“Well… he mumbled. He was thinking about it. If I could get him to answer questions, I was close to having his signature on the dotted line. A year of selling vacuum cleaners had not been wasted after all. “About sixty years is the fastest we could manage it.” Turner whistled. “But that’s too long.” Mack continued, “We need to be off this planet in thirty.”
No deal, so far, but maybe for once the fine print would help. “Can this underground complex of Stella’s here shoot one of those special beams at Mars and build something similar there, the way your probe did here?”
“Yes, but how would that help?”
“Simple. You just do it. Then, once you’re satisfied it’s operational, we eliminate this place, so no interference by nosy humans here on Earth. The complex on Mars starts to work—terraforming, sure—but more importantly it builds huge data storage facilities. Could it do that? And can your DNA patterns and whatever other information be stored for long periods?”
“Yes, it can.” A glimmer in his eyes of… what… amusement?
“OK. Then you beam everybody over to Mars and put them in memory there. As you need the manpower you retrieve some worker drones, boot them up and out to work. When the planet is ready you restore everyone else. Bingo!”
Mack caught on quick. “Five years to build the storage facilities. The data transmission will take twenty years, with a five-year safety margin. Time spent in memory would not present any problems. It could work.”
Then he smiled at me. I’ll never know if it was a smile of relief or the smile of the spider to the fly.
CLICK! Mack disappeared.
Damn! Just like buying a used car. The salesman-hands-off-to-manager run-around. The old good-cop-bad-cop routine. And I had spelled out my offer to… the good one?
“Nice try, Kirk,” Turner said. “But why Mars? Why not Venus? Now there’s a real fixer-upper.”
“I know, but some serious shit will hit the fan if this prospect doesn’t like the offer.”
“I guess you’re right. But Mars… we’ll hate to lose that. That’s a love affair as old as man. First love.”
“No, Doc, it’s been worship from afar all along, ’cause we never did anything about it. The Moon was our first love. At least we touched that. Lost our virginity, but not our hearts, eh? We had our chance with Mars and we turned our back on her. Now we’ll have to watch as others have their way with the Red Planet.”
Turner thought about that. “Maybe a small price to pay to keep Earth for ourselves.”
I nodded, as Stella came between us and took one of our hands in each of hers. I asked her if she thought they’d go for my counteroffer. She didn’t know. We stood there for a moment, feeling like defendants waiting for the jury to come in.
Then I wandered off by myself to think about what I was doing. What was I doing?
Mack reappeared before I had an answer for myself.
“All right. We accept. Stella, initiate security.”
“Not so fast! Not so fast!” I shouted. “Stella, don’t move. First some conditions—and the price.”
Turner whispered something about not pushing my luck. Groans from the aliens.
“You want one of our planets?” I said, “You gotta pay!”
“How much, then?”
“First, the conditions. No space travel for you for one hundred years. You’ll be too busy terraforming and restarting your civilization, anyway. Second, no fancy info-beams after the Mars complex is completed. No sneaking out that way.”
“The quarantine. Yes, we understand.”
“Next, you need to look different when you lake over Mars. If you all look too human, we won’t know if one of you is among us, spying or whatever. You could look sort of human, but enough different to be obvious. Tweak the genes in the right direction and Mars might be habitable for you a few years sooner.”
Mack nodded. I was making sense? I tried to hide my own astonishment.
“Anything else?”
“Only the asking price.” Everyone around me held their breath. “In one hundred years your people will help us turn Venus into the garden spot of the Solar System.”
Mack thought a moment, then a tiny smile showed he got it. He was no fool, though. “By what authority do you sell Mars to us?”
“What authority would you recognize? I don’t think all the diplomats or armies on Earth would impress you folks one quark’s worth. Am I right? My authority might be a laser pistol in a backpack squirreled away somewhere on the premises—sort of the finger on the jugular vein of your whole escape plan.”
He chewed on that for a minute with a look on his face like he wasn’t happy with the taste. When I began to imagine him calling my bluff I broke into an instant sweat. Turner must have seen it. He moved closer to Mack and said, “Mr. McFarland. From what I have seen and heard, I have to say that Kirk’s authority comes from his proposal itself. It simply is the best solution that doesn’t involve your taking Earth by force. We have seen in our own past what damage contact with your culture could do to us. There are consequences of human contact with such a technologically superior race that only a quarantine of millions of miles and scores of years will prevent With your help, we’ll use the time to make ourselves better able to cope with eventual, actual contact. This is, as we say here, a win-win solution.”
Mack smiled, as if arguing with children. “Thank you, Doctor, but you’ll pardon us if your endorsement strikes us as a little biased.”
Stella moved up next to Turner and, looking as cool and in control as I’ve ever seen her, she said “Then I add my endorsement, Father.”
That sobered Papa a little. He seemed to be listening to voices off camera for a moment. Then he gave us all a genuine, warm smile. “We accept your offer—conditions and all.”
Everyone seemed to expect me to say something. They did not expect this. “First, Mack, I want you to know something. There is no backpack. Never was. No gun. No nothing. Just this gruesome twosome from Earth.”
Turner and Stella gasped. They asked me if I was crazy. They even started improvising a backpack for Turner. Mack never lost his smile as we slowly putt-putted back to silence.
“You see, Mack, I don’t want you to claim later that you signed under duress. Do you still agree to the deal?”
“Of course. It was never your threat that swayed us. It was the fact that Stella aided you in the fabrication of your bluff. She is the real finger on the jugular of our escape. That was her role in all of this. And now she has chosen—so we will abide by her decision.”
Mack’s eyes focused on Stella. A father’s love tilled those eyes. “You have done well, my dear. I love you. It’s a feeling this human brain permits, as you already know. My one regret is that the new agreement will prevent us from ever meeting. If only I could have embraced you just once.”
After a little slobbering by everyone, me included, I figured we had to dot some i’s and cross some t’s.
“Well, Mack. I’m gonna let you and Doc work out the details.” Then under my breath, “Go for it, Doc. And while you’re at it, see if you can get them to help us weather that storm that’s coming in 5,300 years.”
Stella and I went back to the kitchen to talk. She asked me if I knew the magnitude of what I had just done. I did a country boy “Aw Shucks” routine, avoiding her eyes. I told her that if I had thought about the “magnitude” I would have frozen. Sort of like when they tell you not to look down.