by Larry Niven
Svetz thought he did. “You need to go faster than light to reach any star while any one SecGen is in power.”
“Faster-than-light is fiction.”
“Fiction.” Huh?
“Waldemar the Tenth was like a bright child. I said I could get us to the stars, and he believed it. Ra Chen, those books you rescued from California saved our butts. We used the science fiction as source material. We mocked up computer-generated landscapes and cities from other worlds, and aliens too. He believed all of it. But Waldemar the Eleventh won’t. Our real power is pitiable.”
Ra Chen could have dismantled the Bureau of the Sky Domains if he’d known that a year ago. A time machine could fix that! Svetz saw all that in Ra Chen’s eyes, and saw him shrug it off. Ra Chen said, “Beware of wishes granted, Willy.”
“I know. A bright SecGen who really wants stars! I thought I could use the Institute to get him that,” Gorky said.
Miya Thorsven half whispered to Svetz, “Dominance games.”
“I’ve watched a lot of this,” Svetz said.
“Director Gorky swallowed up Ra Chen’s department. Would Ra Chen help him justify that?”
Svetz told her what he thought Ra Chen would want her to hear. “If Ra Chen couldn’t protect what he had, there’s no point in asking for it back. If Gorky loses, the SecGen is likely to dismantle Time and Space and start over with relatives as his Chairs.”
Gorky was saying, “We haven’t sent anything bigger than a bedsheet to the stars, but we’ve had the planets for a long time. Hibernation and an ion-fission drive took a crew of five to Jupiter. That technique would take us anywhere, given time. We could build another Jupiter ship and fire it at Four-four, if we had the time.”
“Four-four?”
“51 Pegasi 4–4, fourth moon of the fourth planet, is as close as we can find to another Earth for hundreds of light-years. Only, it’s early Earth. Reducing atmosphere. We’ve never found an oxygen world.
“So. Send a drone package to 51 Pegasi. Move back in time by as long as it takes. A thousand years? A billion?” Gorky brushed aside their attempts to interrupt. “Algae in the atmosphere starts the terraforming process. Add higher life-forms before anything competitive can evolve.
“Now launch a manned ship. A hundred years to 51 Pegasi, we can manage that. We find Earth’s twin waiting for us! Drop a hundred and eight years into the past. Phone home. The laser takes eight years to reach Earth from Four-four. It gets there a month after the ship leaves, or a week. Ra Chen, I take it that won’t work.”
Ra Chen was openly laughing. “I’d be all day telling you what’s wrong with that. Willy, did you ever think of asking?”
“I thought you’d wind up owning me if I asked favors from the Institute for Temporal Research,” Gorky said.
Svetz thought he was probably right, but Ra Chen chortled. “You see it, Svetz? He thought the extension cages were the time machines!”
“Ah.” Svetz told Gorky, “No, sir. The time machine is under the Center. The whole Center is just the top, like a lid on a jar, with a twisty folded-over quark accelerator underneath. The X-cage is the only part that moves.”
Gorky asked, “What’s its mass?”
Svetz didn’t know.
“Three million eight hundred thousand tons,” Ra Chen said with some satisfaction. “Under Waldemar Eight and Nine we built it all as a laboratory. After we got it working we built over it to make the Center.”
“How much could you shrink it? Unlimited budget. We’re only talking, now.”
“How much mass can you put into orbit, Willy?”
“With the new heavy lifters, four thousand tonnes each flight.”
“Forget that,” Ra Chen said.
“You’ve been running a gigantic hoax,” Svetz said. He missed Gorky’s fury and Ra Chen’s disapproval while he chewed new data. “What have you got? Willy, sir, what have you really got? Cities on the Moon? Mars? Asteroids?”
“Moon and Mars,” Miya said. “Mars is just twenty people. Luna City is two thousand, I think, but buried, not much to see. The glass domes we showed Waldemar Ten came out of a computer.”
“Anything on the asteroids?”
“Some automated mining projects that broke down. One day we’ll get it right,” Miya said. “Mine the asteroids for metal. Put all the factories in orbit—”
Svetz waved it off. “Heavy lifter?”
Gorky said, “We’re building it. We’re building four. I could ask for forty now, but I’d have to justify the expense eventually.”
“Will the Secretary-General wait?”
Gorky’s jaw set hard. “He’ll wait for Divine Image. A year at least. Do you know what a Von Neumann device is?”
Both men shook their heads. Miya Thorsven lit up. “It’s a machine no bigger than your two hands that makes more of itself! It’s called Michelangelo. I worked on the Divine Image Project. Michelangelo mines the Moon and makes more Michelangelos and piles the slag along the Earth twilight rim. The numbers double over and over. In a year and a bit we’ll have trillions of Michelangelos! They’re carving the near face of the Moon into an image of Waldemar the Eleventh!”
Svetz gaped. Gorky murmured, “Resculpted from Waldemar Tenth, of course.”
Ra Chen said, “Ambitious. If you’re processing that much Moon, you could bake oxygen out of the slag too. You’d wind up with an atmosphere.”
Gorky laughed and clapped a big hand on Ra Chen’s shoulder, hard. “Right. Right!”
“Doubling rate?”
“Week and a bit—”
“But you get all your action near the end, don’t you? For this next year there’s nothing to be seen from anywhere on Earth…? Just videos of any number of your little mining things crawling over Moon rock.”
“Yes.”
“He bought it?”
“He did.”
Miya was looking at Gorky in shocked disappointment. Gorky said, “I’m sorry, Miya. After you came back to Earth, some of the Michelangelos were chewing rock in the wrong places. Others got blocked up, or made junk, or just quit. We’ll keep fiddling.”
He turned back to Ra Chen. “But a year from now we’ll have to show the little buggers operating, or else have something to show him, or else I’d better retire to the Moon. That’s real. There’s been a city in Clavius Crater since before there were Waldemars. Six hundred years.”
Svetz said, “Moon and Mars. Anything else?”
“Rovers! We’ve got toy boxes crawling over every planet and moon in the solar system, hundreds of asteroids and scores of comets, taking pictures and samples. We’ve sent Forward probes past more than forty stars, with more on the way, Svetz, but the Forward devices are just silver blankets made of computer elements and launched by light pressure. Enough laser power to cremate a city in ten minutes,” Gorky said, watching to see if Ra Chen would flinch. “Firing for ten weeks.”
“The lasers, they’re on the Moon?”
“Yes.”
“So you’ve got the Moon, and everything else is smoke and mirrors?”
“There’s Mars Base One. Twenty men and women and some VR sets to control a thousand Rovers, Pilgrim model. I built it on the equator. I was hoping we could experiment with advanced lifting systems. Orbital towers. Maybe a Pinwheel. We never got that far. Too expensive. Even life support for cosmonauts is too expensive.”
Ra Chen said, “But now you’ve got a time machine.”
“And if I can’t use the Institute, I’ll have to break you up and sell the parts for what I can get.”
Ra Chen didn’t seem surprised. “You’d get nothing but scrap prices.”
“How much do you spend just keeping the Center going? I’d save that much. It wouldn’t save either of us, of course.”
4
On the other side of its glass wall, fifty feet of short-legged lizard half uncoiled, lifted its head high above them, and spat fire along the glass. Gorky and Ra Chen didn’t appear to notice. Miya stared up at the be
ast in awe and wonder.
“We should change the label on this,” Svetz said, “now that Waldemar the Tenth is dead.”
“Isn’t it a Gila monster?”
“No. I found him in another picture book, after I caught him. Dragon!”
“You caught—”
She cut herself off because Gorky was speaking. “You can change the past.”
“That’s scary stuff, Willy! We’ve done that once or twice by accident,” Ra Chen said. “Anyway, what would you change?”
“Right after the first use of a thermonuclear bomb, there were experiments with thermonuclear rocket motors in North America Sector. We’ve got nuke rockets now. We could leave designs on some lab table in the Industrial Age for the locals to copy.”
“Why bother? Like you said, you’ve got them already.”
“But they had the wealth. Ra Chen, if they’d had nuke rockets then, they could have built an orbital solar power system for what they spent on cosmetics! With ten years to work, and for no more than the price of perfumes and lip goo and stuff to shape their hair into topiary, they’d have had free power from the sky and a fleet of spacecraft left over at the end!
“Now we’re living too close to the edge. Too much farmland turned to dust and blew into the sea over the centuries. Too little sunlight gets down to us through the industrial goo. Today that same price would buy about ten million lives. People starve, or they freeze in the dark, when Bureaus divert power from the cities. We lose thousands of lives when we launch a Forward probe, and those are cheap. The Industrial Age, then was when we should have moved. They put twelve men on the Moon and then went home for four hundred years!”
“I know considerable about the Industrial Age,” said Ra Chen. “I’ve been in it. Hundreds of millions of people with thousands of insanely different lifestyles, all of ’em eleven hundred years dead. You’d have to get that kind of a mob moving all in one direction to persuade them to put a permanent base on the Moon instead of using perfume and lip goo and soap … and sunblock, which isn’t just a cosmetic. Are you really that persuasive, Willy? Go ahead, persuade me. But tell me this first. If you did change the past, how would you get the credit? The SecGen’s memory would change too. You’d have nothing to show but a huge bill for electricity.”
“You thought of it too?”
Ra Chen barked laughter. “Everyone thinks of changing the past! If it weren’t for temporal inertia we’d have exterminated ourselves once already, remember, Svetz? And maybe other times he never told me about.”
Miya was gaping, and Svetz grinned at her. Gorky must know the story already, if he knew about the torn cages.
Ra Chen said, “Willy, eleven hundred years ago you had thousands of ancestors. What if you do something to separate any two of them at the wrong time? You might edit yourself out. Or edit me out and find yourself stranded in the past.”
Gorky said nothing.
“The new Secretary-General wants the solar system. You know it could be worse. Any slip you make anywhere in the past, you could wind up with no time machine and a SecGen who collects torture devices.”
“All right,” Gorky said, “no changes.”
They walked in silence for a bit.
“Everything interesting happened eleven hundred years ago,” Willy Gorky said. “Industry exploded across the world. Human numbers went into the billions. Highways and railroads and airlines webbed the planet. All the feeble life-forms went extinct, but ideas boiled! There was every kind of scheme for the conquest of Space. Antimatter rocket engines, antigravity, solar sails, hundreds of tether designs, the Forward probes, Orion spacecraft, and a thousand things that didn’t work but aren’t generically impossible.”
Ra Chen mused. “Lost secrets?”
“Why not? The space elevator, that notion came from a country that was still medieval!”
“Space elev—?”
“You know what I’d like to do with Mars? Use the planet as a test bed. Terraforming experiments, of course. Build a space elevator too. Build all of the skyhook launch schemes, all the ways of getting to orbit without rockets. They all have that much in common. They’re all dangerous! Huge potential energies involved. You could build them all cheaper, in miniature, because Mars has low mass and a high spin. Try them on Mars, where they can’t hurt anyone!
“The Industrial Age is over, the world isn’t rich anymore, and we can’t afford to experiment. But what have we forgotten? What miracles could we find by raiding old libraries? If you search through two thousand years of the past you’re bound to find something.”
“Finding it is the problem,” Ra Chen agreed. “I built the big X-cage to raid the Library of Alexandria before Julius Caesar torched it. It turns out that we can’t reach back that far. But we got to the Beverly Hills Library in plus-sixty-eight Atomic Era! We scooped it all up just before the quake and the wave. Why don’t you set some of your people searching through those old books?”
“I will. What about the Pentagon or the Kremlin? They must have had interesting stuff—”
“Secrets. Locked up, hidden and guarded. Willy, it’s a mistake to think of armed men as dead.”
The albino whale in its huge tank turned sideways to focus one tiny eye on Svetz. Whale looked better than he had after the capture. The broken harpoons were gone, scars starting to heal.
Gorky rubbed his eyes. “I’m just getting used to thinking in terms of time. We’re still just talking, right?”
“R—”
“Aliens, I promised aliens to Waldemar Ten. Waldemar Eleven expects them too. Can your time machines find weirder animals than this?”
“Amazing beast,” Ra Chen said. Whale’s eye turned to look at him.
“We could have billed it as alien. From Europa, maybe.”
“Willy, is there a chance at real aliens?”
“We haven’t found life anywhere.”
“Mars?”
“Long ago. There’s fossil bacteria in Martian rocks dating from half a billion years ago. It’s very primitive stuff, Ra Chen. Mars had seas and a reasonable atmosphere for less than a billion years, and maybe what we found evolved then. Or maybe it all evolved on Earth and got to Mars embedded in a meteor. Not an alien at all.”
“Mars had life later than that,” Miya said.
They turned toward her. Svetz caught Gorky’s indulgent smile.
Miya didn’t. “There was life on Mars. There was civilization! We have sketches made from telescope observations and descriptions from old astronomers, Schiaparelli and Lowell and Burroughs. Hundreds saw channels running across Mars, too straight to be anything but artificial!
“And it all disappeared over the next sixty years, before the first probes reached Mars. The probes found river valleys, but they were dry. Craters everywhere. Almost no atmosphere, nothing left of the water system. Nothing left of the water. High cirrus, and frost at the poles.”
Willy Gorky told her gently, “A lot of these discoveries were made through the Lowell telescope in Arizona. Have you ever looked through a telescope at Mars?”
Miya shook her head. “I’ve never looked through a telescope.”
“Most astronomers don’t. Miya, dear, Lowell’s telescope didn’t have camera attachments. Eyeballs! Everything was a blur. That was the period when they decided Mercury was like the Moon, one face always to the Sun. They were drawing one face of the planet onto the other and didn’t notice! Those canals—” He was talking to the back of her head now. “Tired eyes want to connect the dots. We’ve never found anything on Mars.”
Watching her defeated expression, Svetz asked, “What if she’s right?”
Willy Gorky laughed out loud. “Svetz, what do you know about other planets? Miya, you dug in those old river valleys! What did you find? Microscopic traces that might have been bacteria? Nothing else?”
“No, nothing,” Miya admitted. Her cheeks flamed. Her grip on Svetz’s hand felt like desperation. “But we haven’t searched the thousandth part of Mar
s!”
Svetz said, “We’ve found some amazing surprises in the past. Miya? Did this all disappear just as we were going into the Industrial Age?”
“That’s right.”
Svetz threw up his hands. “If only we had a time machine!”
5
Single-minded as a spider, Lowell built his own observatory to map them and spun a whole theory from the web of lines that he created.
—William K. Hartmann, Mars Underground, 1997
It should have been just that simple.
“I want to see martian civilization at its height,” Willy Gorky told them. “No, futz, we could get pictures like that from a computer! Ra Chen, show me video of Martians holding a funeral, then I’ll send a team there to dig up the tomb in present time. If you’re right, Miya. If there’s a civilization. But if you could find anything alive … anything alien would get the SecGen off our backs for a long time. Svetz, a martian tool would do, or an animal. We’ve brought back soil samples from every large body in the solar system.”
To the left of the armory door was a cluster of chairs and little tables, and a drink and dole yeast dispenser. Svetz sipped coffee and waited … but Ra Chen had developed the habit of letting Svetz deliver bad news.
So be it. Svetz told Willy Gorky, “We can’t move an extension cage to Mars. The reach isn’t there. There’s no way to match velocities either.”
Willy said, “We can use Rovers and Orbiters. Where can you put an extension cage? Anywhere on Earth?”
Ra Chen said, “Northern Hemisphere and some of the Southern. Beyond that, the Earth’s mass—”
“Orbit?”
“Haven’t tried. We build the cages like spacecraft, though. It’s all Space Bureau hardware. They’ll stand up to vacuum.”
“Whale fitted into the big X-cage, didn’t he? We can fit a module in there—”
“But not a launcher.”
“Yes, Miya. Ra Chen, didn’t I see antigravity beamers on the large X-cage?”