Green Mars(101)

“Think about it, Sax. For a while people are forced to stay in the cities, which is convenient if you want to keep control of things. You burn cuts with this flying magnifying glass, and fairly quickly you have your one-bar atmosphere, and your warm wet planet. Then you have some method for scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide— they must have something in mind, industrial or biological or both. Something they can sell, no doubt. And presto, you have another Earth, and very quickly. It might be expensive—”

“It’s definitely expensive! All these big projects must be setting the transnationals back by huge amounts, and they’re doing it even though we’re a good step on the way to two-seventy-three K. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe they feel two-seventy-three is too modest. An average of freezing is a bit chilly, after all. Kind of a Sax Russell vision of terraforming, you might call that. Practical, but . . .” He cackled. “Or maybe they’re feeling rushed. Earth is in a mess, Sax.”

“I know that,” Sax said sharply. “I’ve been studying it.”

“Good for you! No, really. So you know that the people who haven’t got the treatment are getting desperate— they’re getting older, and their chances of ever getting it seem to be getting worse. And the people who have gotten the treatment, especially the ones at the top, are looking around trying to figure out what to do. Sixty-one taught them what can happen if things get out of control. So they’re buying up countries like bad mangoes at the end of market day. But it doesn’t seem to be helping. And here right next door they see a fresh empty planet, not quite ready for occupation, but close. Full of potential. It could be a new world. Beyond the reach of the untreated billions.”

Sax thought it over. “A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there’s trouble.”

“Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.”

“Ah,” Sax said. And was silent all the way back.



• • •

Desmond accompanied him back into Burroughs, and as they walked from South Station to Hunt Mesa, they could see across the treetops of Canal Park, through the slot between Branch Mesa and Table Mountain to Black Syrtis. “Are they really doing things as stupid as that all over Mars?” Sax said.

Desmond nodded. “I will bring you a list next time.”

“Do that.” Sax shook his head as he pondered it. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t take into account the long run.”

“They are short-run thinkers.”

“But they’re going to live a long time! Presumably they’ll still be in charge when these policies collapse on them!”

“They may not see it that way. They change jobs a lot up at the top. They try to establish a reputation by building a company very quickly, then get hired upward somewhere else, then try to do it again. It’s musical chairs up there.”

“It won’t matter what chair they’re in, it’s the whole room that’s going to come down! They aren’t paying attention to the laws of physics!”

“Of course not! Haven’t you noticed that before, Sax?”

“. . . I guess not.”

Of course he had seen that human affairs were irrational and unexplainable. This no one could miss. But he realized now that he had been making the assumption that the people who involved themselves in governance were making a good-faith effort to run things in a rational manner, with a view to the long-term well-being of humanity and its biophysical support system. Desmond laughed at him as he tried to express this, and irritably he exclaimed, “But why else take on such compromised work, if not to that end?”

“Power,” Desmond said. “Power and gain.”

“Ah.”

Sax had always been so uninterested in those things that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one’s options, and reduce one’s freedom. One became a servant of one’s wealth or power, constrained to spend all one’s time protecting it. So that properly seen, the freedom of a scientist with a lab at his command was the highest freedom possible. Any more wealth and power only interfered with that.

Desmond was shaking his head as Sax described this philosophy. “Some people like to tell others what to do. They like that more than freedom. Hierarchy, you know. And their place in the hierarchy. As long as it’s high enough. Everyone bound into their places. It’s safer than freedom. And a lot of people are cowards.”