Proteus in the Underworld p-4 Read online

  A second fireball ripped the northern sky, again traveling from west to east. Before it could pass out of sight the shock of an earlier impact was arriving. A surface wave came rippling in from the south and shifted the ground beneath Bey’s feet in a double up-and- down that had him swaying and sent die rubble-strewn desert into new patterns of cracks and small fissures.

  Bey hardly followed the trajectory of the second object. The ground beneath your feet was not supposed to move like that. He felt much less safe.

  “That was a big one.” Trudy still had her hand on his arm, steadying him. “Close to maximum size, at a guess.”

  Which meant it was about a hundred meters in diameter; a rough-edged chunk of water ice, dirtied throughout with smears of ammonia ice, silicate rock and metallic ore, had smashed into the surface and vaporized on impact.

  “What’s the energy release?” Bey felt a second, smaller ripple of movement.

  “About a thousand megatons, for one that size.”

  Like a really big volcanic explosion back on Earth. Bey was watching events that were equal in energy to several Krakatoa eruptions—except that these were happening every few minutes rather than every few decades. It was the hail-storm of the Gods, with hailstones the size of Melford Castle hitting the ground at forty kilometers a second; and mortal humans, not gods, were responsible for it.

  The chunks of ice had been on their way for a long time. Even with a strong initial boost the journey in from the middle of the Oort Cloud, a quarter of a light-year out, took a comet fragment at least thirty years. And even with the most precise direction by the Cloudlanders during the first phase of the trajectory, a fragment’s fusion motor usually needed a small corrective burn as it came closer to Mars. The specification was a tight one: tangential impact along a due west-to-east line of travel, striking between latitudes twenty and twenty- five degrees north or south of the equator. The thin atmosphere of Mars ablated a little from the bolide, but most of it would make it all the way to the surface and strike at over forty kilometers a second.

  Space-based lasers in orbit high above Mars watched for correction rocket malfunction. At the first sign of a guidance problem the fragment would be disintegrated in space, long before it could become a danger to dwellers on the planet.

  The rain of comets had begun a century ago and continued ever since. It was slow work. Even with a hundred years of added volatiles from orbit and the help of bespoke ground- based organisms to split oxygen from iron oxide, it took a Martian eye to see much difference in the planet’s atmosphere. The water vapor was up to only a thirtieth that of Earth, the oxygen content one fortieth.

  The contribution of the comet fragments to changing the Martian day was even harder to appreciate. Arriving tangentially at forty-two kilometers a second, every one made an addition to the planets angular momentum. Mars was gradually being spun up like a gigantic top, whipped by in falling chunks of frozen volatiles; but a century of impacts had shortened the period by less than a second. If anyone hoped to see a time when the Mars day of twenty-four hours and thirty-nine minutes was reduced to exactly equal that of Earth, they would have to be prepared to live a long, long time.

  Bey scanned the horizon. The sky to both north and south was streaked and filmed with white haze. Most of the added dust and water vapor in the air came not from the comet fragments themselves, but from surface ejecta, vaporized rocks and permafrost of the upper few hundred meters blown high into the stratosphere.

  As a spectacle it was astonishing, just as Trudy had promised. But since Bey was strictly an amateur in all science except his own form-change specialty, it was clearly not the reason for the trip to the surface. He was not surprised when she nodded to him and started to walk across the powdered and rubble-strewn surface. As he caught up with her he noticed that the ground was not quite as desolate as it seemed. The grains of rock were coated with a varnish of dark green. More bespoke organisms, hardened against solar ultraviolet, eking out an existence using dissolved minerals and captured water vapor; their photosynthesis was making its own contribution to the oxygen in the Mars atmosphere.

  A surface structure—the first that Bey had seen—lay a hundred meters to the north. An air car was waiting inside.

  “Put up with the bumpiness for twenty seconds.” Trudy motioned Bey inside. “After that it will be all right.” Even with outsized tires the run to takeoff was rough.

  The landing strip had presumably once been smooth and flat, but continuous ground movement had created pits and potholes ranging in size from fist-sized to big enough to swallow a house. The pressurized car was more than smart enough to note the obstacles and choose a safe course to reach flight speed, but it had less objection than its passengers to sudden swoops and swerves and changes of direction. The promised twenty seconds seemed much longer to Bey before they were at last safely aloft.

  Melford Castle had been placed in a location at the extreme northern edge of Martian development. To Bey’s surprise they now set a course that took them farther north, due north, toward the danger zone of comet impact. He was paranoid enough to reflect that if he were to vanish somewhere in the broken wilderness below it would be a long time before anyone found him.

  Then his sense of humor returned. He was no great prize. It would probably be days before anyone bothered to look for him. But they would certainly search for Trudy Melford. Bey had noted Jarvis Dommer’s discomfort when Trudy headed for the surface. Dommer was a company man (Bey knew no worse insult) and the Empress of BEC was his guaranteed lifetime meal ticket. If Dommer had his way he would keep her in a maximum safety environment and coddle her all the time. It must be hell for him, working for someone as independent and impulsive as Trudy.

  Bey, on the other hand, approved of her more and more. They had exchanged only a handful of remarks and questions since arriving at the surface, but that was good. He liked people who did not feel a need to talk.

  He worried a little about that, too. Start to like a woman, and you became vulnerable to other forces. It had happened to Bey too often in his life for him to pretend that he was immune to manipulation.

  Another flash of fire appeared in the sky to their left. This one struck close to the western horizon. Bey realized that if an arriving object was to strike Mars at a west-to-east tangent, it had to arrive close to local sunrise. As the day wore on the turning planet would take them clear of the impact zone until the dawn of the following day. The firework display at this longitude was ending.

  He turned to Trudy. “How far north are we going?”

  She had been sitting companionably at his side, watching the ground glide past beneath them. She had lifted the faceplate of her suit right after takeoff and motioned Bey to do the same. They were flying low, at no more than three hundred meters.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Sometimes very close to here, sometimes almost all the way to the impact zone. Dawn is the best time.”

  She did not volunteer any more information on what they were looking for. Bey did not need it. He had guessed. But he was certainly curious to see for himself.

  It took another few minutes. Then as they were flying over a broken terrain of rock spires and deep crevasses, Trudy suddenly pointed east. “The Chalice and the Sword. We’re in luck. See them?”

  Bey stared into the sun. He saw a narrow spire of rock, jutting straight up, and next to it a curious shallow basin forming the top of another rock tower.

  “This is one of the best places,” Trudy continued. “See? There.”

  Bey saw nothing. He squinted harder into the rising sun. The ground shadows were long, dark, and confusing, and he needed a few seconds to make out movement next to them.

  “Can we land?”

  “No. Too rough.”

  “Can we get closer?”

  “Doing it now.”

  Trudy had taken over manual control. The car banked to the right and descended. Bey leaned forward as they swooped in low, wishing that he had some kind of t
elescope.

  There were five of them. Large-headed, fat-bodied, thick-legged, and bipedal, they bounced across the ground with the long, springing leaps of kangaroos, covering fifteen meters and more at each bound. Chameleon-like, their skins were black on the side that faced the sun, white everywhere else. Good strategy for heat absorption and conservation. Their feet seemed to be both hoofed and clawed, for insulation from the frozen ground and purchase on slippery thawed rock.

  They showed no sign of alarm. As the car passed right overhead two of them stopped and stared upward. Bey saw big deep-sunk eyes fringed with thick lashes, bulging noses, and ear cavities with padded flaps that could move to cover them.

  Trudy was turning the car to make a second run. But she was going to be too late. Bey saw the five creatures take a last look in their direction, then move toward the shadow of a ledge of rock. One of them gave a little wave as they disappeared from view. The thin Mars atmosphere scattered very little light. Even flying directly above the rock shadow, all that Bey could see below was blackness.

  “Is it worth sticking around?” He was hungry for more.

  “Not today. When they head out of sight like that it means they don’t want visitors.”

  “How about on foot?”

  “That’s possible. But not if you stay on Mars for only one day.”

  Bey shook his head. Trudy had set the bait. Now she wanted to see how firmly he was on the hook. “I have to get back to Earth.”

  “Do you realize what you were seeing?”

  “Sure. I won’t pretend I’m not fascinated. It’s a form-change job, no doubt about it—you’ll notice that there were no signs of air-tanks, and there’s no way that an animal form could adapt so fast to such extreme conditions. Those are humans down there.”

  “BEC had nothing to do with this.”

  “I guessed as much.”

  “But we might like to.”

  “I guessed that, too. I thought before I came that it would be new forms down in the Underworld, but this is much more intriguing.”

  “And potentially valuable.” Trudy had returned control to the car, which was arrowing back to the south ten times as fast as it had headed out. The ground was a blur beneath them. “Illegal, do you think?”

  “Sure.”

  Bey did not bother to offer his personal philosophy; illegal forms were always the most interesting; and legality was often no more than a matter of being willing to plow through the right application process. “The big question is the form-change tanks. Where are they? Where did they get them?”

  “I’m more interested in the second question. Either they were stolen from BEC, or they infringe on our patents.” The car was already descending for a landing. Trudy reached up to drop her faceplate back into position, but before she closed it she turned to Bey. “I might be willing to reach an accommodation on the question of theft.”

  She said nothing more. She did not need to. It was a standard BEC strategy. The question of theft would never be pursued-provided that BEC could make the right deal with the developers of the new form. Bey followed her out of the car onto the raw Mars surface. He peered around him with a new eye. The place when he first saw it had seemed wild, harsh, frigid, and inhospitable. It was still all of those, but now he knew that it was far more. It was habitable. Something could live here, something far more interesting than the veneer of tailor-made photosynthetic algae or oxide-breaking microorganisms that clung to the naked rock. He wanted to know a lot more about the Mars surface forms.

  Bey had swallowed the bait, all the way down. But he was not about to admit that to Trudy Melford. “Very interesting. Now I have to head back to Earth.”

  And if she was disappointed at his response, she was not about to show it to him, either. “Of course. But won’t you at least stay at the castle long enough to have a meal with me?” She sensed his question before he had time to voice it. “Alone with me. I value the services and loyalty of Jarvis Dommer, but not his company.”

  “That sounds fine.”

  Bey had traveled a hundred and twenty million kilometers since breakfast, give or take the odd few hundred thousand, using everything from his own legs to the Mattin Link.

  He had earned an hour or two off.

  Back at the castle Bey realized that Trudy had certainly not given up trying. She dropped him off at a suite on the twelfth floor, suggesting that he relax for half an hour while she changed and gave final instructions for their lunch.

  It took him only a couple of minutes to realize that the whole suite he was in had been designed and equipped for Bey’s particular taste and convenience. Trudy had not only visited Bey’s house on Wolf Island—she had taken careful notes there. Everything from bathroom fixtures to wall decorations had been modeled on what she had seen, presumably with the idea of matching his personal tastes. Trudy didn’t want to give him any reason to refuse to stay.

  Bey was smiling to himself by the time he had been through every room of the suite. What Trudy did not and could not know was that Bey didn’t care what his surroundings were like. He didn’t inhabit a material world. The decoration and arrangements of the house on Wolf Island owed more to prior occupants and gifts from friends than they did to Bey’s own tastes. The thing that he liked best about this castle suite was the view from his windows, of strange illuminated rock spires and spears that jutted up and down from the grotto floor and roof. And he liked that because it was so totally different from Wolf Island. Well, it was only money, and Trudy surely had oodles of that. She could afford to decorate a new suite or a new house for a visitor every day of her life and never notice the expense. But what were her own tastes? He would never deduce it from his immediate surroundings.

  Bey decided that he had the time and inclination to see the rest of Melford Castle. Particularly, if he could locate them, Trudy Melford’s personal quarters.

  He left his suite and headed for the nearest elevator. Up, or down? Would Trudy choose to be high up on the fourteenth floor among the glittering spires, like a princess in a fairy- tale, or would she prefer the greater convenience of the lower floors?

  The second, if Bey was any judge. She might be the Empress, but she was a highly practical one. Wasted time was no more to her taste than wasted words; which again raised the question as to why she was willing to devote so much of the former to him.

  He was no nearer to answering that than he had been before their first meeting on Wolf Island. The Martian surface forms were fascinating, but Trudy Melford had many others working for her who would jump at the chance to come to Mars and investigate them.

  Bey arrived at the elevators, changed his mind, and headed for the stairs. He would still go down, but he wanted to see every floor.

  It was impossible to do a thorough job in half an hour, or even half a day. Melford Castle was reputed to have a hundred and fifty rooms. Bey soon learned that this number did not include ante-chambers and bathrooms and interconnecting corridors. There seemed to be subsidiary staircases on every floor, walk-in closets the size of Bey’s Wolf Island study in every bedroom, little nooks and crannies everywhere that housed treasure troves of priceless curios of old Earth.

  After the first few minutes he gave up the idea of a systematic tour and headed down from floor to floor by the most convenient staircases. By the time he reached the fifth story he had decided that the big surprise about Melford Castle was not its size, or its opulence, or even its odd setting in a Martian grotto. Its principal oddity was its emptiness. He had encountered plenty of cleaners and polishers, smart enough to roll out of his way and delicate enough to handle fine silver and eggshell porcelain. But he had met not a single human being, in eight floors of random wandering.

  Just who lived here? Not Jarvis Dommer, who spent most of his time back on Earth. Not the EEC research staff, who remained in their superbly-equipped labs.

  Bey was beginning to suspect the answer, and to add it to his growing list of mental queries, when he descended a little
crooked staircase carpeted with a thick-piled green rug and found himself where he was not supposed to be.

  The stairs were not intended for general use. They brought Bey down right into a little changing-room that formed part of Trudy Melford’s private wing. He saw the dress that she had been wearing when she met him at the link terminal, dumped unceremoniously on the floor together with underwear and shoes. The launderers would take care of those—they had stood waiting for Bey’s clothes until he shooed them away—but logic said that Trudy must be here, probably beyond the inner door of white enamel.

  Bey was clearly in private territory. He should go no farther. He peered at the panties, which he was delighted to see bore a repeating printed pattern Empress of EEC. Trudy had a sense of humor. How many people got to appreciate this particular demonstration of it? He went to the white door.

  It was still another ante-chamber, or maybe a study. A great wooden desk stood in one corner and the walls were lined with old paper books. Bey started for them—books were one of his own addictions—but he paused halfway. On the wall by the desk hung a series of framed pictures. One showed a baby, fat-faced and frowning at the camera. The next was the same child with a little more dark hair. This time it was smiling. In the final image it was clear from the clothing that the baby was a boy-child. But the same picture was black- edged, and bore along its lower boundary the grim legend: Errol Ergon Melford. In Memoriam, sweet baby. Sleep in peace.

  Bey knew that he had intruded on a very private place. It was almost a relief when the inner door opened and Trudy Melford emerged. She saw Bey, gasped, shivered, and looked around her before she spoke.

  “My God, you startled me. Where did you spring from?”

  “I didn’t feel tired. I thought I’d look round the castle.”

  “But this is my private suite. I mean, I had no idea you were even on this floor. This is my dressing-room. I might have wandered out here stark naked. That’s why I was so shocked.”

  Nice try; but not persuasive. “I’m sorry.”