Proteus in the Underworld

CHAPTER 14

Sondra, deep within the Fugate Colony in the far-off reaches of the Kuiper Belt, was convinced that Bey Wolf regarded her as an idiot. It might have comforted her a little to know that Bey, standing on the surface of Mars, had at the moment no better opinion of himself.

What he had just done might be natural for someone recently arrived from Cloudland. It was inexcusable in a man who had spent most of his life on the turning globe of Earth.

The deep caverns of Old Mars possessed an oddly timeless quality. Temperature was held constant, air pressure at any particular level did not vary. Lighting levels, generated from internal power sources deep within the planet, remained steady. Any significant report or picture that came to Earth from Mars provided as a background an unchanging interior environment. Bey, wandering within the caverns, had accepted the same mental mindset of an unvarying world.

It was a huge shock to ride the spiral escalator up to the surface, and to discover in the final hundred meters that he was arriving during the Martian night Bey stood on the frozen surface and stared about him. This was what happened when you did something without bothering to think. He had no idea of the local surface time. Dawn might be minutes away, or a full twelve hours. He had plenty of power and air in his suit, but he was not prepared to stand like a fool for half a day.

He glanced up. Although the atmosphere of Mars was gradually becoming more dense as a result of the terraforming work, it was still negligible by Earth standards. The stars were brilliant and unwinking. The constellations held their familiar patterns, unchanged from the skies of Earth.

Bey identified the Big Dipper and Polaris. He turned to face them. That was Martian north. Actually, approximately north, because the Mars polar axis, like Earth’s own polar axis, processed around an axis normal to the plane of the ecliptic. Bey could not recall the current Martian pole star. Polaris would have to do.

If that was roughly north, then that must be east. Bey stared off to his right. He was hoping to catch the first glint of light signaling that dawn was on its way. He was disappointed. The eastern sky was dark; but in it, hovering close to the horizon like a hanging jewel, shone a bright point of blue-white light.

It was Earth, which with Venus formed twin Morning Stars of Mars. In an hour or so day would arrive and Bey could get to work. Meanwhile, he would take the opportunity to understand a little more about the world he was standing on. He might also find it worthwhile to ponder what that implied for the new Martian forms. What would it take to survive, naked on the surface of this planet?

First, the easy fixes. One obvious problem was the temperature. On a midsummer day, the Mars surface might occasionally warm up to within twenty degrees of the freezing point of water. Now, close to the end of the Martian night, the monitor in Beys suit showed an outside temperature of a hundred and twenty below. But cold was no big problem for living organisms. All it took to handle it was a good internal heat source—in the form of high calorie food—and adequate insulation. An elephant seal, with its thick layer of blubber, would bask on Earth’s polar ice when the temperature was thirty below. An Emperor penguin would stand for weeks in a raging Antarctic blizzard, stoically protecting the single egg balanced on its feet.

It was excessive heat that was the real killer. Hundreds of Earth organisms could thrive in surroundings far colder than the freezing point of water. Only a few, the specialized chemosynthetic bacteria living within Earth’s hydrothermal vents, could survive much above its boiling point. So far as temperature was concerned, form modification for survival on Mars was no big deal. Bey could think of a dozen ways to do it.

The real challenge was air. Vegetation could and did manage to survive in the ultra-thin atmosphere of Mars, but it did so with very slow growth rates. Humans could be slowed, too. The Timeset variation, developed by Robert Capman more than forty years ago, reduced human metabolic rates and perceived times by factors of more than a thousand. But that form was intended for long interstellar missions with micro-gravity fields. It was no use at all on Mars, where the surface gravity was a substantial fraction of Earth’s. A Timeset form would fall over before it was even aware that it was off-balance. In any case, the forms that Bey had seen on his last trip were too fast-moving to be the result of any metabolic slow- down.

Bey emerged from his pondering, lifted his head, and stared off to the east. He could catch a hint of false dawn there, a faint line of pink on the horizon. Daybreak was less than half an hour away. Wouldn’t it be easiest for the Mars forms to be active only during the day, and to retreat to warmer interior regions at night?

Maybe that was also the answer to the problem of air supply. There could be a steady absorption and accumulation of oxygen during a night period of dormancy, followed by expenditure during daytime activity. Could the surface forms be using some new method for body storage under pressure? They would in any case need high tolerance for carbon dioxide.

Bey thought of the great whales, back on Earth. They took in air on the surface and dived cheerfully to a depth of a mile or more. The pressure change on their bodies during that descent and ascent was hundreds of atmospheres. During their half hour in the depths, the oxygen/CO₂ ratio in their bodies steadily decreased. It did not trouble them. Bey could imagine ways that the modified alveolar patterns of whale lungs, together with their pressure change tolerance, might be achieved in humans. Embodying those ideas into a form-change program was tricky, but it did not sound impossible.

In fact, it was clearly not impossible. Someone had done it. All Bey had to do was find that someone, and ask how.

He roused himself and stared down at the ground. Its temperature was cold enough to burn bare flesh instantly, but the insulated boots of his suit protected him totally. There was no reason why a changed human form could not do just as well, making use of normal organic materials.

It was still too early to distinguish between the dusty reds and stark blacks of the Mars surface, but Bey could see well enough to pick his way across the broken ground. The hangar for the aircar was already visible as a darker hulk against a purple-black sky. He made his way to it, wondering if his surface quest was totally unrealistic.

How many surface forms were there? And what was the chance of encountering one or more of them today in an almost blind search, as Trudy Melford had done last time?

Bey’s natural skepticism kicked in. How much of a blind search had it been? Why should he believe that Trudy had done any such thing? Suppose the whole event had been a set-up, of BEC-funded forms planted at a particular place and time so that he could see them and be lured to work on Mars?

There was only one way to find out. Bey went across to the hangar and climbed into the car. He checked that it was fully powered, then gave the command to take off. There was the same gut-wrenching twenty seconds of rough motion across the torn surface. Finally they became airborne, with the car circling steadily and waiting for Bey’s next instruction.

He set the course that he remembered from the last time, cruising slowly north at low altitude. He would not dare to fly too far in that direction at this time of day. With dawn came the diurnal bombardment of comet material, the fragments hurtling in to strike at twenty degrees latitude and beyond. The first fireball had already streaked across the sky ahead of the car.

Would the surface forms remain hidden until the barrage was over? Or did the spectacle exercise for them, as it did for Bey, the awful fascination of world-building by planetary turmoil?

The sun was well above the horizon now. Its clean bright disk of early morning started to streak and blur with plumes of dust and steam rising from the shattered surface. Bey forced himself to ignore the rain of comets and focused his attention on the rock structures ahead of the floating car.

Even that proved disconcerting. Like most Earth-dwellers, Bey’s knowledge of Mars geography was rudimentary. He knew that the smaller size and mass of the planet must permit steeper rock structures. He also knew that the horizon was closer, and the atmosphere much thinner. What he had not expected was the way that those variables conspired, to produce the effect of a circle of crisp, jagged mountains that sharply vanished at a certain distance, as though the world came to an end there.

He tried to ignore that illusion of a circular cookie-cutter world with the car at its center, and concentrated only on what lay directly ahead. There was little to reward his attention. He was creeping along above a dry, rusty terrain populated with anonymous cliffs, shallow screes, and black boulders. After an hour’s flight he had had his fill of sand, rock, and green- black lichen, and had seen nothing that was significant. He became convinced that he had mistaken the direction of his earlier flight; and then, when he was on the point of giving the command to circle back, the unmistakable and contrasting shapes of the Chalice and the Sword popped suddenly into view over the forward horizon.

Bey instructed the car to set down between them. He could not tell if the terrain was rough or smooth, but there was little risk. If the ground was too broken for a safe landing the car’s sensors would determine that. It would balk at the command to descend.

Apparently the car had a high regard for its own durability. Even with a surface gravity less than two-fifths of Earth’s, the landing-touch-down was surely the wrong word-rattled Bey’s teeth. He held on tightly to the arm-rests until they at last shuddered to a halt “You have air and power sufficient for twenty-one hours of moderately strenuous activity,” said a warning female voice as Bey slid open the aircar door. “It is recommended that you return here for replenishment after no more than fifteen hours.”

“Sure. Fifteen hours.” It was stupid, offering conventional and polite responses to a machine; but everybody did it. Bey found himself standing on a surface rather more rocky and uneven than the one he had started from. There was another and more major difference. The dark-green lichens near the surface exit point from Melford Castle had been no more than a thin varnish, a painted coating on the grains of rock. Here the surface cover comprised recognizable plants, their hair-thin central stems reaching up a few centimeters to try to grab a few photons more than their neighbors.

He oriented himself using the Chalice and the Sword as reference points. The ledge of rock where he and Trudy had seen the surface forms lay about a kilometer to the north- west; the sunlight, striking in at a low angle, marked a faint track in that direction where vegetation did not grow. It could be a natural structure, a fault line in the underlying rock where plant nutrients were missing; or it just might be a trail, worn by the passage of many feet.

Bey turned slowly to his left. There was another marked path heading off to the west, and it was much better defined than the first one. It led to an overhanging scarp face about thirty meters high, maybe half a kilometer away. Later in the day the sun would move to illuminate the side of the rocky mass facing Bey, but at the moment it formed a dark impenetrable shadow.

Should he go to the place where he had seen them before, or pursue what seemed like the stronger trail? When you got right down to it, every important decision in life was made with inadequate information. The tough times were the ones when die decision was irrevocable. This one didn’t seem to be. Bey made the mental toss of the coin, and headed west.

The vegetation scrunched slightly under his boots. Looking behind him, he could see his progress marked by thin broken stems. It made him feel slightly guilty. He tried to walk where the path was already well-defined because plants were not growing as thickly. Vegetation on Mars had enough to cope with from natural conditions, without a blundering human adding to the hardships.

Soon he was at the edge of the shadowed rock. The track he was following went right up to the shadow and vanished into it. Bey could do the same, but he would have to use his suit light. Presumably the car had allowed for such a thing when it quoted him his power and air limits. He set the light to broad beam and turned it on. And froze. Right in front of him, standing no more than ten meters within the shadow, a white form was silently waiting.

“Hello.” Bey raised his suited arm in greeting. “Can you speak?” Even as he said the words they sounded inane.

“Of course I can speak,” The voice was faint and distorted, carrying to Bey partly through the thin Martian air and partly as ground vibration. It sounded impatient and irritated. Bey noticed that there was no cloud of frozen vapor emerging from the broad mouth to accompany the words. The form did not waste warmed air with valuable oxygen merely to produce speech. A smart design would pass it over the vocal chords and then return it to lung storage. And if this form had anything, it was a smart designer.

“My name is Behrooz Wolf. I am a visitor to Mars. I would like to speak with you. I mean, with the ones of your kind who are most appropriate.”

“Sure. Take me to your leader. Why don’t you just say it? I didn’t volunteer for this job anyway. Come on.” The form turned. “My name is Dmitri Seychel,” it said over its shoulder as it headed deeper into the shadow, “though I’m sure you don’t give a damn about that. What took you so long? I’ve been waiting for you ever since your car landed.”

Not it. He. Bey was sure he would have determined that for himself after a few more seconds. There were a hundred clues as to the innate sex of a form, and most of them had nothing to do with appearance or dress.

He studied Dmitri Seychel as he walked along behind him. His only previous opportunity to examine the surface forms had come from above and far away. Now he could confirm or deny those first impressions.

The body was a little taller than Earth-human average and far fatter. The bulky torso, arms, and upper legs were covered with a pouched suit of gleaming white. Bey suspected that, like the visible parts of the body itself, the suit changed color depending on its surroundings. It was white now, to minimize loss of heat, but it would change to black when exposed to sunlight. The fat body wobbled with each step that Seychel took. Almost certainly it bore an inches-thick layer of protective blubber as thermal insulation.

The extremities were less clearly human. The feet, encased in snug-fitting boots that came half-way up kangaroo-like legs, had thick well-separated toes. Bey noticed that Seychel had no trouble at all in strolling along in front of him like any other human. But those same limbs, from what Bey had seen on his last visit to Mars, permitted surface travel in great twenty-meter bounds. More evidence of clever form-change design.

The hands were either bare and lacking in nails, or covered in long gloves that followed every fold and wrinkle of the skin beneath. The fingers, like the toes, were thick and splayed.

All interesting enough, yet all offering no real surprises. The first evidence of those came in the head. Dmitri Seychel’s cranium was big and thickly-haired. Below it his face pushed far forward into a long broad muzzle. That, together with the brown, thick-lashed eyes, gave Dmitri’s head something of the look of an irritated Earth camel.

And still all those elements were trivial, the simple superficial changes to an Earth form that might be performed by any sophisticated cosmetic form-change program. The work that interested Bey lay deep within. There must be massive and complex reconstruction hidden inside the head and torso-functional reconstruction. Some body organ—a new one, or perhaps lungs with basic modifications—had to extract oxygen from the super-thin Mars air while the body lay dormant. It must somehow ignore the air’s carbon dioxide. And it must store the extracted oxygen for many hours, until needed during the active period.

The long muzzle had seen changes of just as fundamental a nature. A whole extra set of air passages must reside there. For one thing, speech had been separated from exhalation. Vocal chords could be exercised without the loss from the body of precious, warm, moisture- laden air. Bey had no proof of it, but he was also willing to bet that somewhere within that long, bulky nose sat an organ that absorbed every trace of water and oxygen from used air. What was finally released to the atmosphere of Mars would be almost pure, dry carbon dioxide.

If Trudy Melford had any notion of the sophistication of the Mars surface forms, there was no wonder she was excited. A genius of a designer had been at work here. Trudy liked to collect geniuses, and turn them to BEC’s exclusive service.

That last thought left Bey more than a little uneasy. He was supposedly independent, supposedly retired, and working if he worked at all only on his own projects—all at the moment sadly neglected. Yet here he was, lured somehow to Mars and doing exactly what Trudy wanted him to do. Had she deliberately made herself unavailable when he arrived at Melford Castle, knowing that he would then head at once for the surface, and fly here? The car had been all ready and waiting for him.

Well, duped or not, here he was. And oddly excited. The old curiosity for any strange new form-change development was strong within him. Maybe Trudy Melford knew Bey better than he knew himself.

They were winding their way now down a long ramp, with fixed red lights on the tunnel walls. It looked more and more like the inside of a building, except that there was no air but the ambient Mars atmosphere. Dmitri Seychel had not once looked back to see that Bey was following, or offered one more word of conversation. Bey felt like kicking him in that amply- padded blubber-laden behind. If that was typical, what the Martian form needed in addition to any physical modification was a booster shot of sweetness and light.

“Here you are.” Dmitri halted at a rectangular opening in the tunnel. “Home of the big cheese, Georgia Kruskal. Have fun.”

He went off along the tunnel without another word, leaving Bey hesitating at the entrance of the room.

“Come on in.” The thin voice was cheerful, as though visitors from Earth or Old Mars dropped in every day of the week.

Perhaps they did. Bey walked in, and found himself in a room that could easily have been an office back on Earth. There was a desk, a table and chairs, a data terminal, and even half a dozen potted plants. But the plants were all different, and all strange. Some were warty black cacti, others hugged the red soil or turned thin, sail-like leaves to face always to the light.

“Experiments, of course.” The being seated at the desk could at first glance have changed places with Dmitri Seychel, and Bey would not have known the difference. “Sit down and make yourself comfortable. I’m Georgia Kruskal, and I get the blame for this madhouse. Tell me who you are, and why you’re here instead of skulking in the Old Mars burrows.”

“I’m Behrooz Wolf. I’m not from Old Mars. I’m from Earth, formerly with the Office of Form Control.” Bey hesitated. Now for the tricky bit. Might as well lay it on the line. “I’d like to know more about the form you are using, because I think I might be able to help you to improve it.”

“Oh-ho.” The camel snout turned to face Bey more directly, and the liquid brown eyes stared at him. “It’s nice to run into someone with real gall. Improve us, eh? Fine. Quem dea vult perdere, prius dementat.”

“ ‘Whom God would destroy, she first makes mad.’ ” Bey did not even blink. He could play that particular game all day long.

Georgia Kruskal was nodding. “First points to you, hombre. Maybe you will improve us after all. Why don’t you tell me how?”

“I need to have some questions answered first.”

“I’ll bet you do. So do I.” Kruskal leaned back in her chair, which was contoured to fit her bulky body. “All right, your turn first. Fire away.”

“Thank you. First of all, are you pure human?”

“You better believe it. One hundred percent, no artificial additives. You and I could get together and start a bambino tonight, Behrooz Wolf.”

“Sorry. I’m spoken for.”

“I’m not sure I believe that.” Georgia studied him for a moment. She had the temporary advantage. She could see and understand his facial expressions, while he had not yet learned to read the body language of the new form. “Anyway,” she went on, “let’s stay with your question. Everything here is done with form-change programs and without inorganic components. Dmitri’s father is standard form and lives back in the Old Mars burrows. I’m Dmitri’s mother. You’ve met Dmitri, so you probably think I have a lot to answer for.”

“I did get the impression that I was more pleased to see him than he was to see me. How many of you are there?”

“Last time I bothered to check, about fourteen thousand. And the number is growing. Does it matter?”

“It might.” Bey thought of Rafael Fermiel, and the earnest faces of the Old Mars policy group. “A more important question: Are your forms stable?”

“Not as stable as I would like. We still need weekly sessions with the tanks. But the life- ratio is good, we should live as long as an unmodified form.”

Georgia Kruskal sounded pleased with herself; as indeed she should be. Most radically modified forms died in just a few years. So now Bey had to ask the trickiest questions—the non-technical ones. “Do you use BEC form-change equipment?”

“BEC hardware and basic routines. The more complex programs and interactions are our own.”

“Done with BEC’s permission?”

“Let’s not split hairs. Anyway, I’m sure you know the answer to that question.” It sounded like an answer, but it wasn’t one. The time had come to be more direct.

“Does Trudy Melford know about and fund your program?” There was a long pause. The eyes with their thick fringe of eyelashes closed. The thick lips pursed. Bey waited impatiently. A yes would tell him a great deal. A no might mean no more than that Georgia Kruskal was lying.

“You ask two questions in one,” Georgia said at last. “Does Trudy Melford know about this project? Yes, I feel sure that she does. Although she is a recent immigrant by Mars standards, her agents are sprinkled throughout Old Mars. We are known—and hated—there. As for your second question, whether Trudy Melford knows our efforts, I wish I could give you a good answer. On the face of it, she does not. Nor does anyone in BEC. But since her arrival on Mars we have consistently found it easier to obtain lines of credit for our work, and for no reason that I can explain.”

Bey found himself impressed again with Georgia Kruskal. Like him, she understood and applied the same basic principle: Follow the flow of money. The project to develop surface forms for Mars was no different from any other major project. It needed funds, and those funds had to come from somewhere.

“One more question, then it will be your turn. You say you are known and hated in Old Mars. Why?”

“You can answer that for yourself, Behrooz Wolf, if you think for a second.”

“I think I know, but I want to confirm it. Old Mars is afraid of you. They see you as interfering with their plans.”

“Interfering, and worse.” The broad mouth widened. It was a smile, toothless and tongueless. Bey guessed that both those features lay far back, out of sight within the long snout. “Isn’t it obvious that Old Mars sees us as a major enemy? The policy council is committed to terraforming Mars, making it into a world in Earth’s image. They take the Mars Declaration and they misunderstand it. The first colonists wanted Mars to be a world where humans can live. The policy council read that statement, and think terraform. But our existence proves that more change is unnecessary. If the comets ceased to arrive and Mars remained as it is today, humans can be quite at home on its surface. We prove that fact daily. Our version of the Mars Declaration would recognize a simple truth: It is easier to change a human than to change a planet.”

“If you know what you are doing, it is.” Bey had no doubt in his mind. She did know what she was doing. Why was it, just when you were convinced that you knew every major player in form-change through the whole solar system, another one would pop up from nowhere? “I could go on asking questions all day, but I promised you that would be the last one.”

“I’m not sure I believe that, either. But I’ll take my turn since it’s offered. First question. Do you work for Trudy Melford and BEC?”

“No. She thinks I do, but that’s not the same thing.”

“Not the same thing at all. Do you work for Old Mars?”

“No. They recently tried to recruit me, but that’s as far as it has gone.”

“I advise you to keep it that way. If you are bought by Old Mars you will work against form-change, not with it. So what are you doing here?”

“Damned good question. Curiosity. Terminal nosiness. Habit. Back on Earth, I was head of the Office of Form Control for a long time.”

“Your name and reputation are not unknown to me. Do you imagine that I would sit here and allow myself to be questioned by any casual visitor? Or give even the time of day to anyone with the arrogance to suggest that he might improve on my work, unless I had reason to believe that such a thing was possible? Remotely possible, I would add. You are not alone in your arrogance.” Again the smile appeared, the stretching of thick camel lips. “But I can tell you why you are here, Behrooz Wolf. You are here to learn. So let us begin.”

Georgia Kruskal tapped at the terminal in front of her with thick fingers, and a wall screen came alive with a brightly-colored form-change schematic. “First I talk, Behrooz Wolf. You look, listen and learn. Then—if you have anything to say—you talk. And then, who knows? Perhaps I learn, too.”