Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  “The smoking is my pleasure,” he said today. Quite reasonably, he thought.

  “It’s dirty. You stink up the house.”

  “What good is it to have a house,” he said with a shrug, “if a man cannot stink it up occasionally?”

  “I have to live here too!”

  “One cigarette? It never bothered you before.”

  “It bothered me. I just never said anything.”

  “Well…there then!” Kemil struggled for advantage on this slippery rhetorical slope. “This is no time to start complaining.”

  “I can complain if I want to. My hair and clothing always smelling like burning tar. Every day the Citizen’s Militia come sniffing around, making rude eyes at me. My food tastes bad—”

  “Your food always tastes bad!”

  “You pig! You filthy Turkish pig!”

  The encounter, no longer likely to be brief, quickly passed through the feverish stage as Gloria hefted the unfinished plate of hummus and slung it at his head.

  Ergun ducked and heard the crockery smash against the wall behind him.

  “You’ll just have to clean that up.” He shrugged again.

  “I’ll clean you up!” She snatched a knife, holding it pointed toward his midsection, a meter and a half away with the table between them.

  It was a dull blade, the one he used for spreading the garbanzo bean paste. It could do him no conceivable harm. Not in her hands, anyway. Ergun grinned at her.

  “Eeee-yi-heeee!” she shrieked. In frustration, he thought.

  Gloria Chan made a feint around the table. Then, in one smooth move, she flipped the knife expertly in her fingers, drew her hand back, and threw Aiming low.

  Ergun ducked again, but the blade caught him between the shoulder and chest. It could not penetrate very deeply, but it made him pause and blink in surprise. He felt a cold wetness against his skin. The residue of oily, yellow-brown paste on the blade would surely stain his shirt. Now he would have to change it before going back to work. His eyes squinted in fury, Ergun came around the table fast, charging at his wife.

  Gloria turned and fled down the hall, headed for the outer door, the public corridor beyond, and a total scandal.

  She was still shrieking. “Help! Murder!”

  That was exactly what Kemil Ergun had in mind.

  Level Two, Tunnel Six, June 14

  Demeter Coghlan was crossing between one ramp and another on Tharsis Montes’s second level, heading back down to her hotel after lunch, when the shouting caught her attention.

  “Help! Murder!”

  Demeter was still so steamed over Jory’s two-faced treatment of her that she wasn’t thinking straight. Prudence, in a 21st-century urban setting, said you moved away from a cry of murder. Instead, Demeter was drawn to it: the voice was a woman’s.

  The corridors were narrower here than elsewhere in the complex—one sign, she had come to understand, of a private residential zone. The hex cubes were laid out with their connecting tunnels branching off at opposing angles, so that the eye was not oppressed by long vistas of drab, dull rock. Demeter threaded her way from one cut chamber to the next, seeking the origin of that shout.

  On either side of the corridor, doors were opening and heads popping out. Martians might value their privacy above all else, Demeter reflected, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy a ruckus when one presented itself. Most of the faces seemed to be some blend of Earth’s Asian populations.

  Demeter had gone perhaps fifty paces down the tunnel when a young woman came around a corner and ran full-tilt into her. Demeter held on to the other’s arms as the two of them went down.

  “Let me go!” The young woman straggled. From her severely styled hair, Demeter guessed she was ethnic Chinese. “He’s going to kill me!”

  By the time Demeter had untangled herself and risen to one knee, other people were around to keep the woman from flying off.

  “What’s happening?”

  “Who’s been killed?”

  “Isn’t that Gloria Chan?”

  “Help! Murder!” the Chinese woman shrieked again and pushed her way through the crowd.

  The source of her terror appeared one second later. A man stumbled out of the cube she had just left. He wore dark slacks and a white shirt, blotched with blood. The handle of a knife stuck out of the shirt at a high angle. His dark face, crossed with a black and bristling mustache, was purple with rage. His eyes certainly sparked murder.

  “Stop him!”

  “It’s the Turk!”

  “He’ll kill her!”

  “Killer!”

  The man passed by Demeter at a stiff-legged run, going after the woman, whose name appeared to be Gloria Chan. The people on all sides tried to grapple with him, but the sight of the knife handle put them off. One man fell, shrieking, and pulled down another. In two seconds more, neighbor had struck neighbor and a brawl was under way, everyone screaming in high-pitched gabble that bore no relation to English.

  Demeter, still down on one knee, shrank against the tunnel wall and tried to keep out of the flight path of fists and feet. She raised the charm bracelet to the vicinity of her mouth.

  “Sugar, call the police or whoever.”

  “Never no mi-ii—”

  A hand reached down and clawed at Demeter’s arm. The bangle was torn away and flew across the corridor. A silvery wink among dark and hobbling heads was the last Coghlan saw of her personal chrono.

  She pressed into the one of the hex corners, made herself small in the junction between walls and floor, and waited for a break in the action so she might crawl into a doorway.

  Demeter was still waiting when the corridor flooded with gas. Even with a fold of sleeve pressed over her nose and mouth, she felt its effects after a moment. Then she felt nothing at all.

  Municipal Lockup, June 14

  Ellen Sorbel’s head had been deep in the geological strata, feeling her way across a layer of broken schist, when Wyatt’s voice came for her.

  “You are wanted in jail,” he said smugly.

  “What? Now?” Ellen never brought her senses out of the datastream, just spoke as one disembodied voice to another. “Why?”

  “A casual has been picked up in a public disturbance. She gives your name as a reference. Shall I say you are otherwise occupied?”

  “Who is it? Oh, let me guess. Demeter Coghlan, right?”

  “The woman can give no clear account of herself. She seems to have lost both her identity cards and her chrono. But Coghlan is the name she used.”

  “Tell them I’ll be down directly.”

  Wyatt paused before responding. “Really, Miz Sorbel, your work for this department is much more important than looking after a…barfly.”

  “Where did you get a term like that?” Ellen wondered aloud. “Demeter is a friend. Now unhook me…and pass my message, will you?”

  “Very well,” the machine said stiffly.

  Ellen had to appear at the cells in person to make the identification, now that Demeter had lost her electronic persona. When Sorbel arrived at the secure area, obvious from its uniform gray paint and its location down at the complex’s lowest finished level, she found a dozen pallets laid out in the open corridors. Each one held a sleeping body, covered to the chin by a white sheet. Some of the sheets were spotted with blood. Here and there a medic attempted to bind a scalp wound or pressure-cuff a broken bone. It looked like the aftermath of a tong war; every exposed face was Chinese or Central Asian. This disturbed Ellen, because the Pacific Rim community was one of Tharsis Montes’s most peaceful enclaves.

  “Where is the Earth casual?” Sorbel asked the first militiaman she encountered.

  “That way.” He inclined his head down the tunnel.

  She passed five cells, all large communal blocks three meters on a side. They were filled with drooping, listless people of mixed race, again with Chinese predominant. Some of the prisoners stared back; one or two smiled at Sorbel’s own Pacific Rim face and
coloring. None of these looked at all like Demeter. But from the sixth cell she heard: “Ellen! Over here!”

  Demeter’s Anglo features shone out like a beacon.

  “Demeter, how did you get in there?”

  “Some kind of riot. I just walked into it, minding my own business.”

  Ellen sensed this was not the entire truth. “I’ll see if I can get you out,” she promised.

  Sorbel went back and found the militiaman. She offered her chips for verification and got Demeter released into her custody. Before he would let the Earth woman go, however, the man outlined Ellen’s responsibilities in detail.

  “I have to accompany you in court, personally, if there’s to be a hearing,” she explained to Coghlan as the two walked past the gray-painted walls, through a door made up of steel bars, and into the public corridors.

  “Will they call me as a witness?”

  “No, as a defendant. In cases like this, the presumption is that you went out of your zone and gave someone cause to take insult.”

  Demeter gasped. “But…I was trying to help! This woman was crying out in terror, so I went over to help her.”

  “And sparked a racial incident.”

  “No, that was the man with the mustache. And the knife. He was a Turk, they said.”

  “You saw such a man?”

  “He went right past me, close enough to touch. He was trying to kill the woman.”

  “Kill her with the knife?”

  “No, it was sticking out of him. Here.” Demeter jabbed fingertips at an angle above her own left breast.

  “Sounds like a family dispute that got out of hand. Then there probably won’t be a court of inquiry. Not if enough people tell the same story.”

  “Does this sort of thing happen every day?” Demeter asked.

  “Well…more often than we’d like. Living so close together, and underground most of the time, people get tense. Tempers flare up.”

  “What will happen to the couple that started it?”

  “They will be counseled, then each made to wear homing bracelets for a while.”

  “Homing—?”

  “Don’t you have them on Earth? They allow the grid to track your whereabouts at all times. You can go to your place of employment during your normal work hours, then you go straight home. Show up anywhere else and you provoke an armed response from the Citizen’s Militia.”

  “Charming. How long does this leper treatment usually last?”

  “Some weeks. Long enough to make an impression and achieve a measure of behavior modification. If drugs or alcohol are found to be contributing factors, they will be forbidden for the duration of the homing period.”

  “How do you achieve that?” Demeter smiled. “A stiff warning?”

  “Slivers of Antabuse, surgically inserted along with the bracelet. Take a drink or pop a lid with that under your skin, and you’ll think you died. You’ll certainly puke enough to die, though the homer helps by monitoring your vital signs. Nobody’s actually gone out while under therapy—not in the last ten years or so, anyway.”

  “You people know a thing or two about crowd control, don’t you?”

  “We have to.” Ellen shrugged. “Think what would happen if a full-scale riot boiled over to the surface levels and somebody punched out a door. That is not a docile climate out there, like you have in Texas.”

  “I suppose not.” Demeter didn’t sound happy. “This place isn’t a thing like Texas.”

  Golden Lotus, June 14

  Demeter Coghlan missed Sugar—even if the titanium bangle was just a machine. She missed the routine of putting her to bed under a water glass, pretending that the chrono might hear Demeter talk in her sleep and report the details to someone, something, somewhere.

  That way, at least, Demeter could imagine that somebody cared about her. As it was, she had to make her report to Gregor Weiss alone that night, just her and the room’s dumb terminal. It was not a happy report.

  “I’m blown, Greg. That’s the long and short of it.”

  Demeter leaned back against the pillows, keeping her head turned toward the microphone. Although, in this small room, how much could directionals matter?

  “The Korean agent knows all about me. Even a lightweight like him spotted me within five minutes. And the Zealander woman blew my cover even before that. Today she was actually giving me pointers on how to be a better spy, for future reference. This place is just a sieve. Every time you turn around, someone’s poking you in the shoulder, telling you how to mind your own business. Half the time, they aren’t even human. Just some mechanical presence, always pushing you around.”

  Demeter thought about that for a moment. She decided to let the sentiment go out as spoken.

  “Paragraph. I’ve tried to get out to the Valles Marineris for evaluation. That’s a bust, too. I’ve seen about as much as you can by walking over the ground inside an animated tripod with a three-dee sensor head. I’ve also taken feed from the dirtmovers on site. But getting there in the flesh…well, it’s just not going to happen. Not unless I mount a full-blown overland safari, with native bearers and elephants—or their mechanical equivalent. You got a budget of a million Neu for this gig? I thought not.

  “Paragraph. The bottom line, Greg, is I want to come home. Mars is not a happy place. Too many people living in too small a cubbyhole. Even the air is stale. I can’t breathe most of the time. So, book passage for me, will you? Next available transport. I’ll take anything you can arrange. Ore boat on a long traverse to the Kirkwood Gap, if you can get it. Just remove me from this sufferin’ anthill!”

  Demeter tried to think of anything else to say. There was nothing.

  “Endit. Code and send…And, Terminal?”

  “Yes, Miz Coghlan?”

  “Turn off the lights, please.”

  She was too tired to move, and her eyes were too wet and blurry to find the wall switch.

  “Of course, Miz Coghlan.” After a moment’s pause, long enough for her to punch up the pillows behind her head, the room went dark.

  Chapter 11

  A Visit with the Elders

  Golden Lotus, June 15

  The new day brought Demeter Coghlan out of bed with a much better mental attitude. With luck, this was going to be her last day on Mars. Or, anyway, the last before she got a positive commitment to bring her home, which was almost as good.

  That being the case, she wanted one final stab at reconnoitering the Valles Marineris District, pulling out all the stops and giving it her very best effort. To do this, Demeter decided, she had to overcome a load of cultural taboos and talk directly to Roger Torraway, Mars’s unofficial first citizen and Guinness Guide title-holder as eldest Cyborg. He ought to know something about the Valles, if anyone did.

  Demeter walked into the hotel’s simulation parlor, plugged herself into the nearest booth, and called up the resident menu. There was no entry for people, even famous ones, just the usual packaged tours.

  “Terminal…”

  “Yes, Miz Coghlan?”

  “Patch me through to Roger Torraway.”

  “Colonel Torraway is not a token holder on this network.”

  “Huh? I thought all Cyborgs were hard-wired into the grid.”

  “That is true: packet radio communications are not optional for recent human-Cyborg conversions. However, Colonel Torraway’s processors precede the fabrication of this nexus.”

  “All right, then,” Demeter said reasonably. “Find out his present location, and slot me into the nearest proxy.”

  “There are no tourist proxies within one hundred kilometers of Colonel Torraway’s present location.”

  “Then I’ll take a working machine and pay the surcharge.”

  “There are no proxies of any kind within that radius.”

  “Well, hell, then I’ll walk. Put me inside the nearest device at any distance. Supply it with a detailed map and a good-guess ETA.”

  “Colonel Torraway will not allow an uninv
ited mechanism to approach him. This is his expressed desire, and his speed over the ground permits him to enforce the prohibition by running away.”

  “Damn, damn, damn it,” Demeter said without particular emphasis. “Put an emergency override on his comm system,” she directed.

  “That is not the routine procedure. Does your situation constitute an emergency?”

  “Mephisto…I order you to connect me with Colonel Roger Torraway’s communications module.”

  “Coming right up, Miz Coghlan.”

  Heliopolis Basin, June 15

  Roger Torraway and Fetya Mikhailovna Shtev were kneeling side by side, staring down a gopher hole. It was an unusual formation in the desert’s reddish laterite soil: an oval depression with no visible bottom. Its origin might almost be volcanic, except that the Heliopolis Basin was more than a thousand kilometers from any recently active lava fields.

  The sides of the tube or passageway were smooth and compacted, just the sort of finish a burrowing animal would leave in moist, slightly clayey dirt along an Earthly riverbank. Except, of course, that the Martian soil was bone dry. And it had never, to Roger’s knowledge, seen an animal so big, burrowing or otherwise. Viruses by the handful, and now and then a microbe, but nothing as large as an ant, let alone a gopher.

  “Is mystery, yes?” Shtev said.

  “Could be the wind,” he proposed.

  “Just here? So deep?” The Russian raised her head to scan the shattered landscape. “And just this once?”

  “Is mystery,” Roger agreed.

  He was about to say more, just empty speculation on the feature, when the horizon lit up the color of blood. It was like a flash of heat lightning, but deep into the infrared. Roger might have thought it was a trick of meteorology—forty years ago. Time and experience had taught him it was nothing to do with the weather.

  Dorrie Torraway stepped out of the locus of the flash.

  “Roger, connect with the grid, please,” she said inside his head.

  “Tell them it’s not convenient.” He formed the words without moving his lips or vocal chords: electronic signals raced away through his backpack computer and found the nearest relay link.