MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  He stepped back and admired the scene. He backed off farther and sat on a rock, memorizing the whole landscape. What a thing to remember.

  Stafford had always been interested in history. Often he had mused over the irony that Earth's park rangers and environmentalists—anyone with decent style—decried modern litter, but would give an arm for the litter of early explorers and colonists. Castoffs and inscriptions more than two hundred years old were priceless, recapturing early travels and adventures. He recalled his visit as a teenager to El Morro National Monument, the historic inscribed rock of the Southwest, in a landscape not too different from this one, except for the bushes. Weary travelers, resting in its shade under the vast New Mexican sky, had carved their names and dates and proud messages. From Onate in the 1600s to American fur trappers in the 1800s, they had left a record that clarified movements of the pioneers, both famous and faceless—important if you had a sense of place and time. El Morro: that is where the idea of medallions was born in the adolescent Alwyn Stafford.

  That night, under El Morro's looming presence, young Stafford's eyes had glowed like the distant stars in the space-black skies of New Mexico's Indian reservations. He lay in their camp at El Morro reading a book on Coronado's expedition, the Mars Project of its day. A thousand men with the latest sixteenth-century technology, setting forth with their banners into the unknown on a months-long journey of discovery. They had published the first written eyewitness accounts of native American villages now destroyed by malls; of burbling rivers, now sucked dry by cities. But historians were still arguing over their exact route. Which villages? Which rivers? They had neglected to sign in on the great white rock of El Morro. If only they had left some carvings, some bronze plaques, or some inscribed medallions for someone to find someday along their route. Under the stars, visions of ancient relics burned in young Stafford's eyes.

  On Mars, old Stafford, pioneer of a new desert, had a chance to carry out his boyhood dream: to leave a record of the pioneers. How to do it? Social niceties forbade that he should go around carving his kilroy on every cliff. He could hardly leave ostentatious brass plaques; aside from the weight problem that would allow him to transport only a small number of them to Mars, they would be quickly removed. When he had hit on the idea of his little disks, he told no one. He simply salted them away in a crevice here, under a rock there, at sites he thought noteworthy. The sequential numbers established the record of continuity. Slowly they would come to light, one at a time, in random order, decades later. They would show there had been someone with enough gumption and courage and craziness to get out and find these places, but also with enough respect for nature and history to leave them undisturbed.

  They would give the next generation of fourteen-year-olds—the first real Martians—something to dream about, in the same way that he had once dreamed of finding Coronado's relic. Mothers would tell them, "Maybe one day you can find one of Stafford's medallions." Perhaps some of his markers would last centuries before being found. And then people would know: within twenty years of landing on Mars, they got as far as here.

  There would be legends of the conquistadors of Mars.

  He looked at the little medallion gleaming in front of him. No telling how long it would take them to find this one. Maybe a decade. Maybe a week. Who would they send out looking for him?

  In the midst of his elation, he realized that this discovery would make his next goal all the more achievable.

  He climbed back into the bus and sat at the wheel, glancing repeatedly at the device outside among the rocks, feeling good about his discovery. It was time to move on.

  He knew he should sit and think it through one more time. He needed to plan how he wanted things to look.

  He began driving in long, leisurely loops around the site. Finally, a half hour later, he turned the nose of the buggy westward across a rocky outcrop and took a deep breath. He began driving, away from Hellas Base, deeper into unexplored desert. Suddenly he wondered: When the time came, would Carter Jahns ever remember the conversations he had choreographed, about Percival Lowell and the canals of Mars?

  5

  MARS CITY FEBRUARY 44-45

  For Carter, it was as if the light level in Nix-O had suddenly dimmed. Stafford? Gone? In a fatal instant, amid the ordinary clinking of glasses and the everyday chatter and laughter of the Nix Olympica Bar after a hard day's work, everything had changed.

  The air itself seemed suddenly to gel into a dark fluid, as if it had been supercooled all along, as if disaster had been lurking in the background of everything they had done on Mars. The lights and glinting chrome of the Nix Olympica now suddenly seemed to shine only in darkness, like stars with no planet to illuminate.

  The background chatter of the room transformed itself into sounds of— what?—prisoners, locked in a weird outpost of humanity. Carter had prided himself on his awareness that outside the thin walls of aluminum and glass and brick the air was thinner and dryer and colder and far less oxygen-rich than the air on an Earthly mountain twice as high as Everest. And that it was a deadly world of risk. Deaths had occurred since he had been here, but they had been statistical accidents, part of Mars City's equation that they all bought into, with that first step onto the rusty soil. Now his old views seemed theoretical and sterile, replaced by a personal element of horror. Could callous Death really reach out of the desert and penalize his friend for a single mistake? Someone he knew, someone who had looked him in the eye, smiled, breathed the same air, shaken his hand...? Besides, Stafford didn't make mistakes.

  For that instant he was transported outside the walls of Mars City, and he was surprised to see that the whole mighty city, the safe fortress he had been building, was only a fragile intruder. Sunset. Mars City, unfinished tubeworks covered with freshly turned Martian dirt, bathed in the last moments of brick-dust light. The hundred-meter layer of ground haze beginning to take on the color of blood along the horizon.

  Suddenly Carter felt older—the first time this sensation had crept into his spine. "God," he heard himself say, involuntarily. His heart was pounding.

  Philippe had said nothing. He sat stony-faced, holding his drink as if it had frozen in his hand.

  "I ... I thought you knew," Annie said. "I'm sorry to be the bearer ... sorry about the news. Of course, they don't know what happened. Maybe Stafford's still out there. There'll be a search...." She studied them, quietly, watching their reactions.

  Carter and Philippe were still silent, staring into their drinks.

  "I understand both of you are friends of his," she prompted.

  Carter nodded slowly, coming back to reality, looking up across the table at her. She was watching him, as if probing him. She had been defined by that moment of light, framed in the doorway like someone arriving from some other dimension. Now, just as quickly, the illusion had been snatched away, smashed...

  Carter felt a chill in his spine. "What happened...?"

  "He set out from Hellas Base Thursday. Didn't come back. Supposed to check in yesterday."

  Philippe muttered, "It had to happen sometime. You know how he was..."

  "Shit." Carter's head was down again, as if he were trying to find something in his empty glass. He banged the glass down on the table.

  Annie touched Carter's arm, a gentle, brief gesture. "Really, I thought you had already heard." She smiled slightly, sympathetically. It was more of a look than a smile. "It's only been five days. I understand the dune buggies have air and water for as much as..."

  "Eight days. He always took extra airpacs. He'd have enough air until Friday at the latest, depending on his level of physical activity."

  Philippe looked at his watch. "The forty-eighth." He drew three more lines through his sketch, deliberately.

  Carter caught Annie studying him, as if still appraising something. "I know you'll have to ... Listen, could I just ask you...? You know him well....?"

  "Yeah," Carter said, numbly.

  "Could you tell me about
him?"

  "Interesting guy. Unique. We're friends. But he has a core that's hard to reach. I never knew what he was thinking, inside. But he's like an uncle. He helped me; helped me get started here."

  Suddenly the waitress arrived with the three reds they had ordered. She was all smiles until she saw in a moment of confusion that the jolly familiarity of the table had disappeared. She hurried away from the pall of gloom.

  "Well, we've got to do something," Carter said, finally. He took a big drink.

  Annie studied him. "Carter, there's more. They're running the search out of Hellas Base but you've been named by Mars Council to report on, what happened."

  "Jeez." Carter remembered the urgent message he had left unheeded in his office. He glanced guiltily at his 'corder, which was still turned off.

  "It's the first flat-out disappearance in the history of Mars, right?" She was still probing. "Fatal accidents, yes, but this is the first time anyone's gone out alone and not come back. Do you have any ideas ... I mean about what happened? Why he would go out alone?"

  "Stafford was a special case. He had arranged some special deal. They'd let him go out alone.... Now, we'll have to..."

  "Carter's the man for the job," Philippe said unexpectedly.

  She turned to him. "What do you think of Stafford?"

  "I admire him." She and Philippe talked, while Carter sank into silence. He would have to turn on his 'corder, of course; link himself again into the world of electronic anxieties. He would be catapulted into the thick of it. First, though, he had to take a moment to collect himself, to prepare. After taking himself out of circulation earlier that night, one more minute wouldn't make any difference.

  Why me? he thought. Mars Council must have picked him because of his friendship with Stafford. Everyone knew of his friendship with the famous recluse. If anyone knew what made the old man tick, it would be Carter. That's what they would be thinking.

  And now, he realized with a shock, he already had the damn press on his heels.

  His reaction was an instinct bred by a semipublic professional life: be careful, the press is the enemy of the public official. Yet when he examined the instinct he couldn't see why it should be so, at least on struggling Mars. They were all in the same boat.

  "Look," she was saying. She had turned to face him again. "I'll level with you. I came here to interview Mr. Brach, here, Monsieur Brach, about his Stonehenge in the desert. That's something I still want to do. But now I've stumbled on you at the same time, in the middle of this...." She waved her hand. "I know this will be a tough time for you. But I want to cover this story. There aren't many reporters here, none with the connections I have. I need to cover this story. It's important for everybody. Will you let me talk to you about it? If not now, then at least when you get the investigation under way?"

  It was as if he could no longer concentrate on what she was saying. He gave her no answer. He turned on his 'corder screen. She watched him in silence. The lines of tiny, precise, black words scrolled across the screen, the little machine blurting out its news like an excited child who couldn't wait. She was right. They had temporarily reassigned him from his office. The search was already under way, out of Hellas; his own job was to investigate the causes and outcome of the accident. One strange thing. Stafford, apparently invoking his usual privileged bending of the rules, had filed only the vaguest of itineraries. "Going out into Hellespontus desert for purpose of historic explorations." Whatever that meant. Then he had typed one more thing. "If problems, Carter Jahns may be able to find me." What the hell was that supposed to mean?

  Tomorrow he'd have to go down to Hellas Base, monitor what was going on. Even if Stafford was found alive, they wanted a report on what had happened. And recommendations. Always recommendations....

  "Look," he said. "I better go log in."

  Annie held up a finger. "Before you go, can I just ask you one more..."

  "Jesus. Listen, let me go check in with them. I'll come back. You guys wait here? I need somebody to talk to."

  They nodded, like conspirators.

  In his office, Carter ended the conversation with Hellas Base and logged off. He sat at his desk in the darkness of his office, illuminated only by the blue-green glow of the screen. He had acknowledged the assignment, then reserved a spot on the Hellas shuttle. Then he just sat there, in the faint glow. Where the hell had Stafford gone? What had happened to him? Nobody knew. Tomorrow it would be his problem. Why would Stafford think Carter could find him?

  He turned off the machine.

  "Have a good night, Mr. Jahns," it said.

  Right.

  He headed back to Nix-O. Maybe Philippe would have some good ideas. Maybe this lady from the press would know something. The press always knew more than anybody else about what was going on.

  She was full of questions when he got there. Hellas Base. What's it like? He'd been there a lot? Were their dune buggies just like the ones she had seen here? What were they like to drive, the buggies? How far could they go? How fast? Were they dangerous? Why was Stafford allowed to go out on his own?

  Carter explained Stafford's position as Grand Old Man and Professor Emeritus of Mars. Some time ago he had wrung informal permission from the new Hellas Director, Braddock, to go out on his own.

  "Can Braddock do that?"

  "At the research stations, they still make their own rules. Besides, Stafford convinced them. What they risked in losing one old codger out in the desert, they gained in a faster flow of new information about the wilderness around them." Carter tried to explain to them what Stafford had said to him once. "Hell's bells," he had said, "I've made my contribution to Mars. I'm old enough now. I want to take some risks. Go for the big discovery. Braddock understands, thank God. It's in his interest if I find something. I like nosing around. Between you and me, I'd like to die with my boots on, instead of sitting in my little steel box of a room."

  Secretly, Carter had liked the agreement for Stafford to go out "nosing around"; he thought it meant they were coming to terms with the planet.

  The agreement was not widely publicized at first. Management wanted to see how it worked out. Perhaps a precedent had been set—after retirement, maybe Martians would be allowed to break the stultifying rules. Carter thought there was some merit in Philippe's idea about the Aztecs, letting their elders flout the taboos as a reward.

  Eventually, of course, word got out. Whenever Stafford made a trip on Mars, everyone waited with interest. Rumors would fly in the bars among the construction workers. "He's seen stuff out there. Stuff they never tell you about..."

  Stafford was the classic desert rat. The more interested the public grew, the more secretive he became.

  "Did he ever get in trouble before?" Annie asked.

  "All the time, but nothing serious. Stafford knew every part of a dune buggy inside out. When he goes out alone he can carry enough spare parts to make a new one."

  "When Stafford gets enough canned air to go out for a week, he is happy as a clam," Philippe said. "I know. I talked to him about these trips." Philippe had been nursing his drink, watching them, watching Annie.

  Annie's Red sat on the table, hardly touched. "Do you think he had some sort of death wish? Did he develop an urge to ... you know, cash in his chips out there in his beloved desert somewhere?"

  "No. No. The guy was ... the guy is vibrant. Besides, he wouldn't waste everyone's time making them track down his June buggy."

  "How hard is it going to be to track him down?" Annie asked.

  "There's something weird there...." Carter hesitated. Was there some reason to use discretion? No, he thought. This is Mars. We—humanity— we're all in this together. Something in the back of his mind laughed at his own naiveté. He plowed on. He needed someone to talk to. "Stafford, as usual, didn't file much of a trip plan. Just said he was going out in the desert, in effect. But the weird thing is, he said I might know where to find him. They tell me they used to complain about the vague trip plans h
e'd file, and he'd get mad, tell them he didn't know which way he'd go till he'd seen the country. But a few trips ago he started adding this note that I'd know where to find him."

  Annie perked up. "Do you?"

  "I don't have the foggiest idea what he's talking about. I don't know where to find him."

  "But he said that? He said you'd know where he was?"

  "I guess the wording was that I might know how to find him."

  Philippe grumbled, "That's different."

  With a start, Carter found himself wondering if Stafford really had been his friend. Did he really know Stafford? Or just admire his reputation and independence?

  The conversation lagged. Little Japanese bean cakes, products of experiments between the greenhouse and the Nix-O chef, lay ignored on the table.

  "We've got to go after him," Philippe said at last.

  "We?"

  "I liked him. He would tell me stories about the desert. A natural arch he discovered once. A hundred meters long, he claimed. And the time he saw a pond of liquid water form in the bottom of Valles Marineris when he uncovered a bare ice layer there. He told me it lasted twenty minutes. Of course, I could never tell if he was, how do you say it, pulling my leg. I think he liked to pretend this is the Old West and we were all the new boys in the town, and his duty was to spin yarns to see how gullible we were."

  Carter reflected. "I think a lot of those stories were true ... the guy had such a reverence for what Mars is really like...."

  "Anyway, I want to come with you on the search," Philippe repeated. "More assistance. It cannot hurt. Besides, the more places I experience on Mars, the better for my work."

  Carter decided he was grateful for this left-handed offer of help. "I'm not in charge of the search itself, you understand. The search crews are already out there. I don't know if I'll go out in the field. Far as I can tell, I'm just supposed to monitor what's going on, lend a hand, ideas... write it all up so they have some sort of record to analyze. I'll go down to Hellas, of course. Had a trip budgeted down there next week, anyway, to look at our monitors. I moved it up. Of course you can come, Philippe, if you want to spend the time."