Hide and Seek

by Paul Preuss

  The truck raced along the lonely road, following the shifting ruts in the sand but guided by satellite. The ruts were an immediate but untrustworthy trace; the road was there even when they blew away, for in reality the road was only a line on a map, and the map was in computer memory. One copy of the map was in the marstruck’s own inertial guidance system; another copy was in computers on Mars Station, which tracked everything that moved on the planet’s surface through its net of sensors–as long as the lines of communication were open.

  In that sense this lonely road was not so lonely. It was in intimate contact with thousands of machines and people, on the planet and in orbit around it. A nice thought–which the unfolding landscape subtly denied.

  Soon after leaving the environs of Labyrinth City the road began its descent and crossing of the western provinces of the Valles Marineris, and Blake faced that ragged planetary scar for the first time.

  To those who have not seen it the Valles Marineris cannot be described. Earthbound analogies are too feeble, but Blake struggled to relate what he saw to what he had experienced before, to images from his youthful summer on the Mogollon Rim and from those other summers touring the North American west–climbing down the North Rim of the Grand Canyon or the slopes of Denali in summer, crossing the Salt River or the Scablands, coming into Zion from the east, dropping into Panamint Valley from the west, rolling down the Phantom Canyon behind Pikes Peak, winding down Grapevine Canyon into Death Valley . . . there was no easy comparison, no real comparison.

  There is a path on Earth–it cannot be called a road–known as the Golden Stair, which descends into the Maze of the western Canyonlands of Utah, near the confluence of the Colorado and the Green rivers; desert aficionados call it the Golden Slide. Built as a mining road, hacked from the ringing rock of stark perpendicular mesas and the slick sides of wind-carved grabens, the sheer slippery slide has claimed many an ATV and even the lives of a few walkers.

  The highway into the Valles Marineris was worse. Seconds after Lydia unhesitatingly pushed the speeding marstruck over the edge of the cliff, Blake looked upon the deepest canyon he had ever seen. In the depths of it the distant banded cliffs were lost in blue haze. He could not see ground over the dashboard, and in that instant he was convinced that Lydia was committing suicide and taking him with her, driving straight into thin Martian air.

  When a moment later his heart started again, he found that there was still rock beneath the treads and he could even see the road by leaning his forehead toward the glass of the bubble. What he saw was almost as bad as what he had imagined.

  The angle of attack was twice what it would have been on Earth, the angle of a playground slide rather than that of even the steepest roadgrade. Blake strained to persuade himself that this made sense–things fall more slowly on Mars, don’t they?–but he kept worrying about a diminished coefficient of friction and wondering about sidesway as the truck whipped around these rollercoaster corners. Inertia concerned itself with mass, not weight, wasn’t that true? So what was to keep the whole hurtling pile of pipe from flying into space?

  “Lydia, do you always . . . ?”

  “Shut up. This is tricky.”

  Now that was comforting . . .

  He did shut up, trying to convince himself that she knew what she was doing. Really there was no question about it, he reasoned; not only did she know what she was doing, she’d done it scores of times before.

  Tell that to your stomach, Mycroft. . . .

  The truck’s speed wasn’t as great as it seemed to Blake, nor was the road quite as narrow or steep, and Lydia was driving with more caution, leaving more margin for error, and employing far more experience than a naive off-worlder could know. Nevertheless, the big truck was rolling down a cliff of sheer slickrock a kilometer high.

  There were more cliffs below it.

  When at last Blake managed to persuade himself he would not die, he began to appreciate the scenery.

  For the next five hours they descended without incident, down a series of rock terraces three kilometers high from plateau to valley floor.

  Reaching bottom, the truck sped across a field of dunes that spread randomly across the crumbling banks of ancient superimposed gullies. Then it began slowly climbing another cliff as high as the one they had come down.

  Going up, Blake could see the road without leaning forward, but seeing it, seeing that narrow, uneven track, was almost worse than hoping something unseen but substantial was under the treads. The red rock wall was on his side of the cab now, and when he looked at Lydia all he saw was the dazzling pink sky beyond her, silhouetting her stern profile.

  They reached the top of the hogback ridge while the sun was still high. Lydia stopped the truck in the only flat place on the ridge, the middle of the road itself, and powered the turbines down.

  In silence they ate their lunches–shrink-wrapped sandwiches and apples, grown in the greenhouses of Labyrinth City–and took turns visiting the pressurized privy behind the cab, reached through the little tunnel beneath the sleeping box.

  Lydia revved up the turbines and they moved on. The road crossed the hogback and descended at a frightening pitch. Before long they came to a place where the road seemed to run straight forward off the cliff. Blake stared at the rapidly approaching edge in horror–there must be some trick to this, but he could not see it.

  “What happened to the road? Landslide?”

  “Later,” she said. She kept the truck rolling, right to the end of the road. Far below them the wrinkled and scarred valley floor stretched away under serrated cliffs.

  Lydia flicked on the dashboard videoplate that showed the view behind the aft trailer. Now he saw it: the narrow road continued on down behind them. They had passed the branch point, like the fork of a wishbone; there was no room on the cliff for even a rover to turn around.

  “We back down this stretch,” said Lydia.

  “How do you . . . ?”

  She looked at him contemptuously. “We’re built that way, Mycroft. The trailer treads are steerable. The computer does the work. I just aim.”

  She just aims, Blake thought, by looking into a videoplate–steering forward while moving backward. He found a little wisp of cirrus cloud high in the sky and studied it intently as the marstruck crept slowly backward.

  Within a few minutes the road ended at another cliff. Lydia kept backing up until the view in the videoplate was of empty air and distant cliffs. By then, the next switchback had revealed itself in front of them. She put the treads in forward and the truck lurched ahead. Blake felt the tension gradually drain out of his neck and shoulders.

  Three more times they had to back down stretches of road with no turnarounds. Blake felt almost blithe about the last one.

  This time the terraced cliffs and talus slopes descended deeper into the Valles than they had before. When Lydia and Blake reached the floor of the mighty chasm it was all in shadow, though the sky overhead was still bright.

  They drove on an hour past sunset, their floodlights picking out the route through high dunes and scattered boulders. When they reached the edge of a geologically new lava flow–its edges of frozen splattered magma were still as sharp as broken glass, despite years, perhaps decades, of sandblasting–Lydia stopped the truck.

  “I’m getting tired. We’ll spend the night here. Do you want chili and onions or dragon stew?”

  “What’s dragon stew?”

  “Textured protein and vegetables, Asian style.”

  Not too exciting, but chili and onions in a confined space with a person who really didn’t want to know him all that well . . . hm. “Dragon stew sounds great.”

  She reached into the food locker, dug out a couple of plastic packages, and tossed him one. He detached the fork and spoon from its cover, unzipped the self-heating package, waited ten seconds for the dinner to heat itself, and then dug in.

  They ate dinner in silence, the same way they had eaten lunch.

  Midway through the bl
and meal Blake snuck a look at the taciturn woman who had now driven fifteen hours with only one break and had said perhaps a couple of hundred words in that time. Her most succinct statement, shortly after he’d launched himself upon what he thought was going to be a cheerful process of getting-to-know-you, was “I don’t want to talk.”

  Now Lydia was staring straight ahead into the starlit night, just as she had been for the whole long day. Her eyes were still fixed on the road.

  Blake settled back into the cushioned seat, easing his safety straps. Things weren’t working as he’d planned. His scheme had been to get Lydia alone, to befriend her and gain her confidence, and then to learn what had really happened between her and Darius Chin on the night of the murders.

  The name Darius Chin had never come up. Blake hadn’t even had a chance to indicate that he knew about the murders. If she were innocent–even if she weren’t–her grief and loss might have kept her from reaching out to anyone. Certainly she would find it hard to express her feelings to a stranger.

  Something nagged him. She’d agreed to give him a lift, but now he was beginning to wonder why. It wasn’t because he’d charmed her into wanting his company, that was plain enough.

  Had that been Yevgeny she’d talked to in the ’Pine? Was this just a favor to Rostov? If so, Blake’s trashing of the motor pool may have been unnecessary, even wanton . . .

  Lydia threw the plastic debris from her dinner into the waste bin. She shoved a loose strand of blond hair out of her eyes and unlatched her harness. She climbed over the middle seat, up into the sleeping box.

  “Here’s a pillow,” she said, tossing one down. “Sleeping sitting up’snot bad in this gravity. Not for somebody from Earth.” She yanked her lace curtains closed.

  So much for good night.

  Midnight. Mars Station was high in the sky.

  Khalid trudged across an expanse of windscoured quartz sand that glittered blue-white under the stars. The plain of whiteness extended all the way to the horizon, like the dry salt bed of an ancient sea. Blue silhouettes of distant buttes and mesas raised themselves against the sky.

  Khalid had enough food and water for two days–not very tasty food and not easy to eat, since he had to suck it through a valve in his faceplate, but high enough in energy content to keep him going. His heaviest burden was the oxygen generator on his back, a unit that made it possible for someone in a pressure suit to walk around in the open without carrying bottled air. The heart of the generator was biomechanical, a culture of tailored enzymes that broke carbon dioxide from the Martian atmosphere into oxygen and carbon, a sort of artificial forest in a backpack.

  But the reaction needed input from batteries. Khalid estimated he had less than two days’ charge remaining in his. He could never walk to Labyrinth City in two days, and he had never planned to. He was walking toward an easier landmark.

  As he walked across the crusty plain of quartz he entertained himself with mathematical exercises. How many square kilometers of desert were there in the Tharsis Plateau? Draw a diagonal across that expanse, label it the pipeline road. . . .

  He consulted his astrolabe and checked the stars. The thing had been made for Earth, but surely there were coordinate transformations one could perform . . . a sphere is a sphere whether it’s called Earth or Mars, and Khalid knew his approximate position, his longitude and latitude, on this one. The position of the stars was the same for both.

  But his mind kept wandering. Was there a rational relationship between so-many-kilometers-of-sand-dunes squared and the volume of lava in the cone of Mount Ascraeus? He doubted it, but if he let his mind drift a little farther out into the glassy night, he might discover one . . .

  Long before the sun rose above the awesome cliffs the marstruck was climbing the rim of the Valles Marineris, winding its way out of the colossal valley through one of its head-eroded dry tributaries, climbing the final kilometers across sliding slopes of talus before at last gaining the open desert of the Tharsis Plateau.

  Once across the Valles, Lydia and Blake had truly begun their trip. Ahead of them stretched more than 2,500 kilometers of meteorite-blasted sand, scarred with ancient lava flows, pitted with sinkholes, faulted with slumping permafrost. They journeyed into the wilderness together, a man and a woman who had nothing to say to each other.

  XI

  What satellite sensors could not know with certainty was the condition of the ground beneath the visible surface of Mars. And so, two days out, driving blind in a windstorm, the track having already vanished in the blowing dust, the marstruck plunged into an enormous sinkhole of decayed permafrost.

  The tractor went straight in and automatically decoupled from the trailers behind it, leaving the first of the two flatbeds dangling half over the edge of the hole, its cargo of pipe threatening to spill forward. Meanwhile, nimble as a gymnast, the big computer-stabilized tractor had landed on an uneven ledge of ice with its forward treads. Lydia and Blake found themselves staring down from their safety harness into depths of dirty ice.

  The dashboard lit up yellow in front of her, and Lydia hit the switches that powered the turbines down and put the tractor’s systems on battery.

  “We’ve got a problem,” she said.

  “If you say so.”

  For the first time in two days she looked him in the eye, both of them hanging there in their harnesses, and he thought she came very close to smiling.

  They sealed their pressure suits and climbed out of the cab and up the sides of the slanted tractor to the edge of the hole. The wind at the surface wasn’t quite strong enough to knock them off their feet. They couldn’t see each other very well in the blowing dust, but they had the commlink between their suits, and Lydia was good at giving orders.

  “Forward tool locker, your side. Slide the shackle left and down. Inside on the left you’ll find a dozen rock bolts, about a meter long. Yellow barrels with red tags.”

  “I see ’em.”

  “Take out three. Mount one forward of the sinkhole on your side. I’ll do the same on mine. Then we’ll put two out to the sides and two aft. Try to find good rock, sandstone. Otherwise, sound ice.”

  “Will do.” Blake was as good at following orders as Lydia was at giving them, particularly when they made excellent sense.

  They found solid rock forward of the tractor, and prepared to sink the explosive anchors.

  “Have you used these?” she asked.

  “Looks easy.”

  “Easy to blow your head off.”

  “I’ll be careful.” He ripped off the tag, pulled the pin, and stepped away. Seconds later the recoilless charge spewed fire and sank the steel shaft deep into the stone.

  On her side of the truck Lydia was doing the same. With the forward bolts in place, they looked for dependable anchorage to the sides and rear. They had to go farther for it, but when they found good rock they were still within range of the truck’s winch cables.

  “What’s the plan?” Blake asked.

  “Cable sling. We’re going to lift the whole thing out of the hole till it’s hanging on the cables, then let it pull itself forward on the cables until it gets its treads on the ground. Computer knows this trick pretty well–we’ve done it a few times already–it will keep the tension adjusted.”

  “All by itself?”

  “More or less. I ride with the truck. You stand clear, in case.”

  With all cables payed out and taut, the four winches began to wrap in synchrony. Lydia was leaning half her body out of the cab, checking the tension on the lines. The front of the big tractor came up slowly until the whole mass of it was suspended over the sinkhole on a net of fine cables. Then the tractor began to inch its way across the open pit, trembling toward the edge.

  Suddenly and silently the left rear cable anchor let go, like a broken guitar string–what had looked liked good rock holding its anchor was fractured. For a moment Blake thought maybe it wouldn’t matter, because the tractor already had its front treads half on the dir
t and the three good lines that were left could carry the tractor’s mass.

  But the loose cable whipped into the jury-rigged lashing of the pipe load on the first flatbed and sliced through it, and the pipe came loose and spilled slowly into the hole. The enormous mass of it cut through two of the remaining cables.

  Things fall a little slower on Mars and even the inevitable comes on a like a flood of molasses. Standing-by where he was there was nothing Blake could to do stop the tumbling rack of pipe, but he had time to leap onto the front right tread and reach up to the door of the bubble cab even as Lydia tried to get through it. He grabbed her outstretched arm and held on as she came out. Just before the sliding pipes sliced the cab door off, the two of them made the desperate leap to high ground.

  They lay there in the blowing dust, face down and side by side. Their suits still had pressure. Neither of them was hurt.

  “Now we’ve got a problem,” he said.

  “Very funny.”

  But it was still pretty much a routine problem. They spent some hours winching the loose pipe out of the hole and stacking it back on the flatbed. They rerigged the tractor, and on the second try the cable scheme worked; the tractor climbed back onto solid ground.

  It wasn’t until the day was ending and the Martian sun was setting in the western desert that they got the whole outfit reloaded and recinched, and got the detached cab door patched with big olivedrab splotches of quicksetting polymer and put back on its hinges. It was nightfall by the time Lydia pronounced the rig ready to roll.

  “Now?”

  “Don’t be silly, Mycroft, I’m not a masochist. What do you want for dinner, chili and onions or, let’s see here . . . chili and onions?”

  “Who does the shopping for these trips?” he asked.

  “Chili and onions it is,” she said, tossing him a plastic tray. They pulled the tabs and for a few minutes they ate in silence.

  “You came through on that,” she said while she ate. It wasn’t thanks, exactly, but it was an acknowledgment.