MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  In the shuttle, on the way down, Annie sat next to Carter and feigned dozing. She thought about loving him. She changed the wording in her own mind; she thought about making love with him. Something had happened, some release. An unexplored space that had always been there had been touched by this man. It had come as a surprise. Looking back on it, she was not even sure she liked what had happened. That lovemaking could release something new in her, at this point in her life, was not what was supposed to have happened. What could she say of herself? She was a professional woman, whatever that silly phrase meant. No, she was a woman. A traveling woman, a woman of the world, who liked men. Who liked sex, if the truth be known. Well, what was wrong with that? There were lots of men, and Mars was particularly safe: all incoming arrivals were screened before departure from the Crystal City, a policy adopted after the AIDS III panic in Moscow and then Tycho. Vitality. An occasional man from Mars could not hurt her.

  Whenever an inner voice nagged her about this, she managed to dismiss it with two thoughts: (a) her life was her own; (b) she was a student of human nature, a writer. Getting to know people and how they worked inside their own heads was what her life plan was all about. It had not been hard, taking occasional lovers. She prided herself that former lovers were still friends. Well, a few of them she hadn't heard from for ages. But certainly not enemies. Not one was an enemy.

  Did she want to feel it again, what Carter had brought forth? Of course. But did she want it intruding into the framework of her life? Did she have any control over the answer? Now she recognized that the psychic space he had found had always been part of her. Simply, her body had exploded in his grasp. The way he held her, she had wanted him not just to make love with her, but to have her, to take her, which suddenly seemed the same as giving him the gift of herself. Not just sharing, which is what love had always been supposed to be ... had always been for her, but giving everything as a gift, giving herself away to him completely, knowing that she could have herself back when it was over.

  The real problem, she began to realize with horror, was that she was a twenty-first-century woman brought up on her mother's twentieth-century ideology. What she had inherited, a progressive credo of sexual niceties, turned out to be incomplete for her. Its ideologically pure equality was supposed to cover not only friendship and economics, but sex. This pleasant theory of sexual equivalence had seen her through numerous relationships, but now she discovered that it did not satisfy every corner of her psyche. Carter had revealed new corners, untouched by ideology, and full of mystery. The mystery involved an unexpected rawness in Carter. Somehow, mutual respect and desire had been blended with a new knowledge of surrender and re-creation.

  And what of Tomas, kind and loving and cheerful Tomas, who was back on Earth? She had not felt this with him. Could she? Could he learn? Did she want him to learn?

  By the time Carter and Annie arrived back at Mars City on Sunday afternoon, Philippe was nearly ready to install his sculpture. What he had in mind was a grand gesture. The tree would stand outside, in front of the main airlock entrance. The only tree to grow in the natural Martian soil would greet all visitors to the new world.

  Philippe had visualized Annie being there, during the installation. She would look intrepid, and spend her time shooting holeos of the ceremony. There would be good angles from atop the airlock door. During her absence, these visions had taken a sad new cast: they no longer seemed an extension of love between them, but merely his own male posturing.

  After Annie had left, he had gone ahead and scheduled the installation of the project for Monday afternoon, March 2. He tried to convince himself he did not care if she was back or not. But surely, by Monday, she would be.

  Now the tree stood in his studio on a heavy platform on rollers. With a tractor, it could be hauled out through the equipment bay and then lifted into position with a crane.

  After Carter and Annie landed, Annie suggested they go find Philippe. Philippe, whom she had left behind: she had to find out how he was doing. Carter followed unenthusiastically. They found Philippe in his studio, bleary-eyed, still tinkering with his tree.

  The sculpture towered over them, sparkling and tinkling slightly in the quietly circulating air currents generated by unseen machines that were within the province of Carter's job description. Annie stood under the tree, listening to the shifting chords. "Nobody's going to hear it, once it's outside," Annie said. She studied Philippe's face.

  "Maybe not for a century," Philippe said, poised over one of the branches with a pair of needle-nosed pliers. "Whenever they get the air pressure up enough for people to walk around without suits." He had not looked at her at all, except when she came in, when he looked at both of them and then looked away.

  "But the light on it will be beautiful," Philippe continued. "It will refract and reflect... diffuse light differently at different times of day. I used the hardest glass I could make. I'm hoping it won't get sandblasted if it's in the courtyard between the airlock and the shed. I'm going to make a garden out of that spot...."

  Carter stood staring up at the huge structure, while Annie had Philippe take her for a walk around it. "It's wonderful," she said to Philippe quietly. She gave him a radiant smile, as if nothing were wrong.

  When they completed their circuit, Carter said, "It's really good, Philippe. It's beautiful. A tie to Earth, but different."

  "Different," Annie echoed.

  "How many leaves are there?" Carter asked.

  "Over four thousand. One for every person who has been on Mars, according to the registry. I've been assembling it all since Friday."

  Carter glanced at Annie and suppressed a strained smile. "All that since Friday?"

  "Je suis tres fatigue. Of course, I made the branches and most of the leaves months ago. They were waiting for me."

  Annie said, "We should get to put our names on them."

  "There is one with your name on it. And one with Carter's, and mine, everyone's. If you look, you'll find one leaf that is different. Scarlet. That is Stafford's."

  "Oh, where is my leaf?" Annie laughed.

  "I don't know anymore."

  The comment stung her. She knew Philippe was in pain. She should have handled it better, but damn it... Annie walked around the tree, closer to where Philippe was working, as if looking for her special leaf. "It must have taken forever," she said. She wanted to hug him, but couldn't with Carter there. He looked like a little boy, trying to be brave....

  Well, she had made this bed and now she was lying right in the middle of it.

  "I thought about leaving room on the tree for new leaves," Philippe was saying. "Future arrivals. They could have a ceremony every six months. Attach leaves for new people, and the tree could grow. Then I thought, no, I will design it for today, so there will be no bare branches. It commemorates how far we have come. In the future, when people come to Mars City, they can look at this and say, 'It all started in '09. That is how far they got by '31.' I hope this will be a benchmark for them all to see a continued increase, a kind of progress." Philippe sighed. "Tomorrow I must get up very early. They move it out into position."

  "We've got to tell you about what we found," Carter said. "Come on. Let's get you out of here. You look like you're going to drop. Let's go somewhere comfortable where we can talk." Carter started for the door exuberantly, trying too hard to be cheerful and to stand near Annie at the same time.

  When Philippe went to turn out the lights on the far side of the studio, Annie trailed behind him, eyeing the tree judiciously from every angle.

  "It's good to see you again, Philippe," she whispered to him. "Everything will be all right."

  When they left, Philippe turned out the lights one by one and they all watched the tree fade into night-dormancy.

  On the way to the restaurant, they passed a pregnant woman in the hallways.

  "Are they still having babies?" Philippe said after she had passed. He waved his arms. "Here it is, March. Why don't they just
have them all in January and get it over with?"

  Carter: "What's that supposed to mean?"

  Philippe shrugged. "I don't know. It just popped into my head. I have had no time to think about what it means. I think it is black humor, probably."

  ARRIBA Y ADELANTE, said the sign over the door. FROM THE SONORAN DESERT: FOOD FOR THE GREATEST DESERT IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM! Someone had penciled an extra "S" in the second "desert." Inside, they made their plans over "cheese" enchiladas and beans from the green-houses.

  Philippe was full of his impending unveiling, trying to avoid the sense of triangle among them. Carter and Annie let him talk. Phobos was exploding in them, but it was as if they did not dare to verbalize it. Their own private story they were not ready to talk about, and the other half, the evidence, seemed as if it might evaporate if exposed to a hearing.

  It wouldn't be an unveiling, really, Philippe continued, unaware of their urgency. The crane had already emplaced the huge basalt boulders and slabs he had brought in, making a pseudo-Japanese garden around the tree site—a Tharsis garden, he called it. It was a combination of a Zen garden and the English standing stones that had inspired his Martian Stonehenge. He loved stones that whispered of paleolithic mysteries. For new visitors, arriving at the Mars City gate, it would be a foreshadowing of the Stonehenge installation, which they might see later during their stay on Mars. Everyone would be invited to see the tree being emplaced into the center of the new garden.

  "Look, Philippe, we've got something to tell you," Carter said finally, as Philippe ran down. "We've all got to go to the Polar Station. You should come. Something is going on there. We don't know what it is, but we need all of us, together." They told the story of Phobos—the impersonal part. The thermal image, the theory that a hopper had picked up Stafford, that Braddock had instructed his own hopper deliberately to obliterate the pickup site, that someone had tampered with the stored images that Carter had seen on Phobos, that the hopper that picked up Stafford must have come from the Polar Station.

  "Couldn't the hopper have come from Hellas?" Philippe asked.

  "I went through the whole manifest of hopper flights from Hellas as soon as I got there. I called down there again yesterday and talked to maintenance people. There were only two hoppers out on the forty-third and I talked to the two pilots; they were at the seismic installation the whole time. The seismic crew verifies it. Everything sounds kosher. And remember, you and Annie interviewed all the people who outfitted Stafford when he went out; you said there was nothing fishy there. I just don't believe you could start making secret flights out of Hellas without it getting around.

  "The Polar Station is different. Small, tight, exclusive. And it's the only other place besides Hellas close enough to reach Stafford's crater in a hopper...."

  "Unless there's a station somewhere on Mars we don't know about," Philippe said.

  "Come on. A conspiracy theory is bad enough. Let's not make it fantastic. It had to come from the Polar Station; that's the place to start. But we don't know what we're getting into. We may need all the help we can get. You're the only person I can trust. We don't know who all is trying to cover this up, or who is watching us, to see what we do next. We need to be fast and decisive, without advertising in advance. I'll requisition one of the shuttles that can get us there. I'll make it Tuesday morning, the day after your tree is unveiled. No one will expect us to descend on the pole the day after your tree goes up. Meanwhile, we've got to make it look like business as usual, like we're starting to put the Stafford thing behind us. Your tree is a great diversion."

  "Oh, thank you very much."

  "You know what I mean."

  Philippe looked thoughtful. "How could this hopper be from the Polar Station? It makes no sense. Elena would know...."

  Annie responded, "Maybe she's in on it. She can do anything she wants down there. Nobody's looking over her shoulder. If she wants to send one of their hoppers out to pick up Stafford in secret, and if she's got a pilot who will keep his mouth shut, who's going to know?"

  Philippe: "But she was helping in the search."

  Annie: "Interesting lady, huh?"

  Carter said nothing, but his mind was racing. He had been wrestling with that one in private for forty-eight hours.

  Philippe finally headed back to his studio, leaving Carter and Annie at their table. He didn't look back.

  "I've got to go work on my stories," Annie said.

  Carter didn't want her to work on anything; he wanted her to be with him. He didn't examine this feeling; it just seemed natural, presupposed. He didn't wonder why sex creates possessiveness.

  "I've got a lot to catch up on," she said. "I really ought to write a follow-up on Stafford and the Mars-2."

  "But you said on Phobos, you'd sit on what we talked about...."

  "I said write, not file. I want to make a record as we go. I'm beginning to think my role is more than just reporting. Maybe I'm the chronicler of this thing. Maybe there's a book in it...."

  "But you still agree: everything so far that we've done together, it's off the record until we find out what goes on at the pole. You can wait till then?"

  "Yeah. God, you're a worrier."

  "I don't want to make it hard for you, Annie. You know that. We're helping each other. You said it yourself. Only, it's getting delicate, you know? Stafford's pulling something and I don't know what's going on, and I'd just like to find out before we go off half-cocked."

  "I understand. You don't have to keep lecturing me."

  "Come on. I'm not lecturing. I just..."

  21

  MARCH 2

  On Monday morning, Carter lay in bed alone, waking slowly, feeling a mounting pressure, like something pushing down on him. Tomorrow, sixteen days after Stafford had disappeared, they would board a requisitioned shuttle and fly to the Polar Station and ... what?

  He opened his eyes. For the first time, a room on Mars seemed claustrophobic. For the last week, he had been feeling the excitement of a search, but now he felt apprehension and desperation building again. His arrival at the Polar Station would blow the lid off whatever was going on.

  Uncharacteristically, he lay in bed a long time, musing. What if Stafford was really alive at the pole...? Maybe if he could find Stafford, the old guy could explain everything in his fatherly way: "Now, Carter, just shut up and listen a minute." But the hope was clouded. Were there really secret programs on Mars? Was he, himself, really a pawn in someone else's game? And how long had that been going on?

  If Stafford had needed to go to the pole, why couldn't he just fly down there quietly? The question answered itself. Stafford could do nothing quietly; he was held too much in awe. People always thought he was "on to something." Maybe there were good reasons for what Stafford had done. Assuming Carter's theories were correct. This morning they were beginning to seem more like wild speculation.

  Carter lost his internal struggle to remain detached and analytical. Part of him felt outraged. There weren't secret projects on Mars. There weren't games being played here. If there were, his whole world was a farce. Carter, of all people, should know what was going on. It was in his job description to know everything that was happening on Mars.

  Carter had a growing, unfamiliar feeling that he had not only a professional assignment to figure out what had happened, but also an independent, moral imperative.

  He struggled to accommodate his suspicion that Stafford was not dead. It bothered him that this belief was now so strong, because he had no solid evidence. Circumstantial evidence, maybe. What if the thermal signature, which now could not even be reproduced from the data, turned out to be a blemish, or worse yet a figment of his strained imagination? What if he proved nothing at the pole? "Maybe you've been on Mars a little too long, Carter." It was the voice of some kindly Council representative, goaded on by Braddock no doubt, who would show up one day at his office. "Maybe you need a change..."

  There was a weak spot in the theory: If Stafford was hidi
ng out at the pole, how could he ever plan to reappear? He couldn't return to his buggy and come driving out of the desert after a month as if nothing had happened! If he ever turned up alive, it would be obvious that he had used one of the public vehicles from Hellas to fabricate a hoax—a deed that could conceivably lead to dismissal from Mars. So there was a go-for-broke aspect to Stafford's actions. There had to be a clue in that.

  Unless Stafford planned to disappear from sight permanently ... But that made no sense. No, he had elected to take a colossal gamble. He would have to stay hidden until he had accomplished whatever he set out to do. What was worth risking his reputation for? Besides, if he had really been picked up and taken to the pole, who at the pole was in on it? Lena? So she had been deliberately lying to him in his own bed? Well, hiding the truth, he amended. And if Lena was not in on it, then who? Carter had a laughable picture of Stafford cowering in some room at the Polar Station, unbeknownst to the rest of the staff, fearing discovery.

  Or being held prisoner?

  None of the pictures made sense.

  Then there was the Annie situation. And the question of how Philippe was feeling about it, which you could never tell about anything.

  Late Sunday night Annie finally answered in her room, but she would not come out. Claimed she had disconnected her 'corder earlier to finish a report. "I'm going to file something on Philippe's tree. I've done a great interview with him." Well, at least it would make it look as if they had put the Stafford incident behind them.

  Not wanting to think about Annie or his own backlog of staff reports, and not sure that he was capable of thinking about anything clearly, Carter got up, took a bath, shaved. This morning, he would devote to putting out fires in the office—the crap he had failed to deal with last night when he got in. This afternoon, the unveiling. Tomorrow, the blitzkrieg on the Polar Station.