MARS UNDERGROUND

by William K. Hartmann

  Annie. He turned, and could see Annie and Philippe in the glass-domed tower behind them. He could see that Philippe had a large notepad and was sketching the scene.

  Sturgis's voice in his helmet: "As I told you already, this station is temporarily closed. You'll have to move back to your shuttle."

  "We're not moving."

  "Move these people back to their shuttle."

  "We're not going back. We want to come inside." They edged forward, cautiously.

  "Move these people back. If they keep coming forward, shoot their airpacs. They'll have a few minutes to get into their shuttle."

  "There's no authorization from Mars Council..." Carter's voice rang in his own ears. He turned to Sturgis's sidekicks. "Do you guys want to be the first to go down in history using guns on Mars? Illegally? Firearms on Mars are illegal."

  "Shut up, Jahns. This is a security operation. Certain procedures have been authorized."

  Carter saw the rest as if from Annie and Philippe's point of view. The face-off. The reporters, pushing forward more aggressively. A shoving match. Stafford moving forward into the fray. Sturgis's men raising their rifles, uncertainly. Stafford behind Sturgis. Crowding.

  "Ohhhhhh." Sturgis's cry blasted through their helmets. "Something's ...I'm losing air!" Sturgis was spinning around. He began lurching drunkenly for the airlock door.

  Sturgis's men's guns drooped, as if in a unified moment of indecision. The reporters pressed after Sturgis. The whole unruly mob moved into the cargo bay airlock, like ants flowing into their hole.

  Inside the airlock, events continued in rapid succession. The fight had gone out of Sturgis's party. It was far too late to salvage the secrecy that Sturgis had so carefully maintained. Already, the live coverage of the standoff and the rifle-wielding security force had made the ten-minute journey to Earth and was beginning to appear in minute-long sound bites on the evening news programs, at one longitude after another. Sturgis's and Elena Trevina's 'corders were beeping furiously.

  When they ran the holeos later, it was impossible to read individual actions in the melee of shoving figures. Body language was hidden by suits; facial expressions, by helmets. It was like watching plastic dolls collide; you could not read emotional content. No one could determine how Sturgis's airpac had been pierced.

  Inside it, they had found a fragment of meteoritic iron.

  Annie's priority was clear as soon as the shuttle had touched down. She had to get a message out to her own network about the artifact. The stringers had their links to the outside. The key was to reach the one from IPN before that link could be shut down.

  As soon as she and Philippe saw the confused throng surge into the station, she raced from the tower to the airlock with Philippe at her heels.

  When they arrived, the airlock entry hall was still in tumult. A shouting match had ensued between Sturgis's men and the reporters about their rights. A camera was smashed. Sturgis was discovering the pea-sized hole in one side of his airpac. He was shouting obscenities as the chaotic argument spilled into the hallways. Cameras were pointed in various directions as the stringers tried to decide between bleating questions at Sturgis's crew and filming the inside of the Polar Station.

  Annie knew that none of the stringers had grasped, in the chaos, what was really going on, but that disclosure of the artifact would come spilling out within minutes. Desperately peering over shoulders, she spotted the man with the gold logo of IPN. She went after him.

  "I'm Annie Pohaku."

  "I recognize you. What the hell is going on here...?"

  "There's no time. I know everything. The whole story. You're still patched through to the outside?" He nodded. "Give me your mike. Quick. We've got to get this out before they shut us down."

  Moments later she was on the air. "This is Annie Pohaku at the South Polar Research Station on Mars. What is probably the greatest discovery in the history of science was made here just weeks ago...."

  The story was out.

  As she finished, Sturgis was throwing down his suit in disgust and was heading down the hall with Carter and a dozen others in hot pursuit. "Been nice working with you, Sturgis," she called after him.

  She spotted Stafford in the chaos. "And now I see perhaps the leading authority..." she was saying, to set up an interview; but he was already brushing by her.

  She caught up with Stafford in the crowded hallway. "What was that about?" she said, struggling to keep the camera going in the jostle. "They found a meteorite in his airpac. That couldn't have been natural. The chances..."

  "Maybe it was natural. Did you see the pac? There was only a slight downward trajectory. Might have been secondary debris from an impact on the surface."

  "Oh, come on."

  He aimed his voice toward the camera mike, "I'd say it was natural, a fluke event at a critical moment. Here on Mars we've learned to expect the unexpected...."

  "You can't really believe that...." But he was gone into the crowd.

  And before she could chase after him, the alarm sirens went off for a second time.

  As the new arrivals glanced around apprehensively, word spread through the packed halls: the seismic tremors were increasing. Triangulation showed that they were now moving very rapidly toward the surface. It was near the pole, under the polar node of the artifact. At this rate, something would be happening on the surface near the other node of the machine, within two hours.

  No, new triangulations showed a rapid acceleration in the ascent. Make that one hour.

  Sturgis, still in command of the base, had the presence of mind to order all satellite monitoring systems to be focused on the site. "Get the Phobos systems tracking on the other node. If anything does happen..."

  "You can't see the pole from Phobos."

  "Well have them point as close as they can. And the polar orbiters."

  "Polar orbiters aren't always over the pole. We'll do what we can."

  Carter, Annie, and Philippe had tracked Stafford to the tower, where he was attempting to cobble together a spur-of-the-moment analysis as reports streamed in from the seismic lab.

  In the tower, technicians were frantically relaying messages from the seismic researchers, trying to establish what was happening. The seismic disturbances, they said, were rapidly nearing the surface. Outside the tower dome, Carter noticed, the landscape looked as still and sullen as usual. As reconstructed later from the satellite data, a multimegaton explosion shook the south pole fifteen minutes later.

  Suddenly one of the voices patched through from Phobos cried, "Oh, my God!"

  "What? What?"

  "It exploded! A huge area, toward the pole. I can see..."

  "What? Describe what's happening!"

  "There was a flash. A huge cloud is rising. It's several kilometers wide. It's spreading...."

  They all stared out the tower window toward the south, scanning the horizon for some sign of the distant violence.

  Seconds later, the southern horizon dissolved in a white mist, racing toward them. It was an evil unsettling, like a sandstorm without any wind. They could only stand and stare, as the wall of white fog raced across the landscape enveloping everything. The mist enveloped the glass dome and everyone in the room was knocked to the floor.

  The reconstructions showed that the subsurface explosion had blasted a crater above the polar node, and satellite images revealed the shock wave racing across the polar cap surface, kicking up the powdery, dusty snow. The explosion was initiated when the seismic activity reached the thirty-two-kilometer-deep node at the other end of the artifact coil, and the outburst accelerated to the surface in less than a second. It blew thousands of tons of debris outward, creating a crater two kilometers wide, which filled with slumped-in rubble, cemented with ice. Whatever structures of alien tubing might have been in place in the upper kilometer of soil, whatever traces of alien activity, all had been destroyed.

  Reports came in, also, that at the excavation site where the nearer node had been uncovere
d, a transient thermal pulse had heated the exposed tubing to incandescence, killing a man and a woman who were unfortunate enough to have been standing near the tubes in the cave during the final stages of the evacuation.

  The eventual analysis from the images obtained at Phobos revealed that something luminous, with a radiant temperature approaching four thousand Kelvins, and a size estimated at not more than a meter, had been ejected from the center of the blast, embedded in a mass of ionized gas. Satellite images showed the brilliant, blurred mass rising several hundred kilometers and disappearing out of the frame in a hundredth of a second. Combined with the framing rates, this gave an indisputable velocity of a tenth the speed of light. By the time this analysis was complete, the object was crossing the asteroid belt, and beyond the range of any possible tracking.

  Among all the available data, the mysterious ejected object appeared on only six images, obtained by three satellites in the fraction of a second following the explosion.

  Later, Carter and Stafford were sitting in Arriba. "What do you mean, 'What was it for?' " Stafford exclaimed, when Carter asked him his theory of the machine's purpose. "I told you, that question may not make any sense. It may be less answerable than it was before."

  "Don't you care? Why are you just giving up?"

  "Ever hear of cargo cults? When ships and planes delivered equipment on Pacific islands a century ago, the natives thought the stuff was supernatural. Would it have made sense to ask them what it was for? Radios, and stuff like that? Could they have answered?"

  "But you can guess...."

  "But you can guess," Stafford mimicked with sarcasm. "That reminds me of the way we were educated in high school. They thought it was better to feel good about yourself than to be proven wrong. So we had lab lessons like 'Make up a hypothesis to explain the data,' before they even had told us what was going on in the experiment. Then they'd pat you on the back when you came up with nonsense." He snorted.

  "But you have to be able to come up with some hypothesis," Carter said, "just to guide your thinking...."

  "All right. You want me to say it was a big machine built by the aliens for some noble purpose and it was lying in wait to be activated by us, and then it launched a little ship back to home base. Is that what you want? Then what?"

  "Jeez, Alwyn. Maybe when you fooled with that screw ... You think you 'activated' it?"

  "Naw; nothing happened. It was just a screw. Anyway, the point is, I don't think anything. Speculating is a waste of time. That's what I'm telling you. We don't even have any observations of the projectile after it left Mars, it was going so fast. So there's no way to test any hypothesis. You can hypothesize it melted the polar ice for them. Or that it was a game for their Fourth of July. Or that God put the whole thing there to puzzle us. He's laughing at the joke. So far, there's no way to test any of those ideas. Better not to verbalize them at all." He smiled at Carter in a paternal way. "I know it's frustrating."

  Philippe came in. Stafford turned to him. "I was just explaining to Carter, here, that the first step on the road to wisdom is to admit that there are things we don't know. We don't know if there's a Jehovah-like god. We just do the best we can. In the same way, we don't know what this thing was built for."

  Stafford glanced around the cafe and made a little, self-conscious laugh. "Of course, maybe we can find out. That's my job. That's enough to keep me happy here for a while. I tell you what. When I learn something, I'll let you know. Tell that to Annie. I'll let her know, too."

  As Stafford left, Philippe remarked, "He is the one I cannot figure out."

  Sturgis disappeared without a good-bye, a few days later. The discovery of the artifact was now common knowledge on Earth. Whole teams of reporters and additional researchers would arrive within months on the next flight from Earth. Sturgis, as it turned out, had been recalled to Tycho with all the security personnel. Annie announced confidently that it was a political decision to withdraw from an embarrassing situation, before the hard-core reporters arrived from Earth. Pull them back into the shadows, rather than allow a confrontation.

  Annie was due back at Mars City, and Stafford had announced he would go to the excavation site to study the post-explosion state of the object. On the last night, they sat around a table with Stafford in his lab. Stafford was in a more expansive mood. Now there was an air of finality.

  "You know," Stafford mused, "I had no idea all the social machinery that would start operating when we reported the find. Suddenly all these people like Sturgis came crawling out of the woodwork."

  "Cockroaches," Philippe said.

  "Turns out they had a small network of sleepers in place here, just like the networks. Mars was full of people on secret retainers. They never would have been called in if I hadn't followed my instructions and reported the find. I felt like I was stabbing Lena in the back."

  "She didn't know about you filing that report?"

  "Not at first. I thought it was routine. We fulfill any requirements from our own sponsoring agencies..." Stafford's voice trailed off uncharacteristically. "If I had it to do over again, well, I don't know.... By the way, the nearer node is still intact. They say the rock is fused for a few centimeters where it was in contact with the tubes themselves, but you can still see the tube surfaces, just as before."

  "What did it...?"

  "I'll admit now that 'machine' is the right word. Our presence activated it." He glared at Carter. "But as to its purpose..."

  "You still say we'll never know?" Philippe asked him.

  "If I had to bet, that'd be my bet, now. But I don't just accept it. After all, I'm on my way out there to see what else I can learn."

  "What will you do?"

  "Spend the rest of my life trying to get more info about this thing. But some things are beyond our level of knowledge. You have to be realistic about your place in the universe."

  "What I don't understand," Philippe said, "is how could you accept your role in this. You let Sturgis remain in control—a little dictator."

  Stafford looked carefully at each one of them. He had a quizzical look on his face. He stared at Carter last. "You think Sturgis was in control?"

  They stared dumbly back at him.

  "Think about it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If I had stood up to Sturgis's plan at any point, I would have been shipped off to some safe corner. He would have found somebody else for his team. They would have known less, of course, all modesty aside. But people like Sturgis don't care about how much we learn. All he wanted was for scientists to study the machine, and his job was to keep the story from leaking out, and prevent outside interference."

  "But you..."

  "My dream has always been to get some understanding of alien life. Just because I followed my dream doesn't mean I bought into all the constraints Sturgis put on it."

  Philippe: "One might say that, morally, you sold out. Unless, of course, you are prepared to confess that you shot that bit of iron into Sturgis's airpac. Which is what I believe. You were standing near him. I ran Annie's film again."

  "Why, that's crazy." Stafford was unperturbed. "Anyway, even if I did, do you think I'd be prepared to admit it? The source of that meteorite will go down as one of those unprovable things. If someone took credit for it, some hotshot in the attorney general's office might... Well, anyway, you don't go around 'shooting' meteorites into things. Although— and this is off the record, Annie"—he smiled curiously—"I did do some experiments once along those lines to study how fast the rock would erode from small meteorites that got through the old atmosphere.

  "And as for morality," Stafford sighed wearily, "why is it that when 'morality' comes into the discussion, people suddenly have such prehistoric attitudes. Like, if I didn't publicly attack Sturgis physically, I was selling out." He sighed. "Selling out means taking no action against him."

  "Oh, right, and you were a whirlwind of action against him?"

  "I told you, anyone who subverted the agen
cy rules could be in serious trouble legally, or at least in terms of research funding. And what would that accomplish? For instance, if I were in that position, I'd just lose my chance to contribute to this investigation." He looked at Annie, wistfully. "I'm not going to sit in front of Annie, here, and give a listing of everything I, ummm, let's say, set in motion. Still, you might want to think about it. Why did you end up here? Did Sturgis succeed after all? And then there is the pleasure of seeing my friends, um, growing up. But what do I know? I'm just an old duffer doing my research.

  "I'm going to have to be getting my stuff ready to go out in the field." Stafford rose. He clasped Philippe by the arm, then Carter. "You guys, well, I'll see you the next time you're down here at the station. And, Annie, the best thing about this was meeting you. You're a remarkable person. If you go on back to Earth, well, I hope you'll return and I'll see you again. Anyway, you're in my memory.

  "Oh, you guys might want to look around the lab." As he left, he nodded toward the shelves where Annie had hidden her backup notebooks.

  "What did he mean by that?" Philippe asked. "Looking around the lab."

  "Probably nothing," Annie said.

  Annie had long ago removed her notebooks. Certainly this had nothing to do with that, she thought. Hours later, she crept back. In the place where her notebooks had been stashed, she found what Stafford had left. It was a fist-sized tool, homemade. Taped to the side of a little tube was an iron pellet. A powerful spring could fire the pellet with enough force to penetrate an airpac.... So there were many things he had set in motion. And not all of them, she decided, could go into what would become her book—at least not until some later edition, years from now, when it could hurt no one.