Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 16

Every inch of space on the desk was occupied. A jumble of diagrams and flow charts and scribbled notes had been produced and discarded, until they covered the desktop and overflowed onto the floor. Around the walls of the room, every display held its own nested set of schematics.

Bey felt totally at home. The setting possessed the totally organized chaos of his own office. It was the shocking intrusive voice in his ear that felt alien: “Six hours remaining air supply at moderate activity level. Replenishment recommended.”

He heard the warning of the suits internal monitor with astonishment. It insisted that he had been on the surface of Mars for fifteen hours. To him, it was no time at all since he had followed that trail of flattened vegetation toward the overhanging rock.

Georgia Kruskal noticed his change of posture. She paused in her explanation of a flow- chart detail and looked up at him questioningly. Bey was learning to read the expressions in those thick-lashed, liquid eyes.

“My suit” He tapped on the helmet with a thin-gloved hand. “Telling me I ought to go. I’ve been here longer than I thought.”

The broad camel’s mouth stretched wide into a smile. “Time flies when you’re having fun.” Bey nodded. It was more than a joke. There was nothing in the world—in any world—more satisfying than digging into the heart of a new form, grasping it as a whole, turning it around in your mind, and sensing its shape. Not its physical shape, which anyone could see; its logical shape, with its envelope of possibilities and future potential.

Bey himself had that gift. So did Georgia Kruskal. He knew it, and so did she. Within a quarter of an hour of first meeting they had moved to a shared concentration so deep that Bey had no other memories of their time together. Had he eaten, or drunk anything? Had she? It was not important. The only important thing was the ideas that had flowed between them.

“You are free to stay here as long as you like,” she said. “I do not have to tell you that. We can easily renew your suit supplies.” Georgia gestured around her at the sea of notes and drawings. “I will not say that I am humbled—that is not within my compass of feelings but I will admit that I have learned something.”

“Me too.” Bey stood up and stretched. “But I must go. Other work to do.”

“I am sure there is. Projects of your own are awaiting your return.” Georgia Kruskal also rose.

It was a comment, not a question. She was merely acknowledging the importance of Bey’s own work. The effect was to make him feel guilty and slightly resentful. No one else knew it, but he had been doing important work back on Wolf Island—as important as the surface form project here on Mars. Somehow he had been persuaded to put it to one side.

Or rather, for some reason still unclear to him, he had persuaded himself that he should come to Mars. It was his own conviction of something new and profoundly important that had allowed his work on Earth to be interrupted. No man is demolished save by himself.

“I will walk with you to your car.” Georgia had taken him by the arm and was already leading die way, back through the dim-lit corridor. “It will take a little while to learn how the ideas you have given us work out in practice. I hope you will return here to see for yourself. You will of course be welcome at any time. Even”—she paused, and swept Bey from head to foot with an evaluating stare—“to move here permanently. New Mars is the future. Old Mars, like Earth itself, is the past.” The muzzle turned to face him. “I see that you are smiling.”

“Probably.” They were already at the surface, and Bey saw what he should have realized before they left Georgia’s office. Fifteen hours after dawn brought you to the early part of the Martian night. He faced a blind flight to Melford Castle, lit only by stars and the wan inadequate gleam of Phobos and Deimos. “You see,” he went on, “what you are saying is something I have heard all around the solar system, everywhere from Cloudland to the Kernel Ring to the Kuiper Belt. And now from Mars: Earth is history, it’s over and done with. A new idea from Earth is a contradiction in terms.”

“Perhaps you hear it because it is true.”

“Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just like the bumble-bee.”

“Bumble-bee?” They were close enough to the aircar for Bey to see it as a faint shape in front of him. Georgia had paused, her thick-fingered hand tight on his arm. “I have heard that word. But I have never seen one.”

“It’s an Earth insect. A big, fat-bodied bee with little short wings. From an aerodynamic point of view, a bumble-bee cannot possibly fly.”

“So?”

“The bumble-bee is stupid. It does not understand aerodynamics. So it flies anyway.” Bey opened the door of the car and stepped up into it. “And the people on Earth are too stupid to realize that they cannot have wise ideas. So … ”

Georgia was invisible on the dark ground. Bey heard her thin chuckle in the darkness. “I hear you. But here on Mars, your bumble-bee truly cannot fly. While a man from Earth, as you have so clearly proved, can have new ideas. Your design of an organic radio for vacuum communication is totally new to our thinking, and may be hugely valuable. More important still are your ideas on form stabilization. You belong here, Behrooz Wolf, here on this new frontier. Think about that. Go and do your Earth work. But as soon as it is finished, return—and stay.”

The car door closed on her final words. Bey gave the command to return to the home hangar. Thirty unnerving seconds followed, of lurching, swaying movement in total darkness; then suddenly the car was airborne, lifting steadily and turning in its path.

Presumably it knew what it was doing. If not, Bey was in no position to over-rule its decisions. He crouched low in his seat, peered into blackness, and was aware of a nervously growling stomach.

Hunger? It had to be. That sort of indulgence would have to wait until he was out of his suit and inside Melford Castle. He pushed away thoughts about his insides. Other matters had priority. Come to Mars, Behrooz Wolf. It was the third proposition of that land in just a few weeks. Rafael Fermiel and the policy council had tried to recruit him to their cause, the protection of the interests of Old Mars. Georgia Kruskal wanted him to join her project, the creation of a New Mars on the surface.

And Trudy Melford wanted him on Mars—for what?

In his years with the Office of Form Control Bey had met a fair number of fanatics, individuals whose life revolved around a single issue. Sometimes they were easy to spot. Anyone who had ever looked into the glowing, magnetic eyes of Black Ransome would know at once that this was a man obsessed by power. But Cinnabar Baker, who controlled much of Cloudland, seemed at first meeting a relaxed and easy-going woman. You had to see a lot of her before you felt the formidable will-power and the dedication. Georgia was a fanatic, too, of the second land. Easy-going on the surface, but she would do anything to further the cause of New Mars. And she had a huge ego—even by Bey’s own standards.

Rafael Fermiel did not seem like a fanatic at all. He acted like an ordinary, worried man. Unless he was far more subtle and devious than he appeared, someone or something stood behind him and the Old Mars policy group, driving them on. And, if Bey’s instincts meant anything, that same someone was providing the vast funding that supported the Old Mars terraforming efforts. It was a strange contradiction, that Old Mars stood for transforming the planet until it was just like Earth, while New Mars wanted a world without additional changes.

And Trudy Melford?

As before, Bey’s thought came to this point, and stopped dead. If Trudy was fanatical about anything, it was a need beyond Bey’s understanding. She owned EEC, and that made her the richest woman in the solar system. It did not prove anything. Sometimes wealth and power merely created the desire for more of the same. But neither money nor power seemed to drive Trudy.

Anger?

Revenge?

Deep insecurity?

Bey sighed. Maybe Georgia Kruskal was right. He ought to be back on Earth, doing what he knew how to do. Instead he was far from home, trying to do what he didn’t know how to do. The aircar was feathering down through the quiet night sky of Mars, closing on what he hoped was an invisible runway.

Bey was tired, more than ready for food and sleep. It was just as well that he didn’t know what he was going to get.

The flight back had not been exactly frightening, but any silent, sightless run above a surface so inhospitable to a standard human form carried with it at least a little tension.

Bey felt easier at once when the car landed and rolled on to place itself in the hangar. The walk in the dark that followed called for the help of a flashlight taken from the car, but it did not take long. The first half of the ride down the escalator was nothing more than boring. By the time he reached the way-station lock and could at last remove his suit, most of his attention was already looking ahead to an early visit to the Melford Castle dining-room.

A little sign stood at the way-station lock exit when Bey emerged from it:

MAINTENANCE WORK SCHEDULED FOR ESCALATOR. ALTERNATIVE ROUTE AVAILABLE VIA CARGO CHANNEL, WITH POSSIBLE DELAY.

He moved to the dim-lit escalator and stared down its segmented spiral. It was working, exactly as usual. Either the maintenance work was all finished, or possibly it had not yet begun.

He stepped onto the broad, shelf-like top step, and was carried smoothly downward. Five hundred meters to go, at maybe five meters a second. Almost two minutes of descent, with nothing but blank walls and the spiral above and below to look at.

Bey stared at his feet. Each step was made of some plates of lightweight plastic honeycomb. He could see through the wide-spaced square grille of the white plastic to a similar step ten meters below, and imagine that he could see through that, to another and still lower step, until every space in the grille at his feet was filled by some part of a step beneath. Olbers’ Paradox, escalator version: Why is the sky dark at night? Answer: In this case, it isn’t. He could see nothing below but white steps.

What was far more difficult to understand was just how successive plates of the escalator were linked, and it was harder yet to comprehend what happened at the bottom, where the steps must somehow turn around and ascend again to the top of their segment. He tried to visualize a double spiral, simultaneously descending and ascending. An unfolding double helix. Escalator DNA; continuously unraveling.

Bey was not so much thinking as drifting, passing the time in idle and random association until this piece of his journey was over and he could get on to the next one. When the unrelieved pattern of white at his feet was broken to become a fine grid of black, it did not alarm him. It did not even particularly interest him. It meant only that the escalator ride was almost over, and would soon discharge him onto the hard black surface of the tunnel to Melford Castle.

But some piece of his mind, far beneath conscious level, must have been keeping an exact count of escalator segments. He suddenly knew they should not yet be at the bottom- certainly not within one turn of the helix.

He stared hard at the step he was standing on. The dark beyond the grille was more prominent, as though some other step beneath it was no longer there. That was impossible. Unless he had miscounted and they were approaching the bottom. Or unless …

Bey looked, not down but along the stepped spiral of steps ahead. He could see eight steps, stretching away to form a full hundred and eighty degrees of turning descent. For a moment he was reassured—until, as he watched, the most distant step below him vanished.

In its place stood nothing. Not another and different color of step, not the approaching floor of the tunnel. Nothing. Except that as he looked, he saw a faint, far-off light. That had to be the tunnel, its wall lights at least twenty meters below him-the height of a tall building.

As he watched, another step vanished from sight. It must somehow be curving back under the escalator and re-ascending. But who cared where it went, or how? The gulf in front of Bey was closer. The escalator was still moving steadily down. There were only six more steps ahead. After that the one beneath his feet would disappear in its turn. He would drop, fifteen meters to a stone-hard floor. Ten meters were often enough to kill a man.

He turned and began to run back up the turning staircase of the escalator. After ten steps he risked a glance behind. It was still six steps to the edge. He could keep up with the escalator-just, in a true Red Queen’s Race, running as fast as he could to stay in the same place.

But for how long? He had seen no halfway point where he could escape from the escalator. The only way he could reach safety was to run all the way back up to the top: half a kilometer, vertically, while the descending escalator steadily nullified his upward progress. Bey knew that was far beyond his physical powers, probably beyond the endurance of the best athlete in the system.

He was already panting for breath. The thinner air of the Mars interior atmosphere offered him less oxygen. Muscle fatigue provided the growing pain of lactic acid build-up in his calves and thighs. His efforts had bought him a couple of minutes of thinking time, but at a price. Even with the reduced Martian gravity, another thirty seconds would put additional exertions beyond him.

Bey spun around again to face the descending steps. When the one he was standing on vanished he would face a fifteen-meter drop. Lie flat until the last moment and then hang at arms-length, and it would become a bit less than thirteen meters. A thirteen meter drop on Mars. What did that equate to on Earth?

Aybee could have told him the answer in a fraction of a second. Unfortunately, Aybee was a few tens of billions of kilometers away. Bey was on his own. Mars surface gravity, about forty percent of Earth’s. Terminal velocity for a given distance of fall proportional to the square root of acceleration. So thirteen meters on Mars was like thirteen times the square root of 0.4 on Earth; say, thirteen times—No time. And no choice, even if he didn’t like the answer.

Bey was again facing up the escalator, his feet placed on the step below. When he felt it vanish beneath them he gripped the leading edge of the step above him. The one his knees rested on would be gone soon, in another second or so. He had to hang on until the step he held reached its lowest point before turning to ascend. Then it all happened while he was still thinking it through. His hands released as soon as he felt the edge of the step begin to turn. And then he was falling.

The lower Mars gravity offered one other small advantage. The duration of his fall was longer. He could orient his body upright, bend his knees slightly, and hope to land and roll.

Bey did everything perfectly. His reward was a sharp cracking sound as he hit. He felt a horrible shooting pain in his left ankle, followed immediately by the equal agony of a breaking left arm and ribs as his body rolled into the hard floor of the tunnel.

He lay still, the left side of his face flat against the smooth surface. He could feel cold sweat bursting out all over his body. He had the answer now to his question, how far was a thirteen-meter fall on Mars? It was too far, too much for human flesh and bone. He felt as though any form of movement would kill him.

But he knew that no form of movement would also kill him. The tunnel, one kilometer down, was balmy compared with the surface of Mars, but it was still at freezing-point. Heat was seeping out of his body into the cold tunnel floor. A few hours of that and he would be dead, regardless of his injuries.

He lifted his head and stared a worms-eye view along the cold, black floor. The chance that someone would conveniently wander along the tunnel to save him was flat zero. He would be almost as well off waiting for a savior out on the barren surface. If he didn’t do it, no one else would. He had to make his way to the little cars that ran to and from the entrance to Melford Castle. He had to lift himself into one. And somehow, at the other end, he had to lift himself out.

There was just one problem. He couldn’t do it. By pushing with his right leg and pulling with his right arm, he could advance a painful few feet along the tunnel before he had to rest. The car he needed was over a hundred meters away.

Think of the alternative. Bey made another great effort and dragged himself a little farther. A hundred meters was nothing but two meters, repeated fifty times. You moved, and you moved again. Or you died. The square root of 0.4 was close to 0.6. And 0.6 times thirteen meters—Bey pushed and pulled and inched forward- that was less than eight meters. Trained acrobats on Earth could take a fall of eight meters and not think twice about it. Which only proved—pull and push and move—what you already knew, that you were not a trained acrobat.

Even if you were, climbing into a car with a broken ankle, arm and ribs would be quite a trick. Something new would be needed for that. Better think it through. Bey slithered his way along like a crippled snail. Or maybe better not think it through. One problem at a time was enough. More than enough.

He lifted his head. Good news: The car was noticeably nearer, and the pain in his ankle was marginally less. Bad news: Before he could reach the level of the car, he would have to hoist himself up a two-foot step on the tunnel floor.

One problem at a time. Bey humped and slithered and scrabbled, until the fingertips on his right hand were bloodied and broken-nailed. At last he was as close to the car as he could get. It was maybe five meters away; and he could no more lift himself up the two-foot barrier than fly across it.

The car was open and waiting. It could respond to his voice command and move freely backward and forward. What it could not do, ever, was move sideways toward Bey. It was a rail car, it sat on tracks, and its motion was totally fixed by them.

Bey sympathized with it. Both of them were stuck in grooves, their actions completely decided by outside constraints.

He could order the car to proceed at maximum speed and smash into the courtyard of Melford Castle. That should arouse enough excitement to bring someone here. Only it wouldn’t work. The car’s own safety system would override any command and slow it down before it approached the castle.

He lifted his head as far as he could and surveyed the walls and ceiling of the tunnel. Nothing there. Both were simple plain surfaces, made of compacted regolith. There would be scheduled maintenance monitoring, looking for fallen rocks from wall or ceiling, and unlike the waiting car the machines that did the work were smart and mobile and general-purpose. But their inspections would be few and far between. He might wait for weeks before the next one was due.

Wrong again. His desiccated corpse would wait for weeks. Bey, the real Bey Wolf, would be long gone.

He stared again at the rail car. It could hear his commands, but it had no voice circuits to reply to them. That was no problem for a passenger, who could see the internal displays. Bey, lying flat on the floor, enjoyed no such privilege.

Did it have visual sensors, enough to make sure that it did not run into fallen rocks? Probably, and it would surely report what it saw to the maintenance machines. But it probably saw only things in its immediate path.

But it might accept other reports.

“Attention. There has been a major rock fall, close to the rail car escalator terminus.” Bey spoke as loudly and clearly as he could, aware that his voice was shaking. He was tempted to continue, adding a warning that fallen rock might form a danger to traffic. Except that he would be wasting his time. The car was simple. If it accepted a message at all, it would be a simple one.

A loud buzzing click came from the car. Bey prepared to repeat his message, thinking that a communications system might be switching on; then he realized that the car was moving. Before he could move or speak again, it accelerated smoothly away along the tunnel and vanished from view.

Bey lowered his head, until his face was again touching the floor. It was colder than ever, but it no longer felt unpleasant. Wasn’t freezing supposed to be one of the best ways to go, with death stealing over you like a gentle sleep?

Maybe it was—if you were ready to go.

Bey lifted his head and deliberately flexed the muscles of his left arm and leg. The pain was quite intolerable and it brought him up to full alertness. He waited a few seconds, then did the same thing again. Isometric exercises with broken bones. A new form of calisthenics, guaranteed to keep the subject awake. Again. And again. Every thirty seconds.

Bey squeezed his eyes shut, gritted his teeth, and counted out the interval. Thirty seconds. Again. And again.

He was still doing it half an hour later, when a hiss sounded just a few feet away. He opened his eyes. A wheeled, multi-armed machine stood there facing him. The arms were reaching out, reaching down. They were strong enough to move two-ton rocks, but they were not used to dealing with delicate human tissue.

“Hey! You can’t just pick me up like that—I have broken bones. I need careful handling. I need—”

What Bey needed was lost in a scream of pain. It made no difference at all to the machine, which could not hear him. It was a simple rock-clearer. What it had just picked up was not what it had been sent to pick up, namely, a fall of rocks. This object was in the way and it certainly had to be moved; however, its final disposition must be referred to a different and more sophisticated machine.

Decisions like that went far beyond rock-clearer grade level.