Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  As they penetrated deeper and deeper into the canyon, the wind-etched ice-canyon walls became higher and higher.

  "Stop for a second," Phyllis said from the middle dome in the engineering segment. "I want to get a photo survey set of that cliff side on the right. The top part is overhanging and the orbiting imager wouldn't be able to get pictures of the layer pattern."

  Al rolled the crawler to a stop while she activated the external long-focus camera. Once they were stopped, she used the laser range finder to designate a series of points from the base of the cliff to the top and the camera took overlapping high-resolution pictures of the cliff side.

  Gus looked out the copilot's window at the cliff side, squinting his eyes until they were almost hidden in the crow's-feet wrinkles.

  "If you squint your eyes to lower the resolution so you can't see the yearly bands," he said, "you can see large light and dark banding."

  "Those are the long-term variations in dust level caused by axial tilt variations," Phyllis said. "There are even longer cycles of two million years caused by variations in eccentricity of the Martian orbit."

  She sang forward to her husband. "You can take off again, Al," she said. "I have the sequence in the can." She climbed down from the dome and came forward to the jump seat behind Al.

  She leaned across to look through Gus' window up at the cliff top high above. "From the laser ranging data I calculate it's over two kilometers high," she remarked.

  "Pretty impressive for ice," Gus replied.

  "Ice with a lot of dirt in it," Phyllis reminded.

  They continued their way up the curving canyon. Viktor had put away the headphones and was looking gloomily out the back window while mechanically cutting up a minipig pork chop he had warmed up for himself in the microwave.

  "According to the navigation system, we are approaching eighty-one north, twenty-five thirty west," Al announced.

  "Do you see anything, Tanya?" Gus asked as he peered through the front windows at the horizon.

  "Nothing yet," Tanya said from the dome above him.

  "Here we are," Al announced, bringing the crawler to a halt.

  "Nothing," Tanya reported.

  "Nothing here, either," Phyllis said from the middle dome. "I guess I'll have to ask Viktor," Gus said resignedly. "I hope he—"

  Just then, Viktor burst from the rear of the crawler, shouting "Nyet!" and brandishing his table knife.

  He lunged toward Gus, but Tanya dropped from the dome above and grabbed his arm from behind.

  "Traitor!" Viktor snarled in Russian. He whirled around and stabbed Tanya in the chest just as Gus felled him with a rabbit punch. Tanya screamed and fell to the floor under Viktor's unconscious body.

  Gus bodily picked up the small Russian scientist and tossed him down the corridor, then bent over Tanya. She was holding her chest and groaning. She got control of herself and slowly took a deep breath, listening carefully.

  "No lung puncture," she said finally. "But ... Oh! It hurts!"

  Gus felt Al's hand on his shoulder.

  "Let me take over, sir," Al said. "I've had paramedic training."

  GUS TIED Viktor firmly in the engineer's chair in the midsection. As he finished, Phyllis came out of the crew quarters in the back.

  "The table knife just slid off the breast bone and down the rib cage," she reported. "She has a long skin gash and a badly bruised breast, but otherwise she's okay. She insists that as soon as Al gets her bandaged up we are to continue on our way. She doesn't want us to turn back now."

  AFTER forty-five minutes, they were ready to go again.

  "I guess the only thing we can do is start a search spiral," Gus mused.

  "Wait," Phyllis said. "Viktor always chose the point exactly midway between the canyon walls. Maybe I can refine our guess with a few range measurements." She climbed into the dome above the still-unconscious Viktor and brought up the laser range finder. She fired once at the cliff face on the right-hand side of the crawler, then again at the cliff face on the left-hand side. Then she hopped down from the dome and came up behind Al.

  "Three hundred forty meters to the west," she told him. "Make sure you stay on eighty-one north."

  The crawler crept forward and mounted a small rise. On the other side was a disturbed section in the snow. Although an attempt had been made to remove the traces, there was a mound of removed snow beside a man-sized depression in the ice. The crawler stopped beside it. The other crawler pulling the trailer with the auger and digger came to a halt on the other side. Everyone went outside except Viktor, who was groggily awake but still tied in the engineer's chair.

  "HERE'S WHERE the original coring hole was," Phyllis said, kicking at a small depression a little over a meter away from the larger depression.

  "Rebore the larger hole," Gus instructed the technicians. "But after the first ten meters, go very slowly. When you hit new ice, stop."

  The techs maneuvered the trailer containing the augur into position and started drilling. Almost immediately there was a loud clank.

  "Stop!" Gus yelled, but the technician was ahead of him. The auger was lifted and everyone looked in. About a meter down was a threaded metal cap on the end of a plastic tube. Al jumped into the pit and brushed away the snow.

  "Number 202! The missing core tube!"

  "Pull it out, then continue digging," Gus directed the techs.

  The technicians jury-rigged a hoist with rope and the auger's lifting mechanism and slowly worked the ten-meter-long segment of tubing out of the ground and laid it flat in the gritty snow. They went back to digging, while Phyllis crawled slowly along the tube, brushing frost away and peering carefully at the layered contents before the frost reformed. Suddenly, about a third of the way down, she stopped short. Her voice over the Marsuit intercom was almost a whisper.

  "This isn't ice or dirt," she said. Tanya and Gus bent down and looked, too.

  "There is about forty centimeters of dark red material with centimeter-thick gray end-caps," Tanya said. "How do we open the tube to get a sample? "

  "The tube is really two tubes, each with a centimeter-wide slot," Phyllis said. "You just twist the ends to make the slots line up and you can pick out a small sample."

  Al and Gus rotated the opposite ends while Tanya got out a small knife and some self-sealing bags from her medi-pack.

  "The dark red material is icelike, but fibrous rather than brittle," she reported. "The gray material is like rubber." She rose and started toward the crawler. "I'll take it inside and look at it under the microscope as it warms up."

  "We've reached the bottom," a tech's voice reported over the Marsuit intercom.

  "I'll be right there," Gus said. He walked over to the edge of the pit.

  "Fourteen meters deep," the chief technician said. "The side wall toward the borehole is soft. Obviously someone dug through there from the bottom of the hole. Shall I have the men clean it out?"

  "My helmet has a helmeyes built into it," Gus replied. "That can let me see in almost total darkness; plus, it can store in memory everything it sees. I'll go down, unless you have an objection."

  "No, sir!" the chief technician said. "Just don't panic if the hole collapses on you. You have plenty of air in your suit and your head is only twelve meters down. We can dig you out in no time."

  Gus had plenty of time to contemplate the idea of being trapped at the bottom of an ice-hole as they rigged up a safety harness. He climbed down using a rope ladder they had found near the bottom of the hole. He was gaining a measure of respect for Viktor Braginsky's courage in going down into the hole alone, with no one to rescue him if anything had happened.

  The chestpack light, combined with the helmeyes, gave him excellent vision. The built-in thumb and finger extenders in the custom-made left-hand glove of his Marsuit worked well in the compacted snow, and he pawed away at the snow in the wall of the hole until his knees were covered. He climbed up the ladder, the techs cleaned out the hole, then he went back down again. H
e started in digging again and his hand struck something large and stiff!

  Just then Tanya called over a special Marsuit frequency they used for private conversations. "Gus?"

  "Yes?" he replied, continuing to brush away at the snow.

  "Both of the samples are organic! They have cellular structure with differentiation. Although there are major differences from their Earth counterparts, if I had to say in one word what they are, the dark red material is 'meat' and the gray, rubbery material is 'skin'. The skin is more like that of a dolphin than a human, though."

  "The skin may be like a dolphin's," Gus said, looking down at a frozen, gray-skinned, hairless foot with six large clawed toes, "but the feet are more like a bear's!"

  He then noticed that what he thought was a badly crushed foot was really the way it was designed. There were three clawed toes to the left and three clawed toes to the right, with a gap between them. They could be brought together to make a powerful digging shovel, or spread apart to pick up a ball—or grasp a victim between the two opposing sets of talons.

  "Toes arranged like a koala bear ... a big, gray, hairless koala bear," he added as he uncovered a massive gray leg as big as his arm attached to the middle of a body that extended under the packed snow in both directions. This was not a hind-quarter or a forequarter, but a "midquarter".

  "What are you talking about?" Tanya said.

  Gus switched over to the common intercom channel.

  "I think we've found the remains of a Martian!" he said.

  There were gasps from above.

  "Frozen there for two billion years," Phyllis whispered in awe.

  "Was it intelligent?" someone asked.

  "No sign of clothing or other artifacts," Gus said. "Probably just an animal. But it has legs and grasping claws, so it's fairly complex. It's also large. Too large to dig out from down here." He stepped back.

  "I think we better get out the backhoe and blade and make a ramp down to here," Gus said. He made sure his helmeyes had recorded a good overall picture of the portion that he had uncovered, then turned and climbed up the ladder.

  THE EXCAVATION went rapidly at first, then more slowly as the three-meter-wide, fifteen-meter-high artificial cliff face began to approach the point where Gus had uncovered the foot. They found one end of the creature next. About half a meter from the end was a set of two feet attached to opposite sides of the body, much the way a bear's would be. This was probably the rear end since the claws on each foot pointed in the other direction. The rear end had a fan of long, hexagonally shaped crystal rods growing out of a muscular skirt, somewhat like the display feathers on a male peacock.

  "Don't uncover too much," Tanya protested, too excited over their find to be concerned about her injuries. "We have to keep it well frozen until some real experts get here. I am only a surgeon, not an xenobiologist." She did, however, work the stiff joints to get some idea of the bone structure and manipulated the crystal fan to see how it attached to the muscles under the skin.

  "Mars has always been pretty cold," Phyllis said, "especially up here at the North Pole where this poor fellow got caught in an avalanche. Why doesn't he have any hair?"

  "Whales and dolphins do fine in the polar oceans without hair or feathers," Tanya replied. "This fellow has thick, blubbery skin to keep him warm. No pores in the skin, either."

  "It would make a good space suit, then," Al said.

  "Very interesting point, Mr. Eisen," Tanya said. "Very interesting point."

  They found the next pair of feet, then, a little further on, another collapsed fan of hexagonal crystals—more of them this time—then another set of feet, another chunk of body, then another set of feet, then another fan of crystals. Each segment seemed to be about one and a half meters long.

  In the middle of each segment, between the two pairs of feet, the normally gray skin changed to a pattern of black and white stripes. They were symmetric about the middle, but the group of stripes on the second segment had a different pattern than the group of stripes on the end segment.

  "Curiouser and curiouser," Gus said. "A bear-clawed, koala-toed, hula-skirted, zebra-striped icepede."

  They continued on, taking pictures and measurements of each segment before covering it again with a layer of snow. On the backbone of segment three was a crumpled mass of what looked like black velvet cloth. Tanya carefully pulled at it and half straightened out a jet black wing with fragile sticklike stiffeners.

  "It would be over two meters from wingtip to wingtip if the other side is like this one," Tanya said in amazement. She tenderly folded the wing back up.

  "Add bat-winged," Gus said.

  "It surely couldn't fly!" Phyllis exclaimed.

  "Bones too heavy," Tanya replied. "Wings are probably for heat control. Like lizards."

  It was segment four that Viktor had bored through with his core-sampling equipment. A half meter one way or the other, and the Martian would have slept on undisturbed underneath the snow for billions of more years. Both segments four and five had wings.

  "Segment six," Gus said as Tanya uncovered another fan of crystals and the body continued on. "Nine meters long and still the creature stretches onward in a seemingly never-ending lineup of segments, one after the other."

  "This pattern looks familiar," Tanya said as she uncovered the black and white section. There was no wing this time.

  "Let me check," said Al, who had been taking the documentation pictures with a vidofax. He flashed back through the images and halted at one. He held it down so Tanya could see and compare.

  "Almost the same," Tanya said. "But the last outside stripe is black instead of white."

  "I wonder why the segments on these lineup creatures don't have the same pattern?" Al asked.

  "Perhaps we shall never know," Tanya said. "I am sure they are extinct. The lineups, as you call them, are so large they would have been easily seen from orbit if they were still around."

  "I've been wondering what to label this file of critter pictures!" Al said. "The name 'Lineup' fits him perfectly. He even has his prison stripes on already."

  Even Gus had to groan.

  "I think we have come to the other end," Tanya said as she brushed away the snow to find the expected fan of crystals. "There are only half as many crystals here, and the skin texture changes on the other side."

  She worked more slowly as she uncovered the head end. There was no neck. The head was conical in shape, like that of a tapir, and narrowed rapidly to a flexible snout. There was nothing that looked like eyes or nose, but the snout was a complex, multifingered structure. It had been badly crushed, so it was hard to figure out its exact structure.

  "I don't want to damage it further by prying at it," Tanya said. "Get me something to shield it and I'll cover it back up with snow to keep it frozen."

  "Hold it up, so I can get one last close-up picture," Al said. He looked through the viewfinder and zoomed the vidofax camera in on the nose section. "Through the zoom lens I can see some featheriike structures under the fingers," he reported as the vidofax clicked a number of single-frame shots.

  "Probably the smell organs," Tanya said. "Like antennae on moths. They can smell single molecules."

  "I can just see my report now," Gus said. "We have found a Martian frozen in the ice at the North Pole. He is called a 'Lineup'. What does Lineup look like? Well, imagine, if you can: a moth-nosed, finger-snouted, tapir-faced, pig-bodied, bear-clawed, koala-toed, bat-winged, hula-skirted, zebra-striped, six-segmented, twenty-four-footed, ten-meter-long, two-billion-year-old icepede."

  GUS WATCHED as Viktor flipped the vidofax through the images Al had taken of the Lineup. When he came to the end, Gus said, "If you had behaved like a scientist and had let us know of your discovery instead of trying to hide it, then I would have put you in charge of the expedition. Then it would have been you uncovering the Lineup and you taking the pictures and you announcing the discovery of the century. As it stands now, you'll have to share the credit."
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br />   "So," Viktor said, slamming the vidofax back in Gus' hands. "You are going to let me share the credit for my discovery."

  "A scientific discovery is not a discovery until it is reported to the rest of the scientific community," Gus reminded him. "You forfeited your priority when you tried to hide your findings. You didn't even tell your fellow Russian scientists at the base. Instead you tried to advance your political states and curry favor with your bosses by running to them with it first."

  "It was my discovery! Then you and your nosy friends came and stole it from me!" Viktor retorted. "You rapacious, capitalistic Americans are just like the Nazis, stealing whatever you can get your hands on. I spit on you!"

  He spat into Gus' face. Gus pulled back, shocked. He reached for a handkerchief, found he had none, then wiped the spit off the side of his nose with his sleeve. Viktor stood petrified as Gus' face curled in anger, the crow's-feet furrows pointing arrowlike at the slitted steel-gray eyes.

  "I hate your guts, Mr. Braginsky," Gus growled. "You have done nothing but cause me trouble since I came. You lie to me, you threaten me, and you tried to kill Tanya. Now—after I have tried to be nice to you—you spit on me."

  Gus' voice lowered even further. "Because of your recent behavior, I would be fully justified in canceling your guest visitor status at Sagan Institute and sending you back to Russia immediately."

  "Don't do that!" Viktor said, panicking. "They will never believe I didn't lead you to the site. Petrovich didn't understand. He thought I had discovered an ancient Martian civilization. He dreamed of finding new weapons. I couldn't convince him otherwise. He made it a state military secret—and the penalty for revealing state military secrets is death. They'll kill me!"

  "Good riddance!" Gus said, his face still clouded with anger.