The elevator car was like an old Amsterdam house, narrow and tall, with a light-filled room at the top, in this case a clear-walled and domed chamber that reminded Frank of the bubble dome of the Ares. On the second day of the trip he joined the car’s other passengers (only twenty on this one, there weren’t too many people going this way) and they took the car’s own little interior elevator up the thirty stories to this clear penthouse, to see Phobos pass. The outer perimeter of the room was set out over the elevator proper, so there was a view down as well. Frank stared down at the curved line of the planet’s horizon, much whiter and thicker than the last time he had seen it. Atmosphere at 150 millibars now, really quite impressive, even if it was composed of poison gas.
While they were waiting for the little moon’s appearance Frank stared at the planet below. The gossamer arrow of the cable pointed straight down at it; it looked like they were rising on a tall slender rocket, a strange attenuated rocket which stretched some kilometers above and below them. That was all they would ever see of the cable. And below them the round orange floor of Mars looked just as blank as it had on their first approach so long ago, unchanged despite all their meddling. One only had to get far enough away.
Then one of the elevator pilots pointed out Phobos, a dim white object to the west. In ten minutes it was upon them, flashing past with astonishing speed, a large gray potato hurtling faster than the head could turn. Zip! Gone. The observers in the penthouse hooted, exclaimed, chattered. Frank had caught only the merest glimpse of the dome on Stickney, winking like a gem in the rock. And there had been a piste banding the middle like a wedding ring, and some bright silver lumps; that was all he could recall of the blurred image. Fifty kilometers away when it passed, the pilot said. At 7,000 kilometers an hour. Not all that fast, actually, there were meteors that hit the planet at 50,000 kilometers an hour. But fast enough.
Frank went back down to the dining floor, trying to fix the hurtling image in his mind. Phobos: people at the dining table next to him talked of shoving it up into a braided orbit with Deimos. It was out of the loop now, a new Azores, nothing but an inconvenience to the cable. And Phyllis had argued all along that Mars itself would have suffered the same fate in the solar system at large, unless the elevator were built to climb its gravity well; they would have been bypassed by miners going to the metal-rich asteroids, which had no gravity wells to contend with. And then there were the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets. . . .
But there was no danger of that now.
• • •
On the fifth day they approached Clarke and slowed down. It had been an asteroid about two kilometers across, a carbonaceous hunk now shaped to a cube, with every centimeter of its Mars-facing surface graded and covered with concrete, steel, or glass. The cable plunged right into the center of this assemblage; there were holes on both sides of the joint where cable met moon, just big enough to allow passage to the elevator cars.
They slid up into one of these holes and came to a smooth stop. The interior space they slid into was like a vertical subway station. The passengers got out and went their ways into the tunnels of Clarke. One of Phyllis’s assistants met him and drove him in a little car through a warren of rock-walled tunnels. They came to Phyllis’s offices, which were rooms on the planet side of the moon, walled with mirrors and green bamboo. Though they were almost in microgravity and only drifting very slowly away from Mars, they stood on that floor and rip-ripped around in velcro shoes. A rather conservative practice, but to be expected in such an Earth-regarding place. Frank exchanged his shoes for some Velcro slippers by the door and followed suit.
Phyllis was just finishing a talk with a couple of men. “Not only a cheap and clean lift out of the gravity well, but a propulsion system for slinging loads all over the solar system! It’s an extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering, don’t you think?”
“Yes!” the men replied.
She looked about fifty years old. After fulsome introductions— the men were from Amex— the others left. When Phyllis and Frank were the only ones left in the room, Frank said to her, “You’d better stop using this extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering to flood Mars with emigrants, or it’ll blow up in your face and you’ll lose your anchoring point.”
“Oh Frank.” She laughed. She really had aged well: hair silver, face handsomely lined and taut, figure trim. Neat as a pin in a rust jumpsuit and lots of gold jewelry, which together with her silver hair gave her an overall metallic sheen. She even looked at Frank through gold wire-rimmed glasses, an affectation that distanced her from the room, as if she were focusing on flat video images on the insides of her spectacles.
“You can’t send down so many so fast,” he insisted. “There’s no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What’s developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, they’re like refugee camps or forced labor camps, and it’ll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies to Terran situations. And that’s bound to hurt you.”
She stared at a spot about three feet in front of him. “Most people don’t see it that way,” she proclaimed, as if the room were full of listeners. “This is just a step on the path to full human use of Mars. It’s here for us and we’re going to use it. Earth is desperately crowded, and the mortality rate is still dropping. Science and faith will continue to create new opportunities as they always have. These first pioneers may suffer some hardships, but those won’t last long. We lived worse than they do now, when we first arrived.”
Startled at this lie, Frank glared at her. But she did not back down. Scornfully he said, “You’re not paying attention!” But the thought frightened him, and he paused.
He brought himself back under control, stared through the clear ceiling at the planet. As they were rotating with it they always looked up at Tharsis, of course, and from this distance it looked like one of the old photographs, the orange ball with all the familiar markings of its most famous hemisphere: the great volcanoes, Noctis, the canyons, the chaos, all unblemished. “When was the last time you went down?” he asked her.
“Ell ess sixty. I go down regularly.” She smiled.
“Where do you stay when you descend?”
“In UNOMA dorms.” Where she worked busily to break the U.N. treaty.
But that was her job, that was what UNOMA had assigned her to do. Elevator manager, and also the primary liaison with the mining concerns. When she quit the U.N., she could take all the jobs she could handle from them. Queen of the elevator. Which was now the bridge for the greater part of the Martian economy. She’d have at her disposal all the capital of whatever transnationals she chose to associate with.
And all this showed, of course, in the way she rip-ripped around the brilliant glassine room, in the way she smiled at all his withering remarks. Well, she always had been a little stupid. Frank gritted his teeth. Apparently it was time to start using the good old USA like a sledgehammer, see if it had any heft remaining in it.
“Most of the transnationals have giant holdings in the States,” he said. “If the American government decided to freeze their assets, because they were breaking the treaty, it would slow down all of them, and break some.”
“You could never do that,” Phyllis said. “It would bankrupt the government.”
“That’s like threatening a dead man with hanging. A couple more zeroes on the figure are just one more level of unreality, no one can really imagine it anymore. The only ones who even think they can are exactly your transnational executives. They hold the debt, but no one else cares about their money. I could convince Washington of this in a minute, and then you just see how it blows up in your face. Whichever way it goes, it wrecks your game.” He waved a hand angrily. “At which point someone else will occupy these rooms, and—” a sudden intuition—”you’ll be back in Underhill.”
That got her attention, no doubt about it. Her easy contempt took on a sudden edge. “No single person can convince Washington
of anything. It’s quicksand down there. You’ll have your say and I’ll have mine, and we’ll see who has more influence.” And she rip-ripped across the room and opened the door, and loudly welcomed a gang of U.N. officials.
• • •
So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough. He would prove her wrong.
On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new President would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.
Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd— it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.
Once resettled in Sheffield, he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn, he was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponents. Three weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Armscor. He was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.
He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quarters. And two days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded supply for the time being. They would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but they would also have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.
Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a café over his solitary dinner. He grinned wolfishly as he chewed. “So we see who’s better at wrestling in quicksand, you bitch.” He finished eating and went for a walk along the rim concourse. It was only one battle, he knew. And it was going to be a bitter long war. But still, it was nice.
• • •
Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in. The Russians next door did the same.
A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the road-building subdivision of Armscor, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil. They had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.
Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in person. He had to ignore not only the standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor’s prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth). Once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no easy task. Never before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made him furious. In the end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.
The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and women. He walked through the inner lock door and breathed hot stale air. So many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see him there. A couple of them cheered.
“All right! I’m here!” he shouted. “Who speaks for you?”
They had no spokesperson. He swore viciously. “What kind of fools are you? You’d better learn to operate the system, or you’ll be in bags like this one forever. Bags like this or else bodybags.”
Several people shouted things at him, but most wanted to hear what he would say. And still no sign of a spokes-person, so Chalmers shouted, “All right, I’ll talk to all of you! Sit down so I can see who’s speaking!”
They would not sit, but they did stand without moving, in a group around him, there on the tattered astroturf of the tent’s main square. Chalmers balanced himself on an upturned box in the middle of them. It was late afternoon and they cast shadows far down the slope to the east, into the tents below. He asked what had happened, and various voices described the midnight attack, the skirmish in the station.
“You were provoked,” he said when they were done. “They wanted you to make some fool move and you did, it’s one of the oldest tricks in the book. They’ve gotten you to kill some third parties that had nothing to do with the attack on you, and now you’re the murderers the police have caught! You were stupid!”
The crowd murmured and swore at him angrily, but some were taken aback. “Those so-called police were in on it too!” one of them said loudly.
“Maybe so,” Chalmers said, “but it was corporate troops that attacked you, not some random Japanese on a rampage. You should have been able to tell the difference, you should have bothered to find out! As it is you played into their hands, and the UNOMA police were happy to go along, they’re on the other side right now, at least some of them. But the national armies are shifting over to your side! So you’ve got to learn to cooperate with them, you’ve got to figure out who your allies are, and act accordingly! I don’t know why there are so few people on this planet capable of doing that. It’s like the passage from Earth scrambles the brain or something.”
Some laughed a startled laugh. Frank asked them about conditions in the tents. They had the same complaints as the others had, and again he could anticipate, and say it for them. Then he described the result of his trip to Clarke. “I got a moratorium on emigration, and that means more than just time to build more towns. It means the start of a new phase between the U.S. and the U.N. They finally figured it out in Washington that the U.N. is working for the transnationals, and so they need to enforce the treaty themselves. It’s in Washington’s best interest, and they’re the only ones that’ll do it. The treaty is part of the battle now, the battle between people and the transnationals. You’re in that battle and you’ve been attacked, and you have to figure out who to attack back, and how to connect up with your allies!”
They were looking grim at this, which showed sense, and F
rank said, “Eventually we’re going to win, you know. There’s more of us than them.”
So much for the carrot, such as it was. As for the stick, that was always easy with people as powerless as these. “Look, if the national governments can’t calm things down quick, if there’s more unrest here and things start coming apart, they’ll say the hell with it— let the transnats solve their labor problems themselves, they’ll be more efficient at it. And you know what that means for you.”
“We’re sick of this!” one man shouted.
“Of course you are,” he said. He pointed a finger. “So do you have a plan to bring it to an end, or not?”
It took a while to rachet them into agreement. Disarm, cooperate, organize, petition the American government for help, for justice. Put themselves in his hands, in effect. Of course it took a while. And along the way he had to promise to address every complaint, to solve every injustice, to right every wrong. It was ridiculous, obscene; but he pursed his lips and did it. He gave them advice in media relations and arbitration technique, he told them how to organize cells and committees, to elect leaders. They were so ignorant! Young men and women, educated very carefully to be apolitical, to be technicians who thought they disliked politics, making them putty in the hands of their rulers, just like always. It was appalling how stupid they were, really, and he could not help lashing into them.
He left to cheers.
• • •
Maya was out there in the station. Exhausted, he could only stare at her in disbelief. She had been watching him over the video, she said. Frank shook his head, the fools inside hadn’t even bothered to disable the interior cameras, were possibly even unaware of their existence. So the world had seen it all. And Maya had that certain look of admiration on her face, as if pacifying exploited laborers with lies and sophistry were the highest heroism. Which to her it no doubt was. In fact she was off to employ the same techniques in the Russian tent, because there had been no progress there, and they had asked for her. The MarsFirst president! So the Russians were even more foolish than the Americans, apparently.
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