White Mars Part 10

The group connected hoses from the Zubrin to the ferry. The refuelling process began.

As the group of six men sheltered in the buggy, waiting for the tanks to fill, an argument broke out between the Feneloni brothers, in which the other men became involved. Each man had a pack of food with him. The plan was that when they reached the interplanetary vessel orbiting overhead, all except Abel would climb into cryogenic lockers and sleep out the journey home. Abel would fly the craft for a week, lock it into an elliptical course for Earth, allow the automatics to take over, and then go cryogenic himself. He would be the first to awaken when the craft was a week's flight away from Earth, and would take over from the guidance systems.

Abel had shown great confidence during the planning stage, carrying the others with him. Now his younger brother asked, hesitantly, if Abel had taken into account the fact that methane had a lower propellant force than conventional fuel.

'We'll compute that once we're aboard the fridge wagon,' Abel said. 'You're not getting chicken, are you?'

That's not an answer, Abel,' said one of the other men, d.i.c.k Harrison. 'You've set yourself up as the man with the answers regarding the flight home. So why not answer your brother straight?'

'Don't start b.i.t.c.hing, d.i.c.k. We've got to be up in that fridge wagon before they come and get us. The on-board computer will do the necessary calculations.' He drummed his fingers on the dash, sighing heavily.

They sat there, glaring at each other, in the faint shadow of the ferry.

'You're getting jumpy, not me,' said Jarvis.

'Shut your face, kid.'

'I'll ask you another elementary question,' said d.i.c.k. 'Are Mars and Earth at present in opposition or conjunction? Best time to do the trip is when they're in conjunction, isn't it?'

'Will you please shut the f.u.c.k up and prepare to board the ferry?'

'You mean you don't b.l.o.o.d.y know?' Jarvis said. 'You told us the timing had to be right, and you don't b.l.o.o.d.y know?'

A quarrel developed. Abel invited his brother to stay bottled up on Mars if he was so jittery. Jarvis said he would not trust his brother to navigate a fridge wagon if he could not answer a simple question.

'You're a t.i.tox - always were!' Abel roared. 'Always were! Get out and stay out! We don't need you.'

Without another word, Jarvis climbed from the buggy and stood there helplessly, breathing heavily in his atmosphere suit. After a minute, d.i.c.k Harrison climbed down and joined him.

'It's all going wrong,' was all he said. The two men stood there. They watched as Abel and the others left the buggy and went towards the now refuelled ferry. As the men climbed aboard, Jarvis ran over and thrust his food pack into his brother's hands.

'You'll need this, Abel. Good luck! My love to our family!'

His brother scowled. 'You rotten little t.i.tox,' was all *he said. He swung the pack on to his free shoulder and disappeared into the ferry. The hatch closed behind him.

Jarvis Feneloni and d.i.c.k Harrison climbed into the shelter of the buggy. They waited until the ferry lifted off into the drab skies before starting the engine and heading back to the domes. Neither of them said a word.

Abel Feneloni's exploit and the departure of the fridge wagon from its parking orbit caused a stir for a day or two. Jarvis put the best gloss he could on the escape, claiming that his brother would present their case to the UN, and rescue for all of them would soon be at hand.

Time went by. Nothing more was heard of the rocket. No one knew if it reached Earth. The matter was eventually forgotten. As patients in hospital become so involved in the activities of their ward that they wish to hear no news of the outside world, so the new Martians were preoccupied with their own affairs. If that's a fair parallel!

Lotteries for this and that took place all the time. I was fortunate enough to win a trip out to the science unit. Ten of us travelled out in a buggybus. The sun was comparatively bright, and the PIRs shone like a diamond necklace in the throat of the sky.

Talk died away as we headed northwards and the settlement of domes was lost below the near horizon. We drove along a dried gulch that served as a road. There was something about the unyielding rock, something about the absence of the most meagre sign of any living thing, that was awesome. Nothing stirred, except the dust we churned up as we pa.s.sed. It was slow to settle, as if it too was under a spell.

This broken place lay defenceless under its thin atmosphere. It was cold and fragile, open to bombardment by meteors and any other s.p.a.ce debris. All about us, fragments of primordial exploded stars lay strewn.

'Mars resembles a tomb, a museum,' said the woman I was travelling next to. 'With every day that pa.s.ses, I long to get back to Earth, don't you?'

'Perhaps.' I didn't want to disappoint her. But I realised I had almost forgotten what living on Earth was like. I did remember what a struggle it had been.

I thought again, as I looked out of my window, that even this progerial areoscape held - in Tom's startling phrase - that 'divine aspect of things' which was like a secret little melody, perhaps heard differently by everyone susceptible to it.

I managed to terrify myself by wondering what it would be like to be deaf to that little tune. How bearable would Mars be then?

I was grateful to him for naming, and so bringing to my conscious mind, that powerful mediator of all experience. All the same, I disliked the drab pink of the low-ceilinged sky.

The tall antennae and the high-perching solar panels of the Smudge laboratory and offices showed ahead. It was only a five-minute drive from Mars City (as we sometimes laughingly called our congregation of domes). We drew nearer. The people in the front seats of the bus started to point excitedly.

At first I thought paper had been strewn near the unit. It crossed my mind that these white tongues were plants - something perhaps like the first snowdrops of a new spring. Then I remembered that Tom and I had seen these inexplicable things on our visit to Dreiser Hawkwood. As we drew close to them they slicked out of sight and disappeared into the parched crusts of regolith.

'Life? It must be a form of life...' So the buzz went round.

A garage door opened in the side of the building. We drove in. The door closed and atmosphere hissed into the place. When a gong chimed, it was safe to leave the buggy. The air tasted chill and metallic.

We pa.s.sed into a small reception hall, where we were briefly greeted by Arnold Poulsen. As chief computer technician, Poulsen was an important man, answerable only to Hawkwood and seldom appearing in public. I studied him, since Tom had spoken highly of him. He stood before us in a wispy way, uttering conventional words of greeting, looking pleasant enough, but forgetting to smile. Then he disappeared with evident relief, his social moment finished.

We were served a coffdrink while one of the particle physicists, a Scandinavian called Jon Thorgeson, youthful but with a deeply lined face, spoke to us. He was more communicative than Poulsen, whom he vaguely resembled, being ectomorphic and seemingly of no particular age.

Did he recognise me from my previous visit? Certainly he came over and said h.e.l.lo to me in the friendliest way.

Thorgeson briefed us on what we were going to see. In fact, he admitted, we could see very little. The science inst.i.tution comprised two sorts of people. One was a somewhat monastic unit, where male and female scientists thought about what they were doing or what they might do, free from pressures to produce - in particular the pressure to produce 'Big Science'. The other unit comprised people actually doing the science. This latter unit was still adjusting the equipment that, it was hoped, might eventually detect Rosewall's postulated Omega Smudge.

As we were being shown around, Thorgeson explained that their researches were aimed at tackling the mystery of ma.s.s in the universe. Rosewall had made an impressive case for the existence of something called a HIGMO, a hidden-symmetry gravitational monopole. The team was running a pilot project at present, on a relatively small ring, since the density of HIGMOs in the universe remained as yet unknown. The ring lay at the rear of the science unit, under a protective shield, we were told.

One of the crowd asked the obvious question of why all this equipment and this team of scientists were shipped to Mars at such enormous expense.

Thorgeson looked offended. 'It was Rosewell's perception that you needed no expensive super-collider, just a large ring-shaped tube filled with appropriate superfluid. Whenever a HIGMO pa.s.ses through this ring, its pa.s.sage will be detected as a kind of glitch appearing in the superfluid. Any sort of violent activity outside the tube would ruin the experiment.'

I found myself asking how HIGMOs could manage to pa.s.s through the ring. He seemed to look hard at me before answering, so that I felt silly.

'Young lady, HIGMOs can pa.s.s clean through Mars without disturbing a thing, or anyone being any the worse for it.'

Someone else asked, 'Why not build this ring on the Moon?'

'The Moon - we're too late for that! Tourist activities, mining activity, the new transcore subway ... The whole satellite shakes like a vibrator in a wasps' nest.'

Turning his gaze on me, he asked, 'You understand this?'

I nodded. 'That's why you're out here. No wasps' nests.'

'Full marks.' He came and shook my hand, which made me very uncomfortable. 'That's why we're out here. It's fruitless to pursue the Smudge on Earth or on Luna. Far too much racket. The Omega Smudge is a shy beast.' He chuckled.

'And if you capture this Smudge, what then?' asked one of the group, Helen Panorios, the YEA woman with dyed purple hair and dark complexion.

'It holds the key to many things. In particular, it will tell us just how the microverse relates to the macroverse, giving us the precise parameters for the dividing line between the small-scale quantum world of atoms and fundamental particles, and the larger-scale cla.s.sical world of specks of dust upwards to galaxies and so on. I take the view of current 'hard science' that these parameters should also tell us how the exterior universe relates to human consciousness. The detailed properties of the universe seem to be deeply related to the very existence of conscious observers - observers maybe like humans, maybe a more effective species which will supersede us. If so, then consciousness is not accidental, but integral. At last we'll have a clear understanding of all existence.'

'So you hope,' ventured a sceptical voice.

'So we hope. When the ships come back and we can obtain more material, we expect to build a superfluid ring right around the planet. Then we'll see.'

'Now we see through a gla.s.s darkly...' said Helen, admiringly.

'We don't quote the Bible much here but, yes, more or less.'

A man who had already asked a question enquired rather sneeringly, 'What exactly is this key between the large and small you mention? Isn't human consciousness just a manifestation of the action of the quantputers in our heads?'

'That may well be true in principle, but we can't proceed without knowing some important physical parameters more exactly, most particularly what's labelled the HIGMO g-factor, whose value is completely unknown at present - let's call it "the missing-link of physics".'

'So what happens when you find it? Will the universe come to an end?'

Jon Thorgeson laughed to the extent of exciting the deep lines in his cheeks. He said that life for the majority of people might go on as usual. But even if the universe did end - well, he said, to make a wild guess, the probability was that there were plenty of other universes growing, as he put it, on the same stem. Mathematics indicated as much.

He came to a halt in the middle of a corridor, and our group halted with him and gathered round as he talked.

'As you know, stars keep going by exothermic fusion of hydrogen into helium-4. When the core hydrogen is almost used up, gravitational contraction starts. The consequent rise in temperature permits the burning of helium. In our universe, nucleosynthesis of all the heavier elements is achieved by this continued process of fuel exhaustion, leading to contraction, leading to higher central temperatures, leading to a new source of fuel for the sustaining nuclear energy.

'But in our universe there are what in lay terms we may call strange anomalies in this process. For instance, unless nucleosynthesis proceeded resonantly, the yield of carbon would be negligible. By a further anomaly, it happens that the carbon produced is not consumed in a further reaction. So we live in a universe with plentiful carbon and, as you know, carbon is a basic element for our kind of life.

'I wouldn't like my boss to hear me saying this, but -who knows? - in a neighbouring universe, these strange anomalies may not occur. It might be entirely life-free, without observers. Or maybe life takes another course and is, say, silicon-based. Such possibilities will become clearer if we can get the tabs on our Smudge.'

One of our group asked if it would be possible for us to enter another universe, or for something from another universe to enter ours.

The lines on Thorgeson's face deepened in amus.e.m.e.nt. 'There we venture into the realms of science fiction. I can't comment on that.'

At the end of our tour, I managed to speak to Thorgeson face to face. I told him that many of the people in the domes, particularly the YEAs, were interested in science but did not understand what the particle physicists were working at. Indeed, the scientific team were regarded as being rather secretive.

Lowering his voice, he said that there was dissension in the scientific ranks. The issues were complex. Many men and women on the team did not see the Omega Smudge as worth pursuing, and favoured more practical concerns, such as establishing a really efficient comet- and meteor-surveillance system. On the other hand... Here he paused.

When I prompted him to continue, he said that practical goals were for people without vision - clever people, but those without vision.

'Was Kepler being practical when, in the middle of a war, he sat down and computed the orbits of planets? Certainly not. Yet those planetary laws of his have eventually brought us here. That's pure science. The Smudge is pure science. I'm not very pure myself - said with a sly laughing glance at me - 'but I support pure science.'

Since I understood those sly glances, I asked him boldly if he would visit the domes and lecture us on the subject?

'Want to come and have a drink with me and talk it over?'

'I have to keep with my group. Sorry.'

Too bad. You're an attractive lady. Korean, are you? We're a bit short of adjuncts to living over here. Monastic is what we are.'

'Then leave your monastery and lecture us on particle physics.'

'You might find it rather dull,' he said. Then he smiled. 'It's a good idea. I'll see what I can do. I'll be in touch.'

At that stage, I did not realise how prophetic those words were.

We were waiting in the reception area for our buggybus to finish recharging. I started talking to the technician on duty, and asked her about the small white tongues we had seen outside the building.

'Oh, the Watchers? I can show you them on the monitors, if you like.'

I went behind her desk to take a look at the surveillance system. It clearly showed the white tongues, unmoving outside.

The technician flicked from screen to screen. The tongues surrounded the establishment. Behind them, Olympus Mons could be seen distantly, dominating its region.

'You get a clearer idea of them when I switch over to infrared,' said the technician, so doing.

I exclaimed in alarm. The tongues were no longer tongues. They reminded me, much more formidably, of gravestones I had seen in an old churchyard, tall and unmoving. They formed almost a solid wall about the establishment. It seemed they were covered in a kind of oily, scaly skin of a dull green colour. I asked if they were going to break in.

'They're quite harmless. They don't interfere. We think they're observing. They don't get in anyone's way.'

As we looked, a maintenance engineer came into view on the screens, suited up and shouldering welding equipment. As if to confirm the duty technician's words, the Watchers flicked back into the regolith and were gone, offering him no impediment. He moved out of view and the tongues at once returned.

I could not help feeling cold fear running through my body.

'So there is life on Mars,' I said.

'But not necessarily Martian life,' the technician said. 'Sit down for a minute, pet. You look terribly pale. I'm only joking. There's no life on Mars. We all know that.'

But jokes frequently hold bitter kernels of truth. Knowledge of the Watchers spread and caused alarm. But custom dulls the edge of many things. Whether alive or not, they made no hostile moves. We became used to their presence and finally ignored them.

After my return from Thorgeson and company, I told Kathi over the Ambient how impressed I was by Thorgeson's intellect. She asked what he had said.

I tried to explain that he had claimed the consciousness of humanity, or of a species that might supersede us, was - what had he said? - an integral function of the universe.

She laughed scornfully. 'Who do you think he got that idea from?' she asked.

After a silence, she said, 'If we cannot behave in a better and more Utopian way, then we deserve to be superseded, don't you think?'

I changed the subject and spoke about the tongues surrounding the science unit.

'Don't worry,' she said lightly. 'We shall find out their function in good time. Do you know about quantum state-reduction? No? I'm reading up about it now. It's the collapse of the wave function, such as Schrodinger's cat - you know all about Schrodinger's cat, Cang Hai?'

'Of course I've heard of it.'

'Well then, the collapse of the wave function resolves the problem of that poor hypothetical quantum-superposed moggie. It becomes either a dead cat or a live cat, instead of being in a quantum superposition of both a dead and an alive cat.'

'I see ... Is that better or worse for the cat?'

She scowled at me. 'Don't try to be funny, dear. Such quantum superpositions occur in the electron displacements in a quantcomp. The definitive experiments conducted by Heitelman early this century made it clear that state-reduction actually takes place when it is the internal gravitational influences that become significant. You see where this leads us?'

I shook my head. 'I'm afraid I don't, Kathi.'

'I'm working on it, babe!' With a cheery wave of its hand her image faded from view.

Sitting there vexed, I tried to understand what she was saying. The gravitational link puzzled me. On inspiration, I decided to Ambient Jon Thorgeson in the science unit.

An unfamiliar face came up in the globe. 'Hi! I'm Jimmy Gonzales Dust, Jon's buddy. We're training for the marathon and he's busy on the running machine. Can I help? He's spoken to me about you. He thinks you're cute.'