Sometimes, as he watched his colleagues floating over weird miniature landscapes that no one had ever before visited—or probably ever would again—Singh had felt an impulse to get away from the ship and enjoy the freedom of space. He could probably find an excuse to do so: his first officer would be only too happy to take over for a while. But he would be a supercargo—even a nuisance—in the cramped quarters of the launch, and could not justify such an indulgence.
Yet it seemed a pity to spend several years at the center of this veritable Sargasso Sea of drifting worlds and never set foot on any of them.
One day he would certainly have to do something about it.
23
ALARM
IT WAS AS IF THE SENTRIES ON THE WALLS OF TROY HAD caught the first glitter of sunlight on distant spears. Instantly, everything was changed.
And yet the danger was still more than a year away. Formidable though it was, there was no sense of immediate crisis: indeed, there was still hope that the initial hasty observations might be in error. Perhaps the new asteroid would miss Earth after all, as so many myriads of others had done in past ages.
David had awakened Singh with the news, at 05.30 UT; it was the first time he had ever broken the commander’s sleep.
“Sorry about this, Captain. But it’s classed absolute priority—I’ve never seen one before.”
Nor had Singh, and he was instantly wide awake. As he read the spacefax, and looked at the orbit of Earth and asteroid it displayed, he felt as if a cold hand had fastened itself upon his heart. He hoped there could be some mistake: but even from that first moment he never doubted the worst.
And then, paradoxically, a sense of elation swept over him. This was what Goliath had been built for, decades ago.
And this was his moment of destiny. On the Bay of Rainbows, when he was little more than a boy, he had met one challenge—and overcome it. Now he was faced with an immeasurably greater one.
This was why he had been born.
Never give anyone bad news on an empty stomach. Captain Singh waited until all aboard had eaten breakfast, then relayed the spacefax from Earth—and the follow-up that had arrived an hour later.
“All programs, all research projects, are of course canceled. The science staff will return to Mars on the next shuttle, while we prepare Goliath for what will certainly be the most important mission that it—that any ship—has ever been given.
“Details are now being worked out, and may be changed later. As I’m sure you know, plans for a mass-driver that could deflect an asteroid of reasonable size were drawn up years ago: it was even given a name—ATLAS. As soon as all mission parameters are known, those plans will be finalized, and Deimos Docks will go into high-speed construction. Luckily all the necessary components are standard items—propellant tanks, thrusters, control systems, and the framework to hold them together. So the nanoassemblers can build ATLAS in a few days.
“Then it will have to be mated with Goliath—so we have to get to Deimos as quickly as possible. That will give some of us a chance to see our families on Mars: there’s an old Earth proverb that says ‘It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.’…
“We’ll take on just enough propellant to carry the empty ATLAS to Jupiter, and refuel at the Europa orbital tank farm. And then the real mission will begin—the rendezvous with the asteroid. By then it will be only seven months from Earth impact—if it is going to impact.
“We’ll have to survey the asteroid, locate a suitable foundation, install ATLAS, check all systems—and start up the drive. Of course, its effect on a body massing a billion tons will be almost too small to measure. But a deflection of a few centimeters, if it can be applied before the asteroid passes Mars orbit, will be sufficient to make it miss Earth by hundreds of kilometers….”
Singh paused, feeling a little embarrassed. All this was elementary stuff for the crew, but it would be unfamiliar to the geologists and astrochemists. He seriously doubted if they could tell him Kepler’s Three Laws, much less compute an orbit.
“I’m no good at making inspirational speeches, and I don’t think one is necessary. You all know what we have to do, and there’s no time to waste. Even a few days lost now could make all the difference between a harmless flyby and the end of History—at least on Earth.
“One other thing. Names are very important—look at all the Trojans around us. We’ve just received the official designation from the IAU. Some scholar has been going through the Hindu mythology, and has come across the goddess of death and destruction.
“Her name is Kali.”
24
SHORE LEAVE
“WHAT WERE THE MARTIANS REALLY LIKE, DADDY?”
Robert Singh looked fondly at his daughter—officially six years old, although the planet on which she lived had made only five circuits of the sun since she was born. No child could be expected to wait 687 days between birthdays, so this was one relic of the Earth calendar that had been retained. When it was finally abandoned, Mars would have severed yet another link with the Mother World.
“I knew you were going to ask me that,” he answered. “So I’ve looked it up. Listen…
“‘Those who have never seen a living Martian can scarcely imagine the strange horror of its appearance. The peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip, the absence of brow ridges, the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip, the incessant quivering of this mouth, the Gorgon—’”
“What’s a Gorgon?”
“‘—the Gorgon groups of tentacles—’”
“Ugh!”
“‘—above all, the extraordinary intensity of the immense eyes—were at once vital, intense, inhuman, crippled, and monstrous. There was something fungoid in the oily brown skin, something in the clumsy deliberation of the tedious movements unspeakably nasty.’ Well, Mirelle—now you know.”
“What are you reading? Oh—the DisneyMars guide! When can we go?”
“That depends on how well a certain young lady does her homework.”
“Not fair, Daddy! I haven’t had time since you’ve been back!”
Singh felt a brief spasm of guilt. He had tended to monopolize his small daughter and her baby brother whenever he could escape from the ATLAS assembly and checkout on Deimos Docks. His hopes of private visits when he got down to Mars had been instantly dashed when he saw the media persons waiting for him at Port Lowell: he had not realized that he was the second most famous person on the planet.
The most famous, of course, was Dr. Millar, whose detection of Kali had changed—and perhaps would change—more lives than any event in human history. Though they had been involved in half a dozen electronic encounters, the two men had not yet met in person. Singh had avoided such a confrontation: they had nothing new to say to each other, and it was obvious that the amateur astronomer had been unable to cope with his unexpected celebrity. He had become arrogant and condescending, and always referred to Kali as “my asteroid.” Well, sooner or later his fellow Martians would cut him down to size; they were very good at that.
DisneyMars was tiny compared to its famous terrestrial forebears, but once you were inside, there was no way of telling that. By means of dioramas and holographic projections, it showed Mars as men had once believed or dreamed it might be—and as one day they hoped it would be. Although some critics complained that a Brainman session could create exactly the same experience, that was simply untrue. One only had to watch a Marschild stroking a piece of genuine Earthrock to appreciate the difference.
Martin was much too young to enjoy the excursion, and was left in the safe care of the latest model Dorcas home robot. Even Mirelle was not really old enough to understand everything that she was seeing, but her parents knew that she would never forget it. She squealed with fearful delight when H. G. Wells’s tentacled horrors emerged from their cylinders, and watched in awe as their monstrous tripods stalked through the deserted streets of a strange, alien city—Victorian London.
And she love
d the beautiful Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, especially when she said sweetly, “Welcome to Barsoom, Mirelle.” John Carter, however, had been all but eliminated from the scenario: such bloodthirsty characters were definitely not the sort of immigrant the Martian chamber of commerce wished to encourage. Swords, indeed! Why, if they weren’t handled with great care, pieces of metal fashioned with such criminal irresponsibility might cause serious injuries to bystanders….
Mirelle was also fascinated by the strange beasts that Burroughs had scattered so lavishly over the Martian landscape. However, she was puzzled about one piece of exobiology, which Edgar Rice had passed over rather lightly.
“Mother,” she said. “Was I hatched from an egg?”
Charmayne laughed.
“Yes and no,” she answered. “But it certainly wasn’t like the one that Dejah laid. I’ll ask Library to explain the difference when we get home.”
“And did they really have machines that could make air so that people could breathe outside?”
“No—but old Burroughs had the right idea. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do—you’ll see when we’ve gone through the Bradbury section.”
…And out of the hills came a strange thing.
It was a machine like a jade-green insect, a praying mantis, delicately rushing through the cold air, indistinct, countless green diamonds winking over its body, and red jewels that glittered with multifaceted eyes. Its six legs fell upon the ancient highway with the sound of a sparse rain which dwindled away, and from the back of the machine a Martian with melted gold for eyes looked down at Tomas as if he were looking into a well….
Mirelle was fascinated yet puzzled by the night meeting of Earthman and Martian, each a phantom to the other; one day she would understand that it was a fleeting encounter between two ages, across an abyss of time. She loved the graceful sandships gliding over the deserts, the flame-birds glowing on the cool sands, the golden spiders throwing out films of web, the boats drifting like bronze flowers along the wide green canals. And she wept when the crystal cities crumbled before the invaders from Earth.
“From The Mars That Never Was—To The Mars That Will Be,” said the sign at the entrance to the last gallery. Captain Singh could not help smiling at that “will,” typically Martian in its self-confidence. On tired old Earth the verb would have been “may.”
The final exhibit was almost old-fashioned in its simplicity, and none the less effective. They sat in near darkness behind a picture window, looking down upon a sea of mist, while the distant sun came up behind them.
“Mariner Valley—the Labyrinth of Night, as it is today,” said a soft voice above a background of gentle music.
The mist dissolved beneath the rising sun; it was no more than the thinnest of vapors. And there was the vast expanse of canyons and cliffs of the mightiest valley in the Solar System, sharp and clear out to the horizon, with none of the softening by distance that gave a sense of perspective to similar views in the far smaller Grand Canyon of Western America.
It was austerely beautiful, with its reds and ochres and crimsons, not so much hostile to life as utterly indifferent to it. The eye looked in vain for the slightest hint of blue or green.
The sun dashed swiftly across the sky, the shadows flowed like tides of ink over the canyon floors. Night fell; the stars flashed out briefly, and were banished by another dawn.
Nothing had changed—or had it? Was the far horizon no longer so sharp-edged?
Another “day,” and there could be no doubt. The harsh contours of the terrain were becoming softened; distant cliffs and scars were no longer so sharply defined. Mars was changing….
The days—weeks—months—perhaps they were really decades—flickered past. And now the changes were dramatic.
The faint salmon hue of the sky had given way to a pale blue, and at last real clouds were forming, not tenuous mists that vanished with the dawn. And down on the floor of the canyon, patches of green were spreading where once there had been only barren rock. There were no trees as yet, but lichens and mosses were preparing the way.
Suddenly, magically, there were pools of water—lying calm and unruffled in the sun, not flashing instantly into vapor as they would on Mars today. As the vision of the future unfolded, the pools became lakes, and merged into a river. Trees sprouted abruptly along its banks: to Robert Singh’s Earth-conditioned eyes, their trunks appeared so slender that he could not believe they were more than a dozen meters tall. In reality—if one could call this reality!—they would probably out-top the tallest redwood: a hundred meters at a minimum, in this low gravity.
Now the viewpoint changed; they were flying eastward along Mariner Valley, out through the Chasm of the Dawn, and southward to the great plain of Hellas, the lowlands of Mars. It was land no longer.
As he looked down upon the dream ocean of a future age, a flood of memories poured into Robert Singh’s mind, with such overwhelming power that for a moment he almost lost control of himself. The Hellas Ocean vanished; he was back on Earth, walking along that palm-fringed African beach with little Toby, with Tigrette padding close behind them. Did that really happen to him, once upon a time, or was it a false past, the borrowed memory of another person?
Of course he had no real doubts, but the flashback was so vivid that it left an afterimage burning in his mind. However, the sense of sadness quickly gave way to a mood of wistful contentment. He had no regrets—Freyda and Toby were both well and happy (it was high time he called them again!) with extended families to look after them. He was sorry, though, that Mirelle and Martin would never experience the joy of having nonhuman friends like Tigrette. Pets of any kind were a luxury that Mars could not yet afford.
The voyage into the future ended with a glimpse of the planet Mars from space—how many centuries or millennia hence?—its poles no longer crowned with caps of frozen carbon dioxide as sunlight beamed down from hundred-kilometer-wide orbiting mirrors ended their age-long winter. The image faded, to be replaced by the words SPRING, 2500. I wonder—I hope so, though I shall never know, thought Robert Singh as they walked out in silence. Even Mirelle seemed unusually subdued, as if trying to disentangle the real from the imaginary in what she had seen.
As they were walking through the airlock to the pressurized Marscar that had brought them from the hotel, the exhibition produced one final surprise. There was a roll of distant thunder—a sound that only Robert Singh had ever heard in reality—and Mirelle gave a little shriek as a shower of fine droplets fell upon them from an overhead sprinkler.
“The last rain on Mars was three billion years ago—and it brought no life to the lands on which it fell.
“Next time, it will be different. Good-bye, and thank you for coming.”
Robert Singh woke in the smaller hours of his last night before takeoff, and lay in the darkness, trying to recall the highlights of his visit. Some of them—including the tender moments of a few hours earlier—he had recorded for future playback: they would sustain him in the long months ahead.
The change in his breathing rhythm must have disturbed Charmayne: she rolled toward him and rested her arm on his chest. Not for the first time, Singh smiled as he recalled how uncomfortable this gesture could be on the home planet.
For several minutes neither spoke. Then Charmayne said sleepily: “You remember that Bradbury story we looked up—the one where those barbarians from Earth used the beautiful crystal cities for target practice?”
“Of course. ‘And the Moon be still as bright.’ I couldn’t help noticing that he set it in 2001. A little too optimistic, wasn’t he?”
“Well, at least he did live to see men get here! But I couldn’t help thinking, after we left DisneyMars—aren’t we behaving in exactly the same way, destroying what we’ve found?”
“Never thought I’d hear a true Marschild talk like that. But we’re not just destroying. We’re creating… my God…”
“What’s the matter?”
“That’s just r
eminded me. Kali. She’s not only the goddess of destruction. She also creates a new world out of the wreckage of the old.”
A long silence. Then:
“That’s exactly what the Reborn keep telling us. Did you know that they’ve set up a mission right here in Port Lowell?”
“Well, they’re harmless lunatics. I don’t suppose they’ll bother anyone. Happy dreams, darling. And next time we go to DisneyMars we’ll take Martin—I promise.”
25
EUROPA STATION
ROBERT SINGH HAD LITTLE TO DO ON THE FAST RUN FROM Deimos/Mars to Europa/Jupiter, except to study the constantly changing contingency plans SPACEGUARD kept beaming to him—and to get to know the new members of his crew.
Torin Fletcher, a senior engineer from Deimos Docks, would supervise the refueling operations when the Goliath/TITAN combination reached the tank farm orbiting Europa. The tens of thousands of tons of hydrogen to be pumped aboard would be in the form of slush—a mixture of liquid and solid denser than the pure liquid and thus requiring less storage space. Even so, the total volume was more than twice that of the ill-fated Hindenburg, whose fiery doom had closed the brief age of lighter-than-air transportation—at least on Earth. Small freight-carrying airships were often used on Mars, and had proved valuable for research in the upper atmosphere of Venus.
Fletcher was an airship enthusiast, and did his best to convert Singh.
“When we really start the exploration of Jupiter,” he said, “and don’t just drop probes into it—that’s when the airship will come into its own again. Of course, since the atmosphere is mostly H2, it will have to be a hot-hydrogen airship—no problem! Imagine—riding around the Great Red Spot!”
“No thank you,” Singh had replied. “Not at ten Mars gravity.”
“Earthies could take it lying down. Or on water beds.”
“But why bother? There’s no solid surface—nowhere to land—robots can do everything we want without risking humans.”