MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

"Naw, nothing. No ray guns, no credit cards with photo ID, Rosetta stones, nothing."

  The room seemed to ring with questions as they clustered around Elena and Sturgis and Stafford. Annie had her minicam out. Carter walked off along the fence, gazing alone up and down at the green organ pipes, tuning in and out of the conversation, which seemed almost irrelevant to the majesty of the construction.

  "What tests have you done on the composition?"

  "You said nothing can penetrate this material?"

  "That's always the way it was in the old movies. Nothing could cut through UFO metal."

  "I've told you as much as we know."

  "We decided the thing to do was to level with you guys. Now you know as much as we do. You can see for yourselves: This whole situation is unprecedented. You see why we have to take certain steps."

  Now Carter heard Stafford's voice, clearer than the rest. "You're in it with us now. You have to decide if we did the right thing."

  Funny phrase, coming from Stafford. Stafford had been in on it. Agreed to ditch his buggy and send them out on a wild goose chase to buy time for Sturgis. Or rather to buy time for himself. Sold out, even? Sold out to Sturgis or to ego? Carter wondered if he would have done the same thing if the call had come to him. You had to allow for the fact that Stafford was taking his last shot at his lifetime dream. You couldn't blame him. Maybe he thought it was all a big joke. Stafford was like that sometimes. A curmudgeon to the end.

  "You can go down and touch it if you want to," Lena was saying. "Two at a time. In the elevator. Go ahead. Take off your gloves."

  While the first two parties went down, Stafford took Carter off to the side. "Well, what do you think? Aren't you glad I brought you here?"

  "You brought me here?"

  "Shhhh."

  "You brought me?" Carter repeated in a lower voice.

  "Sure. I recommended you as the person to contact, in the unlikely case that something happened to me."

  "You didn't know I'd find you."

  "Didn't I?" Stafford's inscrutable smile. "C'mere." He gestured before Carter could argue. "I want to show you something." Stafford dragged him over to a corner where the horizontal tube emerged from the wall of soil. "Look. It's the darndest thing. You've got this seamless mass of tubing joined to tubing, and then there's this." Stafford pointed.

  There was a bulb swelling out of the side of the tube, the shape of half an egg. But there, in the middle of it, as plain as anything, was the flush head of a screw. It was not an ordinary screw. Instead of a straight slot or Phillips head cross, there was a three-branched star indented into the surface. "I discovered it myself. It was only exposed by the digging on Tuesday. Look, can I tell you something that is secret—you won't even tell Annie?"

  "All right."

  "I don't want anybody to know, but I went back to the lab and made the appropriate screwdriver. Pulled the little sucker out of there. Guess what I found."

  "What?"

  "Nothing. That little bulb-shaped dingus came off. That's all. Nice little solid piece of very dense metal, felt like. No apparent function at all. Like a piece of chrome on an old Cadillac."

  "That's crazy. How did you know it wouldn't cause some disaster, like opening a valve or something?"

  "Aw, you don't put a dangerous cap on something with just one screw. Besides, at my age I didn't want to wait for some committee to debate it. Now that I know, I'll report it and wait in great suspense for some official grand unscrewing."

  "Jeez, Alwyn. You could've ... It's not good, having you running around loose."

  Stafford winked.

  "I'm serious."

  "Go ahead, touch it."

  Carter reached toward the metal, but felt almost a physical repugnance against touching it. He could not explain it to himself, and so he forced himself to touch the surface. Smooth, the sensual feel of well-formed metal, like a clean knife blade that has just cut fresh bread. And he had the most subtle sense that some kind of mild current passed up his arm.

  "Funny feeling, ain't it?" He winked again and led Carter back to the elevator, where they rode down into the pit.

  At the bottom of the pit, the rest of them stood at the edge of the tube assembly, where it disappeared into the soil, like a corrugated wall of curved surfaces.

  Carter joined Annie and Philippe, trying to sense their emotions. Annie was running her hand along the surface. She wore a strange smile, half full of joy, half full of fear. As if answering his question, she whispered, "I don't know what to say. I feel like a moth near a flame.... I can't explain it."

  "It is inscrutable," Philippe said quietly, almost to himself, jotting in his book beside his sketch of the tubework.

  Annie rode the tiny elevator with Carter, back up to the main level. She stood against him, closer than necessary in the elevator's tight, open platform, pressing against his shoulder. "I... this is crazy." She stood looking up at the top of the node, as if she had said nothing.

  "What."

  "Tonight when we get back. Come to me. I want you." The elevator reached the main level. She squeezed his hand and walked away from him.

  27

  MARCH 5-6

  So it was done, Annie thought to herself.

  Buried beneath the polar cap of Mars was this ... thing ... and what were they going to do about it?

  Outside the tunnel, they were climbing back into the bus for the evening ride back to the Polar Station, Philippe swearing softly as he bumped his helmet on the bus's low padded door.

  The whole thing had been overwhelming, and she realized she wanted to share it with Carter by holding him in her arms, but she purposely avoided boarding the bus with him. Philippe came and sat across the aisle from her, but she said little to him. There was little conversation anywhere on the bus, at first. It was as if they had all been stunned into a confrontation with their own souls. Finally, Philippe began sketching and jotting in his anachronistic notebook as they waited to start.

  Inside that hollowed cave, with the artificial Martian air cold in her face, Annie had felt something, a beginning of something new. The very existence of this vast, ancient machine marked a new reality for humans. It was like the Renaissance, when the discoveries of Copernicus and Columbus had forced everyone from poets to popes to recognize that the real world was much wider than they had thought. Proof at last of aliens' existence marked a birth date for a new humanity.

  That was how she felt when she had first seen the alien machine.

  But now, waiting for the bus to drive them away, she felt a different reality. The story was not a beginning; it was an ending. Everyone else would focus on the future impact of the knowledge and the mystery of the machine's function, but the real story was the end of the age of uncertainty, the end of innocence. For a long time it had been known that life was not unique to Earth, but now we knew, by God, once and for all, that neither was technology unique to Earth. And if there had been two intelligent species in the universe, there had been millions. It was a form of disillusionment.

  Suddenly she felt a wave of anger wash over her. Sturgis and his people were treating this miracle like some corporate secret, like a new gadget. Treating it like it belonged to them. Ending or new beginning, she reaffirmed silently, it belonged to everybody.

  Carter maneuvered cautiously into the bus. His legs felt strangely heavy, as if he had been plodding through molasses. Philippe was already sitting with Annie. Carter took a seat in the back with Stafford, and waited for them to seal and pressurize.

  Stafford nodded to him paternally, as if waiting for him to speak. Instead, Carter studied the rest of them in their seats, as if searching for some clue as to what would happen next.

  Annie seemed to be in her own world. Elena and Sturgis had paired off in the front two seats. The odd couple, Carter thought. What did they have to say to each other? Not much, apparently. Lena stared out the window most of the way home. He was beginning to understand her: the scientist, trying to do her work, who had
gotten in over her head. He realized he had stopped thinking about her as a piece of this puzzle.

  The bus began chugging along. He turned to Stafford.

  "Alwyn..." he began quietly.

  "Interesting situation, ain't it?"

  "What is that thing?"

  "Nobody knows. That's the whole point." Stafford turned and studied Carter's eyes, as if looking for some medical symptom. "You know that strange feeling when you were near it? I noticed it right away, the first time. Later, after I had been around the thing a lot, I got used to it. But it doesn't go away. Can you imagine a machine that interacts somehow with living material? Maybe through some sort of field at a close distance? Hell, I don't know ... I'm just drifting. But I keep thinking, whoever built it might have seen linkages in nature that we can't even think of, and built them into machines whose purposes we can't even imagine."

  "But there must be some way to start looking at the design, the purpose..."

  Stafford tapped Carter on the shoulder in a fatherly gesture. "Look. Sometimes you run up against a brick wall. You're frantic to find out what's on the other side. You know it's something wonderful. You and Annie and Philippe are going to knock yourselves out for the next few days trying to figure out what's on the other side. I know. That's what I did myself when I got here. But sooner or later, you'll realize that it truly is a brick wall. You beat on the wall, but the only thing you come to know is the brick wall itself. Would Neanderthals have been able to make sense of a radio?" He sighed. "What I'm saying is, I've come around to thinking we'll never know what the machine was, what it did."

  Carter was annoyed by the gleam in Stafford's eyes. "This thing on the other side of the wall, are you sure it isn't just another secret you and Sturgis and Elena are keeping for yourselves?"

  Stafford grew defensive. "Don't put Lena in the same boat with Sturgis. She didn't know she was going to get caught up in this."

  "I know. I finally figured that out. But what about you? You're telling me you're just gonna sit around in your base here with your friends and spin secret theories...."

  Stafford's face turned red against his white hair. "God damn it, Carter, don't lecture me. You know as much as we do now. If you're so damned smart, you go figure out what it is."

  "But you could've brought in all this help from Earth. So much equipment ... All you had to do was make this public. Experts would flock..."

  "To hell with the experts from Earth. God never wrote any rule that said you have to publish a new discovery on the first day, before you've had a chance to study anything. Show me where it says that in the Ten Commandments." Stafford stared at the lifeless gloves he had placed on the little shelf in front of their seats. "Sorry. Christ, Carter, you know I'm defensive on this, in spite of my bluster. Anyhow, it was only for a few weeks. ... I didn't know how it would turn out. I suppose now I'll turn into the scientific villain of the piece when Annie puts out her story. It was a dumb thing, you bringing her. I thought you had more sense."

  "Don't you start in on Annie. I get enough of that from Lena."

  "She's just jealous."

  "Oh, sure."

  "It's normal."

  "Let's change the subject."

  "Even if I did know any big secrets, how could I tell you? Way I got it figured, anything I tell you goes in Annie's ear." He elbowed Carter in the ribs. "I can't take that chance, can I? I probably shouldn't have showed you that little screw."

  "I thought we were going to change the subject."

  Stafford smiled enigmatically.

  "I can never figure you, Alwyn. Sometimes I think I know you. Other times ... Here you are, part of some underground government conspiracy. It doesn't fit. You always seemed, well, irreverent."

  "Remember the hobgoblin of small minds? I may be inconsistent, but it got me in on the biggest discovery of the age, didn't it?" He was still smiling mischievously. "Devious little game I got to play with my buggy back there, I admit it. But it gave me the chance of a lifetime here, not to mention my chance to go after Mars-2. You gotta admit I played my cards pretty well."

  "But Sturgis..."

  "Forget Sturgis." They were whispering now, conspiratorially.

  "How can I forget Sturgis? He's the one that caused all the trouble. He's the one enforcing secrecy, not to mention holding us prisoner! Won't ever say so, of course, but that's what it amounts to."

  "Sturgis is small potatoes."

  Carter said nothing.

  "Look, Carter..." Stafford paused. "You need educating. Sturgis is just a cog in society's engine. What societies do is, they organize their little value systems and then they build huge engines to keep the system chugging along without changing. Inside the engine they put little cogwheels like Sturgis to keep it running. People like us come along and discover new things that threaten to change some assumptions, make whole assemblies useless. The engine doesn't like that. You should worry more about which way the engine is heading, and less about the little oily cogwheels." Stafford turned away to the window again, to watch as the bus approached a whitish, house-sized boulder that had eroded out of the cliff face and rolled almost to the road.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Bureaucracies get ingrown. These security guys are a classic case. Do you know that last week they torpedoed four years of preparation for the joint Existence Field experiments with the French, because they were afraid EuroTech would get ahead of Nanosoft? You let those guys have their way, the basic search for human knowledge about the universe will be controlled behind the scenes by midlevel functionaries. Subconsciously, that's why Sturgis and his friends are afraid of people like you and Annie. If Annie breaks this story before their deadline, it will dramatize the sterility of their ideas about keeping the public and international scientists from knowing what's going on. But, you see, if it comes out after their deadline, then the truth-suppression aspects of the story are lost. The big news will be the discovery itself, and to the public it will look like a nice orderly process."

  "You saying she can get this story out of here? Look, if you wanted to help get it out, you could..."

  "Certainly not. I would never hint at such a thing." Stafford gazed out the window with a bemused look. "Nice day out there, isn't it?"

  "Jeez, Alwyn."

  "Hey, what's the matter? The worst is over. As for me, I'm happy. We'll get several nice little papers in Science outta this—if Science can spare enough page space from their fruit fly research and gossip columns." He began studying Carter again.

  "Who the hell's side are you on, anyway, Alwyn?"

  "I'm on their side, according to you." He had a pious smile. "Besides, if I publicly hinted at sympathizing with you, I'd lose what control I do have over the situation. So I'm not saying anything. We'll have to wait till Annie writes the story to find out her version of whose side I was on. And when the revisionists get done, we may never know whose side I'm on."

  "Stop bullshitting me."

  "You could say I have certain ideas of my own, in my own little way." He looked out the window as the hills passed by, holding their secrets. "For example," he said, suddenly raising his voice above their previous conspiratorial whisper, "a lot of people are missing the most exciting aspect of this."

  Annie and Philippe turned to listen.

  "The Martian microbial and organic materials seem to be associated mainly with the artifact layer," Stafford continued. "From the evidence I have, any of the stuff below that layer exists only where water has percolated down through porous soils and cracks in rocks. The data are still noisy, but the general soil concentrations seem to peak near the 3.2-billion-year-old layer, and then decline slowly after that. You see what I'm driving at? The bacterial life-forms that had us so puzzled when we called them Martian were not originally Martian at all! They were just residues left on Mars by accident when the aliens were active here em-placing their machine. Mars was more clement; the bacterial hung on for a while and then died out. They were never suited for Mars, and M
ars turned pretty hostile. It explains why they are most abundant at 3.2, but less abundant in older and younger rocks and soils, and why life never evolved beyond that stage.

  "So if I'm right, Mars never did form life of its own. The only way life got there was to be delivered by older aliens. Other planets may have been accidentally seeded, too, when they were in periods of attractive climate. And remember, the racemes are different from terrestrial organisms, so we did not grow from the same event that seeded Mars. Terrestrial life either originated on its own as in classic theory, or it was seeded during another alien visit to the solar system." Stafford beamed proudly. "What d'ya think a' them apples?"

  When they were filing out of the airlock into the Polar Station, Carter wanted to catch up to Annie in the hall, but Philippe drew him aside and waited for the others to leave. He pointed with his chin at Annie's receding figure. "She is a beautiful woman, but the relationship is over for me. I thought you would want to know, yes?"

  "What are you saying, Philippe?"

  "She has her own private world. She lets no one into it. I am tired of it, you know? We will see what she does with all this. She will have to make something of it. Then, perhaps, at last we will understand her. She ... I am tired of her mystery, I think. Maybe you are not. It may be a problem for you." He gave Carter a gentle slap on the back.

  "I've got enough problems."

  "Yes, and I am still here to help you; I have done very little, but I want to do what I can if you need me."

  "You're our eyes and ears. You found Stafford the other night. You're our philosopher as well."

  Philippe grew more expansive. "I've been thinking about that, the philosophy as you put it. We all know this is a philosophic milestone: the fundamentalists, for example, will have to recognize that we humans are not necessarily the unique lords of the galaxy, as they would like to believe. Earth is no longer the imperial capital of the universe. But on another level, a political level, as long as Sturgis gets to manage the story, there will be no real effect. Sturgis and his friends, they will arrange things so that they come out heroes, the defenders of liberty. Lena and Stafford will be great discoverers. Annie will get her sensational story. I will come out a noble onlooker. Nobody will care about your report, so you will be safe. In short, nothing changes. Maybe that is okay. You have to decide for yourself.