MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Why had the thread of the story come to such an abrupt halt? It was absurd that they had tracked Stafford all the way to the crater, and then returned empty-handed. Was there really a body out there, somewhere, that they had missed? Had Stafford fallen into some unseen crack? Carter had been acting strangely since they left the crater. He had clammed up. Hardly talked to anyone on the way back. She could sense his mind churning. She found herself wanting to get into that mind.

  It was strange, what had happened with Philippe. She had been attracted to both of them since the beginning, entertaining the possibility of becoming lovers as well as friends. Passing lovers they would be, in the sort of way that happens in far-off places and leaves you with pleasant memories. On that point, Philippe had quoted Yevtushenko, whom he called Carter's countryman: There are no rights and wrongs, only good memories and bad memories.

  She had to confess, if she thought about it, which she was not ready to do, that something had happened. She felt she could see through Philippe, while Carter maintained a mysterious air of peculiar attraction. "See through" was too caustic a term for Philippe. She could see through a translucent outer layer, down to a core where he kept his motivations, artistic and otherwise. But the core seemed so immutable and permanently inscrutable that she no longer wanted to fight to penetrate it, any more than she wanted to see what was inside a piece of granite. Meanwhile, Carter...

  She didn't want to think about it too much.

  When she did think about it, she recognized her own dilemma: she wanted a story from Carter, and she had never let herself be attracted— well, involved—with men from whom she wanted a story. Except for Philippe and that was different. She had learned it was too easy to get what you wanted from a man. There were ethical limits, after all.... She definitely didn't want to think about it. She retained an image of herself as an ethical woman. Whatever that meant.

  Still, there had been no more leads in Mars City. The next part of the story had to start with Carter himself. It was logical, she told herself, to fly to Phobos.

  If you started from Mars City, Philippe said, Phobos was halfway to Earth. In terms of fuel and society, he was right, she realized now. It was more sophisticated than Mars City, at least in the view of those who lived there. Oh, she had read all about Phobos. The University. The hum of commerce. It was the poor man's Crystal City, Mars' equivalent of the great rock docks orbiting Earth, except that they didn't have to bring in an asteroid from somewhere.... Phobos, the moon, had been Nature's gift: a crumbly black rock from which Phobos, the city, drew its sustenance: water in the buried hydrated minerals, and peculiar organic compounds, a valuable resource as long as Earth's agencies were willing to pay for R and D.

  Floating as effortlessly as the shuttle itself, Annie daydreamed about what she had seen so far. While Hellas Base, at least under Braddock's reign, would never be more than a research station, Mars City and Phobos University pretended they were real urban centers. Two cities in the extended desert of Martian space, far from the life of Earth. While Phobos claimed to be more ultra, Mars City claimed to be more connected to gritty reality. Mars City saw no disgrace in its dust-blown domes; Mars City proudly viewed its uncluttered life as beyond reach of the bureaucracies of Earth. But Phobos University wanted to imitate Earth, to imitate Crystal City orbiting in haute majesty, high above Earth's teeming urbanscapes.

  For all its attempted sophistication, Phobos had developed a curious quality of stasis, in contrast to the freewheeling growth of Mars City. Phobos was haunted by time and change. In the teens and twenties, Phobos had been the center of the Martian universe. The Mars Council established its chambers there. Mars had orbited around Phobos. The great ships arrived, pregnant with girders and masses of raw plastic, computer clips and cartridges, and prefab housing mods. It was the time of the feverish rush to create the first sustainable colony outside the Earth-moon system. Phobos University grew and grew.

  But now, Phobos was like a bucket with water flowing out a hole in the bottom as fast as it entered the top. Commerce from Earth flowed through Phobos on the way down to Mars, but the water level never rose. The giant ships docked for a few days, unloaded their cargoes onto the shuttles and onto the spidery, unmanned freighters, and flew away again with new crews. The cargoes went on to Mars City.

  Phobos had reached its limits, Annie speculated to herself. Its inhabitants lived the good life high above the dust of Mars, reveling in their mastery of Mars and their hipness to the latest events on Earth, not realizing that history was passing them by. With a moment of surprise, Annie realized that the woman in the cocoon next to her was intently studying a page of screenzine from Earth, blazing a title "Horoscopes." Annie sneered to herself. She knew the 'zines. The horoscopes were calculated by computer months in advance, distributed electronically across a hundred million kilometers. And purchased. The unimaginative merchants of cultural sleaze in New York City still lived. Marketing genius and adaptability had triumphed again.

  But Annie gawked: didn't this lady know she lived on one of the "celestial" bodies that, according to astrologers of Babylon and New York, radiated strange influences across the now well-traveled spaceways? Mars could hardly be in Gemini for her. She walked on it. What did she make of that blue morning star, casting its occasional gleam across the timeless sands but absent from her astrological charts? What cosmic influence did it cast for a child born on Mars where no red martial god rose in the sky, but only blue Earth, ascendant in the sign of the fishes?

  Farther back in the shuttle she noticed two young men, clones almost, in their anachronistic white crisp shirts, dark ties, and last-century-style jackets. So, the solemn folks from the desert in Utah were still sending their boys to hype their unique interpretations of old manuscripts from other deserts, distant in space and time. From the first desert in Israel/ Arabia to the second desert in Utah to the third desert, Mars ... Deserts, religion, missionary zeal ... Some strange correlation ... She hoped perversely that tweedledum and tweedledee were going home empty-handed, after striking out in sinful Mars City. She wondered what Carter would think of them, proselytizing on his turf, as it were. She expected that one of the few subjects that might drive Carter to outspoken ire was superstition living in the midst of exuberant reality. Especially here, in the still-untrammeled house of God, Mars. She was falling asleep.

  Awakened from cocoon slumber by tinny announcements of imminent docking, Annie turned to the tiny window. Outside, in the glaring sun, Phobos loomed in the distance, above the bright horizon of Mars. The tiny wheel-shaped city, slowly turning once every ninety seconds, provided the shock of scale.

  The Phobos shuttle approached the black moon cautiously. Now she could see the one new project proceeding at Phobos University: construction of the tether. It ran like a hairline into the distance toward and away from Mars. Dotted along it like nodes were little ships and work crews, dots moving and glinting in the light. In a year, the tether would be operational, and the shuttles and cargo ships would save energy by docking at the lower end of it. Passengers and cargo would ride up or down to Phobos in so-called elevator cars, powered by the sun. In its initial phase, it would be five hundred kilometers long.

  A dull thud reverberated through the ship. The shuttle had docked at a central tower erected at the north pole of the satellite. Waiting to debark, Annie studied the scene outside. Surrounding this tower was the amazing structure: the enormous wheel-shaped University. The central tower protruded through the center of the wheel. Cables and four connecting tunnels ran from the tower to the rim of the wheel.

  At the base of the tower, airlocks opened onto the black surface. Like a separate city built around these airlocks by ants of Phobos, a maze of storage bins and cases lay tethered to the surface, scattered in rough alignments. Figures in spacesuits and jet packs drifted lazily above them hopping from one to another like insects among flowers.

  The station turned around them lazily, at a rate to provide eight tenths of Martian gra
vity—a compromise between those who worked on the surface of Mars and those who had to go back and forth from long periods in zero G, working outside in the Phobos environment. She remembered Philippe claiming that Phobos University, not Mars City, was the best city in the solar system for sex. The gentle pressures of sub-Martian gravity... the most bearable lightness of being, Philippe had called it. Strange, she thought, with sexual plagues coming and going, how some generations were blessed with sexual paradises, and others were cursed with sexual dangers and uncertainties— through no fault of their own. It seemed yet another of the cosmic jokes.

  The great bicycle wheel of steel rigging hardly looked erotic. How many women had Philippe had in the cloistered apartments along its rim of the great wheel, rotating slowly outside Annie's tiny window as the ship approached the docking port? Come on, Pohaku, she urged herself, pay attention to the job at hand. And she remembered Philippe's joking voice: "I have learned that one cannot live on sex alone, except for the first fifty years." She could not forget that Philippe had made her laugh.

  An hour later she was striding lightly down the halls of Phobos University, where people bustled with focused, if unidentifiable, purpose. She enjoyed watching them. Her journalistic skills were challenged by the thought of trying to define the something in the air here that was different from Mars City.

  Write one true sentence, Hemingway had said. Mars City had the builders, rough and tumble. Phobos had the people who made the builders dance like puppets below, by pulling on the purse strings.

  She walked the glittering arcades of Phobos, the great shoplined promenade, with its view of Mars spinning dizzily overhead. Banks; university bookstores with 3-D posters of St. Basil's, the latest from Earth; a week more hip than the stores at Mars City ... all built by global corporations so vast and rapidly anastomosing that they hardly seemed to have names or logos or fixed identities anymore. The corporate entities, like the ancient gods, seemed like powerful celestial spirits, angels who had arrived from somewhere far away, and who hovered permanently but unseen in some economic exosphere around each planet. They permeated the very air of Earth and Mars, like smog, miraging throughout cyberspace, which pulsed with their lifeblood, secret electronic plans for the next stage of the great global shopping center. Now, they were probing out into space with delicate, invisible tentacles, and making cities on Phobos and Mars, through unsteady alliances that changed too fast to be tracked by politicians or networks.

  Phobos also had the University. Phobos University, like university towns everywhere, had citizens who looked detached from anything concrete or steel. There were brash young professors, men and women, who talked fast and were the first to latch on to new ideas and words. They were on the make. Being on the make, for them, centered first on careers: getting that grant from Mars Council or, better yet, direct from some Earth agency; making a splash at the next conference. You could tell they were thinking of themselves when you interviewed them, much as they tried to dissemble in strained academic modesty. When you asked them about their research, their real subject was always the same: their place in the scheme of things academic. They were generous with left-handed compliments and veiled put-downs of rival colleagues. The viciousness of academic politics was matched only by the inconsequentiality of its victories.

  During her initial weeks here, the men on Phobos had seemed an odd lot. The corporate men were impossible, of course, like ladder climbers on the mainland. The university men... well, being on the make extended to the opposite sex, naturally, but in a weird way, because they were mostly physical scientists: geologists, atmospheric chemists, seers of the invisible magnetosphere; a secretary she had befriended once at a research institute had told her: There is no such thing as a physical scientist. Anthropologists, maybe, you didn't know what to expect from them. But not physicists or chemists or, worse yet, left-brained mathematical theorists, God help us ... Still, she thought, every once in a while comes along someone whose technical vigor spilled over into a general vitality that embraced all of life. What set them apart was hard to put into words.

  Academic women ... something unfamiliar to her there. Mainland academe fostered some attitudes she had heard about from her mother, but which were outside her experience after her upbringing in Hawaii: in academia, her friends told her, a woman could not flirt and still be a serious researcher. Urban and university women, who wanted to be taken as serious beings, were distinguished by a mode of dress at the opposite end of the spectrum from the loose, provocative styles that had evolved for leisure in space cities or in the hedonistic Pacific pleasure grounds of Hawaii, where men and women consciously dressed to please each other. She had been amused by this urban primness when she first went to work in mainland city newsrooms. Philippe had claimed that the unspoken dress code's mandatory vestigial retro-bow was left over from twentieth-century office culture, and was in turn a relic of eighteenth-century lacy propriety, when impractical clothes were a sign that you belonged to the upper class, i.e. you did not have to work. "Hence the word 'classy,' " Philippe had said. "Everything, it has an origin in the past."

  Yeah, well, she told herself. The business at hand was to find Carter. And then ... There was the question of how to interact with him. She still didn't want to think about that.

  18

  FEBRUARY 55, FRIDAY

  Carter Jahns stared at the screen in his cubicle at the Phobos Library. Glowing back at him was an orbital image of a red volcanic cone, isolated in the desert like an anthill in a sandbox. He replayed his mental tape of the trip to the cone: time spent outside in the Martian desert had a disconnected quality, like dreamtime. He remembered climbing the cone, finding Stafford's buggy, walking around the crater rim alone. And then what? Then his world had changed.

  He had debated with himself about coming up here on the Phobos shuttle. Not debated. Rationalized. It was as if he couldn't think anymore at Mars City. He had a budget of three Phobos trips per year and he hadn't made the trip for six months, and the data archives in the Phobos Library were rumored to have a much fuller set of satellite imagery than was down-linked to Mars City. Intuition had whispered to him: Don't put in requests for pictures. Go to Phobos; you want something done right, do it yourself.

  Intuition. There had been a time, when he was a student technocrat, that he would not have admitted the word "intuition" into his internal vocabulary. Too mystical. Now ... No apology needed. Experience had changed his definitions. Intuition was no longer some magic sixth sense. It was simply the knowledge squirreled away in the back of your brain, subliminal knowledge, the knowledge you didn't know you had, gained from cumulative experience—the churning reservoir stored below the surface of frozen pack ice of consciousness. Strange, that he used to deny its existence. Now, he counted himself rare among the Martian scientists and technicians because he could recognize it instead of denying it. Was that Philippe's influence?

  He knew that a personal search through the Phobos files, even if it didn't drop an answer in his lap, would lead him to thoughts he would not have had if he had sent some earnest assistant. You can't send someone to fetch the answer to a question you aren't sure how to ask. Great line, he mused. You should go back to Earth and produce one of those holeos for insecure administrators.

  The cinder cone stared back at him from the screen, an eye with no expression.

  Carter's intuition told him Stafford's disappearance was no accident.

  Rationality said he still ought to keep the accident theory open, especially since everyone else seemed to want to keep it open. But what was rational here?

  To believe the accident theory, his intuition needled him, you have to explain the hidden tracks, and the tarp, and the wall. Suppose Braddock was right that Stafford, like any good prospector, tended to hide his tracks out of sheer habit, to protect what he found. And that the tarp was just protection when Stafford had set out for a long walk. But the wall? It was obviously to keep the vehicle from being spotted—the opposite of n
ormal practice. And what about the lack of footprints? Carter himself had left footprints. But Stafford had tiptoed around on dustless rock. Why? Answer me that one, Carter, my lad.

  So he had crossed some watershed, some Martian Great Divide. There had been ordinary life, before Stafford disappeared. Now there was this life: Mars was not what it had seemed to him before. Stafford had engineered his own disappearance, and had tried to hide his tracks.

  This new life was only five days old. It excited him. The suspense of the seeming accident had ended in something stranger. He had tried to deal with it at Mars City, but he had been paralyzed by the conflict between his intuition and his frontal lobes. If Stafford had been hiding something from him, who else was hiding secrets? Here, he felt more mental space to explore the paranoid territory where his new ideas were taking him.

  There was the little matter of the report that was due. Around Mars City, the weirdness was compounded by the feeling that people were watching him, waiting to see what he would do about the report. One option was to do what people seemed to want him to do: tie it up in a neat package and get out of the situation. He could send in some routine report that Stafford had driven off into the desert to explore, parked and protected his vehicle, walked away, found himself in a tight spot that he couldn't escape. His body might be hidden in some crevice or lava tube. A report like that would get him off the hook. More importantly, it could buy him time. Maybe then he could pursue matters quietly on his own.