Proteus in the Underworld

by Charles Sheffield

  At last she found herself staring at stark truth, in the form of a simple final message. It read PROGRAM COMPLETE; in Sondra's own mind it spelled FAILURE.

  There had been no hardware tampering. The machine was just as BEC had delivered it, with the original seal intact. And it was not software tampering, nor syntax error, nor more complex logic error.

  It was nothing. There was nothing left to look at.

  Sondra stood up and began to meander hopelessly around the room, pausing to stare blindly at each empty form-change tank. She felt sick. She was hyperventilating, her head spun giddily, and she was chilled to the bone.

  How long had she been here, slaving away to no purpose? She glanced at her watch. More than eighteen hours—eighteen wasted hours, with nothing to show but exhaustion.

  And finally, as though faculties that she had held in suspension were suddenly clicking back into use, a horde of questions raced through her mind.

  Was it as cold in here as it felt? Was the air as thin as it seemed when it entered her straining lungs? And where were the Fugates?

  They had left her to work, but surely they must wonder why she had not asked for food, not called them, not said how she was doing or when she was likely to come out. They did not know of her determination to keep at it non-stop until she was finished.

  She went over to her suit and checked its monitors. Temperature in the room, close to freezing. Air pressure, less than half a standard Earth atmosphere. At some time while she was working it had dropped, so slowly that she had not been aware of the change. It was still dropping.

  She moved over to the chamber door—cautiously, because any exertion left her dizzy and panting. The great door was sealed, and she could see no way to open it. She realized for the first time that the room had no way of communicating with the outside.

  Even if the Fugate colonists who had brought her did not return, surely some others would come here soon.

  But why should they? There were no babies in these tanks. The humanity tests were being conducted elsewhere.

  She went again to the door and hammered on it as hard as she could. She listened. There was no sound but her own breath, rasping in her throat.

  She returned to her suit and eased her way into it. As the seals closed, the internal air pressure began to move back to normal suit ambient, slowly enough so that she did not suffer compression effects. Her head cleared, and she had the welcome feeling of pins and needles in her chilled hands and feet.

  Sondra sat down at the control station for a form-change tank and inspected her suit monitors. When she came to the colony she had been advised to remain in her suit as long as she was here. That had seemed easy enough to do—provided that she could replenish her air and power supplies as often as necessary.

  Which was no longer a good working assumption.

  Power would not be a problem. The suit's heating unit was more than adequate. It would keep her body warm, long after she ran out of air. That would happen in six hours, unless someone came or she could find a way to escape. Maybe she could stretch her time to as much as eight hours if she sat very still. First, though, she would have to stop trembling; and her shivers inside the warm suit had nothing to do with outside cold. She glanced again at the suit monitors.

  Air pressure in the room, one tenth of a standard atmosphere—and falling. Temperature, thirty degrees below freezing.

  Escape. She could not rely on any Fugate appearing to save her in the next few hours, not when they had been happy to ignore her for the past eighteen. She had to find a way to escape.

  How?

  Her mind felt drained, empty, sluggish, unable to produce a useful thought of any kind.

  Bey Wolf's assessment of her to Robert Capman had been accurate: not much above average intelligence. If he could see her now, he would offer a far harsher opinion.

  Sondra leaned forward, put her weary head down on the flat surface of the tank's control station, and closed her eyes.

  CHAPTER 14

  Sondra, deep within the Fugate Colony in the far-off reaches of the Kuiper Belt, was convinced that Bey Wolf regarded her as an idiot. It might have comforted her a little to know that Bey, standing on the surface of Mars, had at the moment no better opinion of himself.

  What he had just done might be natural for someone recently arrived from Cloudland. It was inexcusable in a man who had spent most of his life on the turning globe of Earth.

  The deep caverns of Old Mars possessed an oddly timeless quality. Temperature was held constant, air pressure at any particular level did not vary. Lighting levels, generated from internal power sources deep within the planet, remained steady. Any significant report or picture that came to Earth from Mars provided as a background an unchanging interior environment. Bey, wandering within the caverns, had accepted the same mental mindset of an unvarying world.

  It was a huge shock to ride the spiral escalator up to the surface, and to discover in the final hundred meters that he was arriving during the Martian night.

  Bey stood on the frozen surface and stared about him. This was what happened when you did something without bothering to think. He had no idea of the local surface time. Dawn might be minutes away, or a full twelve hours. He had plenty of power and air in his suit, but he was not prepared to stand like a fool for half a day.

  He glanced up. Although the atmosphere of Mars was gradually becoming more dense as a result of the terraforming work, it was still negligible by Earth standards. The stars were brilliant and unwinking. The constellations held their familiar patterns, unchanged from the skies of Earth.

  Bey identified the Big Dipper and Polaris. He turned to face them. That was Martian north. Actually, approximately north, because the Mars polar axis, like Earth's own polar axis, precessed around an axis normal to the plane of the ecliptic. Bey could not recall the current Martian pole star. Polaris would have to do.

  If that was roughly north, then that must be east. Bey stared off to his right. He was hoping to catch the first glint of light signaling that dawn was on its way. He was disappointed. The eastern sky was dark; but in it, hovering close to the horizon like a hanging jewel, shone a bright point of blue-white light.

  It was Earth, which with Venus formed twin Morning Stars of Mars. In an hour or so day would arrive and Bey could get to work. Meanwhile, he would take the opportunity to understand a little more about the world he was standing on. He might also find it worthwhile to ponder what that implied for the new Martian forms. What would it take to survive, naked on the surface of this planet?

  First, the easy fixes. One obvious problem was the temperature. On a midsummer day, the Mars surface might occasionally warm up to within twenty degrees of the freezing point of water. Now, close to the end of the Martian night, the monitor in Bey's suit showed an outside temperature of a hundred and twenty below.

  But cold was no big problem for living organisms. All it took to handle it was a good internal heat source—in the form of high calorie food—and adequate insulation. An elephant seal, with its thick layer of blubber, would bask on Earth's polar ice when the temperature was thirty below. An Emperor penguin would stand for weeks in a raging Antarctic blizzard, stoically protecting the single egg balanced on its feet.

  It was excessive heat that was the real killer. Hundreds of Earth organisms could thrive in surroundings far colder than the freezing point of water. Only a few, the specialized chemosynthetic bacteria living within Earth's hydrothermal vents, could survive much above its boiling point. So far as temperature was concerned, form modification for survival on Mars was no big deal. Bey could think of a dozen ways to do it.

  The real challenge was air. Vegetation could and did manage to survive in the ultra-thin atmosphere of Mars, but it did so with very slow growth rates. Humans could be slowed, too. The Timeset variation, developed by Robert Capman more than forty years ago, reduced human metabolic rates and perceived times by factors of more than a thousand. But that form was intended for long int
erstellar missions with micro-gravity fields. It was no use at all on Mars, where the surface gravity was a substantial fraction of Earth's. A Timeset form would fall over before it was even aware that it was off-balance. In any case, the forms that Bey had seen on his last trip were too fast-moving to be the result of any metabolic slow-down.

  Bey emerged from his pondering, lifted his head, and stared off to the east. He could catch a hint of false dawn there, a faint line of pink on the horizon. Daybreak was less than half an hour away. Wouldn't it be easiest for the Mars forms to be active only during the day, and to retreat to warmer interior regions at night?

  Maybe that was also the answer to the problem of air supply. There could be a steady absorption and accumulation of oxygen during a night period of dormancy, followed by expenditure during daytime activity. Could the surface forms be using some new method for body storage under pressure? They would in any case need high tolerance for carbon dioxide.

  Bey thought of the great whales, back on Earth. They took in air on the surface and dived cheerfully to a depth of a mile or more. The pressure change on their bodies during that descent and ascent was hundreds of atmospheres. During their half hour in the depths, the oxygen/CO2 ratio in their bodies steadily decreased. It did not trouble them. Bey could imagine ways that the modified alveolar patterns of whale lungs, together with their pressure change tolerance, might be achieved in humans. Embodying those ideas into a form-change program was tricky, but it did not sound impossible.

  In fact, it was clearly not impossible. Someone had done it. All Bey had to do was find that someone, and ask how.

  He roused himself and stared down at the ground. Its temperature was cold enough to burn bare flesh instantly, but the insulated boots of his suit protected him totally. There was no reason why a changed human form could not do just as well, making use of normal organic materials.

  It was still too early to distinguish between the dusty reds and stark blacks of the Mars surface, but Bey could see well enough to pick his way across the broken ground. The hangar for the aircar was already visible as a darker hulk against a purple-black sky. He made his way to it, wondering if his surface quest was totally unrealistic.

  How many surface forms were there? And what was the chance of encountering one or more of them today in an almost blind search, as Trudy Melford had done last time?

  Bey's natural skepticism kicked in. How much of a blind search had it been? Why should he believe that Trudy had done any such thing? Suppose the whole event had been a set-up, of BEC-funded forms planted at a particular place and time so that he could see them and be lured to work on Mars?

  There was only one way to find out. Bey went across to the hangar and climbed into the car. He checked that it was fully powered, then gave the command to take off. There was the same gut-wrenching twenty seconds of rough motion across the torn surface. Finally they became airborne, with the car circling steadily and waiting for Bey's next instruction.

  He set the course that he remembered from the last time, cruising slowly north at low altitude. He would not dare to fly too far in that direction at this time of day. With dawn came the diurnal bombardment of comet material, the fragments hurtling in to strike at twenty degrees latitude and beyond. The first fireball had already streaked across the sky ahead of the car.

  Would the surface forms remain hidden until the barrage was over? Or did the spectacle exercise for them, as it did for Bey, the awful fascination of world-building by planetary turmoil?

  The sun was well above the horizon now. Its clean bright disk of early morning started to streak and blur with plumes of dust and steam rising from the shattered surface. Bey forced himself to ignore the rain of comets and focused his attention on the rock structures ahead of the floating car.

  Even that proved disconcerting. Like most Earth-dwellers, Bey's knowledge of Mars geography was rudimentary. He knew that the smaller size and mass of the planet must permit steeper rock structures. He also knew that the horizon was closer, and the atmosphere much thinner. What he had not expected was the way that those variables conspired, to produce the effect of a circle of crisp, jagged mountains that sharply vanished at a certain distance, as though the world came to an end there.

  He tried to ignore that illusion of a circular cookie-cutter world with the car at its center, and concentrated only on what lay directly ahead. There was little to reward his attention. He was creeping along above a dry, rusty terrain populated with anonymous cliffs, shallow screes, and black boulders. After an hour's flight he had had his fill of sand, rock, and green-black lichen, and had seen nothing that was significant. He became convinced that he had mistaken the direction of his earlier flight; and then, when he was on the point of giving the command to circle back, the unmistakable and contrasting shapes of the Chalice and the Sword popped suddenly into view over the forward horizon.

  Bey instructed the car to set down between them. He could not tell if the terrain was rough or smooth, but there was little risk. If the ground was too broken for a safe landing the car's sensors would determine that. It would balk at the command to descend.

  Apparently the car had a high regard for its own durability. Even with a surface gravity less than two-fifths of Earth's, the landing—touch-down was surely the wrong word—rattled Bey's teeth. He held on tightly to the arm-rests until they at last shuddered to a halt.

  "You have air and power sufficient for twenty-one hours of moderately strenuous activity," said a warning female voice as Bey slid open the aircar door. "It is recommended that you return here for replenishment after no more than fifteen hours."

  "Sure. Fifteen hours." It was stupid, offering conventional and polite responses to a machine; but everybody did it.

  Bey found himself standing on a surface rather more rocky and uneven than the one he had started from. There was another and more major difference. The dark-green lichens near the surface exit point from Melford Castle had been no more than a thin varnish, a painted coating on the grains of rock. Here the surface cover comprised recognizable plants, their hair-thin central stems reaching up a few centimeters to try to grab a few photons more than their neighbors.

  He oriented himself using the Chalice and the Sword as reference points. The ledge of rock where he and Trudy had seen the surface forms lay about a kilometer to the north-west; the sunlight, striking in at a low angle, marked a faint track in that direction where vegetation did not grow. It could be a natural structure, a fault line in the underlying rock where plant nutrients were missing; or it just might be a trail, worn by the passage of many feet.

  Bey turned slowly to his left. There was another marked path heading off to the west, and it was much better defined than the first one. It led to an overhanging scarp face about thirty meters high, maybe half a kilometer away. Later in the day the sun would move to illuminate the side of the rocky mass facing Bey, but at the moment it formed a dark impenetrable shadow.

  Should he go to the place where he had seen them before, or pursue what seemed like the stronger trail?

  When you got right down to it, every important decision in life was made with inadequate information. The tough times were the ones when the decision was irrevocable. This one didn't seem to be. Bey made the mental toss of the coin, and headed west.

  The vegetation scrunched slightly under his boots. Looking behind him, he could see his progress marked by thin broken stems. It made him feel slightly guilty. He tried to walk where the path was already well-defined because plants were not growing as thickly. Vegetation on Mars bad enough to cope with from natural conditions, without a blundering human adding to the hardships.

  Soon he was at the edge of the shadowed rock. The track he was following went right up to the shadow and vanished into it. Bey could do the same, but he would have to use his suit light. Presumably the car had allowed for such a thing when it quoted him his power and air limits.

  He set the light to broad beam and turned it on. And froze.

  Rig
ht in front of him, standing no more than ten meters within the shadow, a white form was silently waiting.

  "Hello." Bey raised his suited arm in greeting. "Can you speak?"

  Even as he said the words they sounded inane.

  "Of course I can speak." The voice was faint and distorted, carrying to Bey partly through the thin Martian air and partly as ground vibration. It sounded impatient and irritated. Bey noticed that there was no cloud of frozen vapor emerging from the broad mouth to accompany the words. The form did not waste warmed air with valuable oxygen in it merely to produce speech. A smart design would pass it over the vocal chords and then return it to lung storage. And if this form had anything, it was a smart designer.

  "My name is Behrooz Wolf. I am a visitor to Mars. I would like to speak with you. I mean, with the ones of your kind who are most appropriate."

  "Sure. Take me to your leader. Why don't you just say it? I didn't volunteer for this job anyway. Come on." The form turned. "My name is Dmitri Seychel," it said over its shoulder as it headed deeper into the shadow, "though I'm sure you don't give a damn about that. What took you so long? I've been waiting for you ever since your car landed."

  Not it. He. Bey was sure he would have determined that for himself after a few more seconds. There were a hundred clues as to the innate sex of a form, and most of them had nothing to do with appearance or dress.

  He studied Dmitri Seychel as he walked along behind him. His only previous opportunity to examine the surface forms had come from above and far away. Now he could confirm or deny those first impressions.

  The body was a little taller than Earth-human average and far fatter. The bulky torso, arms, and upper legs were covered with a pouched suit of gleaming white. Bey suspected that, like the visible parts of the body itself, the suit changed color depending on its surroundings. It was white now, to minimize loss of heat, but it would change to black when exposed to sunlight. The fat body wobbled with each step that Seychel took. Almost certainly it bore an inches-thick layer of protective blubber as thermal insulation.