by Anthology
It reached out for him again, giggling its nasty pleasure. Then it hesitated. Something red and dripping was thrown to it over the edge of the pit. Then a sharp command came from the darkness and it backed off, peering hungrily from him to the meat.
Snagging the hard case containing the flickering blue flame, Mac pocketed the thing and made haste to clamber as best he could up the other side of the rough pit. The slippery shale made climbing difficult, but he virtually levitated himself out of there. He took the case with the flickering flame out of his glove and put it on the palm of his hand. It made a small hiss. What in the nine inhabited worlds was it? He sensed danger, glanced to his right.
Mac glared in utter disbelief at a bulky “noman” staring down at him from illuminated eyes, hooked hands resting on its metal hips. A type of robot he’d never seen. It looked local. Like something he’d come across in the Terran Museum of Martian Artifacts. Only that one had been about a foot high and carved from pink teastone. The archaeologists thought it was a household god or a child’s toy.
Just above the faceless noman, a pale green pillar fizzed like bad Galifrean beer. Then it coalesced into a figure that Stone was surprised to see was human. A bronzed man in the peak of physical condition, wearing less than was considered seemly even on Jam-bock Boulevard. Except for the little signs of regular wear and tear on his leather harness, the man looked like something out of a serial V-drama. At his right hip was a big, old-fashioned brass-and-steel pistol. Scabbarded on his left was some kind of long antique sword. For a wild moment, Stone wondered if he had been captured by those crazy reenactors who played out completely unlikely battles between invented Martian races. He’d seen groups of them in Sunday Field on vacation afternoons.
The guy in the green pillar fizzed again and broke up a few times before he stabilized long enough to say clearly: “You can’t fight me. I’m not actually here. I’m a scientist. I’m from Earth like you. I came to Mars millennia ago, long before the meteor storms. I’m projecting this image into my future. It’s interactive.”
He smiled. “I’m Miguel Krane.” Evidently, he expected Mac to know the name. He had an old-fashioned accent Mac associated with Terra. “We call this little device a chronowire. It sends images and sounds back and forth across time. It is the nearest we’ve been able to come to time travel. Living organisms get seriously damaged. We discovered to our cost that people and animals can’t travel physically in time. The wanal won’t bother you now. Her old responses are still reachable in her deep subconscious. In our time, we domesticate and use her ancestors to find lost travelers. Their natural instinct is to eat us, but thousands of years of training changed their brains. We found her down here with our explorer noman. We sent her for you. In case of any problems, we fed her some sleepy meat. I’m sorry about the crude robot, too. Believe it or not, he’s code-activated! We have to work through remote control with what we can find. In this case, very remote! What do you want to know from me?”
Mac shuddered as he scraped gelatinous stuff from his battered day suit. He looked around. A man-made room. Two doors. A kind of stone box at his feet. He was surprised how warm it was. “You’re not fooling me. Time travel? How the hell could you have gotten from Terra to Mars thousands of years ago? Before anyone had space travel?” He looked around at the cavern. Ingeniously reflected light. The walls were bright with luminous veins of phosphorescent ore and precious stones sparkling like stars. If he kept his knife, he might be able to dig out a few long diamonds and get away. Assuming he could dodge this madman.
The man in the projection shrugged. “Malfunctioning matter transmitter. Lost control. I traveled backward to Mars. One way. You’ve probably heard of me. Captain Miguel Krane? Haven’t you read my books? About my life on Mars? I’m surprised you don’t know them. They didn’t appear under my name, but I dictated them myself.”
“I don’t listen to books much.”
The man in the green pillar seemed thrown by Mac’s illiteracy. But Mac could read forty-seven interplanetary languages and write fluently in most of them. He had taught himself for purely practical reasons. He wasn’t a scholar. He was a thief. He would have been insulted to be thought of as anything else.
For his own part, Mac was uneasy, still checking for his gun, reassured by the feel of a knife in his boot. Miguel Krane’s voice was amused, but Mac didn’t like to hear it in his head like that. Too creepy.
Yet Krane had been instrumental in saving his life. Somewhere over their heads, on the Martian surface, a wombot was still searching for him with the objective of covering him with jelly that could seep through his skin and eat his bones from the inside out. He was in no doubt about his preference. He’d take his chances here.
“Those chances aren’t much better, Stone.” Krane’s voice was still amused. “Let’s just say you’d be dying for a good cause.”
Mac laughed. “When I hear words like that, I reach for my Banning. Where is my gun, by the way?”
“Look for yourself. I didn’t take it. Neither did the noman. Want to know why I sent the wanal after you?”
“I guess.” Mac looked down into the pit, where the nasty thing was finishing its bloody meal. He saw his gun some way up, where it had lodged on a shelf of rock.
“Do you recall a lep coming to see you a few weeks ago?”
“Yeah. Little green man about so high. One of those freaks from Venus. Had some sort of deal. I wouldn’t go for it. I didn’t like the smell of it. Thought he was lying. Too dangerous.” He was on his belly, stretching for the Banning.
“So you told him.”
“Was it him fingered me to the IMF?”
“Not exactly, but you didn’t do yourself any favors turning him down before you listened.”
“He was lying. I know leps. I didn’t want to know what his pitch was. I used to get crazies like him all the time, offering to cut me in on some fantasy in their heads.”
“The poor little guy was scared out of his wits. He’d found one of our time seeds and he thought we were magic. Ghosts of ancient Martians or something. Still, he did what I told him to do and he only once looked inside the bag. That nearly killed him. He almost dropped it and ran. The lep wasn’t just bringing my message. He had a bag of indigo flame sapphires with him.”
“A bag?” Stone laughed. The rarest jewel in the system, indigo flame sapphires couldn’t be cut, polished, or broken up. They had extraordinary properties. There were three known existing sapphires. One was in the Conquest of Space Museum on Terra, one was in the hands of United System President Polonius Delph—he was the richest man in seven worlds, or had been until he’d paid cash for his jewel. The other had been stolen soon after its discovery. Maybe Delph had it. “There’s no such thing.”
“There is. And Delph wants them. He thinks you’ve got them on you. They tortured Gunz, the man I sent after the lep. He told them you had them.”
“Oh, great! So I was set up by a Venusian leprechaun who was set up by a V-Image! That’s why they’ve been willing to spend so much money hunting me down. They just want to know where those mythical jewels are. They don’t care if they kill me. It’s just as easy to interrogate a fresh corpse using a couple of ccs of dreme. You remind me of my mother!”
“I can only guess what strange patchwork of information comes through the time seeds. We scatter them into our future, more or less at random. Often they are destroyed or are recalled, damaged. Enough land unharmed to broadcast back. We aren’t talking linear time as you imagine it, but radiant time. From what I understand of your world, Delph isn’t the only one who wants the sapphires. He has rivals in the Plutocracy. Another mysterious collector? Or those rivals are competing for the presidency or they think they can ruin him. As you know, it’s a vicious circle in politics. You can’t get to be president unless you have the wealth, and you can’t make really massive sums until you’re president. It was much the same in my day.”
“Your day?”
“That depends where y
ou’re counting from.” The more he listened, the more Stone recognized the tone coming through the old accent. Miguel Krane spoke with the economical style of an army man. “Or which planet. So. Was this particular scenario set up by the IMF in order to trick you into giving up the jewels? No. The Interstellar Military Force has nothing to do with us. That was not an IMF ship pursuing you. Probably it’s Delph’s. I know you don’t have the sapphires. The lep was too scared to keep them. He brought them back and left them with the noman.”
In spite of this denial, Stone grew cautious again.
“Then who are you with?” he challenged. “And why are you so interested in me? Someone’s spending a great deal of dough on hunting me down. A real pro, that’s for sure. So—really—who are you?”
“My military experience was in Korea, in the middle of the twentieth century,” said Krane. “I’m a scientist. Later, I worked on a matter transmitter for the Pentagon. I tested it on myself. It went wrong. I was dragged back to old Mars instead. The Karnala—the clan I fell in with—have access to ancient knowledge and technology left behind by an earlier intelligent race, the Sheev. This machine is some of it. We call it a ‘memory catcher’ in Karnalan. This is the most sophisticated type.
“What is it? It’s an interactive device that can communicate across time. We’ve been studying them for years. We’re not sure we’re using the technology appropriately, but we’ve rigged it so it works for us, after a fashion. We have clear visuals and, when we get over language and other problems, can exchange information or even casual ideas! The Sheev scientists were masters of time. Many believe they abandoned Mars for past eras or the future of another planet, wherever conditions were ideal! Some think they had colonies on ancient Earth or in our future! But that is unlikely. This is about the best use we’ve found for their technology. And it’s to ask of you, Mac Stone, something that I would do myself if I weren’t merely an ethereal image in your world.”
“So you want to make a deal. Isn’t that usually the size of it? What can I do for you that you don’t want to do yourself? Isn’t that usually the deal?”
Krane’s image smiled. There was a sense of rapport between the two men. “Usually.”
“OK,” said Stone. “What’s the score? Oh, and don’t forget to tell me more about those indigo flame sapphires. Presumably they come into your deal at some point. Let’s hear it. I have plenty of time to listen.”
Krane did not smile in reply. “Unfortunately,” he said, “you haven’t.”
3
The Star Bomb
“There was a war,” said the bronzed Terran. “We weren’t ready for it. We thought we’d earned an era of peace. But we had enemies who hated all we stood for. A tribe that had hidden itself underground years earlier, after my people had defeated it. We have our own technology, but that earlier race—the Sheev—developed horrendous weapons. They never used most of them because everyone got scared at the same time. So the weapons, with many of the scientific instruments that helped make them, were locked away by common consent. We didn’t know about one particular cache. Our enemy discovered it. An n-bomb probably powerful enough to destroy a whole planet. They planned to use the underground Ia canal to float it under our city, Varnal of the Green Mists, and blow us up. Meanwhile, our scientists found out about it. Thanks to many of the enemy’s own people rebelling against their leaders, who were perceived as reckless, we defeated them. Only when we were discussing terms did we learn about the n-bomb and where it was. It would shortly be directly under Varnal, and would blow within hours.
“We got our best people down there. They could find no way of stopping the thing from detonating. All they could do was adjust the timer. Which they set about doing. By unlocking seven wards in sequence, the timer could be advanced but not neutralized. So the first thing our scientists did was to set the timer to detonate close to a million years into our future. The maximum the timer allowed. We figured that would be more than enough time to find a solution. I thought that Mars would no longer be highly populated by then. We would work on the problem until we had it licked. A million years—plenty of time! The second thing we did was to move the bomb away from the city. We did this by floating it farther on down the canal until it was under a barren, uninhabited part of the planet. Are you familiar with the Ia trans-Martian canal and its story?”
Stone jerked his thumb at the roof. “All the old canals have dried up. There’s nothing left of them apart from traces of their beds. And no records, of course. Pretty much everything was lost during the great “four-millennia cannonade,” when asteroids and meteors pounded Mars to dust, down to most of her farthest shelters. There are a few freak survivals. Nothing much. The canals were deep and wide once, designed to get the most from dwindling water supplies. The meteors leveled them. But this Ia canal? It was underground?”
“My clan’s ancestors planned to build this great underground canal, protected from all foreseeable danger, completely encircling the planet, with branches serving other local systems. The canal was named for an ancient water goddess, Ia. Ia would connect to a series of hubs serving other canal systems. Its creators thought that it would, through the trade it would stimulate, bring peace to the entire planet. Ia would circle Mars from pole to pole, where the melting ice caps would continuously refill it. The project was abandoned long before my time.”
“Abandoned? What happened?” In spite of his circumstances, Stone found the story engaging. “It sounds a great idea.”
“During construction at the Pataphal cross-waterway intersection, after hundreds of miles of the Ia system had already been built, a terrible disaster struck. A whole section of the great Nokedu Cavern floor, which had been tested and found solid, fell away. Hundreds were killed. More of the cavern kept falling, until it formed a massive chasm, miles deep and far too wide to bridge. Black, unfathomable, the Nokedu Falls dropped deep into the planet’s heart. The entire project was abandoned. It was considered folly to attempt another sub-Martian watercourse. No more would have been said had not an extraordinary phenomenon occurred maybe a month after the project was closed for good. A guard reported seeing the canal slowly filling with water!
“Some freak of natural condensation created a system that had the effect of filling the Ia canal with enough water to float a good-size barge. But of course, at Nokedu the water again rushed into the great chasm. Damming didn’t work. It became pretty clear that the water had to circulate. Several expeditions had been made into the Nokedu Deep to find the cause of the phenomenon. The expeditions were lost or returned without success. The water supply remained continuous. Then, about five hundred years in your past, a quake dislodged the bomb.”
Mac played dumb. “What—and sent it down the falls where it could explode harmlessly?”
“You don’t seem to understand. The Sheev originally planned war against nearby planets, especially Terra. The bomb was too powerful. It was never meant to be detonated on Mars. Even in space, it had limited useful targets. It was a star bomb, intended to be launched at another planet and turn that world to cosmic dust!”
“And that’s what’s down there somewhere now?” Stone jerked his thumb toward his feet. “Ticking away as we speak. When’s it due to go off?”
“In just under seven hours,” said Krane.
“Great! So you simply made your problem our problem?” Mac didn’t try to disguise his disgust. Fear began to tie his insides together.
“Not deliberately. We only recently learned that Mars was still populated—or repopulated. This wasn’t the first time we’ve tried to contact someone like you or to defuse it. This was the closest we could get to you on this time-line.”
“If you know the future, you know what will happen.”
“This is the farthest we can get in time. We get nothing back if we go farther . . .”
Mac was silent, thinking that over. He was familiar with Gridley’s theories of radiant time. “So there might not be any future for us?”
The image shimmered as Krane picked up some kind of yellow gossamer scroll on which symbols sparkled. “Our best minds have worked on the problem ever since we knew about it. We have at last determined how to neutralize the n-bomb.”
Mac still didn’t speak. He just wanted to hear Krane’s pitch.
“OK. So where do I come into it?”
“We need you to do the neutralizing.”
“For what?”
“To save your planet. Research says you’re a Martian, even more than I am. You’re a survivor.”
“Except that there are easier ways to live.”
“That’s why you’ll get the sapphires.”
“A bag of indigo flame sapphires?”
“What the lep tried to show you. What Delph heard about.”
Mac grinned. “It’s a sweet incentive. If you’re right, I haven’t a chance of getting out of this alive. I might as well take the lot of you—or them—with me. You’re all as crooked as I am.”
“Except that’s not your style, Stone. You’re a Martian. You were born on Mars. You don’t want Mars to die like that. Not blown to bits.”
“OK. Let’s assume you’re right. How would I get down to this canal and do what I need to do to the bomb?”
“It’s not quite so simple,” said Krane. “The bomb moved, as I told you. After the ’quake it actually floated down the canal. Until it hit white water. Happily the casing is very strong and relatively light. By luck, it eventually caught between some rocks above the falls. Water currents coming in from three sides actually held the thing steady. It’s still there.”
“Rapids? That’s why your robot can’t reach it?”
“One reason.”
“Is it hard to dislodge?”
“That, unfortunately, isn’t a problem. It should dislodge relatively easily.”