MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  "He told you?"

  "Yeah. Besides, Alwyn was his friend, too. I think Braddock thinks Alwyn would be happier this way. Out there ... Anyway, maybe a dust devil, maybe a dust sink. It could have been a dozen different things."

  Carter considered. "Maybe maybe maybe."

  She looked at him expectantly. "You may never find him."

  "We ought to try."

  "But don't you think, ummm..."

  Carter took the plunge. "Look, Lena, I've got something else here. The new pictures came in." He returned the screen to the images he had been studying. "Look, you can see tracks leading west from the Mars-2 area. Away from Hellas. Into the desert. When he was done, why would he go farther into the desert?"

  She was silent for a moment as he showed her. "That could be anything."

  "No, it's tracks. Look. Here, still farther west!"

  "And you think..."

  "Now we have something to follow."

  "Carter..."

  "I'm onto something," he said. "I'm on his trail. Tomorrow we can find out."

  "You need to take a break. I'll stand you a drink at the Oasis. You need to talk, to unwind."

  It was true, he was exhausted. Better to start the search again when he had rested.

  He headed toward the Oasis with her. He was confident now about Stafford's trail. What he needed to know more about was—what was going on here. Maybe he could learn something from Lena. Okay, so he was rationalizing again.

  He walked with Lena, mostly in silence. She was saying. "It's been hard on all of us. It'll do you good to get away for a few minutes. You've got to, you know, pick up the pieces."

  They were coming out of a corridor. He suddenly caught sight of Philippe and Annie striding away from the Oasis, in the distance, heads together, his arm at her waist. They were talking earnestly. They disappeared around a corner. They did not see him. Lena did not see them.

  Suddenly, he felt, somehow, abandoned. So, they were together. Now he could feel almost relieved. Pretenses were gone. Time for a new beginning? He had traced Stafford in the pictures as far as he could; maybe Lena was right, it was time to become normal again. Thoughts and feelings collided in chaos. "Come on," Lena said. "A red will cheer you up."

  In the Oasis, there was music. Indonesian gamelan orchestras and little wind ensembles, very quiet, very sad. The inhabitants of Hellas Base had tried to make the Oasis into a poor man's Nix Olympica. It had a blue ceiling. The insistent rhythms, the hollow sounds of flutes, and the tinkling of bells seemed to fit the spirit of weirdness that, in Carter's mind, pervaded everything here. Outside was the desert, always the desert, always the presence of Mars itself, like a giant monster outside the cave door, breathing quietly, probably asleep.

  Unknowingly they sat at the same table where Annie and Philippe had sat earlier during the previous hour. They both ordered blues, not reds. They ordered it served hot, which made it taste like mulled wine from a different dimension.

  Carter, feeling lousy, finally tried to force himself back into the stream of life, as Lena kept telling him to. For now, he had done as much as he could. It hadn't been enough. "What do you all do, down there at the Polar Station?"

  Lena smiled. "Subsist."

  "No, I mean really."

  "Never been there?"

  "No. Wanted to."

  Lena's eyes drifted to a spot somewhere high on the wall behind Carter. "It's different down there...." Suddenly she looked directly at Carter. "Do you spend most of your time at Mars City? Yes, I guess so." She said it as if she had performed a brain scan on him. Then her eyes drifted back to the spot on the wall. "The pole is very different from Mars City."

  "Tell me about it."

  "At Mars City, you've got a lotta people. And a different landscape. Not very many clouds. At our station, we're at the edge of the permanent ice deposits. Lotta fog. Dunes. The whole place, it feels lonely. Cold, as if the cold seeps through the walls. We wear heavy clothes. Cold and dark as Novosibirsk in winter. The dunes to the north of us, they're the biggest dune fields in the solar system. They make you feel like you're cut off from everything. Just a few kilometers to the south of us, the ice fields. They're kind of pink when the sun is up in the summer. It's pretty then. The sun burns the frost off, and the orange colors come out from under the white. If you go far enough south during the summer, on the permanent ice, you see the soot the Clarke people are spreading on the ice cap. Someday you can come and see it."

  "Yeah." He forced a smile. "Tell me about the research. We ship a lot of stuff down there to you guys."

  "We want a record of the planet's climate history. The pole is the place to look. The geology is ancient sediments, not like Mars City. The summer winds blow in deposits of dust, on top of the winter ice. So the layers pile up. Flat strata. They go way back in time ... clues to the past and all that. We do a lot of drilling and tunneling to expose the lowest layers. Summer's the best time to work; February is our best month. But the fogs will be coming in soon. We're under the polar hood in fall and winter, you know." She was warming to her subject, the ice and the cold. "The winds come whipping off the ice. In early winter when the sun comes up for a few hours at midday, it'll be all gray and misty, with the hills lost in the haze—like orange sorbet made out of dry ice, somebody said. And the CO2 snow. It just appears out of the air and pretty soon it covers the ground."

  The drinks arrived, steaming. She held hers up and looked at him through the vapor. "It looks like this. Fog. On the first days after the snow, the rocks that stick up stay warm. You have all these red and brown rocks sticking up out of little holes in the ice. After a few weeks, the CO2 snow covers everything and we're in the midst of the transient winter ice cap. It's a good time to stay indoors. It's dark outside. We all get a little bit crazy. Summer will be ending down there soon."

  She said all this almost wistfully, and Carter was intrigued by the strange warmth she exuded as she described the cold scene. On one level, she seemed unprepossessing, a scientist-administrator patterned on some no-nonsense stereotype. At first, she had seemed to radiate no power of attraction. And at first, there seemed to be little laughter in her. Surprised, Carter realized he was measuring her against Annie. And yet, with her sense of assuredness and maturity, Lena radiated ... something. A sort of confident femininity? She seemed too used to being responsible. As if she would have to relax entire sets of undreamed-of muscles in order to enjoy a holiday. Yet, if there was little laughter, there were still smiles: sometimes a forced smile, less often an unconscious smile of empathy, and sometimes the Cheshire cat smile. Always, a certain intensity, as if she were watching for something. Her face, her intelligent eyes, and wide, smooth East European jaw were really quite beautiful. Seen in this light, her short hair had a boyish sexy charm, as if challenging his own sexuality. He found he wanted to touch it. But there seemed to be some puzzle beneath the surface of her personality. He couldn't figure her out. What was she really saying? What was her angle?

  For some moments she had lost her self-consciousness, but now, suddenly, it returned and she seemed almost embarrassed by her outburst of enthusiasm.

  "It's okay at the pole," she said, as if to make up for her lyricism. "It changes with the seasons and the winds. It's better than the moon, for instance. God, I'd hate to live at Tycho. Nothing ever happens on the moon, you know what I mean?"

  "But what do you do, day to day? I mean scientifically."

  "Oh ... there's lots of core sampling and drilling. How the water ice layers and CO2 ice layers and soil layers relate to the climate shifts."

  "How many people down there now?"

  "Oh, it varies. A hundred will winter over. Winters are our low season. We call summer the tourist season. People come and go. Come and work for a few months, and go back to Hellas or Mars City."

  "Do you live with anybody there?"

  "I was coming to that." She smiled her most intriguing smile yet. "The short answer is 'no.' You?"

  "No."
/>
  She was looking at him intently. "How do you feel about that?"

  "Usually okay. Sometimes too alone. I think the social picture on Mars..."

  She was smiling again. "You interested in doing something about that? Tonight, I mean? You intrigue me. Let's go to your room."

  "Tonight? You and me?" Carter was surprised at his own words. He sounded stupid. He knew this thought had been there all along, lurking out of sight like a spy in the back of his mind. He had wanted no involvement with this woman. More accurately, on cross-examination, his brain revealed to him that while he didn't want an involvement with this woman, he wanted an involvement with a woman. Especially since an hour ago.

  They went to Carter's room and stayed until she rose at midnight from the semisleep they had fallen into. After their lovemaking, Carter had found himself thinking again of Philippe and Annie. He imagined himself with Annie, and in his imagination, Annie was entirely different from Lena. With Lena, Carter felt... what? Not in control? Not out-of-control frenzied, but out-of-control cast-in-a-role. There was no doubt Lena Trevina wanted... wanted something for herself and perhaps for both of them. Almost as soon as they closed the door, she started to undress silently, leading him slowly around the room in a peculiar slow-motion striptease walk, as if she wanted to look at everything in the room from every angle ... as if putting on a show. Carter said, "Wait." He wanted to do it. She acquiesced verbally but her hands kept helping, slipping things off.

  She had adopted a role of her own. She guided, always guided Carter, as if she felt it was her duty because she was the older of the two. Carter played with her, but she guided him onward, as if the only thing that mattered was to have him slide into her, and more significantly, as if she thought that was the only thing that would matter to Carter, and that once done, it would establish something between them. There was little playfulness in her, and suddenly she breathed heavily, shuddered, and lay still. Carter tried to continue the game, using his fingers and lips, but she grasped his hand. Carter felt he had made love using only his penis, not his imagination.

  They lay together, wordlessly. She played with his dark hair. "What will you do?" she said at last.

  "Do?"

  "About Stafford. Whether it's really worth more searching."

  "Stafford? You're asking about Stafford? Now?"

  "I was thinking about the search crews."

  "I just want to know what happened." He rolled over, on his back, with his hands behind his head. "Tomorrow. Braddock's already agreed. We'll take hoppers out there and follow the tracks...."

  "I know. Braddock told me. He's not very happy about it." She lay still.

  "So, you're his shill?"

  She smiled pensively. "I wanted to hear about it from you." She looked like she was dreaming. "Carter, I want to go, too."

  "Sure. The more people we have out there, the better, way I figure it."

  "Yeah."

  She sat up and listlessly began dressing. Suddenly she stopped and ran her hand slowly across his chest toward his heart. She studied his face with strange care. He had not seen her look at him this way. In spite of their lovemaking, it was only now, at this final moment, that he felt he could see beyond a hardness in her eyes. After a peculiar pause, she said, "You are a good man, Carter Jahns. Keep being a good man." And then as if excusing something that needed to be excused, she kissed him and smiled, "I don't get to do this much at the Polar Station." Her eyes still aimed at him, but the moment of contact had stopped.

  He lay there and watched her finish dressing. She did it with grace and an occasional smile, which evolved from the empathic smile to the Cheshire cat smile, with each new piece of clothing. She seemed to enjoy his gaze, and he was grateful for that. She came over and stroked his cheek once with the back of her hand. "I liked that," she said. "I'll see you tomorrow." She cracked the door, peeked cautiously outside. Then she was gone.

  All the time they had been at each other, she had never blocked his hands from her body, but as the door closed, he felt as if she had. And he felt that she was sorry about it.

  14

  EXPEDITION FEBRUARY 49, SATURDAY

  In his room after Lena left, Carter felt exhausted. Strange how you never knew what life would bring.... Stafford would have granted him dispensation. Naked, he pulled the covers over him. He tried to put everything that had happened out of his mind, to lie still at last. The room was cool and pleasant. Quiet as a tomb.

  Stafford's dune buggy was parked far to the west of the crashed Mars-2 probe and Stafford was sitting at the controls. No, Stafford was outside. In his suit. He heard strange sounds. They were hissing sounds. Stafford looked down. They were the sounds of his own shadow sliding across the stones.

  Carter's dream was vivid. He seemed half-awake, wanting to believe that the dream could tell him something about what had happened. His half-conscious mind rejected this wish as superstition, but he was surprised by his strong desire to believe it.

  In his dream, he could follow Stafford's every thought. He could follow Stafford's growing panic. The hissing sound was back.

  It was not his shadow. Fitful wisps of brown, air-dropped dust blew off the tops of scattered boulders like first wisps of smoke from a fire. After his fantastic luck in discovering Mars-2, Stafford had decided to explore more of the vicinity. Could he find some other detached parts of the probe or the entry package? Far out in the desert he had seen... something. Objects. A lot of them scattered across the flat sands. In Carter's dream, they were formless somethings, white like bleached cow bones scattered on the prairie.... Stafford got in the vehicle and started driving.

  The way was easy. But the beckoning objects were always farther ahead, plunked here and there across the plain, like sirens on their little islands. He drove on and on, crossing little ravines... Up ahead, one of the bone-white objects, embedded in the dusty soil. Part of the descent mechanism? Incredible. Two priceless finds in one day. The first thing to do, Stafford thought as he sat at the controls marveling at the ancient relic, was documentation. Get out on foot and photograph the site. In his excitement he forgot his years of accumulated caution, forgot his own rules about checking and double-checking and having a fallback option if something went wrong.

  Hurriedly he sealed his faceplate and clambered out onto the sunlit orange soil. The huge sky arched overhead, bright and clear. He would leave the vehicle here in this little gully so as not to disturb the immediate site. He walked the distance to the object, photographing it from this side and that. He was almost close enough to touch the sandblasted metal, lying on crusty soil with loose dust banked around it. Suddenly he perceived flickering shadows falling across him and noticed the wisps of dust being sucked into the air. The ground itself heaved as he turned to face the horror wandering mindlessly toward him. He had told himself that it was too early in the season for the big Hellespontus dust devils to spawn. But here it was, spinning capriciously across the desert, as if the Martian gods had lost a toy made of nothing more substantial than winds and pale vapors. People had joked about this threat but nobody took it seriously. The statistics... Now he was actually in danger. The giant Martian dust devil bearing down on him. Surely it would turn aside ... dust devils don't keep coming in straight lines.

  It was even bigger than the one he had photographed years earlier. A huge, ghostly brown column of ever-changing profile, it reached two hundred meters width and rose several kilometers in a strong curve. The dust at the top sheared off into the dusky sky. As it moved relentlessly closer, it seemed more like a hurricane on an old weather map, bearing down on Florida....

  At first, Stafford's reaction had not been fear. Carter admired him too much to let him be afraid at the beginning of the dream. In fact, Stafford reached instinctively for the camera. But even as he turned to face the monster, he realized it filled more than the frame of his camera even if he zoomed to the widest angle. He could not get a meaningful image. It was still moving directly, aimlessly, toward him. A
random universe could bring fortune or malevolence.... The winds began to whip furiously at him, sucking, and he heard a sound like salt being poured onto a table: dust grains hitting his helmet and faceplate. That was when the fear began. Oh, God, he thought, help me out of this one. Now he tried to retain his footing, and then he crouched. His instinct was to throw himself down, but he had an experienced explorer's distaste for getting on the ground and letting the insidious Martian dust twitch its way into his suit fittings, hoses, valves. The wind was too powerful; he went down anyway. In the last instant, he looked up and saw a skyful of dust, a tan fog in the shape of a giant beast. He made it into an image that he hadn't known he remembered, a childhood memory from some Edgar Rice Burroughs story, of an enormous Martian animal galloping across an empty, ancient dry sea floor. The salt sizzle sound intensified. He realized he was being immersed in dust.

  Old Man Stafford was huddling for his life. He had to present the minimum cross section to the wind. No one knew how big an object a Martian dust devil could loft, but there were stories about car-sized boulders showing skid marks out in the salt flats west of Mars City. He doubted them. The calculations said the air was too thin. Mostly, the dust devil was composed only of tiny grains, moving at, what, a hundred, two hundred kilometers per hour? A man could be killed by ants as well as tigers.

  God, how stupid, he thought. How did I get into this?

  Carter was sweating. He hated the dream, now. Some part of his head wanted to wake up. He couldn't. It was the kind of dream where all you had to do was open a door to get out, but you couldn't get the door open. You had to stay and watch the drama play itself out.

  The wind shrieked. Tiny grains of dust and pellets of sand drove into Stafford, seeming to sting, even through the suit. Could Stafford really feel them through his suit, or were they just stinging Carter's mind? He felt the sand slipping out from under him, and had a memory of himself as a kid on the beaches of Earth, a beach in California—yes, that was it, Stafford was from California—a specific beach with the surf swishing around him and sucking the sand out from under him, leaving him in a little hollow with his swimming suit and tennis shoes full of sand. Why these memories? Flashbacks of a drowning man? The noise waned. The ground finally stopped vibrating.