Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  The camera point of view moved forward until Muhammad Sheik slipped off the screen into obscurity, leaving only the vertical infinity symbol in the distance. The camera point of view then zoomed down from the symbol to a glowing point below it. There, growing larger as the camera point of view zoomed in, was the golden figure of Alexander. He stood there, like a golden god from the future, arms outstretched.

  "Come, my people," the golden figure of the Infinite Lord said. "Come unto me."

  CHAPTER 8

  Boreal Base

  THE HOPITER punched upward at high gees through the thin Martian atmosphere on a slightly smoky orange exhaust of carbon dioxide, unburnt carbon monoxide, and the occasional carbon particle. Just after leaving the upper atmosphere, it switched off its engines to coast on its ballistic trajectory the rest of the way to its destination at the North Pole of Mars—one quarter of the way around the planet. Once the engines were turned off, the pilot rotated the vehicle so they could look back at the gigantic volcano they had left behind.

  "We will be flying right over the aureole of Mount Olympus on our way north," Tanya said, loosening her seat harness and floating free to the window. Gus followed.

  "The Sun angle is good," she said. "See how the aureole is made up of lobes on the downhill side of the Tharsis bulge?" Holding on to Gus with one hand, she pointed with the other. "See that each lobe has its outer edge tilted up, and the part back toward the volcano is depressed? That is not an ash flow from the volcano. It is an obvious indication of gravity-driven thrust faulting. Same thing occurred in the Bearpaw Mountains in the U.S.A."

  "But look at that old meteor crater down there," Gus said, pointing. "See how the striations in the lobe pattern seem to be laid down over top of the crater pattern? Joseph would say the old meteor crater was covered with ice, and the lobe pattern was caused by an ash flow that took place over the surface of the ice. Then later the ice melted or evaporated, lowering the ash field pattern gently down over the meteor crater pattern."

  Tanya chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip. "Well, maybe there was some ice," she finally admitted. "But not ten kilometers' worth."

  Their journey peaked just past the still-unexplored Milankovic Crater that stood large and lonely in the middle of the nearly craterless Arcadia Plain. They started their descent toward the Martian polar ice cap that was coming up over the horizon in front of them.

  Gus pulled out a blue "polar" from his pocket and rotated the large, thick, one-hundred-Martian-dollar coin until he could match the swirling pattern on its face with the swirling terraces and canyons in the ice cap showing through the porthole. The spiral-pattern canyons so visible from space and so distinctive on the blue "polar" were not permanent, but were slowly shifting over the aeons, uncovering ancient deposits at the bottoms of the canyons, then covering them again with fresh deposits.

  "We start deceleration in five minutes," the pilot warned from above. "Get buckled in."

  The descent to Boreal Base was just as crude and basic as the lift-off—a high-gee, preprogrammed deceleration maneuver that used maximum advantage of aerobraking to minimize fuel consumption. Since they were landing at a prepared site, there was no period of hovering to find a flat spot; they just dropped down the last five meters onto the landing struts.

  They were met by the base director, Ernest Licon. His primary job was head of Boreal Base engineering. He had the difficult task of designing, constructing, and maintaining buildings that would keep everyone alive and warm during the long, cold, sunless winter season when the very atmosphere condensed and fell from the sky as carbon dioxide snow. The next winter was many sols away, however, and there was sunlight for a good part of the day.

  Even with the Sun up, it was cold, and Gus felt the heaters in his Marsuit switch on high as he stepped out of the hopiter. They hurried across the field, cycled through the airlock, and got out of their Marsuits. Ernest hung his up next to the airlock, but Gus and Tanya folded theirs up, bagged them with their helmets, and carried them.

  "Your office is right down here," Ernest said, leading the way. "We might as well talk there."

  "My office?" Gus asked, as they entered a good-sized room with a large rough-cast aluminum table surrounded by tech stools, a desk with a full comm-comp terminal, and an inflatable plastic lounge seat that could unfold into a single bed.

  "Your administrative assistant, Mr. Fred Whimple, contacted me before you arrived," Ernest said. "I was instructed to clear out an office for your use and to give you every assistance. He even gave me a special unlimited charge number for any expenses. He wouldn't tell me much else."

  "That's because I am here to explore a little mystery," Gus said. "I can't tell you much about it yet, partially because I don't know much myself. Where can I find Viktor Braginsky? I'd like to talk to him."

  "While I was waiting for your hopiter to land I saw Viktor and his two techs returning from a field trip with a rack of cores. You should find him at the core storage building."

  "It might be better if we went and visited him," Gus said, reaching for the bag containing his helmet and Marsuit. "Where is the core storage building?"

  "As you exit the lock, it's the long building off to the left by itself. Make sure you have plenty of charge in your heater batteries. The building is refrigerated."

  "Refrigerated!" Tanya exclaimed. "At the North Pole?"

  "We keep it well below the freezing point of carbon dioxide," Ernest replied. "We don't want the contents of the cores to melt or evaporate until they've been analyzed."

  Tanya and Gus found the core storage building with no trouble. Outside one end of the hut was a crawler hitched to a six-wheeled trailer carrying a coring rig and a set of storage racks that carried about three or four dozen plastic coring-tube liners, each ten meters long. Two men were pulling the tubes off the racks, one by one. Another man was noting the numbers engraved on each tube, entering notes into a vidofax, and giving instructions as to where to store the tube in the building.

  "Kak pozevaetye, Viktor," Tanya said as they walked up to him.

  Viktor looked up with surprise at the two. "Tanya! And Dr. Armstrong! I thought you two were exploring Olympus Mons."

  "We just finished," Gus said. "I wanted to make an inspection trip of Boreal Base and the North Polar region now that it's summer, so I came up on hopiter. Tanya, having been here briefly only once before, took the opportunity to come with me."

  "Before?" Viktor said, then remembered. "Oh! Yes! The day I was shot." He turned to Tanya. "I still have aches in that arm," he said plaintively.

  "What were you doing out on the ice that day?" Gus asked.

  Viktor paused in his answer, then finally stammered, "Why ... trying to defend our base, of course." He grew slightly defiant. "Did you expect me to do anything different at the time?"

  "I mean before the UN forces arrived," Gus persisted. "Where were you and Ivan Petrovich and Tanya going? What did you expect to see there?"

  Viktor hesitated, stammered, then finally said, "Nothing. Nothing! It was just an inspection trip—just like you, the new commissar of Mars, are doing."

  Gus fought down the temptation to explain the difference between his job and that of the old commissar. "We'll wait here while you and your men finish unloading," he said. "Then perhaps we should have a little talk."

  "A—a talk?" Viktor stammered. "About what?"

  "About your status as a guest scientist at the Sagan Mars Institute," Gus said with finality. He turned, walked a few paces away to stand near Tanya, and waited.

  The technicians continued in their task of pulling cores from the rack, taking them by Viktor for recording in his vido-fax, then placing them in the designated racks in the refrigerated core storage building. The men cycled through into the hut by a simple insulated double door system that kept the predominantly nitrogen-argon atmosphere inside from diffusing out. The core sample tubes were slid through a sleeved hole in the side of the wall.

  Gus noticed that the
tubes were covered with frost. The core samples had been pulled up from the frigid depths of the glaciers that formed the northern polar caps, and the carbon dioxide in the air had frozen to the surface of the tubes, hiding the contents. Where the technician's gloves had wiped the snow away, Gus could see thicker layers of white ice alternating with thinner layers of rusty brown dust. Just like tree rings, except that the white ice layers became more compressed with depth.

  Viktor finally finished and they went inside. Gus took Viktor into his office alone. Tanya went off to find their personal quarters.

  "Are you a scientist?" Gus asked Viktor bluntly.

  "Yes!" Viktor said, somewhat surprised.

  "The Sagan Mars Institute is open to any competent scientist, no matter what his race, national origin, religion, or political beliefs are," Gus started. "As long as that scientist acts like a scientist and does not allow his scientific behavior to be distorted by his national patriotism or beliefs. A scientist, first and foremost, is a searcher for truths. Truths about nature. But that is not all. The scientist must transmit to others the results of his searches. He cannot hide his findings for personal gain or political advantage.

  "Now ... there are some reasons to delay publication," Gus continued. "For example, when you have not yet finished analyzing your data, or when you work for a corporation that needs time to file a patent application. You don't work for a profit-making corporation, so that's no reason for not telling me. Is the reason you're keeping silent because you still have further work to do? If so, then let me know so I can make sure you have the resources you need."

  "Tell you about what? There was nothing out there!" Viktor replied angrily.

  Gus looked pained. He took a small card from his pocket and, using the scribbled notes for guidance, began talking in a dry monotone, like the canonical mystery detective summing up a case after having assembled everyone in the drawing room.

  "0800 Zebra Time Monday Week twenty-five: You and two techs took out a crawler, as usual, to continue your ice core drilling survey program. 1410 Tuesday Week twenty-five: You and two techs returned in the crawler, as usual, with a trailer toad of core samples. From 1705 to 2200 Tuesday: The core storage building refrigerator system indicated a six-hundred-watt heat load, typical of one person working in heated Marsuit. 2220 Tuesday: You checked out a crawler with a trailer containing a manhole-sized auger drilling rig. You went out alone at night despite warning by vehicle depot supervisor. 2025 Wednesday Week twenty-five: Twenty hours later, you returned crawler and trailer and canceled your crawler for the next day, after having used a crawler regularly every Monday and Thursday for weeks. 0000 Thursday Week twenty-five: You caught next hopiter to Novomoskovsk, arriving 0025 Zebra Time or 0825 local time. 0140 Thursday or 0940 local time: You have appointment with commissar. 0220: Tanya Pavlova summoned to commissar's office. Told to get surgeon's kit and report to launch site. 0420: You, commissar, and Tanya leave on nonscheduled flight on hopiter back to Novomurmansk. No other passengers on a twelve-passenger vehicle. 0445 Thursday Week twenty-five: Hopiter arrived at Novomurmansk. 0600: You checked out crawler with trailer containing backhoe and blade machine. Passengers were Petrovich and Pavlova. You went east along base of ice cap. 0800 Thursday Week twenty-five: The UN forces attacked and you turned back."

  Gus looked up. "What did you find in those core samples that made you go back out on the ice alone, at night? What did you find there that made you go immediately to the commissar of Mars? What did you say to him that made him drop everything else and order a nonscheduled hop back to the North Pole? And why did you need a surgeon and a digging machine?"

  "It was nothing! I tell you," Viktor insisted. Inside he was petrified with fear. Ivan Petrovich, upon hearing what Viktor had found, had immediately classified it as a state military secret and forbade him to discuss it with anyone. "This is our chance to pull far ahead of the capitalist imperialists!" Ivan had gloated.

  "If you have nothing to hide," Gus said, putting out his hand, "then let me make a copy of the contents of your vidofax where you keep your daily notes."

  Victor hesitated for a second, then passed his vidofax over.

  THE NEXT afternoon, Gus and Tanya were waiting in Gus' office for the arrival of another glacier specialist, Dr. Phyllis Eisen. She was an American scientist who had come with the UN fleet and who had been working since that time with Viktor Braginsky, trying to catch up on what the Russians had found in their exploration of the North Pole ice cap.

  The woman who showed up looked like a trim, middle-aged high school teacher, with intelligent, vigilant eyes, a thin nose, slightly graying curly brown hair, and a pleasant but controlled face that was allowed to smile, but not to grin.

  "I'm Phyllis Eisen," she said brightly, then turned to the man a half step behind her and smiled at him. "And this is my 'right-hand man', Al Eisen." Al was sandy-haired and wiry, about her size, and wore the standard-issue coverall of a technician.

  Al stepped briefly to the front and shook hands, saying, "You've heard of secretaries marrying the boss? Well, I'm the tech that married the scientist." He laughed, and Phyllis frowned slightly, but Al always felt better getting their relationship right out on the table the first time they met someone new. Al stepped back to his shadowing position behind her.

  "Have you had a chance to go over Viktor's vidofax?" Gus asked.

  "You were right, Dr. Armstrong," she replied. "The records for Week twenty-five were missing."

  "Not only were they missing," Al interjected, "they were carefully 'wiped' to make sure someone didn't resurrect them with an UNERASE program. I tried."

  "But having worked with Dr. Braginsky for some weeks now, I know he is a very thorough and very methodical scientist. I pulled up a map of the North Polar region and plotted all the boreholes he had taken up to that time, and after that time. I can show you on your console."

  Al went to the console, inserted a nanodisk, brought up the image of a map, and stood back. Phyllis went forward and started to point to a series of red dots on the map. They had dates marked next to them.

  "East, or clockwise, from Chasma Boreal is a series of wide spiral terraces of thick glacier ice, spaced by narrow canyons where the wind and sun have eroded the glacier ice away. As you can see from where I marked the bore sites, Viktor has placed his past bore sites right along the eighty-first north latitude line. He spaces them such that he cores on one edge of an ice terrace, in the middle of the terrace, just back from the other edge of the terrace, at the base of the terrace cliff, then in the middle of the canyon, the base of the next cliff, and so on. He also takes detailed pictures of the layers visible on the sides of the cliffs. By piecing together the spacing patterns of the alternating dust and ice layers, combined with radioisotope dating of samples from the deeper cores, he has been able to put together a detailed date map of layer pattern versus age.

  "You will notice," she said, pointing to one dot after another, "that the string of boreholes stops right here, with the borehole dug on Thursday and Friday of Week twenty-four being right at the base of this cliff face. If he followed his normal pattern, the next borehole he would have dug would be right in the middle of this canyon. When he resumed research after the invasion, however, he did not continue at that point, but started a new string going west, or clockwise from the base."

  "How far is that point from here?" Gus asked.

  Phyllis measured off some distances with her fingers and compared the spacing with the scale at the bottom of the map. "Three hundred kilometers east along the base of the cap to the entrance to the canyon, and two hundred kilometers up the canyon," she said.

  "We can be there tomorrow during daylight if we start tonight," Gus said. "I'll order a crawler prepared."

  "I can even tell you how far down you are going to have to dig," Phyllis said with a slight smile.

  Gus turned around with a surprised look.

  "Al and I did an inventory of the core sample tubes in the core storage buil
ding."

  "Cold work, that is," Al interjected, slapping his arms around himself.

  "There is one core tube missing, serial number 202," Phyllis continued. "If Viktor had followed his usual pattern of using core tubes sequentially, it would have been tube two in a ten-tube core. Whatever Viktor is trying to hide, it is between ten and twenty meters down at eighty-one degrees north and twenty-five and a half degrees west."

  "I'd better have a crew of technicians follow us in another crawler with a manhole auger, and a backhoe and blade," Gus said, turning to the comm-comp unit.

  GUS INSISTED that Viktor come with them in the crawler, but Viktor spent his time sulking in the living quarters segment in the back, headphones on, listening to heavy metal rock. Al was in the driver's seat, but he let the autonomous vehicle program drive the crawler. Behind them, following their trail, was a second crawler pulling a trailer carrying an auger and a digging machine. Shortly after they left camp, they came to a large dune field. Instead of ice or permafrost, they were now driving over a few dozen kilometers of rolling dunes. The crawlers made their way up the fifty-meter-high slopes, then down the other side, while Al just watched the sandy ripples passing under the glare of the headlights.

  "I did a quick check of the layer patterns in core tubes 201 and 203," Phyllis said from the jump seat in back of Al. Gus turned around in the copilot seat to look at her.

  "The dates in 201 weren't hard to establish using Viktor's dating chronology. They are amazingly old. Two billion years—some two and a half billion years after the formation of the planet."

  "Back when Mars had an atmosphere," Gus mused.

  "The bottom part has a disturbed region, as if there had been an avalanche," Phyllis said.

  They drove on through the darkness.

  IT WAS early morning when they reached the mouth of the canyon and the two vehicles started into it. There was a thick layer of ground fog, and the going was slow since the autonomous vehicle program could not use its video or laser ranging sensors, and was limited to radar. Al was up in the dome where he could look over the fog, while Gus monitored the radar screen from the pilot's seat. As the Sun rose higher, the wind started blowing down the canyon, the ground became visible again, and their speed picked up.