The Martian Viking

by Tim Sullivan

  As they moved toward the compound, Johnsmith glanced at the new buildings under construction, which Hi had told him about a few days ago. It appeared that the new buildings would be considerably more elaborate than the quonset huts they were now approaching.

  The wind whipped around them so savagely that Johnsmith almost lost his footing once or twice. He wondered if the Martian wind ever completely died down. It seemed to somehow penetrate his pressure suit, chilling him in spite of the suit's heater.

  They came to the nearest hut and went inside. There was an antechamber, sort of a spacious airlock, where they could remove their suits and hang them up. They did so, and followed Angel Torquemada into a long, warm room where a dozen or so people sat on long benches working with machines Johnsmith was unfamiliar with. He noticed an odd odor as he looked around. It was more than the close smell of human sweat, machines, and synthetic coffee. It occurred to him that this smell, which he could not identify, might be the lingering scent of Mars itself. Johnsmith felt dizzy with the knowledge of just how different, how alien his surroundings were from what he had known all his life.

  He really was on Mars.

  "This is data processing," Angel Torquemada said. His black hair was combed straight back, widow's peak over an aquiline nose and thin lips. "If you show aptitude and add up enough merit points, you may be promoted to work in here. If not, there's plenty of work available building the factory."

  "What factory?" Felicia asked in a suspicious tone.

  Torquemada turned to her. With no change of expression, he said, "The one we are building here."

  "What are you going to make here that you couldn't manufacture on Luna or in the Belt?" Felicia asked. "I mean, Mars isn't known for this kind of thing, is it? The main thing is trying to grow plants and melt the polar ice cap for terraforming, as I've always understood it."

  Torquemada's bloodless face showed nothing. His indifference seemed ominous to Johnsmith somehow, more intimidating than if he had shown anger at her impertinence. "We are already producing," he said finally, "though only at a fraction of the rate we anticipate when the new buildings go up."

  Felicia clearly expected him to say more, but he didn't. Instead, he turned and resumed the tour. They passed through a curved, plastic connecting tunnel and entered another quonset hut. Here were bunks lined up along the walls, lockers, and showers at the far end.

  "You'll come back here after you've seen the rest of the compound," Torquemada said.

  Obviously, this remark did not apply to Hi and his colleague. They made themselves at home in the barracks, kicking off their boots and lying down as the tour went into a second connecting corridor leading to yet another hut. This one was larger than the others and was L-shaped, the nearest section containing a mess hall and kitchen; a passageway led them to a recreation area with pool and ping-pong tables, exercise machines, and three library booths. Johnsmith was relieved to see the latter, which he had begun to fear would be nonexistent at such a remote outpost. At least he would have some stimulation while he was stranded on this dead world.

  In spite of insulation and sound proofing, the wind lashed at the hut so powerfully that Torquemada could hardly be heard above its howling.

  "I know you must be exhausted," he said. "You've seen everything but your workspace. That can wait until tomorrow. Now feel free to go back to the barracks. You'll find kits containing personal items on your bunks. That's all."

  Returning to the barracks, they passed the ping-pong players and pool sharks, the servochefs, and the handful of people dining quietly. As Torquemada had indicated, there were three bunks with nylon bags resting on drum-tight blankets. These were their personal kits.

  Johnsmith pulled at velcro tabs and opened his kit. It contained a toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving gear, towels, soap, and antiseptic spray. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted that Felicia, apparently assigned to the bunk next to his own, had been provided precisely the same items.

  "I think I'll have a shower and shave off my beard," Alderdice said.

  As soon as he was left alone with Felicia and the slumbering crew of the Interplan ship in the vast barracks, Johnsmith said, "I'm surprised that they have showers."

  "Why?" Felicia said, not sounding particularly interested.

  "Well, because water is so scarce on Mars. Isn't that why the colonies are all—except for this one, I mean—near the polar ice cap?"

  "This must be an area where they found aquifers," Felicia said. "I remember seeing it in Pixine."

  "You mean they drilled down through the rock and hit a water table, or something?" Johnsmith said.

  "Yeah, that's probably why they started building this compound."

  "Sure, makes sense." Johnsmith sat down on his bunk, finding, not unsurprisingly, that it was not a particularly comfortable mattress.

  As he sat in silence, he saw somebody moving through the connecting corridor. A moment later, Angel Torquemada entered, holding a clipboard.

  "Uh, sir," Johnsmith said.

  Torquemada looked up from the papers fastened to the clipboard. "Yes?"

  "Mr. Torquemada, I've been wondering about something ever since you told us this is a factory."

  "And what might that be?"

  There was no hint of impatience or annoyance in Torquemada's voice, and yet his manner still troubled Johnsmith. Nevertheless, Johnsmith finished what he had started. "What do we manufacture here?"

  Torquemada looked straight into his eyes. "Onees," he said, and continued on his way.

  SEVEN

  JOHNSMITH HAD BEEN dreaming of the sweltering heat of Earth, when he was awakened by an ungodly honking noise. He jumped up, nearly falling out of bed.

  "Rise and shine!" a strange voice bellowed.

  For a moment, Johnsmith didn't know where he was. He looked around in confusion, thinking that he would see Ronindella and Smitty. But he knew they weren't here. They couldn't be here in this drab barracks with these fifty or so prisoners. One look at Felicia, lying in the bunk beside his, and he knew that.

  The horrid honking sounded again. It was Angel Torquemada, blowing on a conch shell as he passed through the barracks. "Let's go," he shouted between honks. "You've got a busy day ahead of you."

  They were up and into their paper fatigues in a couple of minutes, Torquemada constantly prodding them, occasionally waving or thrusting the conch shell for emphasis as he hurried them up.

  As soon as they were dressed, they were led through the connecting tunnel. Johnsmith groaned to see that it was not yet light outside. They jogged through the empty recreation area and past the mess hall and kitchen, taking a connecting tunnel that led to a building Johnsmith, Alderdice, and Felicia had not been introduced to yesterday. Johnsmith groaned again, seeing that they were to have no breakfast before they got to work.

  "Double time it!" roared Angel Torquemada, running at the head of the clomping column of prisoners. Instead of turning the corner of the L-shaped building, he led them through a connecting tunnel to another previously unseen part of the compound. The tunnel mouth sloped into the ground. They jogged down a ramp into a cavern a few yards beneath the surface. There were exercise mats and a target range laid out in the football-field length chamber. Though oxygen had been pumped in, the place reeked of the same dusty, metallic odor that Johnsmith had noticed shortly after their arrival at Elysium.

  "Line up over here," commanded Angel Torquemada.

  They did as they were told, falling in a long line before which Torquemada paced, still carrying the conch shell in his right hand. A powerfully built man with an orange crewcut joined him.

  "This is Sergeant Daiv," Torquemada said, stopping two paces in front of Johnsmith, Felicia, and Alderdice. "He'll be working with the new people. The rest of you know what to do."

  With that, the others split off to go to the firing range or to the mats, leaving Johnsmith and his two companions alone with Sergeant Daiv and Angel Torquemada.

  "The Sergeant will
take good care of you," Angel Torquemada said. "Meanwhile, I'm going to have some breakfast."

  Torquemada left them alone with their drill instructor, who sneered at them knowingly. "You snotballs have been in space for the best part of a year," he said. "You've had it pretty easy. No more, though. You're going to get in shape like a good combat team, and you're going to start right now!"

  And they did. First, Sergeant Daiv led the three of them around the cavern, ten laps that had Johnsmith wheezing ominously after only one. Then, without even a brief rest, they were up doing calisthenics on the mats, and then they were running ten more laps. This went on for an hour or more, the most grueling sixty or seventy minutes Johnsmith had spent in many a year. Fortunately, the low atmospheric pressure seemed to make his body quite resilient. Still, he was pretty exhausted by the time they were permitted to shower and go to breakfast.

  Johnsmith stopped for a moment on the way through the connecting tube, before entering the mess hall. The sun was shining, and the sand drifts were whipping about here and there over the rilles, but the Marscape was brilliantly clear when dust was not swirling about the compound. The horizon was too near, and the light too intense in spite of the tiny sun. He suddenly felt very lonely, a hundred million miles from home, everything he had ever loved taken from him, staring out at a desert that went on for thousands of miles. No prisoner had ever been so totally trapped before space colonization had begun.

  Felicia spoke from behind him: "There's a lot of room to hide out there."

  "Hide?" Johnsmith said. He turned to see Alderdice dismiss her comment with a wave of one hand while waddling toward the mess hall. "What do you mean, hide?"

  "Isn't it obvious?" she said. "There's a whole planet out there, with only a few human encampments on it. If we can get away from here . . ."

  "But how would we live out there, Felicia?" Johnsmith asked. "The atmosphere is ninety or ninety-five percent carbon dioxide. We aren't plants, able to breathe that stuff."

  "There's got to be a way."

  "Well, I don't see how." Johnsmith turned away from the bleak vista and walked to the mess hall. Felicia was right behind him as the servochef doled out his portion onto a tray. It didn't look very appetizing, but Johnsmith was very hungry. He took a cup of synthetic coffee along with the food, and joined Alderdice, who was already eating.

  "It's not Kwikkee-Kwizeen," Alderdice said, "but it'll have to do."

  "Don't mention Kwikkee-Kwizeen," Felicia said, arriving at the table a moment after Johnsmith.

  "Why not?" Alderdice looked at her suspiciously. "Do you have some connection to . . .now I remember where I know you from! Felicia Burst, in Pixine!"

  Johnsmith turned to her. "You were in Pixine? Are you famous, Felicia?"

  She would not look at him. "My family is."

  "Of course!" Johnsmith felt very stupid for not realizing this months ago. "The daughter of Edweard and Jannelle Burst, scion of the Burst Corporation and the—

  "—Kwikkee-Kwizeen fortune," Felicia said with resignation, chewing a toasted fiber stick.

  "And you were captured by terrorists," Alderdice added. "Brainwashed, and turned into a revolutionary."

  "Revolutionist," Felicia corrected him. "And everything you heard about me was bullshit."

  Johnsmith and Alderdice were annoyed. They had been thoroughly enjoying themselves, and had forgotten all about their predicament for a few seconds. It was disappointing to think that this new distraction wouldn't last.

  "What do you mean?" Johnsmith asked, sensing that Alderdice couldn't ask because of his government programming. Pixine stories were official. Government employees had no choice but to believe them.

  "Just what I said," Felicia told him in no uncertain terms. "It was all bullshit. I wanted to go with them."

  "You wanted to go with a bunch of terrorists?" Alderdice said. "But why?"

  "They weren't materialistic swine like the people I'd known all my life. They were real people."

  "You speak of them in the past tense," Johnsmith observed.

  "Sure, the Conglom troops killed them all when they discovered where our hideout was."

  "All but you, huh?" Johnsmith found this troubling.

  "That's right, all but me. And you know why?" Without waiting for an answer, Felicia burst into an impassioned explanation. "I'll tell you why. Because I'm the daughter of one of the world's wealthiest families. Because the Bursts own over six percent of the Conglom, Interplan, everything. Because money is power, and power is evil. I've spent my life trying to change the power structure of the solar system, and I haven't given up yet." Her voice had steadily risen until some of the other prisoners were staring at her. "I'm proud to be a revolutionist."

  "All right, Felicia," Johnsmith said, "calm down now. You've proved your sincerity."

  "Have I?" She looked down at her tray, saying with a softness that betrayed her rage, "All I have to do to get out of here is recant."

  Neither Johnsmith nor Alderdice spoke for a few seconds. They were marooned on Mars for life, no matter what. The only sin either of them had committed was being bad at his job. It seemed incredible that this young woman, convicted of violent crimes against all the nations of Earth, could go free by just uttering a phrase of repentance.

  "Then why don't you?" Alderdice said at length.

  "Why don't I what?" Felicia said. "Tell them I'm sorry? Say I was a bad girl, and I won't do it again? Never."

  "I would," Alderdice mumbled, taking a sip of his synthetic coffee.

  "But it's different for us," Johnsmith said, beginning to appreciate Felicia's position. "We don't have any choice. Felicia's here because she wants to be here. Am I right, Felicia?"

  She looked up at Johnsmith with a grateful expression he had never seen on her face before. "Yes, that's right. You understand, don't you, Johnsmith? You really understand."

  "Well, sort of." He was reminded of his difficulties at the University. He had known that he had to do better, but he had been unable to fake it, even though he knew the Triple-S would get him if he didn't shape up. Something in him had prevented him from following the course of least resistance; as a result, he was now on Mars . . .and he would never go home again. He decided not to think about it anymore.

  "You know," Felicia said. "something's been bothering me for the past hour or so."

  "Oh?" Johnsmith ingested a bit of protein paste, licking the excess from his lips.

  "Yeah, they're training us for battle. Why do you suppose they want us to be ready for combat?"

  "Probably nothing," Alderdice said. "The government has all sorts of grandiose names for ordinary things. Calling an exercise period "combat training" is in keeping with that fine tradition, I assure you."

  The conversation was cut short abruptly by the conch shell. They looked toward the mess hall entrance, where Angel Torquemada was blowing a second blast.

  "Apparently, breakfast is over," Johnsmith said.

  "Stack your trays and follow me back to the training area," Torquemada ordered them.

  They did as they were told. The session that followed was target practice with automatic weapons and high-energy particle beams. Sergeant Daiv took them through the procedures carefully, explaining each step as they went along.

  The first time Johnsmith fired a gun, he thought his shoulder would be wrenched from its socket. He couldn't hear anything for fifteen minutes after he stopped firing, either. The particle beam was much more pleasant, though it was disconcerting to see it burn holes through a cinder block, especially when he was firing it himself. Sergeant Daiv praised him for that particular shot, however.

  At half past eleven, they broke for lunch. Johnsmith was grateful that Mars had close to a twenty-four hour day, or there was no telling how long they might have been commanded to remain on the range practicing their uneven marksmanship.

  All of the other prisoners, besides Johnsmith, Felicia, and Alderdice, had returned to the business of constructing the new sections of
the compound and manufacturing onees. It occurred to Johnsmith that their warden felt there was little reason to hurry in training the new arrivals for their jobs, since at least two of them would be here for the rest of their lives. Still, it was odd that they learned to fight before anything else. Who were they expected to fight? Each other? Gladiatorial combat? The thought made him laugh. Johnsmith had led a sedentary life on Earth, and all this exercise didn't suit him very well. He would have preferred to learn about the excitation of the nervous system through the onee's electronic charge. Maybe he could find out more about what went on at Elysium during the evening meal, or in the recreation area later on.

  But the three new draftees did not eat dinner with the others, and there was no time to be wasted with games. They were sent to the showers and then to the barracks. As he bathed, Johnsmith surreptitiously watched Felicia soap her slender body. In spite of his exhaustion, he was aroused. Turning away out of embarrassment, he was dismayed to discover that Alderdice was staring at him.

  Turning the cold water on himself at full force, Johnsmith felt himself wilting. It seemed as though the infernal frigidity of Mars seeped into his bones instantaneously. He shook the soapsuds out of his hair as the freezing water engulfed him, reminding him of that first onee experience once again. But the illusion passed quickly, spoiled by the odor of Mars streaming over him, its minerals carried in the water. Would he ever get used to it?

  He shut off the shower valve and got a towel, immediately wrapping it around his waist even before drying his back and arms. As he grabbed another towel to dry his hair, he caught a glimpse of the forlorn Alderdice, whose brown bulk emerged from the steaming shower room.

  As soon as he was dressed, Johnsmith retired to the barracks and turned down the covers of his bunk. He heard footsteps and, assuming it was Alderdice, did not look up.

  "Got you on curfew, huh?" It was a woman's voice, but not Felicia's.

  He raised his head to see her, a wiry woman in her early thirties whom he had noticed in passing during the morning exercises. "Yes," he said, "Mr. Torquemada says we have to go to bed early."