Arthur Clarke - Firstborn

“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.

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!”

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.”