“ Despite the dreams of the past, there is no life on Mars. But there will be Martians.”
The carts rolled across the surface of Mars. The landscape stretched to a razor-sharp horizon, too close, an endless plain of gray-red rocks and sand broken here and there by the rise of a weary-looking mountain.
A thin, lifeless wind whispered about them. Even with Marty seated next to him, Alex felt so unimaginably lonely that it shocked him. What was it? Subsonics? Subliminals in the light patterns? Whatever it was, it was eerily effective.
Mars seemed then a spinster sister awaiting the kiss of life, a bridesmaid to vibrant Earth, looking longingly across a two-hundred-million-mile gap, waiting, waiting…
Ever a bridesmaid, never a bride.
A light appeared in the sky, a moving, twinkling star crossing from east to west. It loomed larger and brighter, like some huge diamond, and suddenly it blazed. It was like a nearby sun when it touched the western horizon.
The ground shuddered. The sky shivered with the flash. It was as if an H-bomb had detonated. What stood above the horizon was not a mushroom (Mars’s atmosphere wasn’t that thick) but a rapidly expanding dome of flame. The dome’s rim rushed at them, rolled over them with a roar. It passed, leaving them unharmed. Orange magma flowed forth where the intruder had struck.
“- life can come to this barren world, life in a flash of fire-”
A second comet streaked across the sky, and this one seemed to come straight at them, filling the sky, filling Alex’s vision. Alex screamed with delighted terror as the world exploded. Suddenly the sky was pouring with sleet and rain. A billion tons of ice had vaporized-a thousand times the size of the comet fragment that exploded over central Siberia on June 30, 1908.
“- we can bring air and water to Mars-”
No poet had ever pictured Mars as female and Earth as male. Too bad, Alex thought. The Barsoom Project would get Mars with child.
As if by the power of time-lapse photography, the rain fell all around them now, utterly convincing. If Alex reached a hand into that, would it get wet? He did it. His hand remained dry in the midst of a torrential downpour. Marty stifled a laugh.
The rains passed. The small sun, filtered through a thicker atmosphere, seemed gentler now.
Perspective tilted until they were staring at reddish, sandy soil. Dust became gravel became boulders as the carts were zoomed down to a different level of existence. Alex found himself watching Earth-tailored bacteria at work.
The wriggling shapes became more complex; rocky soil broke under their attack; the rain turned fine Marsdust to mud. The expanding carts raced ahead of a writhing network of roots and emerged into a shrinking jungle of green plants.
Now the carts moved through a fall of Marsdust. Great bucketlike vehicles dropped out of the sky, each of a different bizarre design, puffing flame only at the moment before impact. Men erected the spiderweb-thin skeleton of a dome, then filled it in with rhomboidal panels.
The carts were semi-independent now. They would go where their occupants pointed them, though they remained out of view of each other. The central computer controlled them still, so that there was no chance of the invisible carts colliding with each other.
Griffin cruised closer to the dome. It seemed huge: bigger than Gaming A, big enough for a small city, an environment that could house an entire community of engineers and scientists.
“- there will be Martians. We will be the Martians. And you will be part of that process. This is the future. This is how it will begin.”
Griffin accepted a glass of wine from the hand of an eight-foot indigo thark. Its four arms articulated gracefully. It delicately picked its way through the crowd, dispensing a seemingly endless stream of wine and beverages. For an instant he wondered how the illusion was sustained. Surely it was solid. Perhaps a human being within an external shell, the upper arms controlled by waldos?
This was futile. The magic of the Dream Park technicians should be accepted as magic, and there were more important matters to occupy his mind.
A brass-voiced Brit was telling half a dozen amused Americans that “ cannelloni means ‘pasta’ or ‘dinner’ in Italian, but the word was mistranslated into ‘noodles,’ which implies intelligent design..
Japanese investors chatted excitedly as they admired the Phoenix F1, the rocket vehicle IntelCorp had bet its roll on. It was a truncated cone, shaped much like its little brothers, the Phoenix variations that had served between Earth and moon for fifty years. But the Phoenix F1 wouldn’t be just bigger. It would be fusion-powered. The kind of plasma torus that powered Bussard fusion plants on Earth would form the base of the beast; it would leak half-fused deuterium plasma to form a rocket exhaust.
Special Effects had been playing with the Fl. Most of the model must be a hologram, but part of the base had children crawling all over it. No adult in the room was likely to live long enough to see the project’s completion, but these children might. One day they would control Barsoom stock, and they would remember.
“A neat trick, eh?” The voice as a low grumble, and Griffin turned to see Harmony’s face looming above him.
Alex said, “Good move, getting them to bring their children.”
“We gave them all a week’s free Gold Pass to Dream Park. What better way to make these people take the investment seriously?”
Thadeus Harmony was a bear of a man, with the shoulders of the linebacker he had once been. But time had sloped those shoulders, and a desk job added to the thickness of the waist. There was extra gray in Harmony’s hair now, more lines in the blunt features, and a bitter twist to his mouth that hadn’t been there a year ago.
In his first year at Dream Park, Alex had dived into the work headfirst, sometimes not emerging for weeks at a time. Harmony was the one who hauled Alex kicking and screaming from his desk to ski in Aspen or cast for shark in the Bahamas.
All Alex wanted was to return the favor. He had not yet been able to find a way. All he could do was watch a close friend turn into an old man before his eyes. The sense of helplessness was numbing.
With a sudden clankety-rumbling sound, the Leviathan IV model rolled up to them, and stopped. The demo version of the mining rig was only two-thirds the size of the actual unit, but at seven feet high, still impressive. A flock of children rode the vehicle like dogfaces riding a Sherman in World War II. The Leviathan chattered about its specs. Alex paused a moment to listen, and to watch the digging jaws and claws extend, watched the tank-treads and steel sides turn translucent as the whole thing went schematic: ore sample tank, three-man passenger cabin, minilab, communications, powertrain all detailed.
“Looks like a crab on rollers,” Griffin said, walking on.
Harmony was silent.
The Security Chief waited a couple of seconds, and when no comment was forthcoming, ventured another comment. “Everything seems to be going well, don’t you think?”
“Yes, everything,” Harmony said. Griffin stopped. A flat note of disgust had taken root in Harmony’s voice, suddenly growing strong. Harmony’s eyes were tight and wary, and moved too quickly, as if looking for something to avoid.
“What’s wrong?” Griffin asked, voice low. “Don’t bother saying ‘nothing.’ Your nostrils twitch when you lie.”
Not a trace of a smile. Harmony shook his massive head. “I have it on the best authority that nothing is wrong. The very best.”
“Ah-hah. Well, I can accept that. But tell me.”
“What?”
Nobody in earshot? “If there was something wrong-and there isn’t, of course. But if you were listing the people you’d most like to watch sky-dive into a school of sharks, who might head the list?”
Harmony’s face creased in a reluctant smile. “Ah. Evocatively phrased.”
“Well?”
Harmony opened his mouth and shut it again. “Never mind, Alex. I’ve been told that what’s done is done. ‘Are you racing toward the future, or are you mired in the past?’ That’s what I was asked.” Harmony smiled politely as a flock of chattering Japanese businessmen scuttled by. The instant they passed, his face went flat and bitter. “That’s what they asked me.”