The Complete Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

Eventually they led him back to the station. Pausing in the door, Frank didn’t know what to say to them. Quite a crowd had gathered, people had recognized him or been called or drawn to the group. “I’ll see what I can do,” he muttered, and ducked through the passage lock.

Thoughtlessly he stared into tents as he rode a train back up. There was one fitted with coffin hotels, Tokyo style. That would be much more crowded than El Paso, but did its occupants care about that? Some people were used to being treated like ball bearings. A lot of people, in fact. But on Mars it was supposed to be different!

Back in Sheffield he stalked the rim concourse, staring out at the thin vertical line of the elevator, ignoring other people and forcing some of them to jump out of his way as he paced. Once he stopped and looked around at the crowd; there were perhaps five hundred people in view at that moment, living their lives. When had it gotten like this? They had been a scientific outpost, a handful of researchers, scattered over a world with as much land surface as the Earth: a whole Eurasia, Africa, America, Australia, and Antarctica, all for them. All that land was still out there, but what percentage of it was under tents and habitable? Much less than one percent. And yet what was UNOMA saying? A million people here already, with more on the way. And so police, and crime – or rather, crime without police. A million people and no law, no law but corporate law. The bottom line. Minimize expenses, maximize profits. Run smoothly on ball bearings.

The next week a set of tents on the south slope went on strike. Chalmers heard about it on his way to the office, Slusinski actually breaking in on his walk with a call. The striking tents were mostly American, and his staff was in a panic. “They’ve closed the stations and aren’t allowing anyone off the trains, so they can’t be controlled unless their emergency locks are stormed — ”

“Shut up.”

Frank went down the south piste to the striking tents, ignoring Slusinski’s objections. In fact he ordered several of the staff down to join him.

A team from Sheffield security was standing in the station, but he ordered them to get on the train and leave, and after a consultation with the Sheffield administrators, they did. At the passage lock he identified himself and asked to come in alone. They let him through.

He emerged in the main square of another tent, surrounded by a sea of angry faces. “Kill the TVs,” he suggested. “Let’s talk in private. ”

They killed the TVs. It was the same as in El Paso, different accents but the same complaints. His earlier visit gave him the ability to anticipate what they were going to say, to say it before they did. He watched grimly as their faces revealed how impressed they were by this ability. They were young.

“Look, it’s a bad situation,” he said after they had talked for an hour. “But if you strike for long, you’ll only make it worse. They’ll send in security and it won’t be like living with gangs and police among you, it’ll be like living in prison. You’ve made your point already, and now you’ve got to know when to let off and negotiate. Form a committee to represent you, and make a list of complaints and demands. Document all the incidents of crime, just write them down and get the victims to sign the statements. I’ll make good use of them. It’s going to take work at UNOMA and back home, because they’re breaking the treaty.”

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 they 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 gazed down at the curved line of the planet’s horizon, much whiter and thicker than the last time he had seen it. Atmosphere at one hundred fifty 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 seven thousand kilometers an hour. Not all that fast, actually; there were meteors that hit the planet at fifty thousand 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 in microgravity and pulling themselves around, they stood on a consensus floor as established by the furniture, rip-ripping 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 talking to 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, 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 floor at the planet. As they were rotating with it they always looked down on Tharsis, of course, and from this high 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.

“LS 60. I go down regularly.” She smiled.

“Where do you stay when you descend?”

“In UNOMA dorms.” Where she worked busily to break the UN treaty.

But that was her job, that was what UNOMA had assigned her to do. Elevator manager, and also the primary liaison with the mining concerns. When she quit the UN, she could take all the jobs she could handle from them. Queen of the elevator. Which was now the bridge for the greater part of the Martian economy. She’d have at her disposal all the capital of whatever transnationals she chose to associate with.

And all this showed, of course, in the way she rip-ripped around the brilliant glassine room, in the way she smiled at all his withering remarks. Well, she always had been a little stupid. Frank gritted his teeth. Apparently it was time to start using the good old USA like a sledgehammer, see if it had any heft remaining in it.

“Most of the transnationals have giant holdings in the States,” he said. “If the American government decided to freeze their assets, because they were breaking the treaty, it would slow down all of them, and break some.”

“You could never do that,” Phyllis said. “It would bankrupt the government.”

“That’s like threatening a dead man with hanging. A couple more zeroes on the figure are just one more level of unreality, no one can really imagine it anymore. The only ones who even think they can are exactly your transnational executives. They hold the debt, but no one else cares about their money. I could convince Washington of this in a minute, and then you just see how it blows up in your face. Whichever way it does, it wrecks your game. “ He waved a hand angrily. “At which point someone else will occupy these rooms, and,” a sudden intuition, “you’ll be back in Underhill.”

That got her attention, no doubt about it. Her easy contempt took on a sudden edge. “No single person can convince Washington of anything. It’s quicksand down there. You’ll have your say and I’ll have mine, and we’ll see who has more influence.” And she rip-ripped across the room and opened the door, and loudly welcomed a gang of UN officials.

So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough; he would prove her wrong. On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new president would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.

Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd: it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him: running along a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One g. Funny how the body remembered it.

Once resettled in Sheffield he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn, he was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponents. Three weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Armscor. He was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.

He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quarters. And two days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded supply for the time being. They would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but also they would have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.

Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a café over his solitary dinner. He grinned wolfishly as he chewed. “So we see who’s better at wrestling in quicksand, you bitch.” He finished eating and went for a walk along the rim concourse. It was only one battle, he knew. And it was going to be a bitter long war. But still, it was nice.

Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in; and the Russians next door did the same.

A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the roadbuilding subdivision of Praxis, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric, killed three men in each tent and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil: they had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through in their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.

Enraged and disgusted, Frank went down again to deal with it in person. He had to ignore not only the standard objections of his staff, but also the new factor’s prohibition (Helmut had been called back to Earth); and once at the station he also had to face down the UNOMA police head, no easy task. Never before had he tried to rely so heavily on the charisma of the first hundred, and it made him furious. In the end he had to simply walk through the policemen, a crazy old man striding through all civilized restraint. And no one there cared to stop him, not this time.

The crowd inside the tent looked ugly indeed on the monitors, but he banged on their passage lock door and finally was let in, into a crush of angry young men and women. He walked through the inner lock door and breathed hot stale air. So many people were shouting he could make nothing out, but the ones in front recognized him and were clearly surprised to see him there. A couple of them cheered.

“All right! I’m here!” he shouted. Then: “Who speaks for you?”