MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  "No. I thought of that first, the heating effect, but I doubt the cameras caught the area so soon after takeoff that the spot was still warm. You don't transfer much heat into the deep soil during engine ignition. It just blows dust and hot gas around. What I think we're seeing is a spot where the loose surface dust was blown away during landing and takeoff, probably in the afternoon of the forty-third. Once you blow away the insulating dust, the sun heats up the rock, and the rock stores daytime heat. Then at night it radiates it. That's what I saw in the photo on the night of the forty-fourth. Any little spot cleared of its dust looks warm at night in the thermal IR."

  "But there must be a lot of little bare spots."

  "Not so many. There's at least a little dust on most surfaces. A little bit goes a long way as insulation. You blow it off, you have warm rock, or at least cemented soil that holds the heat. Anyhow, the main point is, this spot appeared between the thirty-ninth and the forty-fourth. Something happened in that interval. I'm saying the something was a hopper landing."

  "But who would fly out there and meet him? You make it sound like Stafford was keeping a secret rendezvous. But who's flying around Mars on secret hopper flights?"

  "That's what we want to know, isn't it? You want to help me figure that out?"

  She smiled again, at last. An enigmatic smile. "Wait," she said suddenly. "Wait till afterward. There's something you want to do first. With me."

  He hadn't told her everything.

  It could wait.

  Phobos University turned and the night went on and on in her room. The day/night/day/night of the wheel turning, and Phobos orbiting into Mars' shadow and out of Mars' shadow into sunlight, and Mars itself turning, and their bodies turning and twisting, day/night, one over another, cycles upon cycles, endless blending. "God!" she blasphemed when he stroked her long black hair, pushed it away from her face, and then gripped it tightly. But it was not blasphemy; it was a call to the universe, to a kindred spirit. It was as if she were surprised at her own body.

  What was different about her? The thought flickered through Carter's mind. And he found the answer. When she made love, she withdrew into herself, into a hunger. She became something new: a creature of hunger, of need. He was playing her, sounding the depths of the need, following a trail blazed by her unspoken request. This was something different than with any other woman he had loved: he was making love not with an erotic body, but with a whole, erotic personality. The doing with and the doing to and the being done to were all mixed together. He was both master and servant of this creature's need. She was the extension of his fingers, and yet detached, another continent. With scarcely a word she invited him to be her master, and as he accepted, this made him at the same time her servant.

  In the low gravity, he delighted in lifting her and turning her, letting her fall back to him. Slowly, slowly. When he held her, it was by her wrists, and sometimes she breathed his name again and again, like a heartbeat.

  There was no night and no day and no morning to come because they were on Phobos and they were far away from Mars City. At last they were free and for this moment it was endless night and they could make love until they needed nothing more. There was only the wheel, turning, turning, and the creature of need.

  Annie thought of something she had seen, far away, near the Phobos airlocks: a little girl, newly arrived on a ship from Earth, dancing in delight in a hotel lobby, jumping, floating, skipping, spinning with her arms out, embracing a new world. Annie, too, had become a little girl, dancing, floating, spinning, embracing.

  They had slept and made love again and declared it to be their own morning. They talked—not just words of love and sensation, but exchange. To Carter, it was mystical, this talk: talking to this person as if conversation were normal; talking to this hungering personality as if sentences were a way to communicate. There was a new presence lurking—the third entity that was a new creation, their relationship. How could she just talk, Carter thought. How could she sit here and say sensible words, as if the third party did not even exist? It was lurking, looking over their shoulders. It was glowing with invisible light, hanging in the air between them. How could that mouth even pronounce ordinary words? But they talked, they had to talk, about Stafford and the search. The search whose character had changed now, from a search to save a life to a search that might mean something stranger than death on Mars.

  "I want to see the pictures," she said. "We have to go to MRL."

  Saturday morning, MRL. The sign out front said the lab would be open today only until noon.

  The screen flickered to life when he punched up the image he had been studying the day before. The crater appeared. Now there was something new. The image was streaked and spotted with dropouts. Lines and clusters of pixels that made up the image were missing.

  "What the hell?" he said. The little crater was mostly clear, but a speckled swath of missing pixels covered the hot spot. He fiddled with the contrast and stretch controls.

  Nothing. There was no signal at all in the missing pixel positions. He called up adjacent frames. Same thing. "Shit," he said.

  He stormed to the librarian's desk, leaving Annie studying the fine print on the disk they had slotted.

  "I don't know," the young woman at the desk said when Carter brought her back to the booth. She stared at the screen with a mystified but uninvolved expression. Carter was angry. She was Saturday staff. What did she know? "It looks like electronic damage to the original data. Sometimes we see dropouts like that. We've had malfunctions in memory."

  "That's crazy. I had them out just last afternoon. They were fine. The images I was studying, they were fine. Now it's shit."

  "I really don't know. We do see dropouts like that sometimes. Some glitch in the system... If you'd like to talk to somebody in the technical..."

  "Yeah, I'd like to talk to somebody. I'm up here on special assignment." He explained who he was. Explained about Mars Council. Pulled out his ID, noting with gratification that the young woman seemed cowed. "I've got to talk to somebody in authority. Not just anybody. Who's in charge of the satellite imagery?"

  The librarian punched a number into her console, scowling at both of them. "Ms. Romero isn't going to like to be bothered on Saturday."

  Ms. Romero was out shopping, God help her, but she was planning to stop by her office at one, according to her machine.

  Before they left the library, they hardcopied the image still on the screen. Evidence from the scene of the crime.

  "I had these images up yesterday and they were just tine and now they've all gone to hell. I can't get what I want from the image I've got on the screen. The area I want—the image is ruined."

  Ms. Romero looked at Carter and Annie coolly from behind an imposing desk. She tapped unconsciously at the X key on her console. "As I said, there's not much we can do."

  "Oh, come on. There's got to be some duplicate storage."

  "Not at all. Satellite imagery is not that high a priority. Original images are kept in storage for ten years, and a sampling of images is kept permanently—you know, for geology studies and meteorology. But we don't have fail-safe backups for every image. We don't have infinite storage here, you know. There's a lot of demand for space.

  "Some kinds of data, there's fail-safe backups. But not for routine images. They're used mostly for weather analysis and site-specific geologic analysis. Every once in a while we may get a glitch that takes out some bits. It's rare."

  "You expect me to believe Phobos runs on a system where bits of data disappear inside the computer overnight?"

  "Of course not," Ms. Romero said, sounding defensive. "But if a transient comes through the line when the data is being transferred, you stand a chance of losing some bits. If it's not high enough priority files to have a duplicate data set, you're out of luck, to put it bluntly. You can't expect Phobos to keep duplicate data sets on all the satellite imagery. Really."

  Carter clenched the arm of his chair, angrily.

>   "I'm sorry if your project is hampered, Mr. Carter. Really I am. But this sort of thing happens sometimes. We try to trace each case to its origins, to learn how to prevent it. Those geophysicists, for instance. When they were experimenting with electromagnetic pulses—I mean we were losing data every time they pressed their button."

  "But yesterday..."

  "I don't know that what you saw yesterday was any better than what you have today. Maybe you were seeing what you wanted to see.... Anyway..."

  "I had a goddamn contoured and processed image...."

  Annie put her hand on his arm.

  "Anyway, as I was saying, I'd be glad to take you back and show you the system, but you understand there's no 'original image,' just a bunch of numbers floating in the computer somewhere. You tell me what you want, I'll be glad to go in there and call it up myself—it's just the same as you see downstairs in the lab," She was condescending now.

  "No thanks."

  "I doubt if the images will help with your project now, from what you say about the dropouts. Maybe some other images ... By the way, what did you say your project was?"

  "He didn't," Annie said.

  They left Ms. Romero with a page of "X"s on the screen of her clean, white terminal.

  "That was all bullshit," Carter said. They were walking home with a set of the damaged prints in an envelope under Carter's arm. A group of University students from Germany walked past them, singing. When did you ever see American students singing? they said to each other.

  "There are too many obstacles here," Carter said.

  "Keep talking," she said.

  "Braddock never wanted to take us out there to that crater, you know. I'm convinced of it now. He held off for days. And why didn't I get these pictures you wanted at Hellas in the first place? Why the delays?"

  "Bureaucracy's never perfect, that's what they'll say."

  "This goes beyond imperfect."

  "I tend to agree. They're stonewalling you."

  "Are you ready for another piece of the puzzle?"

  "What?"

  "Think about where I said that hot spot was located—where someone landed to pick up Stafford. Think about how that relates to our departure from the site."

  "Oh, my God," she said.

  "Right. When Braddock brought in his people, he had them land directly on top of the same spot where Stafford had been picked up! They deliberately landed on top of the one spot that could have given them away."

  "And Braddock was the one that called them in! When you were walking around the rim. I saw him. He just called them in on his own. He's in on it."

  "I've been going round and round on this. We have a lot of people here, hiding something. And it means we're all pawns. Me, Philippe, you—most of the people at Mars City for all I know. You think about that, you begin to go crazy."

  "You go where the story takes you," Annie said quietly, as if quoting some journalism professor. She paused, thinking. "You know, maybe I have one for you."

  "What do you mean?"

  "It's about Braddock. At the not I have access to our biographical files about public figures. There's something I didn't think about too much before, but maybe it's relevant. He was in charge of a big drilling project in Zaire a couple of years ago. It was supposed to be a pure geophysics project, but the African Federation threw him out. They claimed he was working on a secret project of the U.S. Security Agency to gain control of oil reserves in central Africa. It was a little flap, but now, in this context, well, maybe it's relevant. Maybe we're dealing with people that have an interesting past."

  "What about Lena?"

  "She's clean. Pure science type. And Stafford, of course; same thing."

  "We have to figure out what to do next," he said.

  "I'm getting an idea about that."

  "Look. I'll play a game with you." He pulled two scraps out of a wastebasket. "You write down what you think we have to do next, and I'll do the same. Let's see if we're both so smart that we agree. At least, then, I can hold my head up and deny I told you everything."

  "...in my bedroom."

  "It wasn't in your bedroom. It was along the goddamn promenade."

  "Oh, yeah."

  They wrote on their scraps. They turned them over. His said in a scrawl "Polar Station." Hers said in neat print "Elena Trevina."

  "Are you afraid?" she said.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "So am I."

  20

  2031, MARCH 1, SUNDAY

  The shuttle to Mars City eased away from the Phobos docking port. Carter, with Annie webbed in beside him, watched Phobos slide away into the distance. He was musing to himself: Maybe this whole thing is simpler than I thought. You trust each other, not because you are lovers but because you are friends. Why shouldn't she be able to write about Stafford and share love with me at the same time? Maybe there don't have to be complications.

  He had a dreamlike image of a stone bridge built across a river: once built, it was a permanent structure, easily merged into the nature of things, like old, moss-covered English bridges, part of the landscape. He did not know that his model for such things was too simple; he did not yet realize that even the strongest bridges built in the night are magical things, made of mist, able to disappear and reappear with the wave of an emotional wand, like bridges in a fairy kingdom.

  Below, in Mars City, on the day Annie left, Philippe had felt inflamed. It had started with anger and confusion. Annie was gone. Cryptically, her machine said only that she was out and would return. It didn't say when.

  Phobos? Was it Phobos? Carter had gone to Phobos.

  Why should he care, Philippe told himself. Slowly the anger and confusion mutated into something else, some sort of manic energy that may not have been healthy. It started with a conscious decision to work. Anything to stop thinking about Annie and what might happen. The rest of the week stretched before him. He thought about Schrödinger's strange ideas: The past was particles, fixed. The future was waves, malleable. Our work alone creates the future, turns it into the fixed structures of the past.

  Besides, he had not really wanted an exclusive relationship. Had he?

  Life so far had taught him that he could stop caring through drugs, drinking or—what was harder—by starting work. He had been feeling stalled, as if all the wheels of his engine were jammed, welded together with molasses. It amused him that his metaphors for it were consciously Victorian: he felt that all the wheels were connected by a system of rods and gears, and if he could only grasp one wheel and turn it, he could force the rest of the machine to start. Curious, he thought, that in this age of liquid held devices we still use metaphors from the era of Watt. "Get those wheels turning." "Get up a head of steam."

  Well, that is what he needed to do. He would return to a dormant project that he had almost finished before the Stonehenge opportunity came along. He closeted himself in his studio, a biology lab temporarily abandoned when funding was cut off by a Russian agency in some political debacle—probably traceable to the scandal over development rights in the Crimean resort peninsula. The Russian biologists had been called home and the lab was empty when he arrived.

  Once he got started, Philippe worked feverishly during the weekend, as if completion of the long-dormant project would release him from something. Only final assembly was needed from the parts he had already cast. He tried to force himself to think of nothing but the emerging, glinting tree, twice as tall as he was. Why should he care what Annie did? Women and men were meant to be friends. Women were there to be loved when they were approachable. He did not want to own her. He did not want to own anybody.

  Still, she could have called him.

  The aluminum and crystal tree grew in front of him. It grew around him, really, because he had a cherry-picker that allowed him to move around it and into it. He worked on the tree like nature herself in the spring, frantically, bending branches, extending shoots. Most of the crystalline leaves already had been attached, but now the
tree was sprouting new growth.

  He did not even sleep on Saturday night, a night when, passing once directly over his head, within eyesight, Annie and Carter were spending their second night together, making unconditional love. In Philippe's eyes, the tree had ceased to be metal and glass; it had became something evanescent. Branching over him, it became a hovering female principle, the moon goddess of ancient Europe, the many-faceted Hindu goddess Kali, Durga, Devi, who was as ever-present and as active as time, who stirred the dormant male principle. Was he an artist in control of his craft, creating something for the pleasure and inspiration of future travelers to Mars, or was he merely the wombless male struggling in impotent frustration to create ... something, anything? The goddess loomed above him, many-branched and many-leaved, and he tried to put Annie's face on it—that would have been the fitting symbolic climax of his dreamy stupor. But he failed in this. There was no face. He fell asleep and woke up Sunday at noon on the studio floor.

  After a few more hours' work, the main framework of the tree, the trunk and graceful branches, stood nearly complete. Aluminum, it gleamed under the spotlights he had rigged around the cluttered studio-storage room. A dull metal gleam with a hint of Earth's sky blue. Outside, in the thin Martian carbon dioxide, it would probably stay bright, not tarnish to dull oxide gray. Philippe was excited, for no reason that he could explain, by the idea of Martian skylight glinting off the branches, the idea that it would be pink light instead of blue. Who had ever seen aluminum picking up a pink sky glow?

  Remaining was only the task of attaching the last of the myriad crystal leaves, each with its name inscribed. There were fifty new ones still to be included. Gravely, hurrying in a blind ferment of work, he hung them one at a time by their little wires. The tree began almost to give off a light of its own, a kaleidoscope of crystal refractions and reflections. The Martian tree blossomed, hour by hour as the day wore on. Martian spring. Monday he would erect it in the airlock plaza. At least he'd have something to show for this period, when everyone else had given themselves up to the hysteria over Stafford and when relationships had changed....