Poul Anderson - The Corkscrew of Space

Everybody in Syrtis turned out when the Fleet arrived, and those who could traveled from as far as Yellowpeak and Whatsit for the occasion. A fair sprang up overnight, tents and booths sprawling over dusty miles, carnivals, migratory shows both live and recorded, noise and bustle and cheer. The alcohol plants and the fun houses did a rush business and you couldn’t get a hotel room for love, money or good sweet water. Some folk even had to break the law and camp in the ruins, the long extinct native race sheltering a new, non-furry breed of Martian.

Laslos Magarac threaded past the crowds till he got to the spaceport fence. He had an impulse to pay a dollar to one of the telescope concessionaires for a look at the fifty great ships orbiting around the planet, but decided against it—the line was too long. After all, twice a local year was about once an Earth-year, so it was a capitalized Event—but the shuttle boats blasting down, sheeting flame through clouds of kicked-up red dust, were spectacular enough.

There was one arriving now, descending on a tail of fire some four miles away—which put it almost on the horizon. It was a bright gleam against the dark-blue sky, under the shrunken sun. As he watched, it entered its cradle and was wheeled off toward the waiting electrotrucks.

Unloading began immediately; the trucks gulped packages and scurried like beetles toward the warehouses. Mail, merchandise, tools and luxuries—it was like a friendly greeting from old Earth.

Another line of vehicles was chuffing toward an empty shuttle with boxed and baled Martian goods, mostly drybean extract with a scattering of jewels, hopper pelts and prehistoric relics.

The Fleet had to work fast, deliver its cargo and get loaded and start home again in a few days.

Magarac found a place in the post office line and resigned himself to waiting an hour. He was a somewhat dehydrated-looking man with a gaunt ugly face and dry black hair. The coverall which protected him from the late-afternoon chill was the standard Martian garment, but as a well-to-do planter, he bore an expensive cloak patterned like a rainbow.

“Ah… impatient, I see, my friend.”

Magarac turned around. Oliver Latourelle had joined the queue behind him. The physicist was a well-nourished man with a plump, sharp-nosed face, watery blue eyes and bushy white hair fringing an egg-shaped skull. “Is it that you await mail from a fair one back on Earth?”

“Not any more,” said Magarac gloomily. “Three Mars-years was too long to wait.”

Latourelle clicked his tongue in sympathy. “The old tale, no? You are going to Mars to raise drybeans and make a fortune. But it takes long to become rich, even in the Dominion, and meanwhile the radio beams are too public and first-class mail is ten dollars an ounce.”

“I’m doing okay,” said Magarac defensively. “On Mars, that is. The trouble is that passage home would eat up half my money.” He didn’t like to discuss his personal affairs, but when there are barely 10,000 people on an entire planet, privacy hardly exists.

“Be consoled,” advised Latourelle. “I speak as a man of experience. No one ever died of a broken heart. That organ is capable of miraculously rapid self-repair. The secret is to give it time to do so.”

“Oh, I’m long over that business,” said Magarac. “What I’m anxious to find out is how synthetic chemistry is progressing on Earth.”

“So? I realize that to operate a plantation here requires a good scientific background, but are you so vitally interested that you cannot wait until your mail is delivered?”

“I am,” said Magarac. “And so is all Mars, whether they know it or not. Eighty per cent of our industry is based on the drybean. It won’t grow anywhere else, and they’re finding new medicinal uses for the extract every year. But figure it out for yourself. Freight rates being what they are, the stuff costs fifty dollars an ounce by the time the Earth doctor gets it. Every chemical firm you can name has a team trying to synthesize the basic molecule. One day soon, they’re going to do it and then the drybean planters are finished. I’m watching the technical journals so I can sell out in time.”

“And what will you do then, with the Dominion broke?”

“God only knows.”

“And I thank Him I was born to be a research physicist, and I thank the Rockefeller Foundation for so generously subsidizing my work,” said Latourelle. “Though with all respect to this excellent planet of yours, my friend, it seems a long and dry three years ahead until I can return to France.” He had arrived with the Fleet before last, but even if he finished ahead of schedule, he would have to wait his turn for passage.

“What d’you have to be here for, anyway?” asked Magarac. He had gotten quite friendly with Latourelle, but knew little of the man’s highly specialized project.

“I am studying magnetism. Mars, you see, does not have a core like Earth, but is of uniform composition. Apparently that accounts for its peculiar magnetic field … Yet in what way? I think it is an effect of relativistic wave mechanics. I have developed a most beautiful theory of Riemannian folds in a multiply connected space. Now I am checking the magnetic data to see if my theory will hold—you pardon the expression—water.”

“And so what’s your hurry to get your mail?” Magarac chuckled. “A gorgeous dame of your own?”

“No. Not that I am too old even now, I assure you, but I have more sense than to expect a delectable woman to wait five Earth-years for my return. I shall simply start afresh. No, no, my friend, it is that I have been extravagant with myself. Well, say rather that I am supplying a necessity. If you would care to visit my house tonight for a little private discussion—?”

And Latourelle would say nothing more. With elaborate silence, he picked up a large wooden case at the desk, and Margarac’s last sight of him was a small suspicious figure hugging the box to his chest and stumping off toward Syrtis.

The news, no doubt, was good for humanity at large, but it would hit Mars heavily. Magarac had been an engineer on Earth, with added experience in chemistry, and could read between the lines. M’Kato announced cautiously that he thought he had the structural formula of protenzase. If he was right, they would be synthesizing it in another year. Quite probably, the next Fleet would not be accepting drybean extract.

Magarac slouched gloomily away from the lights and music and swirl of the fair. What the devil was a man to do?

So far, the history of Mars had been economic history. The first colony had been planted to mine the rich uranium beds of the Aetheria. To save freight, it had had to be made self-sufficient; and, since this was not Periclean Greece, it had had to include women. Children resulted and drybean culture provided a new source of income… so good a source that Mars stopped shipping uranium and used it instead to break down iron oxides and produce a breathable atmosphere.