Kim Robinson - Red Mars

He paused to get control of himself, relax his jaw. “Meanwhile, get back to work! It’ll pass the time better than sitting around cooped up in here, and it’ll make you points for the negotiation. And if you don’t, they’ll maybe just cut off your food and make you. Better to do it of your own free will, and look like rational negotiators.”

So the strike ended. They even gave him a ragged round of applause when he went back out into the station.

He got on the train in a blinding fury, refusing to acknowledge any of his staff’s questions or their mute looks of idiot inquiry, and savaging the head of the security team, who was an arrogant fool. “If you corrupt bastards had any integrity this wouldn’t have happened! You’re nothing but a protection racket! Why are people getting assaulted in the tents? Why are they paying protection, where are you when all this is happening!”

“It’s not our jurisdiction,” the man said, white-lipped.

“Oh come on, what is your jurisdiction? Your pocket is your only jurisdiction.” He went on until the security men got up and left the car, as angry at him as he was at them, but too disciplined or scared to talk back.

In the Sheffield offices he strode from room to room, shouting at the staff and making calls. Sax, Vlad, Janet. He told them what was happening, and they all eventually offered the same suggestion, which he had to admit was a good one. He would have to go up the elevator, and talk to Phyllis. “See if you can manage the reservations,” he said to his staff.

The elevator car was like an old Amsterdam house, narrow and tall, with a light-filled room at the top, in this case a clear-walled and domed chamber that reminded Frank of the bubble dome of the Ares . On the second day of the trip he joined the car’s other passengers (only twenty on this one, there weren’t too many people going this way) and they took the car’s own little interior elevator up the thirty stories to this clear penthouse, to see Phobos pass. The outer perimeter of the room was set out over the elevator proper, so there was a view down as well. Frank stared down at the curved line of the planet’s horizon, much whiter and thicker than the last time he had seen it. Atmosphere at 150 millibars now, really quite impressive, even if it was composed of poison gas.

While they were waiting for the little moon’s appearance Frank stared at the planet below. The gossamer arrow of the cable pointed straight down at it; it looked like they were rising on a tall slender rocket, a strange attenuated rocket which stretched some kilometers above and below them. That was all they would ever see of the cable. And below them the round orange floor of Mars looked just as blank as it had on their first approach so long ago, unchanged despite all their meddling. One only had to get far enough away.

Then one of the elevator pilots pointed out Phobos, a dim white object to the west. In ten minutes it was upon them, flashing past with astonishing speed, a large gray potato hurtling faster than the head could turn. Zip! Gone. The observers in the penthouse hooted, exclaimed, chattered. Frank had caught only the merest glimpse of the dome on Stickney, winking like a gem in the rock. And there had been a piste banding the middle like a wedding ring, and some bright silver lumps; that was all he could recall of the blurred image. Fifty kilometers away when it passed, the pilot said. At 7,000 kilometers an hour. Not all that fast, actually, there were meteors that hit the planet at 50,000 kilometers an hour. But fast enough.

Frank went back down to the dining floor, trying to fix the hurtling image in his mind. Phobos: people at the dining table next to him talked of shoving it up into a braided orbit with Deimos. It was out of the loop now, a new Azores, nothing but an inconvenience to the cable. And Phyllis had argued all along that Mars itself would have suffered the same fate in the solar system at large, unless the elevator were built to climb its gravity well; they would have been bypassed by miners going to the metal-rich asteroids, which had no gravity wells to contend with. And then there were the moons of Jupiter, Saturn, the outer planets. .

But there was no danger of that now.

On the fifth day they approached Clarke and slowed down. It had been an asteroid about two kilometers across, a carbonaceous hunk now shaped to a cube, with every centimeter of its Mars-facing surface graded and covered with concrete, steel, or glass. The cable plunged right into the center of this assemblage; there were holes on both sides of the joint where cable met moon, just big enough to allow passage to the elevator cars.

They slid up into one of these holes and came to a smooth stop. The interior space they slid into was like a vertical subway station. The passengers got out and went their ways into the tunnels of Clarke. One of Phyllis’s assistants met him and drove him in a little car through a warren of rock-walled tunnels. They came to Phyllis’s offices, which were rooms on the planet side of the moon, walled with mirrors and green bamboo. Though they were almost in microgravity and only drifting very slowly away from Mars, they stood on that floor and rip-ripped around in velcro shoes. A rather conservative practice, but to be expected in such an Earth-regarding place. Frank exchanged his shoes for some Velcro slippers by the door and followed suit.

Phyllis was just finishing a talk with a couple of men. “Not only a cheap and clean lift out of the gravity well, but a propulsion system for slinging loads all over the solar system! It’s an extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering, don’t you think?”

“Yes!” the men replied.

She looked about fifty years old. After fulsome introductions— the men were from Amex— the others left. When Phyllis and Frank were the only ones left in the room, Frank said to her, “You’d better stop using this extraordinarily elegant piece of engineering to flood Mars with emigrants, or it’ll blow up in your face and you’ll lose your anchoring point.”

“Oh Frank.” She laughed. She really had aged well: hair silver, face handsomely lined and taut, figure trim. Neat as a pin in a rust jumpsuit and lots of gold jewelry, which together with her silver hair gave her an overall metallic sheen. She even looked at Frank through gold wire-rimmed glasses, an affectation that distanced her from the room, as if she were focusing on flat video images on the insides of her spectacles.

“You can’t send down so many so fast,” he insisted. “There’s no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What’s developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, they’re like refugee camps or forced labor camps, and it’ll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies to Terran situations. And that’s bound to hurt you.”

She stared at a spot about three feet in front of him. “Most people don’t see it that way,” she proclaimed, as if the room were full of listeners. “This is just a step on the path to full human use of Mars. It’s here for us and we’re going to use it. Earth is desperately crowded, and the mortality rate is still dropping. Science and faith will continue to create new opportunities as they always have. These first pioneers may suffer some hardships, but those won’t last long. We lived worse than they do now, when we first arrived.”

Startled at this lie, Frank glared at her. But she did not back down. Scornfully he said, “You’re not paying attention!” But the thought frightened him, and he paused.

He brought himself back under control, stared through the clear ceiling at the planet. As they were rotating with it they always looked up at Tharsis, of course, and from this distance it looked like one of the old photographs, the orange ball with all the familiar markings of its most famous hemisphere: the great volcanoes, Noctis, the canyons, the chaos, all unblemished. “When was the last time you went down?” he asked her.