William K. Hartmann - Mars Underground

MARS UNDERGROUND

William K. Hartmann

TOR®

A Tom Doherty Associates Book New York

Other Books by William K. Hartmann

The American Desert

Astronomy: The Cosmic Journey

The Cosmic Voyage

Desert Heart

Moons and Planets

With Ron Miller

Cyclesof Fire

The Grand Tour

Historyof Earth

Out of theCradle

Coeditedby William K. Hartmann

In the Streamof the Stars

Originof the Moon

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are

used fictitiously.

the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Edited by JamesFrenkel A Tor Book Published by Tom

Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

Tor Books on the World Wide Web: http://www.tor.com Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom

Doherty Associates, Inc.

Design byBasha Durand Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hartmann, William K.

Mars underground / William K. Hartmann.p. cm.

ISBN 0-312-86342-X I. Title.

PS3558.A7143M3 1997

813'.54—dc2197-1398

CIP

First Edition: July 1997

Printed in the United States of America0987654321

Copyright Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the parties who granted permission to reprint material as follows:from

Permission to quote granted by author.quotereprinted with the permission of Simon & Schuster fromThe

Immoralistby AndreGide , translated from the French by DorothyBussy (London:Cassell & Co. Ltd.,

Ltd.

Acknowledgments

With thanks to diverse friends who were foolish enough to encourage me.

...a country and its landscapes perhaps don't fully exist until they've been written about—until poets and

novelists create them.

C. J. Koch, author ofThe Year of Living Dangerously, quoting poet Vivian Smith, from "Crossing the

Gap," 1987

Prediction is always difficult, especially of the future.

Danish proverb cited byNiels Bohr, quoted by Walter Moore inSchrödinger: Life and Thought, 1989

Mars in 2031

Nothing that is can pause or stay;

The moon will wax, the moon will wane,

The mist and cloud will turn to rain,

The rain to mist and cloud again,

Tomorrowbe today.

—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,Keramos, 1878

Prologue

HAWAII, 2032

The plane banks over the blue sea and the white waves, and the deep green blanket that cloaks the

mountainsides.

She gets off the plane at Hilo's ancient airport, and the cool air smells of plants and humidity. Home at

last.

The other end of the universe from Mars.

Upon her arrival back on Earth, during her fifteen minutes of fame, she had been called by Newsnet, "the

woman who brought it all crashing down." The phrase had won her respect in Tokyo, in Moscow, and in

certain hallways along the Potomac, but she knows that in the crucial hours on Mars, the actions that

changed two worlds were not hers alone. Besides, respect in Earth's gray, frenzied capitals seemed no

longer to matter. Here at home, amidst the perfumed greenery of the islands, people still acted as if the

ancient ways of pleasure might, just possibly, be more important than the ways of power. The thought

intensifies her questions about her own life.

The greenness and wetness shield her from the urgent needs of men now far away, but still in her mind.

Carter. Philippe. All of them on that Oz-like red world, following their brick roads that they were laying

ahead of them, one brick at a time. And here, of course, Tomas is waiting for her.

Later, she and Tomas make frantic love, Tomas betraying a hint of suspicion. But the love of Tomas is

different from the love of Philippe which was different from the love of Carter. They are all different, men.

Philippe had said she was sincere but not honest, and the nature of the distinction still goes around and

around in her mind. Yet here, among the soft plants and the warm waters that fall from the sky like liquid

caresses, she feels free.

She settles in, visits her aunt in the hundred-year-old house under the banyan tree on the hills of Ka'u.

She sits on the wooden veranda and looks across the land toward the sea. Do they still have verandas

anywhere else in the United States? The mainland is a teeming mess, consumed by the drought, the debt,

the lottery, this year's sports scandal, the crisisdujour , and everyone's doomed quest to be rich, famous,

a player, the winner—or at least to acquire the facade ofbeing something; here, she takes time to listen

to insects pursuing their business. She walks on the black beach at Ninole cove and stares at the slimy

creatures in the tide pools. They have climbed over wet rocks like these for eons beyond human

memory, without caring whether other species conquered the land or went still further, beyond the sky.

She is surprised that she feels no impatience in this quiet island life. She feels renewal, recreation.

Wonders if some day she will go back. Back to what? She is not sure she knows how to answer that.

What was it she had sought out there?

Being on the island again makes her aware of cycles. Liquid water, for example: Earth's unique

attraction. Mainlanders seem to believe that water flows in rivers because water's nature is to do so. But

islanders see the whole truth before their eyes. Water babbles down from the mountains across the black

lava rocks and dry grassy plains and into the sea; the only way it can get back to the mountains is for the

ocean waters to be lifted through the air, torecondense , to fall on the broad summits, where it can begin

the cycle again.

She feels part of a vast cycle like that, a molecule of water at one stage of its history. On this island, she

sees that even the land has cycles. Twenty new acres of lava have flowed out into the sea since she left;

down the coast, an old black lava cliff, where she played as a child, has fallen back into the sea. And she

has been to another planet and back.

Still later, there is her tiny son and she is happy for a while, content that she has been, after all, true to

herself.

One day a piece of mail arrives from Mars. It's on actual paper, with handwriting, months old. So

characteristic of what Carter would dream up. Was he afraid to contact her in real time?

She sits on the veranda, and tries to think how to answer him. She gazes at the distant ocean far below,

lost in haze on the humid horizon. Everything is beyond that horizon, and yet she is here and content. For

now.

That evening, she checks out "Mars" on the net. Newsnet explains that Mars is reaching the point in its

own orbital cycle where it is close to Earth. It is shining in the darkening east as the twilight settles in, and

she goes down the road to the ancientheiau above Ninole cove to watch it. She sits on one of the

prehistoric rock walls as waves send white foam crashing over the rocks below. Salt spray accumulates

on her skin.

Mars' amber beacon is the brightest light in the part of the sky above the sea. Strange. In ancient tales of

quests, the hero travels to distant empires and then escapes home, leaving the distant land far behind

forever. In her case, the distant land has followed her around the sun and watches her balefully from the

sky across the sea. With a shock, she realizes she will never escape it. At the right season, it will always

be within direct sight. Wars and carnage, craft and madness, lust and spite; Philippe taught her

Tennyson's prescient poem about Mars and Earth.They remain there, living their lives in that point of

peaceful light: friends, lovers, enemies.

It is unbelievable to her: a glowing dot containing the whole world where she had lived, a world that

already seems an amber dream.She . I ambers down to the tide pools in the rough lava at the edge of the

sea, and looks for a reflection of Mars' red sparkle on the water. She would like to see the sea and sky,

Mars and Earth, tied together by that reflection.Il would make some kind of link. But the planet does not

glow quite brightly enough; it is too far away and the sea is too restless.

BOOK 1

Kilroy in Hellespontus

...each tale is but a fragment of a tale

—the tale of mankind's history.

—StephenVizinczey , An

Innocent Millionaire,1985

1

2031, FEBRUARY 42, SATURDAY

Morning. So, was he really going to keep driving west, after all, into the unknown Martian desert?

Stafford smiled to himself.

Stafford's dune buggy churned across the ocher sands of Hellespontus. Inthe immense empty wasteland,

the buggy looked like an insignificant blue insect crawling across a dusty parking lot. The dust kicked up

by its big wheels spurted into the air and fell away slowly, sometimes twisted by uncertain gusts of wind.

Along the horizon, the hazy sky was exactly the same color as Stafford's creased Anglo flesh. But high

above, wasn't that a trace of blue he had been seeing in the last year or so?

They were a long way from anything, Stafford and his dune buggy. Alone. Five thousand klicks from

Mars City. Three-fifty from little Hellas Base, hotbed of desert dreams. There was no road. There had

been no road for more than a day.

Virgin territory, Stafford noted to himself. Well, it wasn't the first time. Old Man of the Desert, they

called him. Not for nothing. He looked at the forbidding, unblemished vista. The smile was still on his lips.

The blue buggy churned on toward ... something. Squinting, Stafford pushed his square, weathered face

forward against the front window, feeling his thick white hair and even his white mustache bristle against

the glass. It was as if he were trying to be out there, to be part of the landscape. The thing he was

searching for would be up ahead, somewhere. He didn't know what it would turn out to be, but he knew

it was there, and he had his suspicions.

When he first started out from Hellas Base on Thursday, he surprised himself by spending as much time

looking out the back window as the front, watching for possible pursuers. This unexpected reaction

intrigued him. Paranoia? Guilt setting in? Still, he knew that people were interested in his actions. The

young engineers and scientists gossiped about him. "So where's Old Man Stafford off to this time?" It

was like the Old West: when a grizzled prospector set out purposefully into the hills, the rumor-mongers

said he was after some secret treasure. Well, this time they were right. Doubly so. Soon they would learn

how right they were.

By virtue of nothing more than the clock's steadfast ticking, Stafford had become one of the seniors in a

rusty world of young technicians.

Martians, they werepleased to call themselves. Well, Stafford had the best claim to the title. Old Man

Stafford, the desert rat, the codger, who spent his retirement searching for ... well ... things. "Wonderful

things." As a boy, back in California, Stafford read about Howard Carter's words when the archaeologist

first peered into King Tut's tomb. "What do you see?" his team asked him. "Wonderful things," he said. It

applied to Mars, Stafford thought.

He peered through the dust-streaked glass. Ahead, to the west, a backlit haze of dust reduced distant,

eroded mesas to pale fantasy castles. They did not shimmer. The air was too thin and too cold. The

castles stood, stolid and still, two-dimensional in the luminous haze. Far cry from the Berkeley cafes and

the last redwood forests, old man. To a lot of the farmers, watching holeo images in their worn armchairs

Earthside, Mars seemed only a landscape of desolation. Red rocks, black rocks, and dust. To Stafford,

it was a new world full of Wonderful Things. Interesting oddities. Martian El Dorados. The things desert

rats had sought for a thousand years.

The spartan horizon ahead was a clean, pale line that no one had ever crossed.

It's always folks from green and wet places like northern California who end up loving the desert, he

mused. Lawrence out of Oxford. Van Dyke out of New Jersey or someplace.

Well let them call him what they wanted. In his twenty-one years on Mars he had had his fill of the

Engineering Corps, the Agriculture Experiment Stations, the Clarke Project,the hundred other

progressive projects of the clean, keen greenhorns who kept pouring into Mars City, intent on bringing it

above what they called "critical mass." Critical mass for survival—that's what they were talking about.

The minimum population and supporting equipment to make a self-sustaining colony. Critical mass was a

shiny, polished concept from the gray halls of the universities and space agencies on Earth, but it had its

dark side—a side discussed only in hushed conversations among the planners who hung out during late

hours in what passed for dim bars in Mars City: they would have to reach critical mass before they could

survive a catastrophic shutdown of the supply lines from Earth—a shutdown that could happen any day

because of an economic collapse Earthside, a spacecraft disaster at Crystal City or Phobos, or worse.

Ordinary Martians laughed it off. But some of the planners thought it might happen. Look what had

happened already in Kazakhstan and Lima.

Stafford's opinion of Earth was that no disaster was too unlikely to contemplate, given the way things

terrestrial were going. The farmers, as Martians called them, had a truly Ptolemaic lack of imagination:

they still thought of Earth as the center of the solar system. Rich, ravaged, unheedful Earth.

Stafford was all for Martian self-sufficiency—anexciting goal—but he grew more and more disillusioned

with the way the greenhorns and uncivil engineers were bent on transforming the rusty old planet not into

a newMars, but into a streamlined suburb of Earth, full of transplanted farmers and mall people.

The thing of it was,no one knew how many people and machines it would take to reach critical mass on

Mars. Some experts said a population of three thousand, plus nuclear generators, soil processors. Others

said five or ten thousand, plus redundant infrastructure; the whole urban mess. For every Ph.D., an equal

and opposite Ph.D.

Martians hoped the present population was enough. Three thousand people—putting Mars City

somewhere in limbo between aresearch out-post and a functioning town. Six thousand Martians in all, if

you counted Phobos, Hellas, and the Polar Station. Too many for Stafford. The old days of basic,

mission-driven exploration had ended. Politics was starting to rear its ugly head. You found yourself

doing something because someone said so, not because it had to be done.

He glanced all around the horizon again. Nothing yet. He craned his neck to peer out the back window.

Nothing behind either. The desert was empty. "Clean" was the word Lawrence had used in Arabia.

Hours later, the blue beetle was still crawling along. In the north, the summer sun had crossed the

meridian and was sinking toward the west. Afternoon. It ought to be hot. Of course, it wasn't. Stafford

didn't let himself think about how cold the air was outside.

He spotted something ahead projecting above the sand. It was dark-colored, not bright as he'd

anticipated. He drove closer.

It turned out to be only a curious rock formation, sticking up like an African anthill. It looked to be some

odd-shaped boulder, exhumed by the winds, sculpted and undercut by the blowing sand. As he drove

by, he foresaw that in another thousand years it would be gone.

Once upon a time, his heart had beat fast every time he saw an odd exposure of old rock. They were

windows into the past. When he first came to Mars, he had been seeking his own holy grail. He had

wanted to be the one to confirm the widespread theory that life had evolved far beyond the measly

microbes that had been reported—on again, off again—since the turn of the century. Given the clement

conditions geologists had established for the earliest phase of Martian history, it should have been true.

From the work of Krennikov and Boikova, it seemed a small step to conclude that once life got started,

it had a thousand non-convergent paths to follow—different paths in each environment, on each clement

planet. Long ago, during the mysteriously moist early millennia of the planet, when the air was thick and

water ran on the surface, Martian RNA and DNA should have gone off in directions never seen on

Earth. He, Stafford, would be the one to find the evidence.

For years, Stafford and his cronies had hoped that they would find rich bioorganic pockets and

advanced fossil forms, sealed deep in protected strata since the beginning of time, proof of their

catechism, of carbon chemistry's quirky ability to adapt. They had wanted an icon, more than a rational

test of a chemical theory, something they could hold in front of the cameras and proclaim, "See,it can

happen anywhere in the universe. We're not alone. Copernicus and Darwin were right: we're not special."

No luck.

But he'd had his day. Dr. Alwyn Stafford—the father of a tantalizing but disappointing new consensus:

ancient wet Mars had produced no more than a few stunted microbial forms, starting three, maybe three

and a half billion years ago. The earliest examples seemed to be found in the ancient southern highlands.

Eventually, with the atmosphere thinning, all lifeforms in the surface layers had died and were buried. On

the third day they had not risen from the dead, and for the rest of Martian time the arid surface soils had

been sterile, while the primordial atmosphere dissipated, albeit with spasms that had left now dry

riverbeds. Some of the microbes apparently hung on in buried strata, but there was little evolution

because they were in static, frozen environments. And across the entire planet, the surface soil was

sterile, thanks to the planet's unkind lack of an ozone layer. Seasonal dust storms churned the soil every

year and exposed dust grains to the sun's ultraviolet light, sterilizing and re-sterilizing them, breaking up

any group of carbon atoms that might have an idea of getting together for a fling...

That was Martian history in a nutshell, and a desiccated nutshell at that. The new dogma, which he

himself had established—Stafford, biologist of the dead world as they had called him. How many hours

had he spent in a spacesuit under the deceptively bright Martian sky to convince the world of that

uninspiring bottom line?

Stafford regretted none of those days. His teams had dug and they had drilled. They had penetrated the

permafrost. There had been that layer, deep in the south polar strata near the three-billion-year level, with

its enhancement of organic molecules and microbial forms. They had labeled it just another local anomaly.

Still, there had always been that next drill hole, that next spot that might be different.

Finally, Stafford's colleagues, who sat in their comfortable labs on Earth and served on review

committees, had had enough. They declared him a member of several academies, and virtually shut down

the BioExploration labs in Mars City. At the same time, they raised the budgets for the atmospheric

experiments, which—according to the hype—were supposed to test some new theories on relieving

Earth's smog. Stafford had retired in a sort of muted glory. Nice work, old chap. Send us your memoirs.

Stafford's career had left a mystery, really. Why hadn't Martian life gone further? Why hadn't it

demonstrated some adaptation to Mars' increasingly arctic climate? Was life less resilient than they had

thought? Was biology, after all, rarer in the universe than scientists had come to believe? Stafford was

beginning to think he might see some answers to those questions, over the horizon. But for now he had to

concentrate on matters at hand.

Always the next Cibola, the next El Dorado.

Stafford had never been discouraged. He had seen more of Mars than anyone. He had seen strange

sunsets in the land of the Thoats, far beyond the wildest dreams of Percival Lowell and Edgar Rice

Burroughs and Ray Bradbury. The new kids coming to Mars from consumerland—they had never read

the Martian classics. Mars for them was just the latest hi-tech testbed, an exotic gig to put on your

resume, in the desperate gamble to establish yourself among the haves, when you returned to Earth.

For Stafford it was different. There was the desert. His desert. The empty craters; the whistling chasms

whose fluted rocks sang faintly with the Martian wind, where you could get away from people. Here, you

could scream as loud as you liked and no one would come running. On Earth, there was no place left like

that; there was always some damned monitoring system or satellite....

Truth to tell, Stafford's desert jaunts had generated some notoriety and income that allowed him a few

luxuries beyond the frugal existence he had imagined for his late years in Mars City. The ice caves: he had

made money selling his holeos of the peculiar crystalline formations. An Earthside image hank had

marketed his famous close-up of lightning flashing among the dust devils. And a wealthy collector in L.A.

had paid well for the biggest crystal of specular hematite in the solar system. Who would have believed

anyone would be crazy enough to pay for shipping that one back! Some nouveau riche MacLaine, she

was, with money to burn and an idea that Martian crystals were even better than Earth crystals in terms

of aura or whatever the hell it was they talked about in their sad, upscale churches.

The income was nice, but the trouble with the notoriety was that people kept an eye on him, wondering

where he was off to next.

His wife, now gone, used to rail at him about the dangers. He saw it as no different from the pioneer

days on Earth. His grandfather had opened up new trails in the uranium fields of the Mexican desert,

traveling alone and risking death in 110-degree temperatures. He himself risked dying in — 110-degree

temperatures. What was the difference? The eager Reaper strikes pretty fast when the temperatures go

two sigma beyond the green zone .

Anyway, he and his grandfather both had their common sense and their radios. And life always has an

element of danger, he thought with grim satisfaction.

Danger or not, life had been all right since he had retired from the new Mars rat race. Not "retired,"

really. Detachedhimself . Become independent. During his official career in BioExploration, he had failed

to achieve his goal, but he had failed magnificently enough to acquire clout.

Now the big balloon tires were throwing phantom minarets of powdered yellow limonite into the thin air

behind him. On the left was a distant orange cliff, soft in the haze-muted sun. Its base was undercut as if

dwarfs had carved out a shelter. He visualized erosion by the sting of saltating sand grains, driven by the

wind. Ahead to the left the horizon was broken by a crater rim three kilometers across, looking like the

scar left by an unseen hand that had punched its way out of the interior of Mars. Stafford glanced at the

orbiter photo pasted to the dashboard. Crater on the left. Check.

In spite of the fact that the buggy was a tiny beetle in the empty desert, Stafford had faith in it. The

William K. Hartmann - Mars Underground

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