“Remember this?” Ellie spread out her softscreen so they could all see a now-familiar string of symbols:
“I’ve had my analysis agents speculating about what these could mean. They’ve come to a consensus—about bloody time too—but I think it makes sense.”
“Tell us,” Yuri snapped.
“Look at these shapes. What do you see?”
Alexei said, “Triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon. So what?”
“How many sides?”
Yuri said, “Three, four, five, six.”
“And what if you continued the sequence? What next?”
“Seven sides. Heptagon. Eight. Octagon.” He was at a loss, and glanced at Myra. “Nonagon?”
“Sounds plausible,” Myra said.
“And then?” Ellie insisted.
Alexei said, “Ten sides, eleven, twelve—”
“And if you go on and on? Where does the sequence end?”
“At infinity,” Myra said. “A polygon with an infinite number of sides.”
“Which is?”
“A circle…”
Yuri asked, “What do you think you have here, Ellie?”
“The Martians couldn’t avert their own Q-bomb, or whatever the Firstborn used on them. But I think this is a symbolic record of what they did achieve. Starting with what they could build—see, a triangle, a square, simple shapes—they somehow extrapolated out. They built on their finite means to capture infinity. And they trapped an Eye that must have been located right under ground zero, waiting to witness the destruction.” She glanced at Alexei. “They did challenge the gods, Alexei.”
Grendel grunted. “How uplifting,” she said sourly. “But the Martians got wiped out even so. What a shame they aren’t around for us to ask them for help.”
“But they are,” Ellie said.
They all stared at her.
Myra’s mind was racing. “She’s right. What if there were a way to send a message, not to our Mars, but to Mir’s? Oh, there are no spaceships there.”
“Or radios,” Alexei put in.
Myra was struggling. “But even so…”
Yuri snapped, “What the hell would you say?”
Ellie said rapidly, “We could just send these symbols, for a start. That’s enough to show we understand. We might provoke Mir’s Martians into reacting. I mean, at least some of them may come from a time-slice where they’re aware of the Firstborn.”
Grendel shook her head. “Are you serious? Your plan is, we’re going to pass a message to a parallel universe, where we hope there is a Martian civilization stranded out of time in a kind of space-opera solar system. Have I got that right?”
“I don’t think it’s a time for common sense, Grendel,” Myra said. “Nothing conventional the navy has tried has worked. So we need an extraordinary defense. It took a lot of out-of-the-box thinking to come up with the sunstorm shield, after all, and an unprecedented effort to achieve it. Maybe we’ve just got to do the same again.”
There was a torrent of questions and discussion. Was the chancy comms link through the Martian Eye to Bisesa’s antique phone reliable enough to see this through? And how could the nineteenth-century Americans of an icebound Chicago talk to Mars anyhow? Telepathy?
Many questions, but few answers.
“Okay,” Yuri asked slowly. “But the most important question is, what happens if the Martians do respond? What might they do?”
“Fight off the Q-bomb with their tripod fighting machines and their heat rays,” Grendel said mockingly.
“I’m serious. We need to think it through,” Yuri said. “Come up with scenarios. Ellie, maybe you could handle that. Do some wargaming on the bomb’s response.”
Ellie nodded.
Alexei said, “Even if Bisesa does find a way to do this, maybe we ought to keep some kind of veto, while we try to figure out how the Martians might react. And we should pass this back to Athena. The decision shouldn’t stay just with us.”
“Okay,” Yuri said. “In the meantime we can get to work on this. Right? Unless anybody’s got a better idea.” His anger had mutated to a kind of exhilaration. “Hey. Why the gloomy faces? Look, we’re like a bunch of hibernating polar bears up here. But if this works, the eyes of history are on us. There’ll be paintings of the scene. Like the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”
Alexei played along. “If that’s true I wish I’d shaved.”
“Enough of the bullshit,” Grendel said. “Come on, let’s get to work.”
They broke up and got busy.
48: A SIGNAL TO MARS
Once again Bisesa, Abdi, and Emeline were summoned to Mayor Rice’s office in City Hall.
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 baseba
ll 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 procrastinating, 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 fancifully.
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.”
A Time Odyssey Omnibus Page 90