MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  But such a report would be nonsense, he believed, and he refused to sign his name to nonsense. Besides, as long as he had submitted no report, he had a certain amount of clout from Mars Council; useful clout. He could string things along for at least another few weeks, tell them he was working on it. Project emotional distress over Stafford's death. In the meantime, solve the mystery. It he could figure out how.

  This whole thing was very murky, and Carter was uncomfortable with anything being murky on Mars. In fact, he was paid to abhor murkiness. Like nature with a vacuum. Meaning? He had to rush in.

  On the flight up to the little moon, he had tried to steer his consciousness away from these ideas. They were ideas that needed to simmer, unexamined.

  Maybe here on Phobos he could finally open Pandora's Box. Since the days of the first climatology programs, photos of Mars had been beamed directly from the various satellites to monitors on Phobos. In the Phobos processors, raw numbers from the unthinking sensors assembled themselves into pictures. Millions of pix were stored in the data banks of Phobos. From the ethereal cyberspace files of Phobos the pix found their way to various scientists and technicians who had ordered them: meteorologists in Mars City, geologists at Hellas Base, geophysics grad students writing theses in the cubicles of the spinning University of the black moon. Sometimes there was even an order from Earth for the Martian images. Usually it came from a god-awful crackpot organization, trying to prove something about conspiracies to hide discoveries of vast deposits of oil, the ancient elixir, fountain of civilization's youth. Still, it was refreshing to know that someone in the terrestrial gravity well occasionally wanted a product from Mars, instead of the other way around.

  Perhaps, he thought, returning to the business at hand, among all the pix stored away on Phobos, there were images that could tell him something. Images that no librarian had thought to suggest to him: damaged images, or images from specialized sensors. So far, satellite images had been the key to this whole thing. They were his allies. They could reveal some secret truth. As a social engineer, he was trained to use whatever surveillance data he could get his hands on, as a tool for solving problems. He was aware, however, of whole organizations on Earth who argued that social surveillance should be stopped; that the orbital surveillance of farm field production, the automated imagery of every traffic intersection, the routine analysis of garbage, and all the other data-gathering techniques— in spite of the cleaner society it had built—left everyone with too little privacy and spontaneity.

  Carter stared back at the impartial eye that glowed on the screen. The juices were starting to flow. If he could just sit in the archives for a day or two, surrounded by the original data and the best image-processing equipment, he might come up with some unnoticed fact about 44.2° south and 313.2° west, the site of the little crater from which Braddock had flown them out of the desert, empty-handed, with Stafford's dune buggy dwindling to a point below them.

  There was a hidden ostinato in Carter's thinking. As Carter's ship was docking the day before, he had found himself thinking of Annie. With a shock he realized he was visualizing himself coming back from Phobos with some new discovery, a solution to the mystery—not to show to Mars Council or Philippe, but to show to Annie. So it was Annie he would be returning to when he took the ride back down to Mars City?

  As Philippe used to say, the human male was conspicuously bereft of bright plumage. Philippe, of course, had his art to show off. Perhaps if Carter could solve the mystery of Stafford's disappearance ... A distortion of his thinking, he realized; perhaps it had been touched off by the sight of a particularly attractive young woman—a graduate student at the University—bouncing from wall to wall out of the airlock, with gleaming red hair that exploded in low-G profusion around her shoulders.

  What made it much worse was that all thoughts of Annie were darkened by a cloud that he could not disperse. He was beginning to see it more clearly. It materialized from what Elena had said: What about Annie's role? Fact: Annie appeared on the scene as soon as Stafford disappeared. True fact: She insinuated herself into the search effort. Or was that a fact? "Insinuated" was a biased word. Still, she cozied up to Philippe and there also certainly seemed to be something going on between Annie and Carter himself, even though nothing had happened.... Anyway, if he wanted to be suspicious—which he needed to be—Annie's role in the case could be questioned. And the deeper he got into this mess, the more suspicious he became. Was she using them for some deeper agenda beyond her obvious purpose of getting her story? Were her actions part of the larger story, or a chance sideshow? He realized that it was this very sense of mystery that attracted him to her. What was going on in her mind, behind the veil of her actions? He wanted to learn more about the tapestry of her life.

  What had started out as logic had dissolved into a branching chain. If Stafford had simply been lost, then there was one set of inferences. But if the disappearance was part of a plan, the list fanned out in a new direction. And if Annie had some hidden plan of her own, there were still new branches. New facts became relevant at every turn....

  On Phobos, the clocks ran on Mars City time. Carter had arrived in the afternoon the day before, on Thursday, February 54. The month was running out of days as fast as Stafford had run out of air. If that's what had happened. In the afternoon, he had rushed directly down to the Mars Reconnaissance Lab, the library division that stockpiled Mars orbital imagery. MRL occupied a large suite, quiet in the midst of its loud colors, on the lowest floor of the wheel. At the front desk an attractive lady of dictatorial air presided as if MRL were her private domain. He found himself faltering as he tried to explain what he wanted, knowing secretly that he wasn't sure. The conversation started with ambiguity, in which they had danced around the issue of which of them had the authority. He was the visiting official, with a mandate from Mars Council; wasn't it he who was in charge? Or was it she who was in charge of the institution to which he had come, hat in hand, so to speak, requesting her assistance?

  It was an unpleasant start, but it ended with Carter being given a cubicle, a console, and instructional data cubes. In principle, he had access to all orbital picture files starting a week before Stafford's journey, and to the staff, who knew the system and could answer his questions.

  His cubicle was painted hot pink. The neighboring booths were peach and vibrant purple. Environmental designers in the teens had gone into a period of brilliant hues—a rebellion against the earth tones and pastels that had marked public and corporate design of the previous decade. They called it the Hispanic influence. Vibrant colors for a new millennium, they said. But there was no psychological theory behind it, Carter felt; just chic decorator talk.

  The plastic laminates that surfaced his cubicle were beginning to chip here and there, exposing low-density honeycomb structural sheets beneath. Someone with knife or nail file had scratched "Trish '27" on the back of the booth. Smooth bright cubicles all in a row: decorator sterility of the early twenties. The Phobos facility was going to need significant refurbishing one day.

  As soon as he was settled in the cubicle, he had checked the screen for the entries under STAFFORD. He hadn't checked Newsnet for days. Annie had been at it again.

  STAFFORD'S BUGGY FOUND IN DESERT

  Widely Known Researcher Located First Human Artifact

  on Mars Before Disappearing

  The mystery over Alwyn Stafford's disappearance took a new turn on Sunday when a search party under the direction of Carter Jahns, Assistant Director of Environmental Engineering at Mars City, and Steven E. Braddock, Director of Hellas Base, located the lost buggy of the famed Martian biologist. Using highly processed orbital images, Jahns was able to trace Stafford's faint tracks, and to direct a search to the remote desert site 300 kilometers west of Hellas, where Stafford had apparently located the damaged remains of the first artifact on Mars, the Mars-2 lander launched by the Soviet Union in 1971. One of Stafford's famed medallions was found on the lander wreckage, b
ut Stafford's tracks indicate he left that site, traveling for unknown reasons farther into the desert, where his buggy was found in a small volcanic crater.

  Mr. Jahns was assigned by the Mars Council to the search project. He stated that...

  Carter erased the screen. For reasons he could not articulate, he felt he had to stay one step ahead of Annie. Life was crazy.

  Eventually it was closing time and he had accomplished nothing. No inspiration had come, after all. Angrily he locked the cubicle with the key card he had been given and wandered off to find the tiny quarters he had been assigned. He was disgusted he hadn't accomplished more.

  Maybe he needed to assemble a list of the facts in the case. Had he really examined all the facts? Maybe he knew them and maybe he didn't. When you examined anything closely enough, facts broke up into indistinct assertions, like subatomic particles. Fully clothed, he ended up crashing on his bed with his little screen, glowing an empty page titled FACTS, on the nightstand beside him.

  The muse who had asked him to search through the images on Phobos toyed with his subconscious, like a cat playing with a mouse. During that first night on the black moon, Carter had had another of his dreams. This one was set in the far future. It was Mars, but with more air. There was a little boy—was it a great-grandson of Carter's, or Philippe's? Or Annie's? Or some pairing of them? Playing in a dune, the boy had found a sand-battered holeo cube. Carter knew, but the boy did not know, that the cube contained all the orbital images of Mars ever made. They were images of higher resolution than Carter had ever seen; you could enlarge them as much as you wanted, and the details stayed sharp. Like reality. It contained all the information needed to track Stafford to his fate.

  More than that. The cube contained all the images from all the explorations through the outermost solar system. Moons and rings beyond measure. It was a precious repository, this cube; humanity's knowledge of the solar system.

  But something was wrong. The boy took the cube to his father, in their dusty hovel by the dunes. Red windblown sand grains pecked at the frosted windows and shimmered in amorphous clouds that made the rest of the town hazy, as if seen through a veil.

  The boy held out the cube to his father. There was no sound in this dream. Carter saw it, as if trapped in a camera. The father was shaking his head. Then Carter realized what was wrong. Inside the dimly lit house there were no screens. On the shelves were a few old magazines—scavenged from the final shuttle arrival? There were no contrails in the milky sky above the house. In the corner of the room was a radio, silent. Broken. There were no other tronix in the room at all. The father had a worn face, a face that radiated fatigue. Their supply lines from Earth had broken down. They had their nuclear and geothermal generators, their farms. The basics. But no way to read cubes. The last of the sophisticated tronix had broken long ago. The father shook his head. There were trillions of bytes of data and no way to read them.

  The sun was setting. The boy went outside. He set up a telescope his father had helped him make. He was looking at Jupiter and its moons— four tiny pinheads. It was all he would ever know of them because there was no way to access what the previous generation had learned.

  Friday, Carter had been the first one at the MRL door. He started the day forcing himself to play his new theories out to the end. If Stafford had arranged his own disappearance, he must have been picked up. That meant a conspiracy theory.

  How could he have been picked up? The only buggies within range of Stafford's crater would have been from Hellas Base, and there seemed no chance any of them had done so. There were only five vehicles out from Hellas on Feb 43: Stafford and some members of the seismic party. All the seismic vehicles returned and were accounted for, and none of them had left tracks on Stafford's trail to the Mars-2 area or beyond.

  The other alternative was to have airlifted Stafford out with a hopper, but you didn't take hoppers into virgin desert. Well, it wasn't virgin. Stafford himself would have been there and could have cleared a landing site. But the photos they made as they left with Braddock's team showed no other marks of a hopper landing anywhere in the vicinity. Carter had gone over and over them in detail; there was no disturbance in the vicinity of the crater.

  So the conspiracy idea didn't hold together any better than any of the other theories, but at least they couldn't say he hadn't considered all the possibilities.

  He wondered whom he meant by "they."

  That confused mass of thought had brought him to this moment in his cubicle in the Phobos Library, looking for some previously unnoticed fact about the little cone at 44.2° south and 313.2° west. Hoping, in other words, that inspiration would finally hit if he immersed himself far enough in the facts.

  He glanced out the door at all the other workers working purposefully over their clean, colored desks. They seemed to know what they were doing. The lab seemed to vibrate with the sub-audible hum of intercourse between machines and human beings. Philippe would say they were turning into each other.

  He had accumulated the relevant files on all sorts of images: wide-angle synoptic weather images; telephoto views targeted by various researchers, showing specific geologic formations and experimental instrument arrays; multispectral images made for obscure mapping programs, in wavelengths that not even the strangest Earth animals could see. He had seen geologists poring over images like these. "Carbonotite," they would say to each other. "Scapolite and montmorillonite. Charge transfer bands." Then they would nod with smiles or fly into arguments. Apparently the words meant something to them and they would go home happy.

  Carter had compiled an inventory of all the wavelengths in which Stafford's little crater had been imaged in the last few weeks. At this point he didn't care how full of static, how low the signal-to-noise ratio, if there was some image or some data that contained a new clue. He was grasping at straws.

  He sat staring at one of the images he had called up. It glowed in multiple, surrealistic colors, greens and purples; colors assigned to the different, exotic infrared wavelengths of the original image. Images spun in his head. Pictures at full scale; pictures at expanded scale breaking up into pixels; pictures in false colors; pictures with grossly enhanced contrast. Pictures until his retinas accepted only scenes made out of dots.

  The breakthrough came, ultimately, because he had asked for all the imagery at all the wavelengths. He was looking at thermal infrared images, used by the meteorologists for studying seasonal weather patterns. The inventory included thermal images on February 39 and February 44 that covered the region of the small crater where Stafford's buggy had been parked.

  The thermal infrared images were made with the radiation given off by objects due to their own greater or lesser heat. Dark areas on the images were cooler than their surroundings; bright areas, warmer. The images took the thermal pulse of the living landscape.

  According to the data block on the February 44 frame, the picture had been taken at 23:08 L.M.T. Well after sunset. The landscape of night gave off its own dull infrared light, as the daytime-accumulated heat radiated into space. Brighter dots and smears marked individual house-sized boulders and rock outcrops that had deeply absorbed the sun's daytime warmth. Being warmed by that deep heat, they were now still radiating that warmth into the cold darkness. The north and east crater walls were bright and spotty, marking the rocky outcrops warmed in the day by the low polar sun. He had climbed those very outcrops. Outside the crater walls, an apron around the crater was dotted with boulders thrown out by the ancient explosion. Beyond the ejecta apron, the dune country was dark and cold because the dust made an insulating surface layer that stored little heat during the day. Everything was as it should be.

  Carter played with the console controls. The resolution on the thermal infrared pictures was not very good.

  If only he could bring out some kind of detail that would give a clue ... He began to play with the contrast, blowing up first one part of the scene and then another. With contrast enhancement, and false
color, he could separate various temperatures. Chartreuse equaled everything warmer than ten degrees above the average of the pictures; dull brown equaled everything else. Nothing. Then a step up. Chartreuse equaling everything more than five degrees above average. Still nothing. An active buggy, warmed by its heaters, would have been a blazing beacon with high enough resolution, but at this scale it was too small to be seen, a candle floating in the ocean at night, viewed from ten kilometers up.

  Carter's arsenal of techniques went beyond analysis of single images. As a long shot, he looked at differences between images preceding Stafford's trip and following it. The method was simple enough. Registering the pixels at four corners of a latitude-longitude grid around the crater, he could subtract one rectified picture from another. This produced an image that registered strong tones only in areas that had changed between the date of the first image and the second. If nothing had changed, the result was a featureless gray. There was a correction for sun angle, but if the sun was at substantially different angles, the resulting image would show a pattern corresponding to changing shadows. He had already used this technique on the high-res visible-light photos that bracketed Stafford's trip. It simply revealed spidery traces of the buggy tracks that he'd discovered at Mars City and used to track Stafford on the ground. Carter didn't know what this technique might yield in the thermal infrared, but he needed all the ploys he could get.

  The difference picture, 44 Feb minus 39 Feb, two kilometers on a side flashed quietly onto the screen. False color thermal infrared of a square, two kilometers on a side, centered on the crater. There was nothing. The image was frustratingly gray. Both pictures had been taken at night. The temperatures must have been similar everywhere.