Martell said, “Venus always seems to welcome new-corners like that. My greeting committee was a thing called a Wheel, which I hope you never meet. I’d be in ribbons now except that a Venusian boy was kind enough to teleport it over on its side. Are you a missionary?”
The man seemed too dazed to reply immediately. He knotted his hands together, released them, adjusted his tunic. Finally he said, “Yes—yes, I am. From Earth.”
“Surgically changed, then?”
“That’s right.”
“So am I. I’m Nicholas Martell. How are things in Santa Fe, Brother?”
The newcomer’s lips tightened. He was a fleshless little man, a year or two younger than Martell. He said, “How can that matter to you if you’re Martell? Martell the heretic? Martell the renegade?”
“No,” Martell said. “That is—I—”
He fell silent His hands tensely smoothed the fabric of his Harmonist green tunic. His cheeks were burning. He realized painfully the truth about himself—that the change in him had worked inward from without—and suddenly he could not meet the gaze of his altered successor in the Venus mission, and he turned, staring into the thicket of the no longer very alien forest.
Four
Lazarus Come Forth
2152
one
Mars Monotrack One, the main line, ran from east to west like a girdle of concrete flanking the planet’s western hemisphere. To the north lay the Lake District with its fertile fields; to the south, closer to the equator, was the belt of throbbing compressor stations that had done so much to foster the miracle. The discerning eye could still make out the old craters and gouges of the landscape, hidden now under a dusting of sawtooth grass and occasional forests of pine.
The gray concrete pylons of the monotrack marched to the horizon. Spurs carried the line to the settlements of the outlands, and they were always adding new spurs as the new settlements sprouted. Logistically, it might have been simpler to have all the Martians live in One Big City, but the Martians were not that sort of people.
Spur 7Y was being added now, advancing in ungainly bounds toward the new outpost of Beltran Lakes. Already the pylon foundations had gone up three-quarters of the way from Mono One to the settlement; a vast pylon-layer was working its way through the countryside, gobbling up sand from ten yards down and spewing out concrete slabs that it stapled into the ground. Gobble, spew, staple, and move on—gobble, spew, staple. The machine moved rapidly, guided by a neatly homeostatic brain that kept it on course. Behind it came the other machines to lay track between the pylons and string the utility lines that would follow the same route. The Martian settlers had many miracles at their command, but microwave kickover of usable electric power wasn’t one of them—not yet—and so the lines had to get strung from place to place even as in the Middle Ages.
The monotrack system was intended for heavy-duty transportation. The Martians used quickboats, like everybody else, for getting themselves from place to place. But the slim little vehicles weren’t much use in the shipment of construction materials, and this was a planet under construction. Now that the reconstruction phase was over. The Terraformers were gone. Mars was a bosky dell, here in this year of grace 2152, and now the task was to plant a civilization on the finally hospitable planet. The Martians numbered in the millions. They had passed their frontiersman stage and were settling down to enjoy the pleasures of a good commercial boom. And the monotrack marched on, mile after mile, skirting the seas, rimming the lakes and rivers.
The dogwork was done by clever machines. Men rode herd on the machinery, though. You never could tell when the homeostasis would slip ever so slightly and your pylon-layer would go berserk. It had happened a few years ago, and somehow the cutoff relays had been blanked out of the circuit, and before anyone could do anything there were sixteen miles of pylons criss-crossing Holliman Lake—eight hundred feet under water. Martians hate wastefulness. The machines had shown that they were not entirely trustworthy, and thereafter they were watched.
Watching over the construction of this particular spur of Monotrack One was a lean, sun-bronzed man of sixty-eight named Paul Weiner, who had good political connections, and a plump red-haired man named Hadley Donovan, who did not. Redheads were rare on Mars for the usual statistical reasons; plump men were rare, too, but not so rare as they once had been. Life was softer these days, and so were the younger Martians. Hadley Donovan was amused by the antics of his gun-toting elders, with their formal etiquette, their theatrically taut bodies, their sense of high personal importance. Perhaps it bad been necessary to wear those poses in the pioneer days on Mars, Donovan thought, but all that had been over for thirty years. He had allowed himself the luxury of a modest paunch. He knew that Paul Weiner felt contempt for him.
The feeling was mutual.
The two men sat side by side in a landcrawler, edging through the roadless landscape twenty miles ahead of the pylon-laying rig. Transponders bleeped at appropriate intervals; on the control board in front of them, colors came and went in an evanescent flow. Weiner was supposed to be monitoring the doings of the construction rig behind them; Donovan was checking out the planned route of the track, hunting for pockets of subsurface mushiness that the pylon-builder would not be clever enough to evaluate.
Donovan was trying to do both jobs at once. He didn’t dare let a political appointee like Weiner have any real responsibility in the work. Weiner was the nephew of Nat Weiner, who stood high in ruling councils, was a hundred-and-some years old, and went to Earth every few years to have the Vorsters pluck out his pancreas or his kidneys or his carotid arteries and implant handy artificial substitutes. Nat Weiner was going to live forever, probably, and he was gradually filling the entire civil service up with members of his family, and Hadley Donovan, trying to oversee a job that really required two men’s full attention, felt vague desperation as he scanned his own board and covertly glanced over at Weiner’s every thirty seconds or so.
Something was glowing purple on the Anomaly Screen. Donovan wondered about it, but he was too busy with his own part of the job to mention it, and then Weiner was drawling, “I got something peculiar over here, Donovan. What do you make of it, Freeman?”
Donovan kicked the crawler to a halt and studied the board. “Underground rock vault, looks like. Three—four miles off the track.”
“Think we ought to take a look?”
“Why bother?” Donovan asked. “The track won’t come anywhere near it.”
“You aren’t curious? Might be a treasure vault left by the Old Martians.”
Donovan didn’t dignify that with a reply.
“What do you think it is, then?” Weiner asked. “Maybe it’s a cave carved by an underground stream. You think so? All that subsurface water Mars had before they Terraformed it? Rivers flowing under the desert?”
Feeling the needles, Donovan said, “It’s probably just a crawl-space left by the Terraforming engineers. I don’t see why—oh, hell. All right. Let’s go investigate. Shut the whole project down for half an hour. What do I care?”
He began throwing switches.
It was a foolish, pointless interruption, but the older man’s curiosity had to be satisfied. Treasure cave! Underground stream! Donovan had to admit that he couldn’t think of any rational reason why there’d be such a pocket of open space underground here. Geologically, it didn’t make much sense.