Mars Plus

by Frederik Pohl, Thomas T. Thomas

  “Why, the government.”

  “Isn’t any.”

  “I beg your pardon—?” Orthis had taken one of her bagels and started spreading yellow glop on it when the flat of his knife went sliding across one knuckle. He looked at the shine of grease on his finger, then thoughtfully licked it off. “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve seen the setup here. This place practically runs itself. Everybody’s too busy making a living to engage in the higher forms of government. And I have it on good authority that they’ve no time for diplomats and diplomacy. So, just who is it you were going to meet with?”

  “There’s a mayor in one of the other colonies,” Orthis said defensively.

  “At Solis Planum? She’s a figurehead. Cuts the ribbon on new tunnel openings. Makes speeches in favor of filtering the air. Gets a budget of about five thousand Neu per annum to operate the chamber of commerce. But that’s it. You try to run a deal with her, you’ll find she has to refer most of it back to the people who put her in office.”

  “You’ve tried?”

  “No, I just do my homework. Ludmilla Petrovna doesn’t make a move without prior approval.”

  “So, it’s simple. We go for the electorate. We mount a public relations campaign, mold opinion toward our—”

  “You don’t get it, do you, Harry? There is no ‘electorate.’ There hasn’t been an election in Solis Planum in twenty years.”

  “What are you trying to tell me?” Orthis asked, seemingly patient.

  “You’ve brought a lot of people up here, right? Planning to negotiate with the Martians, right? Except there’s no one to sit down at the table with, is there? Speaking of boondoggles, this is a helluva long way to come on a jaunt.” Demeter thought of Nancy Cuneo, who had arrived only a day or two after Coghlan herself and not much ahead of Harry’s more public entourage. Why were they suddenly scrambling on site? Instead she asked, “Is your intelligence on the local situation so bad you didn’t know all this?”

  “We—” he replied slowly. Too slowly. “—were led to believe that proper accommodations would be made.”

  “Led? By whom?”

  “I really think that’s out of your purview, Demeter.”

  “By your subcontractors in the Valles? By some local acting as your agent? Who?”

  “And why are you here, Demeter?” Orthis countered.

  “I’m on vacation.”

  “This is a hellacious long way to come for a change of scene,” he tossed back to her. “Especially for someone with diplomatic training—”

  “I never completed my credits.”

  “—and secret credentials granted by the Sovereign State of Texahoma—”

  “That’s not true!”

  “—including provisional U.N. immunity, guaranteed by the signature of Alvin Bertrand Coghlan, member of the General Assembly.”

  “My grandfather can be overly protective.”

  “So it would seem.” Orthis gave a world-weary shake of his head. “And perhaps you’re planning to do things, deniably in his name, that require such protection?”

  “Jesus,” she breathed. “Well, Cuneo and the Korean have it figured anyway. I’m here to watch you, of course.”

  “Watch us do what?” He was smiling. But it was friendly now, not at all in triumph.

  “Take the Valles Marineris away from us. Our computer projections—” Something about computers and their predictions pricked at her memory, but the thought faded out in her rush to explain. “—showed that your development work there would tend to tip the legal balance in favor of your claims stemming from the Potanter Expedition.”

  “Canyonlands is a purely commercial development,” he said “Our interest is solely for profit. The inhabitants will be native-born Martians, or immigrants from all Earth nations, owing allegiance under the appropriate U.N. charters. There was never any thought of making them citizens of North Zealand, either de jure or de facto. Our citizenship requirements are far too rigid to allow for that.”

  “Uh-huh.” Coghlan was prepared to disbelieve anything he said. “And if Canyonlands is so commercial, why are you building an orbiting power station three times the size of your projected end-phase requirements?”

  “Who told you that orbiter was ours?”

  Demeter shook her head, beaming at him.

  “More computer projections?”

  “A little bird,” she offered teasingly.

  “All right,” Orthis went on, “if you know so much about the administrative setup here on Mars, and if we were going to take the Valles away from you—whom did you think we were negotiating with?”

  Demeter could feel her own face go blank.

  After too long a pause, she heard herself admit in a small voice: “I don’t know…Really, it just…never occurred to me.”

  Chapter 14

  The Secret Underground

  Eastern Reserve Overflow Storage Facility, June 17

  By waiting until the middle of the afternoon, Demeter was fairly sure Lole Mitsuno would be out studying rocks somewhere, looking for new water, and Ellen Sorbel would have her head in a computer program, doing ditto. Still, Demeter crept warily over the algae-slimed walkway, listening for voices or other sounds coming from the secret room.

  All she heard was the thunk-thunk of the liquid surface in the tanks, thrumming in an outlet pipe off along the perimeter somewhere.

  Beyond the tankage, she found the abandoned tunnel and the plain steel door. Demeter’s memories of the sexual minuet leading up to last night’s encounter with Mitsuno were a little hazy; had the door been locked? If not then, it was now—with a flat metal hasp and a big tumbler lock.

  Demeter wrapped her fingers around the lock’s smooth, stainless-steel case. She gave it an experimental tug; the shank jerked solidly on the thick metal staple. Demeter looked at the face of the lock’s black dial. Forty white hash marks, numbered off by fives, spun under a triangular marker etched into the rim. She flipped the case up and read off the backside that this was a Crypton™ lock, serial number AB-2301435-YA.

  What they teach you only in Elements of Espionage 101: every commercial lock comes with a default combination. For the convenience of lock company salespeople and troubleshooters, the standard combination is keyed to all those fussy little letters that are part of the serial number. For example, all Cryptons of the “YA” series initially open with the sequence 7-14-38, always going right-left-right and being sure to come all the way back around past the second number on your way to the third. Of course, the default combination can always be changed. That takes the customer, or the sales representative, about twenty minutes with a micropick and a jeweler’s loupe. Not everyone bothers.

  Fifteen seconds later, Demeter had the lock off the hasp and was putting her weight against the door.

  Scree-eee! Rusty hinges protested, but the door moved.

  Inside, she reached around in the folds of cloth on the nearest wall until she found the switch that activated the leeched power circuit. The caged bulbs came on, showing the cave’s interior. Coghlan walked past the bed and the hanging that closed off the chemical toilet. She was headed for the back wall.

  Something very spooky was happening in this place.

  Everyone of her acquaintance had seemed to know within hours last night that she had gone missing. Not just that she had wandered outside the purview of the video lenses and earjacks that were scattered around the complex. People must do that hundreds of times a day: when they went outside on the surface or sat quietly in their rooms or fetched something out of a broom closet. No, for nine hours there the grid and its systems had been totally blind to her. Not just unplugged, as she preferred her cybernetic eavesdroppers. But banished.

  Demeter rubbed the black, wide-weave mesh that draped these rock walls and ceiling. It seemed to be some kind of slippery plastic, maybe an acrylic fiber. She picked the warp and weft apart with her fingernails. Deep in the fabric, she found what looked like a metallic thread. She
traced it down, plucking the black strands apart at spaced intervals, until the wire came out at the hem. There, under a blob of solder, it joined another wire running parallel to the floor. Demeter followed the latter to one of the pitons anchoring the cloth. The base wire was wrapped and soldered around the steel rod. And the rod, by the look of it, was grounded at least nine or ten centimeters into the native stone.

  What could all this metal be for?

  There was an old device—the Faraday shield—that anyone could make by simply connecting a set of parallel wires across one end, then grounding the common point. It was used to block electrostatic charges and to keep a voltage potential from building up between whatever lay on one side of the shield and the other. That would be useful, certainly, in protecting this room’s contents from electrolytic corrosion, say, from seeping groundwater. Or it might screen out static noise that would interfere with delicate circuitry or degrade radio reception inside the room.

  But would such a screen also serve to block out electromagnetic transmissions? Would it, perhaps, shield circuitry cached in this hideaway from detection by distant sensors? Would it protect the occupants from surveillance by telemetry?

  Demeter had taken only the basic science-survey courses recommended for junior diplomats. But she remembered that, back in the twentieth century, when telecommunications signals and power transmission often went by underground copper cable, anti-corrosion devices attached to the outside of the sheathing didn’t inhibit the signal-carrying capability. Nor did they stop eavesdroppers and power thieves who leeched off the surface of the cable with electromagnetic toroids.

  Clearly, the wire mesh surrounding this room was intended to do something. It might be keeping something out, random voltages or sapping currents. But it would have nothing to do with keeping secrets inside. Quod erat demonstrandum…

  In following the hem of fabric across the end of the secret room, Demeter had to pull out part of the store of canned goods and survival gear she had discovered last night. A draft, down near the floor, stirred the fine hairs on the back of her hand. There was an opening behind the boxes—had to be.

  She set about moving the big items farther into the room. When she had opened a squeeze space, Demeter pushed the cloth aside and wiggled under the low lintel into a short tunnel. It was about three meters long, negotiable on her hands and knees, with a dull, caged light at the end. Clearly, the same purloined circuit that illuminated the first room brightened the space beyond.

  The second room was hung with the same dark cloth but had none of the comfortable old furnishings or other amenities. Just a table of recycled, pressed plastic and a collection of…components.

  Without touching anything, Demeter examined them. As she traced the shielded wires and mesh-sheathed ribbon cables between them, she began to get a sense of their function.

  This box, certainly, was a power supply. It was fairly big, slab-sided, with a heatsink on the back and a red switch on the front. The switch had a “zero” and a “one” position, with a light-emitting diode aligned with the one’s place. The black cable coming out of it connected to…

  That cabinet was flat, like a pizza box. It spiderwebbed with parallel cabling into a nest of modules that might-could be peripherals or possibly identical memory units. The cabinet’s flatness convinced her it contained a breadboard: that is, a hand-built circuit with the chips laid flat on an embedded gold-copper trace and soldered into position. That was how cybernetics inventors made one-offs and prototypes. The best commercial, mass-produced circuits from Earth, on the other hand, were spherically cast in layers under a microgravity environment. Like Sugar, they were a single unit, resembling pearls.

  And this nest of modules—probably memories, now that she thought about it—all had a damaged look about them. Each of the ceramic cases had been cracked open, something done to their innards, and then resealed with liquid epoxy…Very hand-built. And by a certifiable paranoid.

  What Demeter couldn’t identify was the input-output module; the system had no keyboard, trackball, or display device, no helmet or gloves. That, and there didn’t seem to be any connection to network resources. She looked for cables leaving the tabletop in any direction, or something that might double as an antenna, and found nothing. Except, of course, that the grid could hear a cyber of this power and complexity just from the electromagnetic emanations of its cabling, sheathed or not. Simply turning it on would send out a radio-frequency signature.

  “Why, you bastard!” Coghlan said aloud, meaning Mitsuno.

  Despite all his assurances, and in the face of his apparent compassion and tenderness, Lole had lied to her. From the evidence spread out on this table, his secure little hideaway—“someplace you’ll like,” he had said, where he “usually required a strip-search” before allowing the uninitiated to enter—had housed its own cyber device all along.

  Counting up the memory modules and dividing by four, she guesstimated that it operated well within the range of artificially intelligent. Probably with a Stanford-Sunnyvale quotient of sixteen hundred or more. And anything it sensed and processed, the grid would know a nanosecond later through electromagnetic interferometry.

  “You unparalleled bastard!”

  Hoplite Bar & Grill, June 17

  Lole Mitsuno and Ellen Sorbel entered their favorite watering hole, still wrangling about the botched datafields on the Hellas survey.

  “You know there’s no way a bed of olivine crystals can have extruded sideways into those sedimentary layers,” Mitsuno told her. “I know there’s no way it could have happened. Olivine is igneous rock. When it enters a formation, all the orderly structure just evaporates. Literally. So tell that to your cyber.”

  “I tried, but he’s stubborn.”

  “Well then, we’ll talk him over with Wyatt. Maybe the boss program can pound some sense into his diodes—”

  “There you are!”

  Lole glanced up and saw Demeter Coghlan bearing down on their table. From the flare in her eyes, she wasn’t the happy woman he’d left ten hours ago.

  “Demeter! Good to see—”

  “Do you want to tell me what that tunnel’s really for?” she demanded.

  “What tunnel?” he asked, face dropping into a mask.

  “Lole, what have you—?” Ellen sounded worried.

  “The secret room where we…” Demeter glanced at Sorbel and her jaw tightened. “Where we fucked last night.”

  “Lole!” Ellen gasped. “Did you—?”

  But Mitsuno cut her off, talking fast “As I explained, Dem, it’s a place where some of us go to unwind, to discuss things in private, maybe hold a little party. It’s no big secret. Really.”

  Demeter chewed this over for just ten seconds.

  “Then will you also explain to me,” she said in a lower tone, “why the minute I go there, everyone is worried about it?”

  “Who’s worried?”

  “Sun, the Korean playboy, and Orthis, the North Zealand negotiator. Both of them came asking after me this morning. Both said they missed me last night. They went looking right away and couldn’t find me.”

  “Well, I think I mentioned that those tunnels aren’t exactly open to the public,” he replied slowly, trying to signal her with his eyebrows. Hadn’t she figured out yet that the grid listened everywhere? “There are no real services in that part of the complex. There are no terminals or glasslines, let alone electronic, uh, observation points. So people looking for you might not be able to, uh, contact you.”

  “You’re lying to me,” she countered sharply. “You’ve got a computer in there.”

  Lole heard Ellen draw breath beside him.

  “We do?” he asked, once more semaphoring with his eyes. This was extremely dangerous talk, and Demeter ought to understand that. “How do you know?”

  “I saw it.”

  “Oh? And when?”

  “This afternoon. I went back there.”

  “Why would you do that?”

 
; Coghlan paused. “I was looking for…my earrings. I lost them last night.”

  Mitsuno honestly couldn’t remember whether she had been wearing jewelry or not. He remembered Demeter seeming awfully naked when, statutorily, she had been fully dressed.

  “You should have asked me,” he chided. “I would have looked for them.”

  “You were busy today.” She shrugged. “And besides, you never said not to go back.”

  “But the door was locked.”

  “A cheap mechanical tumbler. They teach us how to get around those.”

  “Who teaches you?” he wondered aloud.

  “My university courses, for future diplomats.”

  “Ah! Spies.”

  “You got it.”

  “I’m sorry about the lock,” he said, hoping to distract her. “But, of course, with no power, we can’t use an electronic thumb pad.”

  “So I figured. But then, you’ve got enough power for that computer.”

  Lole sat up straight and looked her levelly in the eye. “If there’s a computer in that room, Demeter, it’s news to me. You must’ve seen something else and thought it was a computer.”

  “I’m not that dumb, Lole.”

  “Demeter, dear…” Ellen cut in.

  The Coghlan woman barely glanced at her.

  “That whole corridor is like a public dump, you know,” Ellen went on smoothly. “I’m sure you’ll find pieces and parts of terminals, virtual-reality gear, old cybers, bit registers, lots of stuff, just strewn around.” Now Sorbel was wig-wagging with her eyebrows. “Some of it’s probably even wired together, as it was when the owner tossed it. But none of that junk’s working. You understand?”

  “So? You’re in on it, too?” The way Demeter sounded, the news didn’t surprise her much.

  “In on what, dear?”

  “On whatever it is you two’re trying to hide.” With that, Demeter puckered her lips in a frown, nodded once, stood up, and walked away.

  Ellen turned to Mitsuno. “Lole, what have you done?”

  “I don’t know, but I guess I’d better undo it.”