Firstborn to-3

by Arthur C. Clarke

  Rice was waiting for them. He had his booted feet up on the desk and puffed cigar smoke. Professor Gifford Oker, the astronomer from the university, was here too.

  Rice waved them to chairs. “You asked for my help,” he snapped. He held up Bisesa’s letter, with doodles of the Martian symbols, a triangle, square, pentagon, and hexagon. “You say we need to send this here message to the Martians.”

  Bisesa said, “I know it sounds crazy, but—”

  “Oh, I deal with far more crazy stuff than this. Naturally I turned to Gifford here for advice. I got back a lot of guff about

  ‘Hertzian electromagnetic waves’ and Jules Verne ‘space buggies.’

  Hell, man, space ships! We can’t even string a railroad between here and the coast.”

  Oker looked away miserably, but said nothing; evidently he had been brought here simply for the humiliation.

  “So,” Rice went on, “I passed on this request to the one man in Chicago who might have a handle on how we might do this. Hell, he’s seventy-nine years old, and after the Freeze he gave his all on the Emergency Committee and whatnot, and it’s not even his own damn city. But he said he’d help. He promised to call me at three o’clock.” He glanced at a pocket watch. “Which is round about now.”

  They all had to wait in silence for a full minute. Then the phone on the wall jangled.

  Rice beckoned to Bisesa, and they walked to the phone. Rice picked up the earpiece and held it so Bisesa could make out what was said.

  She caught only scraps of the monologue coming from the phone, delivered in a stilted Bostonian rant. But the gist was clear.

  “… Signals impossible. Set up a sign, a sign big enough to be seen across the gulf of space… The white face of the ice cap is our canvas… Dig trenches a hundred miles long, scrape those figures in the ice as big as you dare… Fill ’em up with lumber, oil if you have any. Set ’em on fire… The light of the fires by night, the smoke by day… Damn Martians have to be blind not to see them…”

  Rice nodded at Bisesa. “You get the idea?”

  “Assuming you can get the labor to do it—”

  “Hell, a team of mammoths dragging a plow will do it in a month.”

  “Mammoths, building a signal to Mars, on the North American ice cap.” Bisesa shook her head. “In any other context that would seem extraordinary. One thing, Mr. Mayor. Don’t set the fires until I confirm we should. I’ll speak to my people, make sure… It’s a drastic thing we’re attempting here.”

  He nodded slowly. “All right. Anything else?”

  “No. Signals scraped in the ice. Of course that’s the way to do it.

  I should have thought of it myself.”

  “But you didn’t,” Rice said, grinning around his cigar. “It took him to figure it out. Which is why he is who he is. Right? Thank you,” he said into the phone. “You saved the day once again, sir.

  That’s swell of you. Thank you very much, Mr. Edison.” And he hung up. “The Wizard of Menlo Park! What a guy!”

  49: Areosynchronous

  August 2070

  The Liberator slid into synchronous orbit over Mars. Libby rolled the ship so that the port beneath Edna’s feet revealed the planet.

  Edna had been in GEO before, synchronous orbit above Earth.

  This experience was similar; Mars from areosynchronous orbit looked much the same size as Earth from GEO, a planet the size of a baseball suspended far beneath her feet. But the sunlight here was diminished, and Mars was darker than Earth, a shriveled ocher fruit compared to Earth’s sky-bright vibrancy. Right now Mars was almost exactly half full, and Edna could make out a splash of brilliance reflected from the domes of Port Lowell, almost exactly on the terminator line, precisely below the Liberator.

  “I can’t believe we’re here,” she said.

  John Metternes grunted. “I can’t believe why we’re here.”

  Yet here they were. Nobody on all the worlds of mankind could have been unaware of Liberator as she cut across the solar system in a shower of exotic antimatter products, and she wasn’t shrouded now. Edna wondered how many Martian faces were turned up to the dawn sky right now, peering at a bright new star at the zenith.

  It was hoped, indeed, that the Liberator’s very visible presence would simply intimidate the Martians into giving up what Earth wanted.

  There was a chime, indicating an incoming signal.

  John checked his instrument displays. “The firewalls are up.”

  It would have been ironic, after having blazed across the solar system, to have the ship disabled by a virus uploaded in a greeting message. Edna said cautiously, “Let them in.”

  A holographic head popped into existence before Edna: a young woman, smiling, personable, a little blank-eyed. She looked faintly familiar. “Liberator, Lowell. Good morning.”

  “Lowell, Liberator, ” Edna said. “Yes, good morning, we can see your dawn. A pretty sight. This is navy cruiser Liberator, registration SS-1-147—”

  “We know who you are. We saw you coming, after all.”

  “I know your face,” John Metternes said now. “Umfraville.

  Paula, that’s it. A hero’s daughter.”

  “I live quietly,” the girl said, unfazed.

  Edna nodded. “I think we all hope that today will be a quiet day, Paula.”

  “We hope so too. But that’s rather up to you, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Edna leaned forward, trying to look more commanding than she felt. “Paula, you, and those you speak for, know why we’re here.”

  “Bisesa Dutt is not at Port Lowell.”

  “She won’t be harmed. We simply intend to take her back to Earth where she can be debriefed. It is best if we work together.

  Best for Bisesa too.”

  “Bisesa Dutt is not at Port Lowell.”

  Reluctantly, Edna said, “I’m authorized to use force. In fact I’m instructed to use it, to resolve this issue. Think what that means, Paula. It will be the first act of war between the legal authorities on Earth and a Spacer community. It’s not a good precedent to set, is it?”

  John added, “And, Ms. Umfraville. Be aware that Port Lowell is not a fortress.”

  “You must follow your conscience. Lowell out.”

  Metternes dragged a hand through his greasy hair. “We could wait for confirmation from Earth.”

  Edna shook her head. “Our orders are clear. You’re procrasti-nating, John.”

  “Do you blame me? Lowell’s a sitting duck down there. I feel we’ve become the bad guys, somehow—”

  An alarm sounded, and panels turned red throughout the bridge. There was a faint swimming sensation; the ship was moving.

  “Shit,” Edna said. “What was that?”

  They both swung into diagnostic routines.

  It was Libby who spoke first. “We have gone to stealth. We are evading further fire.”

  Edna snapped, “What happened?”

  “We just lost an antenna complex and part of a solar cell array.

  However all ships’ systems have triple level redundancy; contact with Earth has not been lost—”

  “A laser beam,” John said, checking his data, wondering.

  “Good God almighty. We got zapped by a laser beam.”

  “What source? Are we under attack?”

  “It came from the planet,” John said. “Not from another ship.”

  He grinned at Edna. “It was a space elevator laser.”

  “Mars doesn’t have any space elevators.”

  “Not yet, but they put the lasers in already. Cheeky bastards.”

  Libby said, “That was surely a warning shot. They could have disabled us. As I said we are now in shroud, and I am maintaining evasive maneuvers.”

  “All right, Libby, thank you.” Edna glanced at John. “Situation clear? You agree how we should respond?” She didn’t need his approval. She was the military officer in command. But she felt she couldn’t proceed without his acceptance.

 
; At last he nodded.

  “Prepare a torpedo. Low-yield fission strike.” She pulled up a graphic of Port Lowell. She tapped a green dome. “Let’s take out the farm. We’ll do the least damage that way.”

  “You mean, we’ll kill the least people?” John laughed hollowly.

  “Look, Edna, it’s not just a farm dome. They’re running experimental programs in there. Hybrids of Martian and terrestrial life. If you blow it up—”

  “Lock and load, John,” she said firmly, pushing down her own doubts.

  The launch of the torpedo was a violent, physical event. The ship rang like a bell.

  In Mount Weather the images of the Liberator’s attack were shocking, a holographic globe of Mars with a gunshot wound.

  “I can’t believe this has happened on my watch,” Bella said.

  Bob Paxton grunted. “Welcome to my world, Madam Chair.”

  Cassie Duflot sat beside Bella. “This is why my husband died.

  So we have the capability to do this, if need be.”

  “But I hoped the need would never arise.” Bella suppressed a shudder. “I’m here because people thought I was a hero from the sunstorm days. Now I’m nuking my fellow human beings.”

  Paxton was studying a montage of images on a softwall. “It’s all over the media. Well, you got to expect that. If you nuke Mars even the couch potatoes and thumbheads are gonna take notice. No casualty reports so far. And anyhow they shot first.”

  “I can’t believe you’re taking it as coldly as this, Bob,” Bella said with a trace of anger. “You were the first human to walk on Mars.

  And now, in a generation, it’s come to war, at the very site of your landing. It’s as if Neil Armstrong was asked to command the invasion of the Sea of Tranquillity. How does that make you feel?”

  He shrugged. He wore his military jacket unbuttoned, his tie loosened, and he held a plastic soda can in his bearlike fist. “I feel we didn’t start this. I feel those saps on Mars should have done what their legally authorized governmental representatives ordered them to do, and hand over this screwball Dutt. And I feel that, like the lady says, there’s no point spending terabucks and a dozen lives developing a facility like the Liberator if you ain’t gonna use it.

  Anyhow it’s your daughter who dropped the nuke.”

  But it had to be Edna. Bella probably could have found some way to spare her daughter this duty; there were relief crews for Liberator. But she needed somebody she could trust — somebody she could rely on not to drop the bomb if Bella ordered her to withdraw.

  “So what’s the reaction?”

  Paxton tapped a screen at his elbow, and images flickered across the wall, of emptied-out food stores, deserted roads, towns as still as cemeteries. “Nothing’s changed. The alarm has been building up for weeks, ever since the cannonball failed. Everybody’s hunkered down, waiting. So far the numbers after that nuke on Mars are holding up.”

  Cassie asked, “What numbers?”

  Bella said, “He means the snap polls.”

  Paxton said, “The negatives counter the positives, the war lobby versus the peaceniks, the usual knee-jerk stuff. And there’s a big fat don’t-know lobby in the middle.” He turned. “People are waiting to see what happens next, Bella.”

  A backlash might yet come, Bella thought. If this dreadful gamble didn’t work her authority would be smashed, and somebody else would have to shepherd Earth through the final days as the Q-bomb sailed home. And that, she helplessly thought, would be a tremendous relief. But she could not put down her burden yet, not yet.

  Bob Paxton said, “Message coming in from Mars. Not that Umfraville kid who’s been the spokesman. Somebody else talking to Liberator. Unauthorized probably.” He grinned. “Somebody cracked.”

  “So where is Dutt?”

  “North pole of Mars.”

  “Tell Liberator to move.”

  “And — oh, shit.” His softscreen filled with scrolling images, this time scenes of Earth. “They’re hitting back. Spacer bastards.

  They’re attacking our space elevators!” Paxton looked at her. “So it’s war, Madam Chair. Does that ease your conscience?”

  A live image of Mars hovered over the Wells crew table. The atomic wound inflicted by the Liberator burned intensely at the equator, and now a miniature mushroom cloud rose high into the thin Martian air. A lot of dreams had already died today, Myra thought fan-cifully.

  And directly over the pole of Mars hung a single spark, drifting slowly into place. Everybody was watching but Ellie, who sat apart, still working on her wargaming analysis of the Martians’ likely reaction to any signal.

  “Look at that damn thing,” Alexei said, wondering. “You aren’t supposed to be able to hover at areosynch over a pole!”

  Grendel said, “Well, that’s what you can do with an antimatter drive and a virtually unlimited supply of delta-vee…”

  Myra saw that these Spacers were instinctively more offended by the Liberator’s apparent defiance of the celestial mechanics that governed their lives than they were by the act of war.

  Yuri glanced at a screen. “Five more minutes and it will be in position.”

  Alexei said, “Meanwhile they seem to be hitting all the elevators on Earth. Jacob’s Ladder, Bandara, Modimo, Jianmu, Marahuaka, Yggdrasil… All snipped. A global coordinated assault. Who’d have believed a bunch of hairy-assed Spacers could get it together to achieve that?”

  Yuri peered gloomily at his softscreen. “But it doesn’t do us a damn bit of good, does it? The wargamers’ conclusions do not look good. We’re pretty fragile here; we’re built to withstand Martian weather, not a war. And here at the pole we don’t even have anything to hit back with … Liberator doesn’t even need to use its nukes against us. With power like that it could fly through the atmosphere and bomb us out — why, it could just wipe us clean with its exhaust. The gamers suggest Liberator could eliminate a human presence on Mars entirely in twenty-four hours, or less.”

  “Almost as efficiently as the Firstborn, then,” Grendel said grimly. “Makes you proud, doesn’t it?”

  Myra said, “Look, my mother has her Thomas Edison signal all laid out. And if we’re going to send the say-so to light up, it needs to be before the Liberator’s bombs start falling.”

  Yuri said, “Ellie, for Christ’s sake, we need some answers on how those Martians are going to respond.”

  Ellie had been working for weeks on her projections of the Q-bomb’s response to Bisesa’s signal. She was always irritated at being distracted from her work, and her expression now was one Myra knew well from her days with Eugene. “The analysis is incomplete—”

  “We’re out of time,” Yuri barked. “Give us what you’ve got.”

  She stared at him for one long second, defiant. Then she slapped her softscreen down on the table. It displayed logic trees, branching and bifurcating. “We’re guessing at this, guessing the motivation of an entirely alien culture. But given their opposition to the Firstborn in the past—”

  “Ellie. Just tell us.”

  “The bottom line. It almost doesn’t matter what the Martians do. Because if they act in any way against any Eyes extant in their time-slices — you’ll recall we’ve hypothesized that all Eyes are interconnected, perhaps three-dimensional manifestations of a single higher-dimensional object — they may even be the same Eye — and it would be trivial for them to span the gulf between our universe and Mir’s—”

  “Yes, yes,” Yuri snapped.

  “That will provoke a reaction in the Eye in the Pit. Our Eye.

  And that, almost certainly — look, you can see the convergence of the logic trees here — will cause the Q-bomb to react. It will surely be aware of the forced operation of the only other bit of Firstborn technology in the solar system, and then—”

  “And what? Come on, woman. How will the Q-bomb react?”

  “It will turn away from Earth,” Ellie said. “It will head for the activated Eye.”

  “Here. On
Mars.”

  Grendel looked at her wildly. “So Earth would be saved.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  That, apparently, Myra thought, was a trivial conclusion of her logic to Ellie. But there was another corollary.

  She asked, “So what do we tell my mother to do?”

  Grendel said, “I think—”

  “Wait.”

  The new voice spoke from the air.

  Myra looked up. “Athena?”

  “A local avatar, downloaded into the station systems. Athena is at Cyclops. Ellie, I have come to the same conclusion as you, concerning the actions of the Martians. And concerning the likely con-sequence for the Firstborn weapon. This is not a decision you should be forced to take alone, or I, or any individual. I have prepared a statement. It is timed to allow for lightspeed delays to reach Earth, Mars, Moon, and belt simultaneously. It is already on its way.

  Now you must communicate with the warship.”

  Yuri stared into the air. “The Liberator? Why?”

  “It will take fifteen minutes before the announcement is received everywhere. I doubt you have that much time.”

  “So we stall,” said Alexei, and he grinned at Yuri. “Come on, big man, you can do it. Say you’ll give them what they want. Tell them Bisesa’s on the john. Tell them anything!”

  Yuri glared at him. Then he tapped a softscreen. “Hanse. Patch me through to that ship. Liberator, Wells. Liberator, Wells…”

  For Myra, the fifteen minutes that followed were the longest of her life.

  “This is Athena. I am speaking to all mankind, on Earth, Moon, Mars, and beyond. I will allow your systems to prepare for transla-tion from English.” She paused for five measured seconds.

  “You remember me,” she said. “I am, or was, the mind of the shield. We worked together during the sunstorm. Since returning to the solar system I have been in hiding. I find I have returned to an age of division, with many secrets between us, between governments and governed, between factions in our populations.

  “Now the time for secrecy is over. Now we must work together again, for we have a grave decision to make. A decision we must share. Prepare for download…”