MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Philippe and Carter waited in silence for the beer to arrive. "To the friendship of asses," Philippe toasted when the beer came. He guzzled a heavy mouthful. "I really don't want to talk about it," he added.

  They stared at their drinks.

  "We need to talk about it," Carter said. "Besides, I've been thinking. We ought to patch it up with her. She's expecting to come with us. We can't just sit there in silence. I could exclude her, since it's my own requisition—part of my budget—but, hell. She'd show up anyway. Besides, she's been helpful."

  "Helpful to herself. Hell, she has been using us. You don't see that? It's as plain as anything. She gets a good story. An exclusive source or two. A little sex on the side ... It's a great career, journalism. She's got all her programs running. Talk about manipulation."

  Carter stared glumly into his beer. What he was saying was not what he had expected to say. "Suppose it isn't true. I mean, the facts are true but your interpretation isn't. Suppose this doesn't have anything to do with manipulation or sex." My God, Carter thought, where is this coming from? "I mean, suppose it's like an Escher drawing and now you have to look at the fishes instead of the birds. The same set of images, but different pictures..."

  "Whether it's two plus two or three plus one, it still adds up to four. Why do you make up excuses?"

  "Our century's metaphor for reality is a jigsaw puzzle, where each piece is a fact, and once you have all the facts, they fit into one picture: reality. But suppose facts are like mosaic tiles; the same set of facts can fit into any picture you want."

  "Philosophy, it is so helpful."

  "Philippe, look. Suppose you're making a sculpture of a woman and you have this beautiful model who comes in and poses for you. You like her. You find her intriguing. You take her out to dinner and you end up spending the night and have great sex. Are you using her?"

  "No, but..."

  "And maybe she likes you and she makes a gift of posing for you for a whole Saturday without pay, because she knows she's planning to stay with you anyway, that weekend ... She's thinking maybe she'll move in with you. Is she using you?"

  Philippe shrugged. "There is no way to measure motivation; there are only actions. We have to judge the quality of the actions."

  "You've conned her into giving you free time and free sex as well. She's conned you into a place to live. Manipulation, yes?"

  "But you are leaving out ... there is a set of standards...."

  "We all keep saying this is a new world. Annie's evolving her own rules as she goes, her own style. She's becoming less of a classic journalist and more of a writer-participant, helping to search for Stafford, and writing about it at the same time. What's wrong with that? She's a good writer. She's reported well and made a balance between reporting the news and keeping our trust about what we've found. I mean, in some detached sense, if you strip away all the old conventions, what's wrong with what she's done?"

  "In a job like that, one must avoid even the appearance of conflict of interest."

  "You say that because you're hurting and you want to accuse her of something."

  He shrugged again. "As you like."

  "Of course it hurts. I don't like it either. She should have leveled with us in the beginning, before she started these relationships with us. But human beings haven't figured out how to level about that in ten thousand years. How would you have felt if she said, 'Oh, tomorrow night I'll be sleeping with Carter. Have a good time while I'm away.' "

  Philippe downed the rest of his glass.

  "Well?"

  Philippe snorted. "I think you are missing the point. Down below all the platitudes, human beings are programmed to want to get their DNA together with someone else's. That is what I was telling you. Love is mucous membranes wanting to get in contact with each other."

  "All this bullshit of yours is just your defense mechanism, Philippe."

  "Animals are just jolly big clumsy ambulatory mechanisms to carry genes around until they can get in contact with other genes. I mean, why do you think teenaged girls act the way they act? I have this niece in London, you would not believe her. Spends the whole day trying on different clothes and arranging her hair. Spends the nights looking for the loudest, most crowded spots. You think people are the grand high point of evolution? Wrong. Evolution produces big molecules that have the ability to interlock and split and make more molecules and store little molecular predispositions to make big casings around themselves. The molecules have the ability to make wonderfully complicated casings to carry them around. We're the casings. It's all perfectly ... normal. None of it matters. I forget what I was saying. I'm drunk, my friend. At last."

  "That's all very nice, but what are we going to do with her?"

  Philippe ordered another beer. "We just go on. We go test your crazy theory about the pole. You want to take her along, obviously. Okay. Count me in. We let her get her story however she wants. The hell with her. Just watch her. Keep an eye on what she's doing. Better we have her where we can keep track of her than out of our sight writing God knows what. But you should not let her make a fool of you, or me either. Meanwhile, we adjust. New facts take a little getting used to. Flexibility is our middle name, n'est-ce pas?" He raised his glass and waved it around the room. "To flexibility."

  Carter could get no more out of him.

  By the time Carter got back to his room, he was convinced Philippe's version of it was right. Annie had not only insinuated herself into the investigation and wormed information out of them—out of Carter anyway—but by seducing them both, she had consciously tried to insure a maximum number of allies.

  The beer helped him decide that he had weathered the worst of hurricane Annie, and that the storm was over. It was a glitch on the side of the larger issue of Stafford's disappearance, and he was lucky to get out of it as easily as he had. There were a dozen other outcomes that would have been disasters.... If she had used the information differently ... If it had come out that they had been lovers while he was covering the investigation...

  With her along, he would be able to watch her manipulations.... Maybe she would even level with him.

  Anyway, he would talk to Lena. Without Annie. Lena had been approachable enough before, God knew. Maybe Lena would level with him. Maybe somebody would level with him.

  As for Philippe, Carter would be glad to have him along, with his common sense and humor. They had both been conned by Annie; it was time to reconfirm their friendship. Liberte; egalite; fraternite! Philippe was a good right-hand man in any undertaking. Besides, he had been making noises about gathering information on the polar cap, and creating a final sculpture to be installed exactly at the pole. With his Stonehenge and Martian Tree projects in place, Philippe had begun carrying on about a new field he was inventing; planetary art, he had called it.

  His 'corder pipped.

  It was Annie. "Listen, Carter, I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I didn't handle it well. I admit it. We've all got to talk. Philippe agreed. There isn't much time."

  Of course, she had to ask Philippe first.

  He hung up on her and turned off the unit.

  All night he hated himself for it.

  BOOK 5

  The South Pole

  Thou art Mars of malcontents.

  —William Shakespeare,

  The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1600

  22

  2031, MARCH 3, TUESDAY

  Outside Mars City, the sun came up cold and red in the southeast. Tuesday morning. The red glow crept across the soil-mounded tunnels and observation towers and began to burn the frost off the tiny windows in Carter's office as the sun gathered its heat.

  Carter sat alone at his desk. Well, this is it. Funny how clocks and worlds keep turning at constant, uncaring rates, when momentous events are building. The sun rises with monumental unconcern, just as it rose on the day of the Magna Carta signing, or the first day of Gettysburg.

  A fuzzy patch of sunlight began to slide down the wall opposite Cart
er's desk. Show time.

  Certainly by now they would know he was coming. He had had to reserve the shuttle the night before. Word would have spread. They'd be getting ready for him, Lena and the rest of them.

  It was almost time to head out to the shuttle. He walked over to the tiny window. Through the clearing frost, he could see the shuttle, sitting on the desert landing pad, crouched on its spidery legs, waiting. He looked around his office one last time, feeling like a character in a twentieth-century movie, who should be pulling a gun out of the drawer and sticking it in his belt, hidden by his heavy black sweater. Crazy thought.

  It could be a wild goose chase. They could hide Stafford in some underground lab or out in a rover. They could deny everything if they wanted to. If there was anything to deny. Still, he had to have a look around. The pole was exerting some force on him. The magnetic pole.

  Those were night thoughts. The rising sun, growing brighter by the minute, cut through the fog. For him, light had always made the night-shadowy shapes of things suddenly more definite. He hoped it would work this time.

  Now, in the daylight, the real world was returning. He would have to force the mess with Annie back into its place, like stuffing a sleeping bag into a sack. She had said she wanted to talk. Would she even show up? He would pursue the mission and to hell with her if she thought she could ... To hell with everything until he found out what had happened to Stafford.

  Go down to the pole and see everything with your own eyes. The trick here is to keep those eyes open, be ready for anything.

  He headed for the airlock.

  He passed the little bistro down the hall from the airlock suiting room, catering to shuttle passengers and still-spacesuited field crews with their helmet collar rings shining around their necks. Coffee and doughnuts on the run. No sign of Annie or Philippe there. Truth was, he wanted to grab Annie and shake her, and find out the truth. He wanted to kick Philippe's ass back into gear, too—make them sit down and formulate a plan. If they showed up. Forget about all the psychological crap going on between them. Time heals, and all that.

  All the while, a traitorous voice whispered in his ear: It wouldn't hurt to listen to whatever she might have to say.

  More night thoughts. Remember, the sun is rising.

  There they were, in the airlock. Philippe suiting up and Annie tinkering with her suit's fittings as if she had just arrived. She looked tense, as if on the verge of saying something, but stifling it.

  No one else was in the airlock. They would have the shuttle to themselves. Annie and Philippe began suiting up on a semicircular bench in the corner, busying themselves with the bulky garments. Carter claimed a bench across from them. He wanted to prove he could keep his distance.

  Carter kept his face blank but, he hoped, not unpleasant. At least Philippe wasn't smiling that goofy grin of his.

  Philippe gave Annie a good-natured nudge. "I told her I was sorry I got angry," he said. "It's just that I was totally unprepared. Besides"—he made his self-deprecatory shrug—"you should never take my anger seriously."

  "We should talk before we go to the pole," Annie said quickly, as if trying to wrest the initiative from Philippe. "There's no use being mad at each other down there. We don't know what we'll run into. It could be important to all of us. I'd just like to straighten this out ahead of time, if we can. I need to clear the air, I guess."

  "So clear away." Carter hardly felt like being warm.

  "This is hard..." Annie said.

  Carter let himself study her face. No matter what maps he constructed with his mind-words when they were apart, something different happened when he could watch her face. She radiated a capacity for honesty and inner pain beyond anything that he had met before.

  Philippe remained silent, as if he had already made his peace.

  Annie hesitated, with a look pleading for him to give her an empathetic cue to continue, but terrified that she should lose her place in some carefully rehearsed speech. "Help me," she said.

  "Jesus, Annie," Carter blurted. "I look at you, your warm-and-friendly act, I want to believe it, but I find myself thinking, what does she really want?"

  "Like Freud," Philippe chimed in. "What do women..."

  Carter ignored him. "Last night, I was thinking that if we had a magic camera recording us for the last two weeks, I could ask any jury to watch the tapes. You'd have no defense. They'd all say you were just using us any way you can to get your story. You can say what you want, but that's what the tapes would show. Right? Nothing wrong with it, I suppose. You get your story, a little love on the side. It's kind of a blow to see it that way, you know? There's such a thing as feeling used."

  "Define 'used.' "

  "I can't. I always had trouble with that word. Never really used it before. Now I get the idea what it feels like."

  "I've known a lot of men who have trouble with that word."

  "Okay. So I've learned something. You're a great teacher."

  Philippe: "Don't get holy on us, Annie. You have to see how it seems to us. You have been using us all along to get your story. There's no way to distinguish that from the alternative."

  Annie cocked her head to one side. "The alternative. And what is the alternative? You've made a very nice presentation of the Annie-is-a-bitch theory, thank you very much. Now can you also put an alternative into words? Go ahead."

  Philippe picked up his fleur-de-lis helmet. "Maybe if I think about it."

  "No! Don't lock yourself away in your helmet yet. You think if you get your feelings hurt you can just hide away. Well, it's not fair. Look. I could give you some BS about how you're just getting paid back for centuries of the double standard. But that's not the point. What I'm trying to say is something else. Suppose a woman meets men she likes, and she's attracted. Suppose she's trying to grope her way through life like anyone else. Suppose she's away from home for a long time and she has an arrangement."

  "An arrangement."

  "You know what Tomas and I do? He's a journalist, too. Wanted six months off from the network for a project he's doing. He's heavy with book. You try to hang around each other with your minds on projects like that, you get on each other's nerves. Maybe you guys don't know. You've never been married. Neither one of you. You don't know what it's like when it stops being just entertainment, and you're actually trying to build something. We want our life together, but we want our own lives, too. I wanted time to be a really good reporter. We decided we'd take our six months apart. We always want each other, thank God. IPN lets us send a message to each other on the network almost every day. I miss him and he misses me. But ... marriage isn't just the bungalow in the burbs anymore, you know? We decided we were free to see other people. We're convinced we will keep loving each other, so we reached this decision: You can't shut yourself off from the other half of the professionals in the world, the other sex."

  "Pretty words."

  "It's hypocritical to work with people every day and pretend attractions don't exist. Love between human beings is a wonderful thing. At least it should be. Babies aren't a factor anymore; it's not two hundred years ago. Sexual taboos evolved in agrarian villages, to prevent disrupting society. That's not our problem anymore; lack of connection is our problem now. So why not an occasional human intimacy beyond dry work?

  "And there's something else." She was hitting her stride in the speech she must have planned for the previous day. "Tomas and I, we never accepted the old idea that there are only two modes of male-female interaction: cold isolation or screwing. The idea that you're either doing it or not. There are a million levels of intimacy and attraction, a glance, a sharing of words, a thousand ways of touching ... The three of us, we've shared what we wanted to share and there was no need for you guys to start acting possessive...."

  She looked at them despairingly. "Look, I want to pursue this story. I want to do it in your company. I want to help and I want to report what I see. I'm going to the Polar Station in any case, but I propose let's g
o as comrades. What do you say?"

  "We can't keep you off the shuttle," Carter said. He forced a smile.

  She turned to Philippe for confirmation.

  "Comrades in arms, so to speak. One for all and all for one." Philippe saluted with a lanky flourish. He really does think everything is a game, Carter thought bitterly. Maybe that's what they have in common.

  He was about to say something more, but the pilot came into the suiting room, a tall, wordless chocolate-skinned man who kept looking at his watch. The pilot finished suiting up as if not even thinking about it. He seemed not to notice them. His attitude seemed almost a pretense.

  The pilot's presence wrenched Carter back to the reality of the moment. Carter studied him carefully. What did he know? Was he in on some plan? With Lena? With Braddock? With Annie herself? The pilot looked bored. Finally he gave them a nod with a friendly grunt and headed toward the airlock. "C'mon with those suits. Let's get this show on the road."

  Philippe finished with his own suit in silent concentration. He adjusted his helmet and headed toward the airlock with the pilot, fumbling with his locking collar. "See you out there," he said as the door sealed behind him.

  At least a pilot had showed up. Carter had half expected some delay. Some new excuse. Sorry, the shuttles had to be serviced. We'll take you tomorrow, or Wednesday. The arrival of a pilot meant that whoever was pulling the strings behind the scenes was letting them come. Or would there be some last-minute hold on the takeoff?

  Play this by ear. Be ready for anything.

  Carter watched Annie sealing up her suit closures. She looked like a ski queen in oversized down leggings. Carter tried to shake off the thought that he enjoyed seeing her in this puffy, cuddly cocoon, the thought of a cozy fireplace in a ski lodge. He had been thinking what he wanted to say to her, going over and over the half-formed questions.