MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Elena sent her a preapproved press release.

  There was still a chance. She asked for permission to add a paragraph about lack of damage to the buildings. Elena agreed. She submitted her own innocent addendum:

  In spite of a series of minor tremors, detected only with seismometers at the South Polar Research Station, the condition of the facility itself appears to be satisfactory. The seismic staff continues to evaluate the situation here. Otherwise, conditions here, five hours after the quake, are normal.

  Twenty minutes later, her 'corder confirmed that the bulletin was out on the net. All but the last paragraph. The story amounted to only the original press release, over her byline.

  She stormed up to Sturgis's office.

  "I was expecting a visit from you."

  "Damn it, they cut my story. I suggested it in the first place."

  "That's right. Think of this as a war zone. There's a certain amount of editing that must go on."

  "Censoring...."

  "It happens. Besides, you don't trust me, and I don't trust you. Think of it as a sign of mutual respect."

  She could not afford to show too much anger. It would make him suspicious. "I don't do press releases," she muttered. With this display of righteous indignation, she left. Sturgis had won another round.

  She would bide her time and strike again, she swore to herself.

  She swung through the cafeteria at lunchtime, but it resulted only in a pointless philosophic argument with Philippe, which put her in a darker mood and sent her off on her own to process the story on her own terms.

  She decided to hit the halls with her 'corder and minicam, recording impressions all over the station.

  Her real fear was that Sturgis would pretend to give her free rein, but at the last minute destroy all her video material and supporting notes before he let her out. So she made her own plans. In public, she projected acceptance of Sturgis's offer to let her collect notes and break the story, implying she would suffer through these few weeks with subservient grace. She made a show of her camera work and took 'corder notes in public, even requesting—with no response—a taped interview with Sturgis. Privately, she decided to work in two mediums, electronic and written. She pulled out a set of small, red, Japanese notebooks Takemitsu had sent her as a going-away present. "Emergency backup..." his little card had said. If he only knew.

  The writing surprised her. Transcribing her 'corder notes onto paper, she discovered that they had the advantage of immediacy, of recording personalities on the spot. She came to enjoy the writing. It was somehow longer term than the electronic records: it had the advantage of not just recording, but of synthesizing after reflection. But she wrote in secret, by hand. Takemitsu had sent a little pencil, too, but she preferred using a little sketching pen Philippe had given her, only days earlier—now so long ago. Curly, nineteenth-century letters, ragged and barely legible, from lack of practice; cryptic abbreviations, and her own pseudo-shorthand.

  Writing had a physical and even sensual feel that was unfamiliar. She was surprised at her reaction to it, this trying to get things down on the little pages. Ideas became part of her. She pictured herself two centuries back in time, with the Bronte sisters. She began to realize what sketching must be like for Philippe, who had talked of impressions entering his eyes, mixing in his brain, and traveling down his arm onto the paper.

  At the same time, she made preparations to prevent Sturgis from destroying the work. She tried to visualize how they might come after her. "Give us all those videos you shot." "Is this everything?" "Now we're going to search your room." The first line of defense was to back up her videos with duplicate chips that she hid in various parts of the station as the opportunity appeared, coding these locations into her written notes.

  But the electronic copies weren't safe; she knew Sturgis's people had detectors that could pick up electronic data storage. Even a hundred buttons would be no guarantee. They could sweep her luggage, her body, even the whole station. But they were powerless against simple little notebooks as long as no one knew about them. She would have to hide them, too, one at a time, as she filled them.

  Should she tell Carter about the notebooks? The question nagged at her. Finally she decided against it. Demonstrations of trust and love were fine, but you had to have your own life.

  Later, she knew, she would have another problem: the organization of facts was different from the facts themselves. There was the question of how to cover Elena, Stafford, even Sturgis himself. Could she depict any of them as, somehow, "good" or "evil"? Or were those merely labels we assigned from our own biases? No one, even Sturgis, thought himself to be evil.... Especially Sturgis. They all thought they were on the side of the angels, carrying out their professional duties.

  Later that night she was on a roll. She told Carter she needed to be alone. She wrote as much as she could: the arrival at the station, their first meeting with Stafford, Sturgis and his rules.

  When she filled the first notebook on Saturday morning, there was the question of where to hide it. Scientific facilities, she had noted, were always full of clutter. She wandered artlessly around the station, with her equipment, recording impressions. When she came to Stafford's lab, she saw an open door. She peeked in. Stafford had apparently stepped out. She found a dusty recess behind shelving that had not been moved in ages. Checking the room for surveillance monitors, she stood against the shelving as if to take an image, and behind her back, slipped the first notebook there, to pick up after the story broke. After all these centuries, the high-tech warriors could still be defeated by the simplest sword—the written word.

  She returned to her room and started filling the second notebook: how the artifact had looked in the cave, how it had felt being there, her talk with Sturgis, how the tremor felt.

  She did not write what she had been doing when the tremor struck.

  Carter spent Friday in amazement. Annie, the night before, the night that would not leave his mind, had placed a bomb in his hands. Would he really play a role in getting the story out before Sturgis's deadline? Probably the question was academic; there was no way to get a message out. But if the chips were down, what would he do? No doubt Sturgis had the law on his side. When do you break the laws of your country? Were "break" and "laws" words that he really believed applied here?

  And what of the tremor? Entries posted on the net, including a spare account with Annie's byline, indicated that minor seismic disturbances were still being detected at a depth of 950 kilometers under the pole, triangulated by the polar seismic grid. Now and then he would stop and try to feel them—some vibration in the building or under his feet. But he felt nothing. Everyone wanted to believe that it was Mother Nature, hidden, working at her own schemes somewhere in the mantle of the planet. But, said some, what if it was the machine? Worse yet, what if the machine and Mother N. were working in some unholy alliance?

  There was nothing he could do about it. He tried to return to his immediate duties. First he put in a request to Lena for a formal review of possible damage to the station by the jolt. By midday, he was putting the finishing touches on the first draft of his report of Stafford's disappearance—the disappearance that had suddenly become a nondisappearance. The others were right: In the big picture, his report would be moot. He needed to supply some written record to keep the bureaucracy off his back, but his official role had been reduced to irrelevance. Except that now, Annie had put this bomb in his hands and thrust him back onto center stage.

  Throughout this mess, he reflected, Annie always had her goals laid out, while he was always improvising. But her determination seemed too simple. It was as if she could avoid uncertainty merely by announcing a reporting objective. She was ever the journalist, with a one-track mind. It must be nice, he thought, just to hop around the solar system asking questions, cavalierly making friends and enemies, taking responsibility for no one. Having no planet depending on you.

  And Stafford had a point: The scientists woul
d, in any case, soon report the discovery anyway. Even without Sturgis's spooks, they would have kept the discovery quiet for months, getting the bugs out, getting it just so, putting together their just-so stories. This whole crisis about beating Sturgis's deadline was the kind of issue he hated, manufactured by those looking for some moralistic point to outrage themselves.

  Why not stop whining and let them release their report in a few weeks, by the end of March. Maybe he should go talk to Stafford. Get a commitment that they would put it out on time....

  There was even the chance that Annie was bluffing. A small voice urged him to consider that while her code might be real, she might not have any automatically timed message in files. It was another one of her ploys to sucker him in, use him to get the story out. He put away the thought. He didn't want to think about her this way.

  By late morning, the seismic triangulations had been refined. The original tremor and the continuing tremors originated directly below the far node of the alien device.

  "You know what I'm going to do when this is all over?" Philippe was being his expansive self, at lunch with Carter. "I sketched plans last night while you were, um, occupied." He smiled. "I would like to make a monument at the present day pole. They left their monument. We should leave ours. A real pole. Big, .aluminum, right at the true pole of rotation, homage to their tubes, or whatever they are."

  This was when Annie came by. She listened for a moment. "What's the point, Philippe?" she challenged him. "Right now, we've got..."

  "The point? It will be there for all time, just as their monument is. Two species' monuments. Besides, it will confuse the hell out of the next species to visit Mars, a billion years from now. Figuring out the relationship between the two installations." Philippe's eyes sparkled. "I don't want it to be too phallic. Still... it ought to be a pole. The pole that marks the south pole. In the long term..."

  "For me," Annie interrupted, jokingly, "I don't care about the philosophy anymore; I just want to get Sturgis where I want him."

  Carter glanced around the room. He had seen some of Sturgis's crew sitting at a table, dressed slightly too neatly. No one seemed to be hearing them.

  Philippe stared at her, hard. "Look, this discovery will come out, one way or another. Four hundred years from now, what will people remember about this year? The pitiful political issues surrounding the discovery? No. The discovery itself, and what we do with it. That is why I do what I do. I sit here at this table, trying to look into the future, trying to turn this experience into something, and you just laugh at me. It's what I was telling Carter. What makes me feel isolated is that I don't understand why everyone here acts as if only their problem-of-the-week has any importance."

  Annie grimaced.

  "You Americans," Philippe continued, "you are a nation of problem-solvers, as you are fond of saying. But you don't seem to know that solutions are never solutions. Solutions are only the birthing pains of problems for the next generation. That's what we have learned in Europe. Life is bigger than solving your current problem. It goes on, of its own accord. Do we remember the political intrigues in the court of Elizabeth? No, we remember that guy who was writing plays—Shakespeare. Of course, there must have been courtiers, and political reporters. They dealt with the short term. Others have to speak for the long term. It is not so dishonorable, but if you do it, you are doomed to laughter and neglect. A generation later, they may adopt your ideas, when they turn back and call you a hero. Well, that is life. You know what my favorite writer said? Those who create deserve more respect than those who rule.' Kundera. I am sick of short-term crises—the games of people who want to feel involved with power."

  Annie smiled, but was red-faced. "Well, I'm sick of your Kundera." She pushed her chair back roughly and stomped off, out of the cafeteria.

  Philippe and Carter looked at each other in blank amazement.

  "I never wanted her to come between us," Carter said. "She's going away anyway, you know. Back to Tomas."

  Philippe made a show of ignoring what Carter was saying. He paused, staring down the hall, toward infinity. "Do you really think it made any difference who won the Second World War, a hundred years ago?"

  "Jesus, Philippe."

  "All right then. What about your Russian ancestors? They and the Americans almost destroyed the world over the issue of their communism. But now they are the rich capitalists exploiting the resources of Asia, and you Americans have a muddled social democracy." He made a few idle lines with his pencil, and smudged a gray area with his finger. "I don't know. People raise families, pursue their careers. That is what is important. The only thing that happens when they get excited about ideological issues is that people get killed. Usually in the name of justice and humanity."

  "Did you hear what I said? She's going back to Tomas. She's leaving as soon as this is over. She is important to me, you know."

  Philippe looked up at last, with a lame smile. "It is all right, my friend. She was never the only one for us. There are a thousand more, eh? Think of the number of women we will never know.... Man's relationship to women is the great sadness of life." He was launched into one of his monologues. "The two great burdens of our time are singleness and marriage."

  Carter smiled. "Go fuck yourself, Philippe."

  They both laughed. "Yes. It is a good idea."

  Annie came running back in, and stood before them, breathless. Philippe smiled wryly. "Do you remember, this is how it all started. You came to us with news. What news do you have this time?"

  "The epicenters are moving upward. The tremors are occurring now at 850 kilometers."

  Philippe: "What does it mean?"

  "No one knows. They say they've never seen anything like it."

  Philippe: "Did you see Stafford?"

  "No. He's locked away in his lab. Working on samples."

  Carter: "Did anybody project a time of arrival at the surface?"

  "I didn't hear anybody talk about that."

  "If you have maybe three hundred kilometers in a day, and—what?— eight hundred kilometers to go, that would be ... less than three days!"

  It was the next day, Saturday, when Annie came to the same table again. "Sturgis wants us in the conference room. Now."

  They met in Elena's conference room. Sturgis paced up and down as he talked. One of his aides sat at the head of the conference table, saying nothing. Carter felt his heart pounding. Would this be a showdown? He was ready.

  Annie took the initiative when they came in. "When do we get to go home, Sturgis?"

  He smiled enigmatically. "I've been thinking about what you said."

  "Or are you going to put us on bread and water to save food for your troops?"

  "And about your attitude."

  "What attitude is that?" Philippe said.

  "Especially your attitude, Ms. Pohaku." He turned an icy gaze on her. "Rather ... what shall we say, disloyal? I think you have the idea that this discovery belongs to the whole world." He chuckled unconvincingly. "Not to the people who made it."

  "So...?" Annie challenged.

  "You're wrong, you know." He looked from Annie to Carter without changing his expression. "Your government is very interested in this apparatus. That's what you should remember."

  "During the long cold nights in our cells?" Annie returned his icy smile.

  Sturgis took no notice. "I say 'your government' advisedly. Remember, it was the American and Russian people who paid to set all this up. That should interest you, Carter. American mostly. Taxpayers. We have a right to get a return on the investment."

  "You mean, you have the right? You and your friends? A right to control truth, dribble it out to the masses as you see fit...."

  "You're becoming tiresome, Ms. Pohaku. I'm not a chief. I just try to be a good Indian."

  "But, of course, that isn't why you called us here," Carter egged him on.

  "In my role of a good Indian, I have been monitoring communications from the outside. I have to say, you were
right. I'm beginning to get queries from your various people about your whereabouts. Not you, Mr. Brach; from the dossier we've got on you, I'd say you're an oddball lone cuss, anyway. Nobody seems to care if you're down here at the pole or out in the field for a few weeks. By the way, that Stonehenge thing you did— craziest bunch of shit I ever heard of. I just wanted to tell you."

  Philippe said nothing, but watched Sturgis expressionlessly.

  "Course, you artists are used to hearing that all the time," Sturgis continued. "Right? I understand that the more the public complains, the happier you are. I just wanted to cheer you up." He was smiling cheerily again, but it was the face of a true believer. He looked pleased with himself.

  "As for you two"—he turned to Annie and Carter—"you're a different story. We've been into your e-mail files. A few messages accumulating, but nothing significant. Still, we can't have you just dropping out of sight with no explanation. But these earthquakes give us a perfect card to play, and we're going to play it. We'll explain to them. Ms. Pohaku naturally wants to stay here and cover the unfolding seismic story. And Mr. Jahns is concerned about structural integrity of the station. We're already responding to your request for an assessment of the buildings. The pressure seals are now being studied, one at a time, and Elena will give you a more specific report later today.

  "On top of all that, we're going to say we've rigged up a field trip to the pole to improve the seismic detectors, and you guys elected to go along. Two weeks. Ms. Annie Pohaku will be getting her story and Carter Jahns will be getting emergency information about the seismic risks down here." He chuckled again. "There's enough gossip about you two already, according to our people in Mars City. When you say you're going off into the field together, everybody will wink and shut up for a while.