Realizing he needed a break, Hawkes decided to work within his brain for a while, just to figure out for himself what he had learned. The first thing that came to mind was the fact that everyone at the table had seemed prepared. That had been a disappointment; he would have liked to find a link between one of the parties and the pirate raid.
The interrogation of the pirates taken prisoner—both on board the Bulldog and subsequently on Mars—had yielded nothing of value. Finally, with Hawkes's approval, standing Martian law was followed and the prisoners were taken away to Recycle.
Most of them had been quite stoic about the sentence. A few had cried out in rage and disbelief until they had been removed from earshot. Sitting alone in his chambers a day later, the ambassador could still hear them in the back of his mind.
Angrily, he silenced the sentimental side of his nature, reminding himself that they were mercenaries who had taken on the job of wholesale murder. He did think the pirate attack pointed a definite finger, however. He was beginning to feel that the source of the attacks on him had to be Earth.
The first two attempts on his life had been made on Earth. The third had been an all-out try to keep him from Mars, and must have seemed guaranteed to succeed.
I've been here awhile and no one's tried anything. It could just be that they spent big and now they have to regroup. But I get the feeling this is Earth inspired. The AWF—why? What would be the profit? The workers . . . how could they have paid for any of it?
Absently pushing aside papers and memory report chips, the ambassador closed his eyes, trying to squeeze the fatigue out of them. As he did, he thought, Earth League . . . there's the place to look for the kind of money it takes to orchestrate a deep-space assault . . . or, he added, remembering the attack on his ranch, recruit a mercenary force of supposed dead men, for that matter.
Feeling a bit more secure, Hawkes shoved aside his own concerns for the moment, deciding to get back to organizing everything he had learned about the Martian situation. As he did, he was actually surprised at just how much everyone concerned seemed to agree on.
Point number one . . . the colonists who first came to Mars had done so thirty-four years earlier. It had been understood that life would be underground and communal for the first decade. After that, family units would be made available for those workers who wanted to live privately. After another decade, domed areas were to be completed, in which people could live on the surface.
There was no disputing this. Everyone had copies of the first agreement. Unfortunately, the outer domes were now fourteen years late in being completed.
Hawkes thought for a moment of living in tunnels for thirty-four years. Of never seeing the sun, smelling fresh air, running through grass, feeling the wind in your face, eating an apple pulled down from a tree . . . ten thousand thoughts flashed through his brain in an instant, ten thousand images and sensations that could not be seen or felt or indulged in by those who had come to settle Mars.
By those who had been born on Mars.
Who had never known anything but Mars.
It was a horrifying feeling to him—the thought of children growing up in caverns . . . comfortable caverns . . . clean caverns with piped-in water and food and light, caverns with a television that would pour out entertainment of any and all sorts . . . if one could afford them. Which led Hawkes to point number two.
Another thing that everyone agreed on was that the pay was extremely bad on Mars. For years the rewards for meeting quotas had been cut over and over. Here the ambassador found his disagreements cropping up.
Red Planet claimed that their expenses had turned out to be much greater than those initially projected. It was true that now they were supplying more than half the Earth's food, and through the AWF almost half the Earth's raw materials. But the cost of building the colony—living quarters; factories; the vast, continent-spanning sponge/mush vats—had yet to be paid off. Red Planet had scaled back actual pay and, for decades, had been making up the balance with shares in the company.
What it meant was that the workers were rich, but only on paper. By rights, they all should be living like royalty. The problem was that until the colony's managing company began to turn a profit, their stock—sheltered separately from the Earth League's other holdings—was worthless. A good hedge against the future for the corpor/ nationals, which had invested together to create Red Planet, but worthless to the people dying to pay off the ever-spiraling debt the company had incurred in the act of creating itself.
Red Planet's output seemed to Hawkes to be the third major point. Once again, there was no disagreement— Mars was feeding, clothing, and sheltering the Earth. The ambassador could not even begin to imagine what would happen if production on Mars were suddenly to halt. But that was what talk of strikes and revolt was threatening to bring about.
On Earth, a number of the corpor/nationals had begun to grow leery of their investment. For decades, blocks of Red Planet stock had been traded back and forth on a regular basis like any other recognized currency. Lately, however, people were beginning to find it harder to interest anyone in taking even a fraction of the stock load they would have in days gone
