Martian Rainbow

by Robert L. Forward

  "The second stays the second to keep the scientists happy," Chris started. "The day—excuse me, sol—has twenty-four hours, or maurs if you want to get technical, and the hours have sixty minutes, or marmins, each averaging 2.7 percent longer than Earth hours and minutes. Since time cards, appointments, and schedules are in hours and minutes, but seldom in seconds, this makes businessmen and administrators happy."

  "Sounds great so far."

  "Now comes the complication," Chris said. "Let's see if I can remember the details ... The minutes have either sixty-one or sixty-two seconds. The shorter sixty-one-second minutes in each hour are the 00 and 01 minutes, every minute divisible by three, and in three sols out of four the 02 minute of the 00 hour. That produces three sols of 88,775 seconds and one sol of 88,776 seconds for an average of 88,775 and a quarter seconds. That's close enough to the physical sol that the scientists can include the clock drift in their normal leap second adjustments to the calendar to accommodate the slowing down of the planet's spin rate."

  "That's not bad," Gus said. "The only people who would really care whether a minute or an hour or a sol had an extra second or two in it would be the scientists, and they can learn the system. Everybody else wouldn't have to be bothered."

  "Since all watches are controlled by chips anyway, nobody has to remember," Chris said. "Just program all the details into the chip, along with the calendar and its leap mears."

  "Sounds great! Why don't you go ahead and get some watches made?" Gus said. "We'll want one for everybody and extras for vehicles and consoles. Get bids for a batch of twenty thousand and I'll arrange payment out of the institute administration budget."

  "Don't need to," Chris said nonchalantly. "I awarded the first Martian patent to the inventors last week—Al and Phyllis Eisen. They formed a partnership with Charles Kim, who has a brother in the solar-powered watch business in Korea.

  "The first shipment should be on the next crew rotation ship. They didn't want to wait for the slow freight supply ships, so they'll pay someone to include it in their personal baggage allowance. Since I gave them a patent monopoly for ten mears, they should make a killing."

  "How much are these going to cost?" Gus asked, the administrator in him concerned about buying one for nearly every office, lab, and vehicle owned by the Sagan Institute.

  "That's up to them. If you don't like the price, Gus ..."

  Chris said, pausing to take another sip of beer. "You can always just reset your watch every night."

  Gus groaned.

  TWENTY-six weeks later, they were back under the dome in the Boston Commons for the periequinox holisol. Chris had been unanimously reelected governor of Mars thirteen weeks before, but had requested that someone else be elected mayor of Olympia. Being governor of Mars was no longer a part-time job. First there were the negotiations with the Russians and Japanese on sites for future expansion bases and the ratio of supplies to personnel. Then there was the hassle of trying to reason with newly elected President Alexander Armstrong's transition team, led by the very firm and even more demanding future Vice-President Diane Perkins.

  With fall coming and the days getting shorter and colder, the diamond prospectors at the North Pole had given up and departed, their searches unsuccessful. The woman prospector had told Chris she would be back next spring, however, and paid for her fossil hunting license in advance.

  The new mayor of Olympia was playing his lasermonium. He was wearing the badge of his office, a somewhat battered collapsible top hat someone had unaccountably brought in as part of his personal baggage allowance and even more unaccountably had donated on the night of the election.

  "It's nearly midnight," Seichi Kiyowara said through his microphone to the crowd under the dome, the top hat sitting jauntily on the back of his head. "Time for 'Auld Lang Syne'!"

  As he started in on the introductory chords, Gus looked down at the thin plastic decal pasted over the face of his old wrist-watch. The two rows of numbers on the liquid crystal display said, "M021 75SAT" and "23:58:35".

  Gus had deliberately sought out and sat with Chris and his friends for the periequinox celebration, for it was lonely with Tanya off on a field trip around Elysium Saddle. Fortunately, he would be taking some time away from administrative duties at the institute for the next few weeks and would soon be working with Tanya's survey team on Hecates Tholus. He joined in the singing, but soon developed a catch in his throat and had to quit for a while, eyes damp.

  "... take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne ..."

  The singing stopped and the countdown began, with Seichi swinging the laser beam back and forth like a metronome.

  "fifty-eight ... fifty-nine ... sixty ... sixty-one ..."

  As Gus stared at his watch, the display switched from "M021 75SAT 23:59:61" to "M021 PEQUI 00:00:00."

  Seichi repeated his fireworks finale from Independence Sol, and the two-sol holiday started.

  "They really do have everything all programmed in," Gus said, impressed. "All that in a stick-on decal no thicker than a fingernail. Almost makes it worth four olys."

  "I'm sure glad the Eisens suggested a five percent 'government royalty' or tax on the gross receipts of patent-protected monopolies," Chris said. "Now the Territory of Mars has enough money to run for years at its present rate, without bothering with other taxes."

  "Maybe the institute should start charging you for your telephone calls," Gus said. "You certainly have spent enough time talking to the State Department and the secretary general, as well as the Russians and Japanese."

  "Well, I finally have the Russians convinced that they are going to have to name everyone they send ahead of time, so the CIA can make sure they're really technical people and not just KGB agents. Now all I have to do is convince the transition team and the State Department that every scientist is not necessarily a technology spy. It just takes jawboning. They'll come through."

  EARLY the following week, Gus finally wiped the last of the urgent chores from his administrative disk files and made a reservation on the evening west-bound hopiter flight. The hopiter caught up with the Sun during the rapid suborbital flight and it was afternoon when he landed at Elysium Saddle. Tanya was not there to greet him, but there was a note for him on the message board outside the Down There cafe and beer garden on the lower level of the central hub of Elysium Saddle base.

  "Techs bringing in trailer load of cores on 77THU. Ride back out with relief crew. Miss you. Tanya." Gus looked at his watch. "M021 77TUE 21:15:33," it said. He set it back five hours. He had two days to spend. He went to the local office of the Sagan Institute and found that Andrew Phillips was taking a crawler out to Elysium Mons early the next morning and he could go with them.

  It was only sixty kilometers from the base to the Stygis Fossae, part of the circular fracture zone that almost completely surrounded Elysium Mons. The crawler had been over this territory before, so the autonomous vehicle navigation program took them there swiftly and smoothly.

  "This is where I stop," Andrew said. "I want to collect some samples at a few more places to make sure I have the whole fault structure properly mapped. But right now it looks like a simple thrust fault. The volcano built up, got too heavy for the crust, the crust cracked, the mountain sank down like a stone on rubber ice, and the edges of the crack came up."

  "Like Olympus Mons," Gus suggested.

  "Well ..." Andrew said doubtfully. "I don't really buy Tanya's theory that the two are the same. Those ramparts around Mount Olympus are mighty high. I have to agree with Joe Stanislavsky that there might be other explanations. For example, just to the west of us, in Granicus Valley, are some ridge-shaped, serrated mountains, very similar to the moberg ridges on Earth that form from volcanic fissure eruptions underneath glaciers—only much—"

  "Larger," Gus interjected.

  "Right! Anyway, the size of a moberg ridge is limited by the thickness of the ice above the erupting fissure lava. The height of the moberg ridge in Granicus Valley is two an
d a half kilometers high, indicating that the preexisting ice sheet was at least that thick."

  "So maybe Joe is right, after all," Gus said.

  He looked out the front window of the crawler. "How do you get from here onto Elysium Mountain? That ditch in front of us has some pretty steep walls on the far side."

  "The Russians installed a cable-lift north from here," Andrew said. "It connects to the cable system going up to the top of the mountain. If you'd like to go up to the top for a look around, I can spare a tech to go 'buddy' with you."

  "I'd appreciate that," Gus said. "It wouldn't do for the director to flaunt institute safety regulations and travel alone."

  The crawler took them to the start of the cable-lift system and they rode their way up the two-hundred-kilometer-long slope of the medium-sized volcano. Gus noticed as they traveled that the volcano was significantly different from other volcanoes on Mars. The lava that formed it must have been less fluid, since it produced hummocks of lava rather than featherlike flows. It was more like an Earth volcano. Except for the lack of large cinder cones, it had a great deal of similarity to the Emi Koussi volcano in northern Chad, just south of the Sahara Desert in Libya.

  "Only bigger, naturally," he said to himself. "Being it's on Mars, it's twelve kilometers high instead of three and a half."

  They spent the night in a twelve-man hut on the top with a small group of technicians that Tanya had left behind to continue a core-sampling survey across the diameter of the fourteen-kilometer-wide caldera. Gus cycled through the airlock into the hut and was taking off the helmet of his Marsuit when one of the techs lounging around inside the hut reacted with surprise.

  "My Infinite Lord!" he cried, flipping back the viewer on his yellow Cap of Contact and falling to the floor on his knees, his hands clasped together in ecstasy.

  "Get up!" Gus said somewhat angrily. "I'm his brother."

  That evening after dinner, the scientific curiosity in him having overcome his natural reluctance to pry, Gus asked to try on the technician's Cap of Contact. The cap was willingly turned over by the still-awed tech, and Gus watched a full fifteen minutes of his brother blathering on about ridding the world of atheistic neocommunism and other forms of venial sin, and unifying all mankind into one great Church family.

  He thought it hadn't affected him, but he had a difficult time getting to sleep and, when he did, he had a terrible dream. He was standing on top of a tall volcano on Earth, dressed in a golden robe. Next to him, standing on a bubbling pool of molten, bloodred lava, was the Devil. The Devil was pointing to the world spread out below them, promising Gus it would all be his, if he would but sign a pact with him. Gus, to his horror, saw himself scrawling his signature at the bottom of the proffered piece of scorched parchment, two ornate letter A's, each followed by an illegible squiggle. The instant he signed, the Devil gave a long echoing laugh, the volcano exploded, and the whole world was turned into a roiling ball of molten lava.

  Gus awoke to find that he had left the hut heater on high and it was stifling inside. He turned the heater down and slept fitfully until dawn came.

  He would have liked to have spent more time on the volcano, but he had to get back. Besides, the Unie made him nervous, the way he followed him around with his eyes. The trip back to the Elysium Saddle base was uneventful, and Gus made arrangements to go back out to Hecates Tholus with Tanya's relief group of techs early Friday morning.

  THE DOMED shape of Hecates Tholus seemed to grow abruptly up out of the plains surrounding it like a gigantic rotten mushroom cap dropped on the floor. The Russians had not installed a cable system here, since the volcano was only ninety kilometers from base to caldera and only six kilometers higher than the saddle point on the ridge where Elysium Saddle base sat perched five kilometers above "sea level". The crawler only took three hours to cover the one hundred kilometers to the base of the volcano, including a half-hour stop to untangle some fiber-optic strands that had wound around one of the wheel hubs. The crawler then started up the steep slopes of frozen lava, all on autonomous guidance, since it had been this way many times before. About halfway up, the slope decreased and they came onto the relatively flat region on top of the volcano. There they found Tanya keeping two crews of techs busy drilling cores and taking samples, working their way from the bottom of the mountain to the caldera.

  The next ten weeks of Gus' life were the most blissful he had ever spent, even though he never got a moment alone with Tanya. The two volcano specialists divided the sol into two twelve-hour shifts and, adding another group of techs, kept two coring rigs working day and night. One or the other would be out on the surface, looking at the cores as the crews pulled them from the ground, deciding what segments to leave there, what segments to take inside for a quick look, and what segments to take back to base.

  "That last segment shows evidence of a different flow layer at 12.3 meters," Gus said through the crawler comm link. "Very thin, though. You must have caught the edge."

  "I'll start the next core thirty meters over," Tanya said from outside. Through the crawler cockpit windows, Gus could see her different-shaped, curvy figure silhouetted in the glare of the floodlights among the bulkier man-shaped Marsuits of the techs.

  "I'm going to hit the sack," Gus said, stretching.

  "Spokoinoi noche," Tanya said sweetly over the general comm channel. The morning-shift techs were already snoring in the back of the crawler, so Gus switched the crawler comm to the channel he and Tanya had selected for private conversations. The sound of a kiss came over the speaker. He sent one back.

  IN THE middle of Week eighty-seven, they reached the bottom of the slope on the north side of Hecates Tholus. The days were getting shorter, and it was time to come in out of the cold and turn the data they had collected into a first guess at the flow history of the volcano. They returned to Elysium Saddle, spent another two weeks selecting segments from the cores that they had sent back to the base, and arranged to have them shipped back to the diagnostic and dating labs at Olympia.

  The flight back on the east-bound hopiter from Elysium Saddle to Olympia was crowded. By the time Tanya and Gus got to the launch pad, the passenger compartment was full. Rather than wait, they crammed into the jump seats behind the pilot and engineer. The hop was a relatively shallow one, since they didn't have far to go. As they rose up over the Tartarus Mountains the pilot tilted the nose of the hopiter toward the south so his guests could see Orcus Patera, a still largely unexplored giant dike-rimmed oval lake of frozen lava four hundred kilometers long and one hundred fifty kilometers wide.

  "A caldera as big as the San Joaquin Valley," Gus said, impressed.

  "Mars is a strange place," Tanya said. "The planet is smaller than Earth, but the structures are bigger."

  "Gravity," Gus suggested.

  "Maybe," Tanya allowed.

  TANYA and Gus were first through the airlock and soon were back inside the familiar corridors of Olympia. Their walk from the hopiter pad corridor to their underground dormitory rooms took them through the Boston Commons and past the tables set up outside the Olye Olye Outs Inne.

  "Tanya!" a voice called from a small crowd gathered to watch the Icarbatics practice at the center of the commons. They stopped and a young woman came running over. "Thanks for letting me use your wings while you were away. They're so much better than the clunky things you can check out from the equipment desk. I just put them away in my room, let me get them for you."

  "I'm glad you put them to good use, Penny," Tanya said. "I'll come with you."

  Gus watched them go, then heard someone calling him.

  "Hello, Gus, you handsome devil. Where have you been all these weeks?"

  Gus turned to see a young woman get up from a table and strut over to him. She was dressed in a short red skirt that showed off a pair of black net stockings with elaborate designs cascading down her long legs and into her red high-heeled shoes. His view of these delights was soon blocked by the nearby presence of an obviously un
encumbered swaying bosom barely contained in a deeply scooped peasant blouse. The light color of the woman's hair had been aided by peroxide, probably obtained from some rocket engineer, and the ruby-red lips, rouged cheeks, and long artificial eyelashes must have been brought in as part of her personal baggage allowance. He tried to place the face. Finally he remembered.

  "Rose! Rose Wood. One of Jay Plantagenet's techs," he said, finally remembering. "Hi, Rose. What can I do for you?"

  "What can I do for you, is the question," Rose replied with an inviting smile. "You've been away for a long time. Would you be interested in having a little company for a while? Hummmm?"

  She came closer and her fingers started walking up his chest. His eyes flickered nervously, very aware of the two mounds exposed to view below. She tickled his chin. "Very friendly company," she promised, lips pouting slightly.

  Suddenly there was a loud explosion of Russian words that Gus had never heard before. He turned his head to see an enraged Tanya spluttering in indignation. There was another long burst of Russian, ending in "... swine!" and Tanya stomped off. Rose had backed off during the outburst, but now she started to come back.

  "Thanks, Rose," Gus said, shaking his head and waving her off with his mangled left hand. "Not interested."

  He turned to go. It was no use talking to Tanya now. He might as well dump his bags in his room and go to the office.

  Fred jumped up from his tiny desk in the outer office when Gus entered the institute door.

  "I'm so glad you're back, sir," Fred said, greeting him with concern. "Something terrible has happened since you left."

  "Really, Fred?" Gus replied. "You could have contacted me, you know."

  "Oh! No!" Fred said with horror. "I couldn't have told you over the comm links! Someone might have overheard!"

  "Sounds serious. What's the matter?"

  "Well ..." Fred said, nervously, his voice lowering almost to a whisper. "One of our techs decided that she didn't like spending over half her time outside in a Marsuit and quit."