Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  “Um, excuse me?” Demeter spoke up.

  “Yes?” the AI replied after a pause.

  “Could we skip the electronics lesson and go see this thing?”

  “Your understanding of the scale of the station would not be complete without—”

  “I know all that. But I’d really like to take in the sights before I have to put in another quarter.”

  “‘Put in a…quarter?’” the machine repeated, mystified. “There is no such unit—”

  “Just wire me into the nearest proxy and keep your database to yourself, hear?”

  “As you wish.”

  The black background inside her goggles, representing the void surrounding the computerized construct of the station in abstract, suddenly glittered with stars. On the periphery of her vision, sand-colored Phobos tumbled slowly past.

  Demeter looked down. Her hands were no longer bone-and-blood hands in the V/R gloves. They had become what passed for manipulators with this proxy, and they were methodically walking up a ladder. Instead of fingers, the hands used parallel gripping surfaces which opened and closed with a barrel-screw drive, like an old-style Crescent wrench. These keyed into square holes bisected by a bar of sturdy metal. The holes—the rungs of the ladder—were aligned along the outside of a tube about two meters in diameter. Demeter let her gaze rise from this near view of continuous, repetitive motion up the tube…and up…and…

  She almost lost her balance—at least, part of her did, the part that was sitting in the flesh on her chair in the Golden Lotus’s simulation parlor. The proxy never swerved from its obstinate, mechanical climb. The tube it climbed seemed to stretch to infinity, sloping away from her like the curve of the horizon, leaving her with an endless number of steps to negotiate, ascending forever.

  Demeter took a stern hold on her stomach and looked away for some relief.

  Off to her left, a field of gold blossomed in her goggles. The image flared with reflected light, then dimmed as the proxy’s video chips bumped the signal down a few steps. When her goggles had stabilized, Demeter could see that the field was an array of solar cells, as blue as Earth’s upper atmosphere. The glare came from their spiderwork of wire cathodes momentarily catching the distant sun.

  The solar cells appeared to be massive hexagons, each perhaps a kilometer from point to point. It was hard to tell, exactly, because Demeter was seeing them almost edge on, from a totally flattened perspective. She could only approximate their outline from the angle of the various borders that stretched away from her single point of view, dark blue against the black of space. The AI narration would probably have something to say about hexagons being the simplest shape for tiling such a large area.

  Demeter looked back up the tube: more infinity, with stars.

  She looked off toward the right, and saw more flattened hexagons.

  She tried looking down, toward wherever the proxy had come from in its climb, but the sensor head would not swivel that far.

  After another fifty steps or so—each with its complicated slot-grip-and-pull gait—Demeter decided this was boring.

  “Um, Narrator?”

  “Yes, Miz Coghlan?”

  “What is this proxy used for when it’s not piggybacking tourists?”

  “This unit is a maintenance robot. It is assigned to walk the satellite’s support spars and inspect for meteor damage to the cell’s visible surfaces. It performs this function by interpolation of the—”

  “Thank you. Now, do you have any proxies that, oh, fly around and fix things? Is there anything interesting like that for me to see?”

  “Maintenance operations are carried out only in the event that actual damage is detected. Of course, we do have an interesting presentation, which—”

  “No, thank you. Um…this is a completed and fully functioning power satellite, isn’t it?”

  “Solar Power Station Four went into pre-startup operation on December 19, 2039. It attained full power on—”

  “All right, all right. But you’ve got a station still under construction, don’t you?” Demeter remembered something else Sorbel had told her. “Over Schiaparelli, isn’t it?”

  “That would be Station Six.”

  “Do you have any proxies there I could look in on? It would be interesting to see your orbital construction techniques.”

  “No tourist proxies are currently installed on that project.”

  “Well, could you plug me into a worker robot? I’ll accept visual signals only. I wouldn’t want to mess up its routines.”

  “I will see what feeds are available,” the AI said primly.

  The image in her goggles clicked through a brief spurt of static, and Demeter found herself at the center of a bouquet of arms. They were all jointed in two or more places, waving up around her sensor head like the stamens of a flower. Some had gripper claws holding pieces of irregularly shaped metal and moving them into position; others ended in tools like arc-welding probes and pop-riveting rams, which sequentially zipped and hammered the panels into the wall two meters in front of Demeter’s face.

  This scene didn’t look anything like the vast planes of the other power station, filled with darkly glimmering hexagonal cells crisscrossed by silvery wires. The metal pieces here were all bluntly curved and—from what she saw when one was being turned away from her—all several centimeters thick. Plate steel, Demeter guessed, but the color where the arc touched it was strange, purplish. Maybe some kind of alloy?

  She wished she could see more. She had no control over the sensor head, of course; that was reserved for the program directing this machine’s work. But from the views she snatched as the robot glanced here to gather one piece, there to align another, she figured out that this particular segment of the construction work was taking place inside a large, hollow cylinder some tens of meters in diameter. The space was already enclosed, the scene illuminated by high-intensity worklights. The robot seemed to be adding a second, interior wall to the one that defined the canister.

  What kind of a double-walled bottle would be needed on a solar power station? Demeter understood from the earlier narration that these satellites were fully automatic and so required no human habitations. And the nacelles for the transformers and microwave horns were small things, weren’t they? Three or four meters in any dimension, tops.

  Putting up two layers of thick metal might serve to protect critical components from asteroid strikes, especially this close to the Belt. But that didn’t seem to be the pattern of Martian orbital construction, at least as far as she’d seen it. The solar satellites apparently relied on redundant function and constant, mobile maintenance. Building bunkers in the sky just didn’t fit the established profile.

  “Narrator? What am I looking at? Is this some kind of hybrid station, maybe, with a reactor pressure vessel supplementing the—?”

  The goggles went dead black. No stars, no wire guides, no compass pattern. Demeter’s head filled with nothing. Her gloves clenched once, spasmodically, and went limp. The phone beads in her ears generated a steady, low hum.

  After thirty seconds—or perhaps thirty minutes, thirty hours—of this induced sensory deprivation, the voice of the AI narration returned.

  “I am sorry. You were plugged into an incorrect data feed.”

  “Oh. Then that wasn’t Solar Power Station Six?”

  “It was…not. What do you think of the geology of Mars so far, Miz Coghlan?”

  “The geol—?” For just a moment, her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth. It took an act of will to unstick it. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Nothing…This concludes your simulated tour of the Mars power stations. Have a nice day.”

  The low humming in her ears stopped. The goggles clicked once and turned themselves off without going through the closing logos and date-time sequence she had come to expect with these things.

  Shaking her head, Demeter pulled off the V/R helmet and stripped off the gloves. Suddenly, she didn’t feel
very well.

  Commercial Unit 2/9/6, June 13

  Dr. Wa Lixin was surprised when the grid warned that he would have to take an afternoon appointment out of rotation. It wasn’t the disruption to his schedule that surprised him, but the fact that he could not identify the patient as one of his own.

  “Coghlan? Demeter?” he asked, searching his memory. “Do I know him?”

  “She is a transient casual,” the disembodied voice replied. “You gave her a preliminary examination last week as part of your reimbursed civic practice. Now she claims to have symptoms and wants to see you again.”

  “Oh, all right.” Wa Lixin sighed and closed the journal file he had been reading. He sat up straight in his office chair and sent the screen into a neutral moiré pattern. “Send her in.”

  As the young woman stepped through the door, he recognized her. The plump Caucasian girl with the supposed cranial accident. “Hello, Miss Coghlan. Nice to see you again—I hope?”

  “Hi, Dr. Lee…” She perched on the edge of his examination table, rather than taking the chair facing him across the desk. “I wanted to…um, that is…”

  “Yes?”

  “When I was here last time did I mention, well, mental problems?”

  “Let me see.” Wa turned to the screen and pulled up her file from the archives. It was fragmentary but did include his comment about intermittent complaints of “inability to integrate,” which she appeared to have fully compensated.

  “You said you had occasional trouble concentrating.”

  “Yeah. I fall asleep at odd times, too. And, just since I got here, I’ve had the hardest time, well, sticking to things. Like, personal decisions I just made.”

  “Since you got here?” He picked up the verbal clue right away. “But not before?”

  “I don’t remember it coming up before. Maybe I’m all turned around by the cultural differences, meeting new people, that sort of thing. But I feel I’ve been acting, well, weird.”

  “For example?”

  “Well, twice now I’ve had sex with a man whom I find totally immature. Even a little repulsive. In an alien kind of way.”

  “Is he…not of your race?” Wa Lixin had heard that most continental Americans, Texahomans especially, were closet xenophobes.

  “He’s a—what you call a Creole.”

  “Ah? Yes, I see. You would find such a person exotic.”

  “Well, at first. Now he’s just crude and boring.”

  Dr. Lee smiled. “You are not the first person to be seduced by a foreigner, Miss Coghlan. Or by a Cyborg.”

  “All right, I guess I needed to hear that. But what about the other? The drowsiness—”

  “We have a longer day here.”

  “—and the zoniness.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My head’s up in the clouds half the time,” she said. “I say one thing and something else seems to come out—the wrong word, or sometimes even a completely different thought. It’s like my head’s stuffed with cotton wool.”

  The doctor tried to imagine such a substance and failed. “These are the same symptoms as before?” he asked “Having to do with your concentration problems?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “And, after the accident, did your doctors or therapists prescribe anything for it?”

  “Cocanol.”

  It was the brand name for a synthetic alkaloid, derivative of cocaine, that enhanced the action of neurotransmitters in the brain by delaying the enzymic breakdown of acetylcholine at the point of synapse. Cocanol was supposed to be nonaddictive, but Wa Lixin had his doubts. Any patient who came in complaining of vague symptoms but pronouncing a ready affinity for the drug aroused his suspicions.

  “I see.” He kept his face an unreadable blank.

  “Cocanol seemed to help, back on Earth. At least, I could think of something for longer than ninety seconds at a time.”

  Patients who took Cocanol in clinical tests reported having “a mind like a laser” and being able to “see through a brick wall.” Or that was their perception, anyway. Then Wa Lixin decided to relax and give the woman what she wanted—so long as a check with Earth’s grid nexus confirmed her previous prescription. After all, Demeter Coghlan wasn’t really his patient.

  “As your locally assigned physician, I can prescribe for you,” he told her. “I’ll make sure the grid issues you a supply. It will be waiting at your hotel.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Lee.” With a brief, reflex grin she jumped down from the table. “That’s all?”

  “Subject to the usual billing. I still have your account number.”

  “Ta, then.” And, once again, she passed through his waiting room and out of his life.

  Golden Lotus, June 13

  The doctor was as good as his word: when Demeter put her thumbprint to the touchplate that protected entry to the Golden Lotus’s suite, the doorkeeper announced that a package was waiting for her at the front desk.

  She took the parcel back to her room and opened it. A month’s supply of patches spilled out on the bed. Demeter peeled one and slapped it against the skin behind her left ear. The darkened flesh tone of the disk’s outer covering blended with the short hairs at the nape of her neck, concealing her use of it.

  Almost instantly, the familiar licorice flavor filled the back of her throat, the sign that her bloodstream was receiving the medication. In a minute or two, Demeter could feel her head clearing, her thoughts untangling, her brain coming alive.

  “You have a visitor,” the room announced.

  “Oh? Who?”

  “Lole Mitsuno, hydrologist with the—”

  “Let him in.”

  The door slid back on the tall, blond man. He gave her a nice smile, but she could read just a hint of worry at the edges. It was the way the corners of his lips turned down. That, and the slight defensive position of his hands, cupped at his thighs, as he stood there.

  “Lole!” Demeter came forward with her hands outstretched, palms down, willing him to take her in his arms for a friendly hug. Or something more. Anything more would do.

  He grasped her fingers, like a trapeze artist who had nearly missed a flying catch. He held her practically at arm’s length, and the worry lines stayed with his smile.

  “Glad I found you,” he said. “Did you…have an interesting day?”

  “Why, yes. Um—” Demeter glanced back into the room, which really had nowhere for them to sit but on the bed. “Let’s go to the lounge where we can talk.”

  “Sure.”

  As she led him down the corridor to the hotel’s public rooms, Demeter was sure he would grill her about that foolish request she’d made of Ellen Sorbel. Lole had once practically accused her of being an Earth spy when they had gone out hunting water; then this morning she had admitted as much to his closest coworker. Mitsuno would want to examine her motives—and the secret information she’d hinted at with Ellen—before either of them offered to help.

  Not that Demeter particularly needed Sorbel’s programming skills now. With the Cocanol at work, fluffing and combing her brains, Demeter could think of at least a dozen other ways of getting access to the messages sent by her opponents. Probably the simplest would be to turn Sugar loose on a badger hunt in the grid’s databases to dig out the archivals of all interplanetary communications. Any quasi-governmental system would routinely keep offline copies, if only to indemnify itself against damage claims from garbles and lost transmissions.

  So, all Demeter had to do now was convince Lole that Ellen must have misunderstood her. As a fallback, Demeter might even claim that she never entered the Agnus Dei geological data at all—that Ellen must have been hallucinating, or encountering a cybernetic hiccup, or something.

  Hey! Demeter had finally said it—or thought it, anyway. “Geological,” the word that had been playing on her mind and tangling her tongue for days now. She congratulated herself on finally going to the doctor and getting the medicine she needed.

  In the
lounge, Demeter steered him to one of the armchairs. Then she positioned herself on the settee next to it, curling one leg attractively underneath her and twisting her body to offer her best profile. “What did you do today?” she began brightly.

  “The usual—walked the pipelines, looking for wind erosion around the support brackets and pebbling of the conduit surface.”

  “You went outside again?”

  “No, we use satellite surveillance. I do my patrol through a pair of goggles and gloves.”

  “Seems like everyone works that way,” Demeter commented.

  “You went up to the power satellites, didn’t you?”

  “Ah…yes. How’d you know?”

  “The system logs in all visitors. Ellen told me.”

  “She did.”

  “What do you think of our orbital construction program?”

  “Well, I didn’t see much of it. What there was looked pretty boring. Miles and miles of blue sheet silicon, all etched with little silver wires. After you get your mind around the sheer size of the thing, it seems fairly uncomplicated.”

  “Did you get to see the new station?”

  “Which one’s that?” Demeter had to think for a minute.

  “The one that’s still under construction.”

  “I don’t believe so. Does the logbook say I did?”

  “No.”

  “Then I guess not. The touring software showed me something…” Demeter tried to sort out her memories—they were still a little hazy—from the time before she took her medicine. “But it wasn’t anything to do with solar power. I’m not even sure it was in orbit. The signals got crossed up somehow. Typical cyber foulup.”

  Lole Mitsuno was looking at her thoughtfully.

  “What?” Demeter said after a long pause. Maybe twenty seconds.

  “You really don’t like computers, do you?”