opened the refrigerator door briefly and John caught a glimpse of more spiky growths; either he kept experiments in there, or else his snack food had suffered a truly virulent eruption of mold. John said, “You can see why most of the attacks have been on the moholes. They’re the easiest project to attack.”
Sax tilted his head to the side. “Are they?”
“Think about it. Your little windmills are everywhere, there’s nothing to be done about them.”
“People are disabling them. We’ve had reports.”
“What, a dozen? And how many are out there, a hundred thousand? They’re junk, Sax. Litter. Your worst idea.” And nearly fatal to his project, in fact, because of the algae dishes Sax had hidden in some of them. All of that algae had died, apparently— but if it hadn’t, and if anyone had been able to prove Sax had been responsible for its dissemination, he could have lost his job. It was yet another indication that Sax’s logical manner was a front.
Now his nose was wrinkled. “They add up to a terawatt a year.”
“And knocking a few apart won’t do anything to that. As for the other physical operations, the black snow algae is on the northern polar cap, and can’t be removed. The dawn and dusk mirrors are in orbit, and it’s not so easy to knock them out.”
“Someone did it to Pythagoras.”
“True, but we know who it was, and there’s a security team following her.”
“She may never lead them to anyone else. They may be able to afford to expend a person per act, I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Yeah, but some simple changes in screening personnel would make it impossible for anyone to smuggle any tools aboard.”
“They could use what’s out there.” Sax shook his head. “The mirrors are vulnerable.”
“Okay. More than some projects, anyway.”
“Those mirrors are adding thirty calories per square centimeter per sol,” Sax said. “And more all the time.” Almost all the freighters from Earth were sunsailers now, and when they arrived in the Martian system they were linked to large collections of earlier arrivals parked in areosynchronous orbit, and programmed to swivel so that they reflected their light onto the terminators, adding a little bit of energy to each day’s dawn and dusk. The whole arrangement had been coordinated by Sax’s office, and he was proud of it.
“We’ll increase security for all the maintenance crews,” John said.
“So. Increased security on the mirrors and at the moholes.”
“Yes. But that’s not all.”
Sax sniffed. “What do you mean?”
“Well, the problem is that it isn’t just the terraforming projects per se that are potential targets. I mean, the nuclear reactors are part of the project too in their way; they provide a lot of your power, and they’re pumping out heat like the furnaces they are. If one of them were to go, it would cause all kinds of fallout, more political even than physical.”
The vertical lines between Sax’s eyes reached up nearly to his hairline. John held out his palms. “Not my fault. That’s just the way it is.”
Sax said, “AI, take a note. Look into reactor security.”
“Note taken,” one of the Schillers said, sounding just like Sax.
“And that’s not the worst,” John said. Sax twitched, glared furiously at the floor. “The bioengineering labs.”
Sax’s mouth became a tight line.
“New organisms are being cooked up daily,” John went on, “and it might be possible to create something that would kill everything else on the planet.”
Sax blinked. “Let’s hope none of these people think like you.”
“I’m just trying to think like them.”
“AI, take a note. Biolab security.”
“Of course Vlad and Ursula and their group have stuck suicide genes into everything they’ve made,” John said. “But those are meant to stop oversuccess, or mutational accidents. If someone were to deliberately circumvent them, and concoct something that fed on oversuccess, we could be in trouble.”
“I see that.”
“So. The labs, the reactors, the moholes, the mirrors. It could be worse.”
Sax rolled his eyes. “I’m glad you think so. I’ll talk to Helmut about it. I’ll be seeing him soon anyway. It looks like they’re going to approve Phyllis’s elevator at the next UNOMA session. That will cut the costs of terraforming tremendously.”
“Eventually it will, but the initial investment must be huge.”
Sax shrugged. “Push an Amor asteroid into orbit, set up a robot factory, let it go to work. It’s not as expensive as you might think.”
John rolled his eyes. “Sax, who’s paying for all this?”
Sax tilted his head, blinked. “The sun.”
John stood, suddenly hungry. “Then the sun calls the shots. Remember that.”
Mangalavid broadcast six hours of local amateur video every evening, a weird grab bag of stuff that John watched every chance he got. So after building a big green salad in the kitchen he went to the window room on the dorm floor, and watched while eating, glancing from time to time at the florid sunset over Ascraeus. The first ten minutes of that evening’s broadcast had been shot by a sanitary engineer working on a waste processing plant in Chasma Borealis. Her voice-over was enthusiastic but boring, “What’s nice is we can pollute all we want with certain materials, oxygen, ozone, nitrogen, argon, steam, some biota— which gives us leeway we didn’t have back home, we just keep grinding what they give us till we can let it loose.” Back home, John said to himself. A newcomer. After her there was an attempt at a karate bout, both hilarious and beautiful at the same time; and then twenty minutes of some Russians staging
John shut off the TV and took the elevator down to the dorm. He got into bed and relaxed. Karate as ballet. The newcomers were all still engineers, construction workers, scientists of all kinds. But they didn’t seem as single-minded as the first hundred, and that was probably good. They still had a scientific mindset and worldview, they were practical, empirical, rational; one could hope that the selection process on Earth was still working against fanaticism, sending up people with a kind of traveling-Swiss sensibility, practical but open to new possibilities, able to form new loyalties and beliefs. Or so he hoped. He knew by now it was a bit naive. You only had to look at the first hundred to realize scientists could become as fanatical as anybody else, maybe more so; educations too narrowly focused, perhaps. Hiroko’s team disappearing. . Out there in the wild rock somewhere, lucky bastards. . He fell asleep.
He worked at Echus Overlook a few days more, then got a call from Helmut Bronski in Burroughs, who wanted to confer with him about the new arrivals from Earth. John decided to take the train to Burroughs and see Helmut in person.
The night before his departure, he went to see Sax in his labs. When he walked in Sax said in his monotone, “We’ve found an Amor asteroid that’s ninety percent ice, in an orbit that will bring it near Mars in three years. Just what I’ve been looking for, in fact.” His plan was to place a robot-controlled mass driver on an ice asteroid and push it into an aerobraking orbit around Mars, thus burning it up in the atmosphere. This would satisfy UNOMA protocols forbidding the kind of mass destruction that a direct impact would cause, but it would still add huge quantities of water and separated hydrogen and oxygen to the atmosphere, thickening it with precisely the gases they needed most. “It could raise the atmospheric pressure by as much as fifty millibars.”
“You’re kidding!” The pre-arrival average at the datum had been between seven and ten millibars (Earth’s sea level averaged 1,013), and all their efforts so far had only raised the average to around fifty. “One iceball will double the atmospheric pressure?”
“That’s what the simulations indicate. Of course with the initial level so low, doubling is not as impressive
