Martian Time-Slip (15 page)

“You will,” Jack said. “Possibly tomorrow.”

They stood for a moment longer, and then they walked back into the house. “Does Silvia still take dope?” Leo asked.

“Dope!” He laughed. “Phenobarbital. Yes, she does.”

“Such a nice girl,” Leo said. “Too bad she's so tense and worries so much. And helping that unfortunate widow next door, like you were telling me.” In the living room, Leo seated himself in Jack's easy chair, crossed his legs and leaned back, sighing, making himself comfortable so that he could continue talking…he definitely had much more to say, on a variety of subjects, and he intended to say it.

In bed, Silvia lay almost lost in sleep, her faculties doused by the 100 milligram tablet of phenobarbital which she had taken, as usual, upon retiring. Vaguely, she had heard the murmur of her husband's and her father-in-law's voices from the yard; once, their tone became sharp and she had sat up, alarmed.

Are they going to bicker? she asked herself. God, I hope not; I hope Leo's stay isn't going to disrupt things. However, their voices had sunk back down, and now she rested easily once more.

He certainly is a fine old man, she thought. Much like Jack, only more set in his ways.

Lately, since he had started working for Arnie Kott, her husband had changed. No doubt it was the eerie job which he had been given; the mute, autistic Steiner boy upset her, and she had been sorry from the first to see him appear. Life was complicated enough already. The boy flitted in and out of the house, always running on his toes, his eyes always darting as if he saw objects not present, heard sounds beyond the normal range. If only time could be turned back and Norbert Steiner could be somehow restored to life! If only…

In her drugged mind she saw, in a flash, that ineffectual little man setting out in the morning with his suitcases of wares, salesman off on his rounds, yogurt and blackstrap molasses.

Is he still alive somewhere? Perhaps Manfred saw him, lost as the boy was—according to Jack—in disfigured time. What a surprise is in store for them when they make contact with the boy and find they have rekindled that sad little specter…but more likely their theory is right, and it is the next, he sees the next. They will have what they want. Why is it, Jack? What do you want it for, Jack? Affinity between you and that ill child. That it? Oh…Her thoughts gave way to darkness.

And then what? Will you care about me again?

No affinity between the sick and the sound. You are different; it weighs me down. Leo knows it, I know it. Do you? Care?

She slept.

High in the sky circled meat-eating birds. At the base of the windowed building lay their excrement. He picked up the wads until he held several. They twisted and swelled like dough, and he knew there were living creatures within; he carried them carefully into the empty corridor of the building. One wad opened, parted with a split in its woven, hairlike side; it became too large to hold, and he saw it now in the wall. A compartment where it lay on its side, the rent so wide that he perceived the creature within.

Gubbish! A worm, coiled up, made of wet, bony-white pleats, the inside gubbish worm, from a person's body. If only the high-flying birds could find it and eat it down, like that. He ran down the steps, which gave beneath his feet. Boards missing. He saw down through the sieve of wood to the soil beneath, the cavity, dark, cold, full of wood so rotten that it lay in damp powder, destroyed by gubbish-rot.

Arms lifted up, tossed him to the circling birds; he floated up, falling at the same time. They ate his head off. And then he stood on a bridge over the sea. Sharks showed in the water, their sharp, cutting fins. He caught one on his line and it came sliding up from the water, mouth open, to swallow him. He stepped back, but the bridge caved in and sagged so that the water reached his middle.

It rained gubbish, now; all was gubbish, wherever he looked. A group of those who didn't like him appeared at the end of the bridge and held up a loop of shark teeth. He was emperor. They crowned him with the loop, and he tried to thank them. But they forced the loop down past his head to his neck, and they began to strangle him. They knotted the loop and the shark teeth cut his head off. Once more he sat in the dark, damp basement with the powdery rot around him, listening to the tidal water lap-lapping everywhere. A world where gubbish ruled, and he had no voice; the shark teeth had cut his voice out.

I am Manfred, he said.

“I tell you,” Arnie Kott said to the girl beside him in the wide bed, “you're really going to be delighted when we make contact with him—I mean, we got an inside track, there: we got the future, and where else do you think things happen except in the future?”

Stirring, Doreen Anderton murmured.

“Don't go to sleep,” Arnie said, leaning over to light another cigarette. “Listen, guess what—a big-time land speculator came over from Earth, today; we had a union guy at the rocket terminal, and he recognized him, although naturally the speculator registered under an assumed name. We checked with the carrier, and he got right out of there, eluding our guy. I predicted they'd be showing up! Listen, when we hear from that Steiner kid, it'll blow the lid off this whole thing. Right?” He shook the sleeping girl. “If you don't wake up,” Arnie said, “I'm gonna shove you right out of bed on your ass, and you can walk home to your apartment.”

Doreen groaned, turned over, sat up. In the dim light of Arnie Kott's master bedroom, she sat palely translucent, tucking her hair back from her eyes and yawning. One strap of her nightgown slipped down her arm, and Arnie saw with appreciation her high, hard left breast with its gem of a nipple set dead-center.

Gosh, I really got a gal, Arnie said to himself. She's really something. And she's done a terrific job in keeping that Bohlen from shucking it all and wandering off, the way those hebephrenic schizophrenics do—I mean, it's almost impossible to keep them at the grindstone, they're so moody and irresponsible. That guy Bohlen; he's an idiot savant, an idiot who can fix things, and we have to cater to his idiocy, we have to yield. You can't force a guy like that; he don't force. Arnie took hold of the covers and tossed them aside, off Doreen; he smiled at her bare legs, smiled to see her draw her nightgown down to her knees.

“How can you be tired?” he asked her. “You ain't done nothin’ but lie. Isn't that so? Is lying there so hard?”

She eyed him narrowly. “No more,” she said.

“What?” he said. “You kidding? We just begun. Take off that nightgown.” Catching it by the hem he whisked it back up once more; he put his arm beneath her, lifted her up, and in an instant had it off over her head. He deposited it on the chair by the bed.

“I'm going to sleep,” Doreen said, closing her eyes. “If you don't mind.”

“Why should I mind?” Arnie said. “You're still there, aren't you? Awake or asleep—you're plenty there in the flesh, and how.”

“Ouch,” she protested.

“Sorry.” He kissed her on the mouth. “Didn't mean to hurt you.”

Her head lolled; she actually was going to sleep. Arnie felt offended. But what the hell—she never did much anyhow.

“Put my nightgown back on me,” Doreen murmured, “when you're through.”

“Yeah, well I'm not through.” I'm good for an hour more, Arnie said to himself. Maybe even two. I sort of like it this way, too. A woman asleep don't talk. That's what spoils it, when they start to talk. Or make those moans. He could never stand the moans.

He thought, I'm dying to get results on that project of Bohlen's. I can't wait; I know we're going to hear something really downright wonderful when we do start hearing. The closed-up mind of that kid; think of all the treasures it contains. Must be like fairyland, in there, all beautiful and pure and real innocent.

In her half-sleep Doreen moaned.

9

Into Leo Bohlen's hand his son Jack put a large green seed. Leo examined it, handed it back.

“What did you see?” Jack asked.

“I saw it, the seed.”

“Did anything happen?”

Leo pondered, but he could not think of anything he had seen happen, so at last he said, “No.”

Seated at the movie projector, Jack said, “Now watch.” He snapped off the lights in the room, and then, on the screen, an image appeared as the projector whirred. It was a seed, embedded in soil. As Leo watched, the seed split open. Two probing feelers appeared; one started upward, the other divided into fine hairs and groped down. Meanwhile, the seed revolved in the soil. Enormous projections unfolded from the upward moving feeler, and Leo gasped.

“Say, Jack,” he said, “some seeds you got here on Mars; look at it go. My gosh, it's working away like mad.”

Jack said, “That's a plain ordinary lima bean, the same as I gave you just now. This film is speeded up, five days compressed into seconds. We can now see the motion that goes on in a germinating seed; normally, the process takes place too slowly for us to see any motion at all.”

“Say, Jack,” Leo said, “that's really something. So this kid's time-rate is like this seed. I understand. Things that we can see move would whiz around him so darn fast they'd be practically invisible, and I bet he sees slow processes like this seed here; I bet he can go out in the yard and sit down and watch the plants growing, and five days for him is like say ten minutes for us.”

Jack said, “That's the theory, anyhow.” He went on, then, to explain to Leo how the chamber worked. The explanation was filled with technical terms, however, which Leo did not understand, and he felt a little irritable as Jack droned on. The time was eleven
A.M.,
and still Jack showed no sign of taking him on his trip over the F.D.R. Mountains; he seemed completely immersed in this.

“Very interesting,” Leo murmured, at one point.

“We take a tape recording, done at fifteen inches per second, and run it off for Manfred at three and three-fourths inches per second. A single word, such as ’tree.’ And at the same time we flash up a picture of a tree and the word beneath it, a still, which we keep in sight for fifteen or twenty minutes. Then what Manfred says is recorded at three and three-fourths inches per second, and for our own listening we speed it up and replay at fifteen.”

Leo said, “Listen, Jack, we just gotta get going on that trip.”

“Christ,” Jack said, “this is my job.” He gestured angrily. “I thought you wanted to meet him—he'll be over here any time now. She sends him over—”

Breaking in, Leo said, “Look, son, I came millions of miles to have a look at that land. Now are we going to fly there or not?”

Jack said, “We'll wait until the boy comes, and we'll take him with us.”

“O.K.,” Leo said. He wanted to avoid friction; he was willing to compromise, at least as much as was humanly possible.

“My God, here you are for the first time in your life on the surface of another planet. I should think you'd want to walk around, take a look at the canal, the ditch.” Jack gestured over toward the right. “You haven't even glanced at it, and people have been wanting to see the canals—they've argued about their existence—for centuries!”

Feeling chagrined, Leo nodded dutifully. “Show me, then.” He followed Jack from the workshop, outdoors into the dull ruddy sunlight. “Cold,” Leo observed, sniffing the air. “Say, it's sure easy to walk around; I noticed that last night I felt like I weighed only fifty or sixty pounds. Must be because Mars is so small—right? Must be good for people with cardiac conditions, except the air's so thin. I thought last night it was the corned beef that made me—”

“Leo,” his son said, “be quiet and look around, will you?”

Leo looked around. He saw a flat desert with meager mountains in the far distance. He saw a deep ditch of sluggish brown water, and, beside the ditch, a mosslike vegetation, green. That was all, except for Jack's house and the Steiner house a little farther on. He saw the garden, but he had seen that last night.

“Well?” Jack said.

Being obliging, Leo said, “Very impressive, Jack. You've got a nice place here; a nice little modern place. A little more planting, landscaping, and I'd say it was perfect.”

Grinning at him crookedly, Jack said, “This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this.”

“I know that, son, and I'm exceptionally proud of what you've accomplished, you and that fine woman.” Leo nodded solemnly. “Now can we get started? Maybe you could go over to that other house where that boy is and get him, or did David go over? Maybe David's getting him; I don't see him around.”

“David's at school. He was picked up while you were sleeping.”

Leo said, “I don't mind going over and getting that boy, Manfred or whatever his name is, if it's O.K. with you.”

“Go ahead,” Jack said. “I'll come along.”

They walked past a small ditch of water, crossed an open field of sand and sparse fernlike plants, and arrived at the other house. Leo heard from within the sound of small girls’ voices. Without hesitation he ascended the steps to the porch and rang the bell.

The door opened and there stood a big, blond-haired woman with tired, pain-filled eyes. “Good morning,” Leo said, “I'm Jack Bohlen's dad; I guess you're the lady of the house. Say, we'll take your boy with us on a trip and bring him back safe and sound.”

The big blonde woman looked past him to Jack, who had come up on the porch; she said nothing, but turned and went off back into the interior of her house. When she returned she had a small boy with her. So this is the skizo little fellow, Leo thought. Nice-looking, you'd never know in a million years.

“We're going on a ride, young man,” Leo said to him. “How does that sound?” Then, remembering what Jack had said about the boy's time-sense, he repeated what he had said very slowly, dragging each word out.

The boy darted past him and shot down the steps and off toward the canal; he moved in a blur of speed and disappeared from sight behind the Bohlen house.

“Mrs. Steiner,” Jack said, “I want you to meet my father.”

The big blonde woman put out her hand vaguely; she did not seem to be all there herself, Leo observed. However, he shook hands with her. “Glad to meet you,” he said politely. “Sorry to hear about the loss of your husband; it's a terrible thing, something striking like that, without any warning. I knew a fella back in Detroit, good friend of mine, did the same thing one weekend; went out of the shop and said goodbye and that was the last anybody saw of him.”

Mrs. Steiner said, “How do you do, Mr. Bohlen.”

“We'll go round up Manfred,” Jack said to her. “We should be home late this afternoon.”

As Leo and his son walked back, the woman remained where she was on the porch, looking after them.

“Pretty odd herself,” Leo murmured. Jack said nothing.

They located the boy, standing off by himself in David's overflow garden, and presently the three of them were in the Yee Company ’copter, flying above the desert in the direction of the line of mountains to the north. Leo unfolded a great map which he had brought with him and began to make marks on it.

“I guess we can talk freely,” he said to Jack, nodding his head toward the boy. “He won't—” He hesitated. “You know.”

“If he understands us,” Jack said drily, “it'll be—”

“O.K., O.K.,” Leo said, “I just wanted to be sure.” He carefully refrained from marking the place on the map that he had heard would be the UN site. But he did mark their route, using the gyrocompass reading visible on the dashboard of the ’copter. “What rumors have you heard, son?” he asked. “About UN interest in the F.D.R. range?”

Jack said, “Something about a park or a power station.”

“Want to know exactly what it is?”

“Sure.”

Leo reached into his inside coat pocket and brought out an envelope. From it he took a photograph, which he handed to Jack. “Does this remind you of anything?”

Glancing at it, Jack saw that it was a picture of a long, thin building. He stared at it a long time.

“The UN,” Leo said, “is going to build these. Multiple-unit dwellings. Whole tracks of them, mile after mile, with shopping centers, complete—supermarkets, hardware stores, drugstores, laundries, ice cream parlors. All built by slave equipment, those construction automatons that feed themselves their own instructions.”

Presently, Jack said, “It looks like the co-op apartment house I lived in years ago when I had my breakdown.”

“Exactly. The co-op movement will be in with the UN on this. These F.D.R. Mountains were once fertile, as everybody knows; there was plenty of water here. The UN hydraulic engineers believe they can bring enormous quantities of water up to the surface from the table below. The water table is closer to the surface in these mountains than anywhere else on Mars; this is the original water source for the canal network, the UN engineers believe.”

“The co-op,” Jack said in a strange voice, “here on Mars.”

“They'll be fine modern structures,” Leo said. “It's quite an ambitious project. The UN will be transporting people here free, providing their passage right to their new homes, and the cost of buying each unit will be small. It will take quite a big slice of these mountains, as you might guess, and as I heard it, they expect it to be ten to fifteen years before the project is completed.”

Jack said nothing.

“Mass emigration,” Leo said. “This will ensure it.”

“I guess so,” Jack said.

“The appropriations for this are fantastic,” Leo said. “The co-op alone is putting up almost a trillion dollars. It has huge reserves of cash, you know; it's one of the richest groups on Earth—it has greater assets than the insurance group or any of the big banking systems. There's not a chance in the world that with them in on it the thing could fail.” He added, “The UN has been negotiating with them for six years on this matter.”

Finally, Jack said, “What a change it will mean for Mars. Just to have the F.D.R. range fertile—that alone.”

“And densely populated,” Leo reminded him.

“It's hard to believe,” Jack said.

“Yeah, I know, boy, but there's no doubt of it; within another few weeks it'll be generally known. I knew it a month ago. I've been getting investors I know to put up risk capital…I represent them, Jack. Alone, I just don't have the money.”

Jack said, “You mean, your whole idea is to get here before the UN actually takes the land. You're going to buy it for very little and then resell it to the UN for much more.”

“We're going to buy it in great pieces,” Leo said, “and then at once subdivide. Cut it up into lots, say, one hundred feet by eighty. Title will be in the hands of a fairly large number of individuals: wives, cousins, employees, friends of the members of my group.”

“Of your syndicate,” Jack said.

“Yes, that's what it is,” Leo said, pleased. “A syndicate.”

After a time Jack said in a hoarse voice, “And you don't feel there's anything wrong with doing this?”

“Wrong in what sense? I don't get you, son.”

“Christ,” Jack said. “It's obvious.”

“Not to me. Explain.”

“You're gypping the entire population of Earth—they're the ones who'll have to put up all the money. You're increasing the costs of this project in order to make a killing.”

“But Jack, that's what's meant by land speculation.” Leo was puzzled. “What did you think land speculation was? It's been going on for centuries; you buy land cheap when nobody wants it because you believe for one reason or another that one day it will be worth a lot more. And it's inside tips that you go on. That's about all there is to go on, when you get down to it. Every land speculator in the world will be trying to buy in, when they get word; in fact they're doing that right now. I beat them here by a matter of days. It's this regulation that you have to actually be on Mars that gets them; they're not prepared at the drop of a hat to come here. So—they've missed out. Because by nightfall I expect to have put our deposit down on the land we want.” He pointed ahead of them. “It's in there. I've got all sorts of maps; I won't have any trouble locating it. The location of the piece is in a vast canyon area called the Henry Wallace. To comply with the law, I have to actually set foot on the piece I intend to buy, and place some permanent marker, fully identifiable, in an exposed spot. I have such a marker with me, a regulation steel stake which bears my name. We'll land in the Henry Wallace and you can help me drive the stake in. It's just a formality; it won't take more than a few minutes.” He smiled at his son.

Looking at his father, Jack thought,
He's insane.
But Leo smiled calmly at him, and Jack knew that his father was not insane, that it was exactly as he said: land speculators did this, it was their way of going about their business, and there really was such a mammoth UN–co-op project about to start. As shrewd and experienced a businessman as his father could not be wrong. Leo Bohlen, and the men with him, did not act on the basis of a rumor. They had top connections. There had been a leak, either at the co-op or the UN or both, and Leo was putting all his resources to work to take advantage of it.

“It's—the biggest news so far,” Jack said, “regarding the development of Mars.” He could still hardly believe it.

“Long overdue,” Leo said. “Should have taken place right from the start. But they expected private capital to be put up; they waited for the other fella to do it.”

“This will change the lives of everybody who lives on Mars,” Jack said. It would alter the balance of power, create a totally new ruling class: Arnie Kott, Bosley Touvim—the union settlements and the national settlements—would be small fry, once the co-op, in conjunction with the UN, had moved in.

Poor Arnie, he thought. He won't survive this. Time, progress, and civilization, all will have passed him by, Arnie and his steam baths that waste water, his tiny symbol of pomp.

“Now listen, Jack,” his father said, “don't spread this information around, because it's confidential. What we want to watch is crooked business at the abstract company—that's the outfit that records your title. I mean, we put up our deposit, and then other speculators, especially local ones here, get tipped off and then have pull at the abstract company, so it turns out—”