Mars-2 site, his trip could be explained as a successful attempt to locate the historic object. But as soon as Carter tracked him going southwest from here ... the shit would hit the fan. He smiled again.
As he approached the worn cinder cone, his body felt like lead. It was a pang of conscience. Tempted as he was by Sturgis's offer, how could he feel good about what he was doing? Jahns was more than a clever young buck. He was also a friend. You don't manipulate your friends.
Well, why develop guilt toward either Sturgis or Jahns? Certainly he owed Sturgis nothing, the smug bastard. He had agreed to Sturgis's plan servility enough, but if it failed there was nothing to lose. All Stafford wanted was a chance to be in on the ground floor, to have the extra two months that he needed to start his analysis. What happened after that was of little concern except to the narrowest minds in the solar system— the lawyers from Earth. And what did they matter when science was at stake? Make the discoveries first. Then let them adjust their laws and programs and bureaucracies to the realities of the universe. Otherwise, they would begin to try to make the universe fit their ideologies, as philosophers and bureaucrats had tried to do for centuries. Science's ultimate discovery was that you don't try to fit the universe to your ideology; success in life is making sure your ideology fits the universe.
And as for Carter Jahns, Stafford would probably see him soon enough. There'd be time enough for apologies. With beer and champagne at Nix-O, they'd all laugh together and celebrate what a fine adventure it had been. Just give me these last few weeks without distraction, he prayed to himself.
MARS UNDERGROUND Page 18