“I understand your dilemma,” Simon Kunz said. “Though I come at it from a different angle. I’m into the exploration of planets. Think of that, Bob. Think of an entire planet. From our point of view, it’s pristine. Pristine, that is, until we land a craft there, bum it with rocket flames on descent, walk all over it, and presumably leave monitoring machines behind us and some trash, too. We expel gas, we lose water vapor. Inevitably we leave bacteria. Think about that planet Mars. How do we go about its exploration when we know that the very act of exploration will irrevocably change the planet we re exploring? It’s a toss-up, is what it is. We have to decide one way or the other. Either we commit ourselves to going no nearer the planet than orbit, or else we commit ourselves to change, and accept the fact we’re never going to have a pristine planet again. And if we take that step, who’s to say when we stop? What’s going to keep us from going all the way? What’s going to stop us from changing the atmosphere, the landforms, the chemistry—in short, altering, or else creating, a whole planetary ecosystem?”
“Which way do you lean?”
“Frankly, I’m an all-the-way kind of guy. I wouldn’t be where I am—well, that’s not saying much, but I wouldn’t have gotten where I did in the space programs of three countries on two continents if I wasn’t into messing with the Universe. I figure we’ll go to Mars and change it radically. We re going to make it a human habitat if it isn’t a habitat for something else already. We re going to make it a place to live.”
I would have cause to remember those words.
Across the newsholo’s front page, full-screen, some ten or so days later: GREEN “SPOT” GROWS, MAKES RING AROUND POLE: MARS ALIVE? “The ring has blobs and other features, new photos reveal. See details Page 3 Down.”
A blurry holo next to the headline showed, indeed, blobs and other features.
I remembered the headline from a tabloid only the day before: “Martian Canals Will Reappear This Month, Scientists Say.” I nearly bought it.
Less happy news arrived on the Newsprint Local, with an obituary of O. Howard Luntes, industrialist, benefactor of the Great Lakes Area Freshwater Task Force, and past trustee of Nettleridge Community College. I could count on no more assistance from that quarter, presumably. The Dean mailed me a note about one of my classes, moreover. A cancellation. “Enough students signed up,” she said, “but we had to cut somewhere and the axe is coming down in the part-time staff. That’s been an unprofitable part of our operation this last quarter. Sorry, Bob, I tried to save this one.” Thank you, Jean. Better news from Sandy, who was off visiting home: “Mom’s better,” she said, “and I bought her a new dress. One for me, too. Love and kisses, and a bill, enclosed.”
The same day, mid-afternoon, an ambiguous express package apparently arrived at my office at the college. I say apparently because I was at home that evening when the phone call telling me about it came via secure line.
“Hello, Bob?” he said. Even without the vidline activated—part of the security process, I supposed—I knew his voice.
“Didn’t expect to be hearing from you,” I said. I only spoke the truth. I figured to run into Simon Kunz in another decade, after he spent his way through another fortune on space and I had fruitlessly hit up another zillion blank-faced benefactors for funding frog skin research.
“Did you get the stuff?” he said.
“What stuff?”
“I didn’t have your home address. Or someone didn’t. I don’t know. I’m just in charge of this place. They must have sent it to the college. You’re still at Nettleridge, right?”
I thought of the canceled classes: two last year, one so far this year. “Sure.”
“I sent a plane ticket there. It must be at your office. I want to talk to you. Can you catch the flight? It’s going out tonight.”
“Tonight? My god, Simon, what are you talking about? It’s after six!”
“You’re doing fine,” Simon said. “Plane’s not till nine. Go pick up the ticket and I’ll meet you at the airport at midnight.”
“You’re crazy!”
“Sure I am. See you later!”
“Wait, wait—why not just talk to me on the phone. I mean, I’m here, and you’ve got me. Talk. Tell me what’s going on.”
His silence told me he wouldn’t before his voice did. “Bob, listen. No one listens to Nettleridge College phone lines, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I’m not Nettleridge.”
He hung up.
Three hours later I sat in a plane headed for a layover in Cleveland and a connection with a flight to Sarasota. There, in the air, I remembered I had been thinking of taking the train to Iowa the next day. Iowa. Home of a rara avis—a rara rana would be closer to the truth, and rara acris would be closest of all—Blanchard’s cricket frog, extinct or nearly so now over most of its range and still common in only a few areas of Iowa-Nebraska. I had made some calls to a herpetological friend in Cedar Rapids, a member of my amphibian-watchdog team. I’d even suggested a time and a meeting place. And had forgotten to cancel plans after Simon Kunz called. It would have sounded strange, I know: “Listen, Ed, one of the leading aerospace industrialists just called and I can’t go on the frogging trip.”
A businessman sat beside me on the flight. At the moment he stared at his lap, at his cellular.
“Flight attendants won’t let me use it,” he said, noticing my gaze. He had porcine cheeks despite a relatively slim build, and large eyes that looked both apologetic and spoiled. “But it’s damn pretty, isn’t it?”
The phone sat on with its back-side up, a trio of miniature screens there showing what I presumed to be videos. One screen showed what looked to be movie material. The other two spoke to me more loudly of the businessman’s state of mind: a Saturday morning cartoon, and a pornflick with writhing, sweat-slicked bodies. A human nature show, I supposed.
I nodded. “Real pretty.”
“Too bad we re bom with only two eyes, eh?” He bulged his at me.
“Scientists are working on it,” I said, wondering if they were.
“I owe you a beer,” Simon Kunz said.
“Christ, you bring me here in the middle of the night to buy me a beer?”
He laughed.
An attractive, matronly woman had run me from the airport to the Kunz complex, and led the way to the office of the man himself. She looked like an older version of that resident assistant of ours back in that Beloit dorm.
Kunz looked pretty much like Kunz did the last time I saw him, down to the faint lines of worry. I had heard about his abrupt upturn of fortune when the States and the new provisional Moon governing body had announced the revival of Mars expeditions junked nearly a decade before. Global Spacenet followed suit days later.
So I noticed and wondered at those lines of worry.
The office looked far more spare than 1 had expected. Even the window took in a relatively modest view of a courtyard and garden of mildly exotic plants. The furnishings had a lived-in feel. I suspected they had seen these four walls for all of the past ten years, a tight-belted time for the world that revolved around Simon Kunz.
He pulled a pair of English ales from a cooler with labels I had never seen before. I wondered that he had found time for pub-crawls in his down-and-out phase.
“Actually, you’ll probably think it’s an awfully small thing, what I bring you here for,” he said.