MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  He turned to the photos spread beside him. He had to stay one jump ahead of the driver. On the rocky surface, the bus bumped along more slowly.

  A million thoughts were racing through his head like rabbits. He had led everyone down this rocky road. Or was it a garden path? They would have to spend the night out here. Would they be able to trace both the trail and the story to some sort of ending tomorrow? Or would the tracks just peter out and leave them knowing no more than they did tonight, out here in the cold dark? If so, Braddock might do more than complain. Braddock had said little civil to him all day, and had remained out of radio contact in the bus behind them. Did Braddock have something against him? He could imagine Braddock agitating for his dismissal if the expedition was disastrous. Perhaps Lena would intercede for him if he needed her. But the farther they traveled, the colder even Lena seemed.

  The bus was jostling over more rocks, and Carter retrieved the puffy down overjacket from his outside suit and rolled it into a cushion between him and the hard wall of the vehicle. They were all wearing jumpsuits that formed the inner layer of the pressure suits. Deflated, they were like multilayer sweaters or thin down garments. The rigid collar was the only uncomfortable feature of the suit; a helmet could be added in a second and the suit pressurized to give a layer of protection in case of an emergency. The heavier down jacket with its heater coils, that Carter was using as a cushion, was part of the outer layer, added for protection against the bitter Martian cold of the thin air and surface soils.

  Their progress across the landscape must have been slower than Stafford's, Carter surmised. They made stops to pore over the photos and choose the route, and stops to check the tracks outside wherever patches of soil recorded them. Judging from the purposeful tracks, Stafford had known where he was going.

  Finally, the sun was sinking in the west, producing an ominous red glow in the haze layer along the horizon.

  "This whole trip could be just a wild goose chase," Lena said, turning back to Carter. Then, seeing him engrossed in the photos, she abandoned him as Annie had.

  The driver told them he was afraid they'd lose the trail in the lengthening shadows. They stopped for the night. The bus was soon filled with the smell of warming food.

  In the gathering dark they could see the other bus, windows cheerfully aglow, a little island of warmth, a mobile camp in a night that seemed as cold and vast as space itself.

  They tried to make small talk. What a big day it would be tomorrow. As if everyone were trying to cheer up everyone else. Were they all secretly worrying about what they would find?

  Philippe hit his head trying to extract his bag of personal belongings, which was jammed in the cramped storage space in the back. Then it came loose and he swung it easily over the back seat. "You know what the song says," he called cheerfully. He sang it, waving his long arms.

  "All is hard on Mars above,

  "but lifting things and making love."

  Then he looked uncomfortable. He looked around the bus and joked that Mars didn't know the first thing about hotels. "Concierge! I need some more hot towels, s'il vous plait!"

  The small talk died a natural death as they settled down. In the stillness, they could hear the bus making an occasional gurgle or creak as it cooled, and then it, too, grew still, as if defeated.

  The darkness seeped into the bus. It seemed to create an atmosphere not of gloom, but of apprehension. Something had happened to Stafford out here.

  Midnight. In the daytime, you could marvel at Mars going by outside the windows of the bus. Everything was strange, new, real, as if it were the sun that gave physical reality to the hills and the eroded rock formations. But now, at night...

  Carter could not concentrate on the stars.

  Carter was surprised at his own emotions, here in the night. Darkness hid the hills and rocks, which had changed little since before the days of the trilobites. The Martians could come out from their hidden crevices and stalk the land unseen. It seemed that any minute after midnight, you might hear footsteps outside in the darkness. There might be a rap on the window, and when you turned on the outside lights in a panic, no one would be there....

  The beds were neatly separated. Annie had made a show, it seemed to Carter, of selecting her own, on the left side, forward of the back bench. "This will be mine," she had said, almost too loudly. She was across the aisle from him. Philippe made his bed across the back bench, bustling to unfold it and smooth its pads. Everyone in his own little nest. But in the absolute quiet Carter imagined he could sense Philippe reaching forward, touching her quietly in the dark.

  Did the Martian spirits in the darkness outside the window care about human feelings? Safe in the peacefulness beyond existence, didn't they laugh to themselves at humans who could dream of love while sleeping in a little glass and metal coffin, in the middle of a nearly empty planet?

  Hours later, Carter awoke. Something was different. Where it had been black outside, now there was a faint pallor. The landscape seemed faintly illuminated, but the color was morbid, as if life had drained out of the lava hills. Rocks gleamed dully, like skulls. He craned to look upward.

  High in the enormous sky a mass of noctilucent clouds had formed, catching the sun's glow from beyond the northeast horizon. It was their flat, pearly glow that lit the landscape. And in their midst blazed a dazzling star with a faint companion.

  He reached across the aisle and touched Annie's hand. He could see her eyes flash open. He pointed upward out the window. "Look," he whispered.

  Quietly she leaned across to look out his window and her long hair brushed his arm.

  "Earth," he whispered to her, brushing against her. "This month it's the morning star."

  The bright star stared back at them, unwavering as a streetlight.

  "And the moon," he added. "See? Just above and to the right."

  Carter tried to see the blue color of home, but the bright light seemed as pale and white as a ghost. Nine billion people, he thought. A third of them asleep, a third of them hungry, and one percent of them rich.

  "It's beautiful," she whispered, one syllable at a time. She leaned close to him and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "Thanks."

  They watched together in silence, neither making a move, until the light of the clouds began to fade.

  15

  FEBRUARY 50, SUNDAY

  In the morning the buses started rolling across the open desert, pausing now and then to spy out the faint tracks. Progress was slow. Carter directed them to areas where segments of tracks were visible in the orbital images. In other places, Stafford's tracks climbed purposefully onto the rocky outcrops or onto gravel fields, where they could scarcely be traced.

  In these areas, Carter manned the seat next to the driver in the front of the bus and studied his photos, looking for the next elusive spot, a kilometer or so ahead, where he could glimpse the next faint segment of tracks. Annie, Philippe, and sometimes Lena peered through the glass door between the compartments, until he would finally point off in some forward direction. "It looks like the next possible segment on the photo is at 44.4732 south and 313.6885 west," he would tell the driver, who would punch in the coordinates and study the glowing map on the console in front of him.

  It was hard talking with the driver, who, like an old-fashioned aircraft pilot wore 'phones and a mike, and seemed immersed in his tasks. He seemed to be conversing at frequent intervals with Braddock in the vehicle behind them.

  Carter, returning to his seat in the main part of the bus, alerted all of them to keep looking for any sign of Stafford's buggy, since Stafford might have reached his end point to the west of them, turned around, and headed back along this path. But whatever tracks they found always appeared to be outbound.

  When they were on the rocky areas, the two buses would move ahead slowly in tandem, until they picked up the trail again. Braddock's bus would then fall in dutifully behind them as they bumped along. Each success in identifying Stafford's track gave Carter mor
e confidence.

  Several times, they parked, donned suits, and clambered out of the vehicles, scouting around until they found Stafford's lonely pair of furrows heading off along a shallow gully or a terrace of outcropping lava. Trickles of windblown dust were already obscuring the tire tread prints in several areas. The stops, they barely acknowledged, broke the tedium of long hours in the bus.

  Once, as they returned to their vehicles, they realized Philippe had not joined them. Carter spotted him crouched some distance off, kneeling beside a rock. What now? Carter and Annie went over.

  Philippe was scooping loose dust in his glove, holding it at eye level, watching it sift through his fingers. The air was still and the dust fell like a little waterfall in the vacuum. It had a beautiful burnt adobe color. "Mars," Philippe was whispering to himself, unaware his short-range transmitter carried his voice to the rest of them.

  "Philippe, you're always off in a world of your own," Annie chided him.

  "Hey, Philippe, let's go," Carter added.

  Philippe was startled. He jumped and the motion was visible even through the suit.

  "Why, Philippe," Annie teased him. "You're embarrassed."

  "It's different when you know you are the first human being ever to touch something," he mumbled.

  Mars rolled by outside, one hour, two hours. The sun arced upward into the northern sky.

  "You know," Philippe piped up in a deadpan voice, "I've been thinking that we ought to plant one of every kind of cactus we can get our hands on, just to see what happens. I bet if you came back in a year, one of them would be prospering. This just looks like the right kind of country."

  It set Carter to musing. In a land devoid of vegetation, he realized, the scattered rocks themselves took on the role of plants. In the verdant landscapes of Earth, rocks had historically been faintly repulsive to the puritans who wanted to believe in a Garden of Eden or a Gaia. Fair Earth's rocky rocks seemed like protruding bare bones that should have been clothed with flesh. Exposure of the rocky bones of England or Massachusetts came down through the language as faintly obscene—"naked rock," "strip mines," "a wound," "a sore upon the earth."

  But in the ancient hills, the rocks filled the landscape with variety. The rocks and soils of Mars had as many textures as trees and flowers. There were dark rocks with gleaming crystals and bubbly rocks like sponges on the sea floor. They passed a dense basalt sculpted with conchoidal fractures like the sides of elephants' skulls. They saw vistas studded with rough boulders and hillsides of patterned fine soil, blown by the wind, smooth as a woman's thigh. Rocks dislodged by Stafford's wheels protruded from freshly disturbed ground along the road like newly planted bushes along a country lane. There were mosses of gravel. Once they passed a meadowlike patch of faintly greenish olivine cinders, a striking color contrast with the rusty vistas.

  Watching out the bus windows, Philippe pointed out the rocks' facets taking on the colors around them: upward facets catching the lavender of the high morning sky; shaded groundward facets reflecting and concentrating the red of the sunlit soil.

  They entered a country of stratified sediments. Distant hills showed banding, slightly tipped. Closer to them, house-sized slabs of tilted sandstone jutted out of the ground, as if the long-departed gods of Mars had built houses of playing cards, and then left them in a half-demolished state.

  Down into a little hollow they rode, along the front of a thick flow, whose twisted rocks loomed above them. Here, the horizon closed in upon them, claustrophobic after the grand vistas they had been seeing.

  They crossed one more stubby lava flow, where Stafford had deliberately turned up a cobbly ramp onto the rocky surface. As the driver cursed the rough country, they threaded their way across the flow, aiming for high dunes on the horizon to the southwest, where Carter had found the next faint line on the orbital photos.

  No doubt, now, Carter thought to himself; the old guy was trying to hide his tracks. Stafford hadn't had to pick his way across this rocky plain. He could have driven around the south side of this flow where the dusty dunes allowed slow but steady going, but the photos showed that he had picked the widest part of the flow to cross. The only rationale was that Stafford didn't want to be tracked. Since Stafford had used orbital images in his earlier rambles, he must have known the potential for image processing to find buggy tracks. He had tried to hide his tracks but hadn't he known it would be impossible? It didn't make sense.

  And why the hell hadn't Braddock put someone serious on the orbital photos right away? Carter felt like calling Braddock again on the radio, but it would just produce another argument. What was the use? Better to bide his time. The end of the trail should reveal more answers than any half-baked argument with Braddock.

  Later in the morning they came down a slope onto one of those unsung marvels of Mars, a vast, flat plain of sullen black basalt boulders, scattered like toadstools, weathered out of some partly buried lava flow. Black rocks. Flat-lit by the high sun, the plain looked like a giant's sheet of music, with rocks scattered like notes that would play some strange music if only you knew how to read it.

  Suddenly Carter noticed that beyond the boulder Held, lined up along the horizon like smoke stacks in the distance, pale columns of midday dust had begun to rise. He sat watching them. Were they the answer to the Stafford mystery? He began to want to see one at close range.

  Annie was in the seat behind him. She leaned forward. Her smile was nearly against his shoulder. "Dust devils?" she said. Carter nodded.

  "I've never seen anything like that before," Annie said in wonderment as the bus chugged along. "You know, everything is new to me on this trip. Dust devils seem alive, the way they come into being, grow, move around."

  "And ultimately vanish. To me they seem like phantoms. Look at the way that one comes and goes. See? It gets thick for a moment..."

  "...and then twists around and thins out, as if it turned sideways and vanished..."

  "...but in the next minute it's back again, dense as ever." They laughed at their complicity in the thought.

  She leaned over the seat, closer to him. "Thanks again for letting me come along," she whispered. "It's wonderful." He liked the way she pronounced the word, accenting the first syllable and rolling it off her tongue like a waterfall spilling over rocks. "I could be sitting back at Hellas earning my keep by writing about Stafford and everything that's happened. But this is so much more—visceral—being out here."

  Carter shifted uneasily in his seat. This seemed almost too much, like a come-on. He turned to her with a grin. "Try as I might, I couldn't find a valid reason to keep you from coming. You're ... involved."

  "Because you allowed it to happen." She paused. "It's interesting, watching you with people, watching you take charge of things."

  "What do you want, this time?" He said, still smiling.

  "No, no. I don't mean it that way." She seemed genuinely distressed. "I think you're doing a good job," she added, as if explaining something.

  Lena had turned back to listen to the conversation. She gave Carter an I-told-you-so raise of the eyebrows.

  They watched silently out their own windows as the bus maneuvered down a bank into the remains of an ancient riverbed. The soil here was as dry and dusty as that on the plain. "Downstream" they could see the pointed end of what once had been a streamlined island in the channel.

  Philippe gestured at the expanse of river bottom. "Water level's right low this year."

  "Yup," said Annie. She leaned forward again and whispered in Carter's ear. "Well, here I go. Time to interview the ice queen." She got up and moved to the seat across from Lena.

  Ice queen? Ice queen? Carter watched as she approached Lena's seat with a body language of deference. In a moment, to Carter's relief, they seemed to be talking peacefully enough. Occasionally over the noisy lurching of the bus, he could hear phrases.

  "These rocks remind me of..." Lena muttered something that Carter couldn't hear.

  "You must
have taken a lot of field geology, preparing for your work," Annie persisted.

  "Yes."

  Carter watched the two of them, Annie's long black hair brushing the back of the seat as she sat across from Lena. "What causes the varieties of rocks," he heard Annie ask. Lena launched into an answer. Lena's not buying it, he thought, but Annie plowed ahead with little harmless questions. Carter caught snatches of Lena's answers. "...deep polar strata ... reconstruct the cycles of climatic history ... volunteered to come along on the search ... Yes, of course I knew Stafford personally ... we're all concerned." Some of it covered the same ground Lena had covered with him the other night, but her voice sounded more tense. And finally, Lena's voice, testily, "Look, I'm really not here to be interviewed."

  Annie shrugged. "Sorry." And now it was Annie who nodded at Carter with an I-told-you-so expression as she moved back to her own seat and watched the landscape silently.

  By noon Carter could see their objective, a volcanic cinder cone breached on one side, forming a distinctive horseshoe-shaped amphitheater about two kilometers across at the base. The photos indicated an unusually red coloration in the formation, but it was too far away in the horizon haze to show much color.

  Stafford's tracks had disappeared. The last definite tracks, visible on the photos or on the ground, were in the hills a kilometer back. There were none beyond that on any of the photos. Both Lena and Philippe had voiced doubts about whether they could possibly pick up any new tracks by driving around on the ground, this far from the last set. "If you can't see any more tracks, and we can't see his vehicle, then it's been a wild goose chase," Lena told him. "Stafford's buggy could be out of sight in any of these hollows, anywhere out there. We can't keep driving around forever looking for it. Face it, Carter, we're done."

  But Carter had noted that the tracks lined up purposefully in the direction of the crater ahead of them. The only landmark in this area. "Keep going," he told the driver. "If we've come this far, we're going to go check out that cone."