The Martian Race

by Gregory Benford

  A part of her did not want to say it. This is impossible. It can't be … “A … human shape.”

  No mistake. The mat was creating a pseudopod, pseudohuman. Responding?

  “What … ?”

  “It's the mat's idea of us.”

  “Another kind of echo?”

  Marc could not take his eyes off the changing shape, which had now stopped thrusting out. It stood there, fully two feet above the surrounding mass, a blunt but recognizable outline of the human body. She tried to ask herself questions, to make her mind work. How could a mat enlarge itself into a particular mold, so quickly … ? How could it know … ?

  She said through a dry throat, “It can see us, somehow. At least enough to work out our outlines.”

  “It has eyes?”

  “Maybe that's what all this glowing is about. It communicates across the cavern with light.”

  “Sentience?”

  “Must be. Of some kind. It has developed enough to control its environment. Life does.”

  “But why'd it kill Gerda and Chen?” Marc asked as he twisted in his harness. His microcam flashed on and he took a long pan of the thing in available light. Was it glowing more now? He might capture its image, though the moist darkness seemed to absorb light. They had kept their beams away from the mat, relying on back-reflection from the mist to light up the area. The mat glow seemed stronger around the form. She aimed her own microcam at it and carefully swept the area to take it all in.

  “It didn't,” she said softly, “except maybe by accident. Holding them, feeling all over them … to find out what they were?”

  “They were out of their harnesses, couldn't winch out anyway. Then the mat got them.”

  Can it hear us? What senses does it have … and are they remotely like ours?

  She spoke rapidly, to quell a rising wave of unease. “Maybe in response to them, the Marsmat protected itself. That valve membrane above, it closed automatically. Its major threats come from above—peroxides and cold and vacuum. The mat could build up vapor pressure in here by sealing that exit. Chen and Gerda were trapped below it and got stuck in the mat itself.”

  Marc spun carefully around the axis of his line, peering uneasily at the vast darkness that now seemed to close in, clasping them in gossamer veils of haze. “How do we convince it to let us go?”

  “I expect it's sentient but probably not intelligent.”

  “So?”

  She was unsure of everything, and every breath narrowed their options. Was this extruded shape an attempt at communication? Or a threat? How to get it to release the valve above? Noises? Thin atmosphere, unlikely it would respond to sound. The flashlights? What signal to send? They had been sweeping their beams all over this cavern.

  Her heart thudded harder. To fight the rising panic she knew she had to keep her thinking crisp, direct. React later.

  “Look, it must be responsive to chemical stimuli. If the gases coming up from deep in the interior are wrong for it, there's got to be a way to filter them, expel others.”

  “So we make it want to let us go by poisoning it?”

  “Maybe Chen figured that, too. That's why the burns in the mat.”

  “Which failed.”

  “Maybe to irk the whole system we have to pour it on.”

  “With what?”

  “Their oxygen tanks.”

  “They're our reserve!” Marc was getting impatient.

  “Notice their connectors? They're screw type, not the pressure clamps we have. So we can't tap them anyway.”

  “Damn, no, I didn't.”

  “So we might as well try with them.”

  “Me, I'd rather bang on the door up there.”

  “No reason we can't do both.”

  “Not like I can think of anything else, either.”

  She sent a call to Viktor, for the Rover to relay. At least they would know what had happened down here …

  The winches labored hard—don't burn them out!—to lift them away from the glowing, phosphorescent mat with its strange humanoid shape, its elephant ears and festoons of every blobby shape, its mass of essential strangeness.

  In the haunting darkness her muscles now ached and her breath came in ragged gasps. Tired? Or scared? …

  Both.

  A part of her thought of what message they would be sending to this strange place, how they would appear to this being, a truly advanced Martian life-form. No way to tell. But what choice did they have?

  She looked down at the crude humanoid shape, still plain against the mat. A part of her wanted to stay and study it, but her nerves screamed get away!

  React later, she reminded herself. Think ahead.

  During the ride up she opened the screws on her Airbus tank. It spewed out, a moist plume condensing immediately into crisp snow. Water in the compressed tanks froze on expanding. The air around them was still very cold.

  This vapor is from the mat itself, not coming up in warm gas from below. The mat is releasing it … why?

  The unseen oxygen made gusts in the foggy banks around their beams. She glided upward through a universe unlike anything she had ever imagined—a shadowy, clouded world of diffuse light that throbbed with a slow, softly radiant energy.

  No easy explanations here. No immediate explanation for the deaths. This was life unlike any analogy with Earthly biology, still evolving from forms older than the continents, still hanging on, indestructible, still dealing in its own strange way with the hard conditions dealt it, still coming.

  She directed the Airbus tank spout at a nearby outhanging. Frosty gas vented onto it. The mat jerked visibly.

  “Good,” Marc called, and did the same.

  They approached the valve membrane, drawing up through a somber fog that thickened toward the ceiling. Their lines slid easily through the narrow puckered center of the membrane.

  “I'll give it a squirt,” Marc said.

  Playing the Airbus reserves over nearby thick mat surfaces produced a curious rippling revulsion. The glow heightened here, ebbed there, in no apparent pattern. In her beam she saw tubers seem to swell with liquids, like fat roots. Without a sound she caught the sense of growing agitation.

  “Now to knock on the door.” Marc brought himself up to the membrane and slammed his gloved hand into it. Nothing. He took a screwdriver out and punched a hole in the leathery pale skin, but it was thicker than the tool. He could tear away some fragments but the strength of the valve was obvious.

  “Marc, stop!”

  “Why? What's wrong?”

  “I don't think we want to send the wrong signal. We want to tickle it open, induce it to cooperate.”

  “What's wrong with a little force?”

  “It's not a threat, and I don't want it to become one.”

  “No, huh? It just killed two of us.”

  “Accidentally. Their inexperience was probably as much to blame.”

  “Chen was sawing some big chunks off just before. Maybe it reacted to that.”

  “I really don't know. But I don't want to find out what a full protective reaction is. Okay? Let's try it my way for now.”

  He grumbled something inaudible, but put the screwdriver back in his belt pack.

  Julia took her turn. They were both bleeding Airbus oxy and she could think of nothing more to do.

  Yet she felt around them the same gathering sense of urgency.

  Glowing patterns flowed in the mat nearby.

  “Hey, pressure's building,” Marc said. “Fast.”

  The atmosphere around them was thicker. Their beams now penetrated only a few meters into it. A wind brushed the banks of murky haze. Wind?

  “It's giving off gas,” Marc said, reading his instruments. “Must be, to build this fast. And—what's blowing?”

  “A breeze from below,” she said. “Look down, you can see currents coming up.”

  The cavern now brimmed with light. Vapor, glows—all somehow coupled in the complex system this place had evolved to … wha
t? Survive. Irritate an organism and it will—

  A crack formed. The membrane valve abruptly began to open.

  Immediately the wind tore at them, rushing past.

  She could hear the rising roar of a hurricane gale.

  “What?” Marc looked down in alarm. “Hold on—”

  “No, spread your arms. Catch the wind.”

  “Catch—?”

  The valve snapped open with an audible pop.

  The blast of pressure from below swept them up, through the hole. She got tangled in her own winch cable and tumbled through the opening feetfirst. She slammed into the side, whirled, scrambled for a grip on anything. A piece of mat came away in her glove. She got a grip on a rock and pivoted, out of the direct wind.

  A fountain of vapor sprayed up into the dark vent. Moisture turned to snow, a white gusher that drove upward in eddies.

  “Marc!”

  “Here.”

  She saw him clinging to the other side of the vent, five meters away. “It's … sneezing us out.”

  The storm died quickly. The irritant oxygen was expelled into the vent, to find its way to the surface.

  They followed, shaking from the aftereffects. It was a long ride up out of the swallowing dark, into a glittering sky rich in cold and stars.

  PART V

  MARS CITY

  37

  FEBRUARY 2,2018

  THE NEXT DAY CRAWLED. MARC AND JULIA SLEPT LATE IN RED ROVER, exhausted and depressed. Breakfast was a silent meditation over acidic coffee and warmed-up instant oatmeal with hard knots of raisins.

  Neither felt like waxing long over comm on the events in the vent. Julia made a brief report and they didn't answer the comm as they drove back south through the pingo hills.

  When they reached the classy Airbus rocket, proud tower in the ruddy midday, there was nobody home. Or so it seemed.

  Claudine saw them from the pingo two hundred meters away, where she had been hooking the hoses into the autodriller.

  She came running. “I thought work was best, to keep from thinking,” she gasped over comm.

  “It was …” Julia did not know what to say. “Strange. They died in some way we do not fully understand.”

  “Viktor called, told me, last night. I wanted to be out in the open today.” She looked drawn through her faceplate, eyes hollow.

  “At least Earthside can't reach you while you're in your suit,” Marc said. “Come on inside.”

  Claudine walked around the rover with an awkwardness that Julia knew would go away within another week in 0.38 g. The blue-suited figure pointed toward the rocket. “Maybe I should go into the ship first. I want to shower, change—”

  “Nah,” Marc said. “We'll take you to the hab. Shower there.”

  When Claudine came inside she marveled at some of the rover's “customized” features—a scent catcher, cool water spigot, self-warming meal dispenser; all Raoul's retrofitting.

  Only then did Julia call Viktor. “Let's have conference,” he agreed.

  On the ride they spoke little, and mostly of Mars, of landscape, of the many small ways to adapt to a world that is always trying to kill you.

  When they came into the hab Axelrod was on the screen.

  “—hold steady there, guys. We've got a good horse to ride now, Airbus can't think they've got much in their hand. You should see how stiff their lawyers’ faces are now! And my engineers, they figure no way can she fly that package back alone—”

  Viktor cut it off and turned to them. “Welcome.” Some ritual condolences, all in tones soft and hushed. Viktor embraced Julia. They moved to where Raoul had already prepared a high tea, appropriate for late afternoon. On the wall the big screen reverted to the exterior scene, shadows stretching across the cluttered landscape that was the human signature upon the rusty plains beyond.

  “He is right,” Claudine said. “I cannot fly the ship by myself.”

  “Chen, he must have talked about how severely the life-support apparatus is limited,” Viktor said.

  “He did,” Claudine said. “We can take only four.”

  “Not five, not at all,” Viktor said. It was a question.

  “Not possibly.”

  “Then he was telling the truth,” Marc said. “We weren't sure. I mean, where did he think you'd get the fuel?”

  She blinked. “Why, the ice.”

  Raoul pressed, “You didn't want the methane?”

  “It is yours. And we would have to move the ship to land nearby … too dangerous, such a close landing.”

  “So I believed,” Viktor said mildly, quite obviously not looking at Marc and Raoul.

  “So one person must stay,” Claudine said dejectedly. “Unless we all do.”

  “What?!” Raoul said loudly.

  “To load the ship with water will take drilling, steam cycling, pumping … and we do not have Gerda.”

  “I can handle that,” Raoul said quickly.

  “Sure, we'll all pitch in,” Marc added.

  “Of course,” Viktor said. “That is a given. I wish to discuss one principle, before we go to details.”

  Claudine frowned. “I do not understand how we can plan the return flight.”

  “Principle is,” Viktor said soberly, “we decide here all such matters. Not Axelrod, not Airbus. We.”

  They all nodded.

  They went back in force to recover the bodies.

  Julia had made the case for it, expecting opposition, but there was none. “We can't let the mat get into the suits,” she said anyway. “It may find a way to breach them. Intermingling cells, who knows what damage that could do?”

  Plus it could mess up doing clean science down there!

  Only then did she think of the more humanitarian reason—the way Earthside would play it, of course: a decent burial.

  Five Earthlings, two rovers, and three winches strong—the team of four prepared with aching detail. Viktor remained in Red Rover, to keep Earthside informed and to brood. His ankle was still not up to a major job.

  They brought every spare air tank on the planet. Triple-checking every step, they planned meticulously and in the first leg of the descent made no mistakes. Raoul and Claudine unjammed the Airbus winch so they had enough lifting power to make the recovery possible. In the end it wasn't that difficult.

  As she lowered into the vast main chasm Julia felt a prickly sensation returning, a feeling she had not had the time to register before. Not fear, not curiosity … something with wonder in it: awe.

  The mat was dim, hardly glowing at all. Their beams did not excite it. “Maybe it's exhausted from the last time,” she said to Marc as the two lowered themselves gingerly. “Plants have a recovery time.”

  “You said it's not a plant.”

  “Right. But basic metabolic laws should apply. Anaerobes are not as efficient as oxy users.”

  The big valve they had found open, and so left Raoul and Claudine above it. Insurance, and to handle what was to come.

  “I sure don't want to wake it up,” Marc replied, dimming his hand beam.

  The bodies did not seem to have changed at all. To all sides the mat lay like a dim, dormant rug. It did not seem to have swarmed further over the suits. The blue filaments were flaccid. The mist was less dense, and she got a clearer look at them. They looked more like giant tube worms than linguine. So much to learn.

  But today was not for science.

  Julia was cautious as they attached clasps and ties and stays to the Airbus lines, hovering over the bodies, but no awaking radiance rose from the surrounding mat.

  They gave the signal. The Airbus winch labored to break free of the mat that encased the suits. They both came out with some hard pulling and the mat slithered away, collapsing below. Still no luminosity from it.

  They rose together up into the misty atmosphere of the enormous vault. She longed to study it, watch its reaction to their breathing exhaust. As they neared the valve membrane some shifting colors came through the fog, as if from
distant features. She still had no idea how far away the walls of this huge place were. It could go on for kilometers, part of an underground web of intricate implications …

  They got the bodies through the narrow passage of the valve—and she was sure that term did indeed describe its function. Somehow the mat kept this region thick with vapor, and by ordinary gas dynamics that could not be sustained for long. The valve must cut off the losses to the surface, manage this eerie environment. A pressure lock.

  But how did it know to close? How to respond to pressures and moisture densities? She was convinced that the glows and gas densities somehow carried messages, organizing this whole shadowy realm.

  Raoul and Claudine were of great help in maneuvering the bodies around the edges and angles of the ascent. They were all careful of the bodies, working almost without speaking up through hundreds of meters of the vent. Sunlight beckoned above like a promise and she felt a surge of an odd, joyous energy. Still, when they got back to Red Rover, they were all exhausted.

  “It's the spookiness does it,” Raoul remarked. “I never figured on that.”

  “Who could?” Marc said tersely.

  They rested and ate in the hab. Inevitably, reaction from Earth-side had to be at least considered, though no one felt in the mood. Billions were jostling to peer through the media knothole at five people many millions of miles away … who didn't much want to talk, thank you.

  On her personal slate she saw that Airbus had accused her and a Consortium conspiracy of “driving the two to their deaths” because she wouldn't share her Marsmat samples.

  Axelrod's PR people had been massaging the events, issuing a list of reasons to retrieve the bodies: salvage the suits; not contaminate the Mat; most featured: “It's just not right to leave them there.”

  She glanced at the immense backup of files and shuddered. “ALIENS KILL TWO ON MARS!” screamed the tabloids.

  In all, it was like reading a barely understandable foreign tongue.