"Look at that," Carter breathed. "Dust devils."
Philippe: "How do you know? They just look like blobs."
Carter turned to Annie. "Sorry. We have to put up with these greenhorns, you know what I mean?"
"I was going to ask the same question myself," she said.
Carter pointed out how the hills had much stubbier shadows, and described how each light patch was a cloud of dust stretching a column up from the surface, and how the long shadow revealed the form; funnel-shaped in many cases; sometimes straight vertical or slanting columns, like typhoon waterspouts. "From the shape and direction of the shadow you can sense the relief: this one is maybe six hundred meters high and a hundred meters wide. That's no hill! Second: they move. Becky, can you punch these coordinates from a photo on another day, maybe the February forty-second set? Do you have a blink routine?"
Becky's fingers conversed with the keyboard. In a moment the picture was blinking back and forth between the original and a new view, perfectly registered with each other. In the new view, the craters and dunes were in the same places, with slightly longer shadows caused by a lower sun angle. But the light blobs and their shadows had vanished. Two new ones had appeared in the east. "Voila!" said Carter. "Here today, gone tomorrow."
"Magnifique," said Philippe, clapping Carter on the back.
"Hmmm," said Annie.
"So," said Carter, "we know there were big dust devils in the area on February thirty-fifth. Stafford set out on the fortieth for four days. We know there were more devils on February forty-second. Also, we know devils are nothing unusual for this time of year. Stafford liked to photograph them. He even chased them sometimes!"
Annie: "So you're saying..."
"I'm just thinking out loud. Devils aren't considered dangerous. Usually. But Stafford was always waiting for that big one. The perfect dust devil..."
Annie's eyes widened.
Philippe frowned. "How does a big dust devil destroy a buggy? Flip it? What?"
Carter pushed back from the table. He ran his hand through his dark hair. He stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Hypothesis: Stafford goes out on February fortieth. Runs his dune buggy up into those hills, infested with dust devils. Tries to chase one down. Gets hung up on a rock or something. The dust devil turns on him. Comes along and flips him ... or somehow disables his vehicle and transmitter both."
He turned to Becky. "Okay. What I want to do is look at the high-res set from Monday. You have stereo pairs from that pass?"
"Most of it. The stereo didn't cover everything."
"Set me up for stereo. Start with the end of the Hellespontus Road. You have coverage there?"
She punched the console. The screen jumped into a holographic 3-D image, faintly flickering. Becky adjusted Carter's chair position directly in front of the screen and swung an optical stereo mask over Carter's face. "It's sharper if you use the mask."
The rest of them watched the screen from the side. Craters and furrowed hills glowed at them, from a slightly oblique angle, with traces of haze here and there, hovering above the landscape.
Carter exclaimed, "Jeez!" as the stereo came into focus in his mask. "Can you give me exaggerated relief?" he added.
"You've already got two times exaggeration."
"Give me four times. I might as well be sensitive to the slightest... No, that's too much. How about three times? There, that's great." Tiny depressions in the terrain loomed as deep hollows, and gentle swells of dunes rose as sharp, domed hills.
"Now, Becky," Carter said from behind the mask, "give me a blowup of the Hellespontus Road where it comes to an end. The highest resolution pair you've got. Monday's. February 44th. That's a resolution of..."
"Five meters give or take. You're still not going to see a buggy."
After some keypunching and screen flickering, the image shifted to some broken ridges, running north-south across the screen. Winding through them toward the west was a clear thread—the Hellespontus Road. The rest of them could see it even without the stereo mask. The thread weakened and the country grew more rugged toward the west.
"The end of the road is here"—Becky pointed—"where the seismometer installation is." The thread turned into a jumbled patch, where random spidery lines trailed off in all directions, like a hydra's tentacles. They promptly faded into the desert. "The road goes beyond that a ways, but the country gets pretty wild. You can see where groups of people go joy-riding off the end of the road, like I told you yesterday. It's really torn up out there. Every year it gets a little farther."
"Like lemmings," Philippe butted in. "You say it's five-meter resolution..." he continued, as if pondering some fine point of logic.
"Maybe four, three in the very best pictures," Becky said. "The distance between pixels. You never know the size of the smallest craters and rock shadows you can actually see. Depends on the lighting, the clarity of the atmosphere. But you're never going to see a buggy, that resolution."
"What about the trail?"
"Certainly not a single buggy's trail." Becky looked annoyed at Philippe's density. "If you can't see the buggy with its shadow, you're certainly not going to see its tracks."
"You know, Stafford said something to me about that," Carter spoke up from his mask. "We had this conversation once about seeing small things on orbiter photos, like the Viking landers and the old rovers from the turn of the century. He said everyone believes the resolution in the routine satellite imagery isn't good enough. Then he started talking about rovers leaving trails, and he said..." Carter sifted through his memory. "He said they ought to read their Percival Lowell."
"Ha," Becky snorted. "What did Lowell ever get right about Mars?"
"Lots of things," Philippe shot back. "A dying planet, escape of the atmosphere because of low gravity."
"Four meters is four meters," Becky insisted. "A whole buggy and its shadow covers one pixel. You can see a road but you're not going to see any tracks from a single buggy."
Philippe hunkered down on a desk in the corner, speaking into his 'corder.
Carter was still studying the hydralike image of the end of the Hellespontus Road. "Blow it up." The hydra head expanded. You could see individual house-sized boulders casting stubby shadows on the hillsides, but the picture was breaking up into tiny squares. "Listen, did Braddock and his people actually look for buggy tracks on any of these images?" Carter asked her.
"He was in here Monday morning before he went out. Braddock and a couple of the other guys. Had me run through the images. I'm not sure he actually looked for individual tracks. I keep telling you, they're so small ... Besides, he was in a hurry to get going. He studied the area farther out to the west, looking for signs of something unusual. You know, like a distress sign. Something Stafford might have traced out if his radio quit. They made a big point of the fact that there was no distress signal out there."
"Don't you think he should have looked for fresh tracks heading out from the Hellespontus Road?"
"Not if you can't resolve them.... Look, my job is normally to look at big fuzzy cloud masses, not tiny details...."
Carter was still hidden behind his mask a few moments later when Philippe, bent over the little screen on his wrist, interjected "Ah!" He held up his wrist and 'corder in triumph. "I've been reading Lowell. Lowell's books. Let me teach you something that good old Percival figured out over a hundred years ago in the days of Martian canals. You can see a line even when you can't resolve the width of the line. You can see a power cable at a distance when you wouldn't be able to see a piece of the wire itself, because the line covers many adjacent cells in your eye. In the same way, you pick up a three-meter-wide trail even if you can't see a three-meter-wide spot because it stretches along many pixels."
Carter broke away from his machine to listen.
"And there's more to it than that. Lowell popularized the canals, but he claimed what astronomers were seeing were not the canals themselves, but the vegetation strips along both sides of the c
anals. In the same way, the disturbance of dust along the sides of tracks is wider than the tracks themselves. With the right enhancement techniques..."
What Philippe was saying matched Carter's intuition: somehow, you ought to be able to see some trace, with a picture this sharp.
"Carter," Annie broke in excitedly, "that's what Stafford was trying to tell you about Lowell! That if he ever got lost, his track might be detectable, if you use all the tricks...."
Carter went back to his mask. "Give me more contrast. Let's see how much you can get out of this thing.... Give me a spiral search pattern, outward from the end of the road."
They stared as the image snapped into masses of dark gray and white.
"Aha," Carter breathed from behind his goggles. Was there a thin tentacle there, winding its way toward the west?
Annie: "It looks like a mess, Carter. Can you see anything?"
"I've got something."
Becky brought them lunch, what passed for ham salad sandwiches. They stayed glued to the machines.
At two o'clock there was a commotion at the door of the lab. Four people barged into the room together. A barrel-chested older man, balding, with steely blue eyes; a striking woman, about thirty-five or forty, with short dark auburn hair and a wide, smooth face; and two younger men still in the process of shucking their down-stuffed suit liners, suggesting they had just come in from outside.
"Once you get cold out there, it's like you can't warm up," one of the younger men muttered, as if by way of introduction.
"Carter Jahns?" the older man said.
"Yeah."
"Braddock. I'm director around here. Don't get up." He shook Carter's hand with a quick gesture.
"I remember. We met when you were coming through Mars City. Glad to see you again, Braddock. I've been meaning to come and see how things are going."
"Not so well."
Everyone used Braddock's last name. Carter couldn't even remember the man's first name.
Braddock glanced gravely at Annie and Philippe.
Carter introduced them. "We wanted to help," Annie said.
Braddock's baldness lent him a stern, commanding look, but he had laugh lines around his eyes. He looked like a man who laughed under other circumstances, but not on this particular day, not with these particular people.
"I heard you were coming." He turned back to Carter. "The search is already under way, such as it is. I'm not optimistic. Hard to identify new tracks out there. I should have put a stop to that stupidity of Stafford going out on his own."
"I thought you were the one who approved it."
"I've got my share of the blame."
One of the two young staffers, who had finished removing his suit liner, piped up, "I still say the Martians got him."
Braddock scowled. "Ain't funny. And don't go starting stupid rumors. Oh"—he gestured to the woman at his side—"this here is Elena Trevina. You've probably met." He turned grudgingly toward Philippe and Annie. "Brach, and Ms. Pohaku, have you met Lena? Well, you know of her. Director of the Polar Station. She was s'posed to come up here next week—came early to see if she could help out."
Carter had met her only once before on a quick trip to Hellas Base a year before, out in the field. They had spoken only briefly. They had been wearing suits. He felt he had never really met her. She was an elusive figure of the south. She monitored the Clarke Project's black carbon dust coating of the polar ice cap, but her own interests lay with those of the planetary ecologists in her shop. She was known for her team of geologists and their work on the permanent water-ice deposits at the core of the south polar cap. Something to do with the interwoven strata of ice and dust that seemed to be involved with the wild climate fluctuations of ancient Mars. Carter had been meaning to visit her little research station to see the installation and the polar ice fields for himself. Someday...
On that day a year before, when they had met, he had visualized that behind that filtered helmet lurked some sort of austere Valkyrie. He was surprised to find her intriguing, if formidable. Her no-nonsense demeanor and square Eastern European face contrasted with her slight smile and smooth ... She started to say something but Braddock, nodding gruffly at the displays on the screens, cut her off.
"We've been over all this, ya know," Braddock said. He walked over and glowered at the largest blowup. "Nothing there. Vehicle's too small to see on orbiter photos."
"Tell it to Percival Lowell," Philippe said.
"What?"
"Never mind."
"I'm looking for tracks," Carter said. "Not the vehicle."
"Find anything?" Lena asked.
"Yeah."
Braddock looked surprised. "Yeah? What? What ya got?"
"Look here," Carter replied. He disappeared behind the stereo mask and began moving the cursor on the big screen. "Maybe you can't see it unless you use the stereo viewer, but there's at least one trail running off a long way west into ... what's west of the end of the Hellespontus Road?"
"Dust devils," Braddock said grumpily. "The summer dust storms come out of there. If you'll look farther west, you'll find a lot of dust devils out there. He musta got hit by one."
"Yeah, yeah. We found those."
"You found the dust devils already?" Braddock looked surprised again.
Carter turned away from the screen and studied him. "Yeah. What do you see when you're out there on the ground?"
"Nothing. A lotta dust in Hellespontus country ... lotta craters. Not much else."
"I think you'd better mobilize all your people out there to follow this." He pointed to the screen.
"What? I don't see anything."
Carter drew his finger along the screen. "Tracks. The only ones this far from the end of the Hellespontus Road. It's got to be him. Even with the mask, you can only see segments of tracks. Just here and there. I have to use stereo and a lot of blinking with the earlier images, but I can project it and follow it from one segment to another. Listen. You get in touch with your people in the field, I'll follow this damn thing as far as I can and tell you the coordinates of each fragment I find. They can head out there on the ground and see what they can see." Braddock glanced at Trevina in surprise.
Late Wednesday afternoon. Only two days left for Stafford to survive. If he was alive at all.
Braddock and his party had gone grumpily back to Braddock's office to manage the search, promising to relay any track positions from Carter to the field crew.
Carter continued studying the images on the screen. Behind the stereo mask, he was immersed in the machine. "Look," he would say from time to time, "I've got something."
There was a moment when Annie and Carter were in the lab alone together. She was silent at first.
"What's eating you?" Carter asked her from behind the mask.
"I'm getting hungry and I've got a story to write...." She stepped close to Carter and looked intently at one of the images on the screen. Low ridges and boulders casting shadows. She put her hand on the back of Carter's chair and peered intently at the screen, not at him. "Carter, I want to ask you something. I don't know why I'm saying this. A journalist isn't supposed to ask this question. It's supposed to come from you, but I want to ask you this because I want to keep ... a good relationship with you. Look at it as my own cynical investment in the future of my news source, if you want. Anyway, we may need each other before this is done. I think I know how you feel about me tagging along. Anyway, here's the question. Is there anything so far that you want off the record?"
Behind his mask, Carter felt a million thoughts, running from anger to pleasure. He had to do all the work and she got to write ... Still, she was trying to be helpful.... "No. Use what you want. There's no secrets on Mars as far as I'm concerned. We're all in this together." Why did it feel like he kept forcing himself to say that?
"You're an interesting man. Do you ever have any serious doubts? I mean, about what you are doing?"
"Doubt?"
"Maybe that's what I can
help you with. Doubt."
"What do you mean?"
"Reporters have to be more skeptical than builders."
He wanted to ask her what she was talking about, but Philippe returned.
She stepped back, away from Carter.
Carter kept his eyes on the screen, afraid that if he looked away, the thread of the trail and the thread of the conversation would both vanish. But he called: "Hey, Annie, thanks for asking. If we get into ... an uncomfortable situation, I'll let you know." It could all be so simple, Carter thought, if I just accepted her for what she says. How do I distinguish a person's reality from what they say and do...?
He heard Annie leaving.
Philippe followed her out like a puppy. "See you later, my pal," he said. Carter could see that eager little smile on his face without looking away from the screen.
8
DATELINE HELLAS
Evening. There was no sense of time in the war room. Carter had been poring over the pictures for hours.
After Philippe and Annie had left, he had begun to brood about what he had said. Hell, he thought, if we do find anything I don't want her to report yet, I can always... He couldn't quite complete the thought. Besides, the story wasn't over yet. Stafford would be tracked. Stafford would be found.
Annie ... It bothered Carter that she was cast in an old-fashioned parody of a woman's role, hanging around, saying little. All the scene needed now was for her to stand in a doorway as Carter set out: "Oh, Carter, be careful...."
As she promised, she had genuinely tried to encourage them. But of course, thought Carter, the more she hung around, the better the story she got. "The more you learn, the more you earn," she had said to them. Why was he being so uptight as to let this needle him? The trouble was, part of him wanted her there, and he couldn't afford to think about that now. He didn't even want to admit it.
MARS UNDERGROUND Page 10
