Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“I can scratch your face for you if—”

“I’ll let you know, Suit Five.” She looked around. The ground was flat and white, the sky a smoggy dark. The station modules were somber masses looming over her, with equipment and stores heaped up against their stilts, and vehicles parked up: those two rovers with snowplow blades, even what looked like snowmobiles.

Discovery was long gone, driving itself back to Lowell.

Alexei, Myra, the whole station crew, everybody at Wells but Paula was here, in their green spacesuits and with illuminated faces, all looking at her. The snow kept falling, big fat flakes, from a lid of gray cloud. “I’m at the pole of Mars. Good God.” She raised her hand and flexed her gloved fingers.

Yuri approached Bisesa. “We have a short walk to make. Just a few hundred meters. The drilling rig is positioned away from the habs for safety, and for planetary protection. Just walk normally, and you’ll be fine. Please. Walk with me. Myra, you too.”

Bisesa tried it. One step after another, she walked as easily as she had since she was three years old. The suit was obviously help-ing her. Yuri walked between Myra and Bisesa. The others went ahead. Drilling engineer Hanse Critchfield had ROUGHNECK

printed on the back of his life support pack, with a cartoon of a gushing oil well. His suit looked heftier than the others. Perhaps it was a super-powered version, designed for the heavy work of the drilling rig.

The Martian snowflakes pattered against Bisesa’s visor, but sublimated immediately, leaving the faintest of stains.

“I can assist you any way you require, by the way,” said Suit Five.

“I’m sure you can.”

“I am managing your data transfer and your consumables. Also I have sophisticated processing functions. For instance if you are interested in the geology I can process your field of view and highlight exceptions of interest: unusual rock or ice types, unconformities.”

“I don’t think that will be necessary today.”

“I wish you would explore my physical functions. You may know that under Martian gravity walking is actually more energy-efficient than running. If you like I can stress selected muscle groups as you walk, thus providing an overall workout—”

“Oh, shut up, Suit Five, you bore,” Yuri snapped. “Bisesa, I apologize. Our electronic companions are marvels. But they can get in the way, can’t they? Especially when one is surrounded by such wonder.”

Myra looked around at the dismal plain of rock-hard ice, the scattered snowflakes falling through the beams of her helmet lights.

She said skeptically, “Wonder?”

“Yes, wonder — for a glaciologist anyhow. I just wish I lived in a universe peaceful enough to indulge my passion without distraction.”

They approached the largest structure on the ice. It was a hemi-spherical dome more than twenty meters tall, Bisesa guessed. She could see a ribbed structure under flaccid panels; it was a tent, supported by the ribs, not inflated. Yet it had airlocks of fabric, through which they had to pass in turn.

This was the drilling rig, Hanse Critchfield’s baby, and he helped Bisesa bend to get through the lock. “These are PPP barriers, not really airlocks. In fact we keep a slight negative pressure in here; if we get a leak the air is sucked in, not blown out. We have to protect any deep life we dig out of our boreholes — even from other sorts of life we might find at other layers. And we have to protect it from us, and vice versa.” He spoke with a comical mix of what sounded like a Dutch accent with southern United States, maybe Texan. Maybe he had been watching too many old movies.

Inside the dome, the seven of them stood in bright fluorescent light under sagging fabric walls. The derrick, even inert, was an impressive piece of gear, a scaffolding tower set on a massive base of Mars glass. Hanse ran through the mass and power: thirty tonnes, five hundred kilowatts. The coiled drill string was four kilometers long, more than enough to reach the base of the ice cap. A grimy plant stood by to pump a fluid into the borehole, to keep it from collapsing as the ice flowed under its own sheer weight: the drilling teams used liquid carbon dioxide, condensed by this plant from the Martian air.

Hanse began to boast about the technical challenges the drillers had faced: the need for new lubricants, the way moving mechanical parts tended to stick together in the low pressure. “Thermal control is the key. We have to take it slow; you don’t want too much heat building up down there. For one thing, if the water ice melts, you get water mixing with liquid carbon dioxide — pow, the product is carbonic acid, and then you are in trouble. The Aurora crew brought along a toy rig you could load on a trailer, that could only dig down maybe a hundred meters. This baby is the first authentic drilling rig on Mars—”

Yuri cut him off. “Enough of the guided tour.”

Myra walked to the drill platform. “This borehole has no fluid in it. In fact you’ve sleeved it.”

Yuri nodded. “This was the first hole we dug, down to it. We knew there was something down there, actually, under the ice, from radar studies. When we reached it we came back out, and put in a request to Lowell for a mass budget to provide us with a sleeve sufficient to keep the borehole open permanently. Then we pumped out the drill fluid—”

Hanse said, “And we sent down another bore in parallel. At first we dropped down cameras and other sensors. But then—” He bent and lifted a hatch. It exposed a hole in the ground maybe two meters across; a platform rested just below its lip, with a small control handle mounted on a stand.

It was obvious what this was. “An elevator,” Bisesa breathed.

Yuri nodded. “Okay. Moment of truth. You and me, Bisesa.

Alexei. Ellie. Myra. Hanse, you stand by up here. And you, Grendel.” Yuri went and stood on the platform, and looked back, waiting. “Bisesa, is that acceptable? I guess this is your show now.”

Her breath caught. “You want me to ride that thing? Two kilometers down into the ice to this Pit of yours?”

Myra held her hand; despite the servos she could barely feel her daughter’s grasp. “You don’t have to do this, Mum. They haven’t even told you what they’ve found down there.”

“Believe me,” Alexei said fervently. “It’s best you see for yourself.”

“Let’s get it done,” Bisesa said. She strode forward, trying not to betray her fear.

They stood together, facing inward. The round metal platform felt crowded with the five of them aboard, in their spacesuits.

The disk jolted into motion, whirring downward into the ice tunnel, supported by tracks embedded in the walls. Bisesa looked up. It was if she was descending into a deep, brightly lit well. She felt a profound dread of falling, of being trapped.

The suit murmured, “I can detect rapid breathing, an elevated pulse. I can compensate for any increase in atmospheric pressure—”

“Hush,” she whispered.

The descent was mercifully short.

Yuri said, “Brace now—”

The elevator platform jolted to a halt.

There was a metal door, a hatch set in the ice behind Yuri. He turned and hauled it open. It led to a short tunnel, lit brightly by fluorescent tubes. Bisesa glimpsed a flash of silver at the end of the passage.

Yuri stood back. “I think you should go first, Bisesa.”

She felt her heart thump.

She took a breath and stepped forward. The tunnel floor was rough-cut, not flat, treacherous. She concentrated on walking, not looking ahead, ignoring the silvery glints in the corner of her vision.

She stepped out of the tunnel into a broader chamber, cut crudely into the ice. A quick glance up showed the narrow borehole that had been drilled to get to this point. Then she looked straight ahead, to see what the Spacers had found here, buried under the ice of the Martian north pole.