Analog SFF, November 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  I stared at him. “You're going to Cleveland?"

  "I leave next week."

  I set my sandwich back on my plate without taking a bite. NASA. Whittaker was going to work for NASA. I knew I should be happy for him—but couldn't he have waited another day or two to tell me? I had just dug my career into a pit, and now he was getting a chance I would have killed for. Glenn Research Center was the real thing—enough money to run a dozen full-time labs, cutting-edge research, the leading wave of humanity's bid for the stars.

  "Congratulations,” I said, trying to swallow my jealousy. I really was glad for him, and I couldn't think of anyone more perfect for the job. “Isn't the machine too big to be used in space?"

  He pointed a finger at me. “Bingo. That's why it's a multiyear project. We need a miniature, spaceworthy device that can do just enough processing to signal to the ground. If we can do it, and show it to be reliable, it'll replace a dozen different devices they use today."

  I started picking my bun into little pieces. “I suppose it will be important to NASA to know about the outliers in our results.” The bitterness crept into my voice. I couldn't help it.

  "Peter,” he said. “That's not all the good news."

  I tried to laugh goodnaturedly, but it came out wrong. “There's more?"

  "Listen.” He unfolded a sheet of paper from his shirt pocket, smoothed out the creases, and began to read. “'Given the importance of absolute reliability in space technology, we want researchers with an eye to detail, a commitment to thoroughness, and complete scientific integrity. As such, although first selection is yours, a board of senior staff members must review and approve each applicant.’”

  The hair on my arms prickled. “You get to handpick your team."

  He grinned at me. “They want someone with ‘scientific integrity.’”

  "Anybody you want."

  He shrugged. “If I can find anyone suitable. Do you know anyone with a ‘commitment to thoroughness'?"

  "Tell it to me straight,” I said.

  He coughed into his hand and adopted an official tone. “Peter Atterley, despite your adamant refusal to agree with me on every issue, you are hereby offered a place on my staff at the soon-to-be-created Sympathology Lab at the Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. And you're not allowed to say no."

  I fell against the back of my chair and laughed for real this time, panting in relief. “You jerk,” I said. “You strung me along."

  He shook his head, his great frame shaking. “You should have heard yourself—'I suppose NASA will want to know about those outliers...’”

  I didn't have any peanuts this time, so I threw my whole sandwich at him. Sliced meat and Velveeta exploded over his shirt and onto the floor. The manager came over to see what was the matter, and we couldn't answer him, we were both laughing so hard. When we finally apologized and walked out, leaving a 50 percent tip on the table, I put my hand on Whittaker's shoulder.

  "Permission to speak freely?"

  "Always,” he said, returning the gesture. “Always."

  Copyright (c) 2007 David Walton

  * * * *

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  THE PARADISE PROJECT by H. G. STRATMANN

  * * * *

  Illustrated by Mark Evans

  * * * *

  As the saying goes, first you have to get their attention....

  * * * *

  "RUN!"

  Martin Slayton glimpsed the panic and fear on Katerina's face as she turned and ran back toward the habitation module. His startled cry “What's the matter?” went unanswered as her slim figure raced toward the rusty plain they'd just crossed.

  Martin shivered as a cool breeze riffled his close-cropped black hair. The vast slab of steel-gray metal he stood on was even more unsettling and empty in the silence created by his fiancée's sudden flight. He frowned at the Cyrillic letters engraved in the alien metal at his feet, struggling to translate those words with the little Russian he knew. What message did they contain that could frighten Katerina into abandoning him?

  Giving up, Martin scrutinized the other blocks of writing on the platform. Each of the nearby meter-wide squares etched into its surface like a gigantic chessboard contained words in a different language. If Katerina was right and this artifact really was a huge version of the Rosetta Stone, one of these squares had to be in a language he could read.

  He stepped forward slowly, studying the squares—and then he spied the one in English. As his lips mouthed the words inside the square, Martin's expression twisted with fear and panic.

  He ran.

  Martin sprinted fifty meters before his boots leapt off the metal slab onto a patch of bare damp soil. He slipped and nearly fell before he regained traction and crunched onto rocky ground. His feet splashed through puddles of rainwater and trampled delicate lichenlike plants, fleeing from the unseen terrors spawned by his own imagination.

  His lungs burning in the dry air and legs cramping, Martin finally saw Katerina's blue jumpsuit wavering far in the distance. His long strides brought him ever closer to her as the Sun, only slightly smaller and dimmer than seen from Earth, glared mockingly down on him from a rose-tinged sky.

  Suddenly he was twelve years old again, watching a scary movie from the early 1950s about another twelve-year-old boy. Both of them were running from nightmarish monsters as a montage of memories flashed through their minds. The scent of death invaded Martin's brain as he remembered...

  * * * *

  "I always wanted to go to Mars. I never thought Mars would come to me!"

  A warm, wet Florida wind gently wafted Katerina Savitskaya's long auburn hair as she spoke, her hazel eyes elevated toward the clear moonless night sky. Her pose reminded Martin of Botticelli's “Birth of Venus.” The aquamarine shorts and halter top wrapped around her nicely rounded thirty-two-year-old figure added only a modicum of modesty to the picture.

  Martin, more conservatively attired in his light NASA uniform, handed his slightly shorter companion a pair of high-powered image-stabilizing binoculars. He said, “Let's hope we're seeing Mars even closer in three weeks."

  Far away across the empty field, pale lights illuminated the towering Ares VII rocket. In two days it would fling both of them to a rendezvous with the fourth planet. He and Katerina had been earthbound since their trip to the Lunar Sou
th Polar base at Shackleton Crater in ‘33. Though six months overdue, this first manned mission to Mars was now ready to launch. The engineers had finally managed to modify the habitation module to set its two-person crew on a world radically different from the one for which the module was originally designed.

  But Martin wasn't complaining. The time Katerina and he spent together more than compensated for the rigors of these last two years of training. Their interest in each other had long ago exceeded the organizational need to maintain cordial relations between his NASA and her Russian Space Agency. They were both the same age, never been married, and in love with space and each other.

  Not that they always thought alike. His opinion of the Russian Orthodox Reawakening of the ‘10s that had helped shaped her worldview was tepid at best. While he respected Katerina's religious beliefs, her old-fashioned moral standards played havoc with his libido. She insisted on waiting until this mission was over and a traditional church marriage ceremony when they returned to Earth before granting him the perks of a wedding night. But compared to the decades he hoped they'd have together to make up for lost time, another year was worth the wait.

  In the still of the night Katerina gazed upward and focused the binoculars on a brilliant crimson beacon high in the heavens. Starlight glinted off the three-barred cross, nearly as long as her hand, that she wore suspended by a braided gold chain around her neck. Besides its long middle crossbeam, the heavy golden cross had a small horizontal bar near its top and an even shorter slanted bar close to its bottom.

  Katerina's relic was a sacred heirloom several hundred years old, preserved and protected by her grandmother during the darkest hours of the previous century. The nonagenarian had thoughtfully sent the cross to her beloved granddaughter from St. Petersburg last month to help safeguard Katerina on her coming journey to a new world.

  A smile flickered on Katerina's lips as she held the binoculars fixed on Mars. She murmured, “I think I can see the canals."

  "I thought I saw them too. At least we have a better chance of being right than Schiaparelli or Lowell. They saw canals that weren't there. We know there really are ones now."

  "Have you heard if the orbiters have spotted any new canals carrying water from the Boreal Ocean?"

  "No. We can ask about it at the briefing tomorrow."

  The scent of freshly cut grass wafted toward them from the field bordering the faraway launch pad. Katerina lowered her binoculars and whispered, “I wonder what the air will smell like on Mars."

  "Probably bland. There's too little plant life and the humidity's fairly low. Unless the aliens decide to spray the whole atmosphere with a humongous can of air freshener to give it the scent of violets and lavender. Considering what they've done so far, I wouldn't bet against it!"

  Katerina smiled back at him. Now they could afford to joke about Mars. But ten years ago, in the year 2025, the Earth seemed on the eve of destruction.

  At first the public ignored or laughed at the frenzied reports radiating from observatories and space agencies around the world. A planet leaving its orbit and spiraling sunward toward Earth? That only happened in cheap sci-fi. In real life it could only be a prank by a twenty-first century version of Orson Welles.

  But as years passed and that ruddy glow in the sky gradually blazed ever brighter like a plunging fireball, humanity could no longer doubt the evidence of its own eyes. Few people were reassured by the experts who'd calculated that the runaway world wouldn't collide with Earth. Even when Mars gently settled into its new circular orbit 157 million kilometers from the Sun, a mere seven million kilometers farther than Earth's average distance, the riots and apocalyptic panic continued. It was a long time before it dawned on an emotionally exhausted human race that doomsday really was postponed.

  The unknown force that repositioned the fourth planet also dragged its two tiny moons and small retinue of orbiters along for the ride, adjusting their orbits appropriately as Mars underwent a miraculous metamorphosis. Month after month orbiters both old and newly arrived beamed back astounding pictures of a lifeless world laboring to be resurrected.

  But the violent changes on the planet's surface could only partly be explained by natural means. Both polar ice caps melted far quicker than predicted from the greater warmth of the Sun alone. In the vast lowlands of the northern polar region, the Boreal Ocean formed and sent liquid water cascading into ancient riverbeds. The frozen carbon dioxide blanketing the south pole rapidly sublimated, allowing the water ice beneath to melt and flow into the highlands and craters of the southern hemisphere.

  Other changes went even further beyond any known areology. One day a weblike pattern of deep furrows began to appear, as if an invisible giant as large as Voltaire's Micromegas was running its fingertips through the soil. Data from the orbiters suggested those furrows were created by a focused beam of intense heat from some unknown source slicing through the planet's crust, vaporizing its nitrate-containing rocks and liberating nitrogen and oxygen into the atmosphere. Soon these “canals” crisscrossed the planet, bringing water from both the Boreal Ocean and the crater lakes of the south to its parched lands.

  Later, patches of green streaked the Martian landscape, as if unseen hands were planting a garden in its newly moist soil. But no earthly plant could use carbon dioxide rapidly enough through photosynthesis to account for the huge quantities of free oxygen flooding the planet's atmosphere. And no known science could explain how the planet's gravity and magnetic field had changed.

  Humanity gradually accepted in awed wonder what was happening to its new next-door neighbor in space. But the great questions of “how” and “why” it was happening remained unanswered.

  Katerina sighed. “Why do you think the aliens haven't shown themselves yet?"

  "Maybe they're just modest."

  "Martin, be serious!"

  "Okay. Humanity is beneath the notice of aliens whose technology is so advanced they move planets as easily as we use a bulldozer to move a mound of earth. Have you ever introduced yourself to the inhabitants of an anthill?"

  "But they must know about us. Otherwise, why would they make Mars such a perfect place for humans to live?"

  Martin frowned. “It worries me that what you said isn't quite true. I don't understand why, if our shy aliens really had us in mind, they didn't fully terraform the planet. If they can somehow alter a whole world's gravity, why did they increase it to only 0.91 g and not make it the same as Earth's?"

  "Perhaps that's to give us a little spring in our step when we run. Besides, that level of gravity is enough to minimize any bone or muscle loss. And it makes it a bit easier to take off from Mars."

  "Maybe. But they also didn't get the atmosphere quite right either. The carbon dioxide level is okay, but there's a bit too little nitrogen and the atmospheric pressure at ‘sea level’ is only 95 percent of what it is on Earth."

  Katerina laughed. “But the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere is 25 percent—high enough to make the partial pressure of oxygen similar to what we're breathing now!"

  She rumpled his hair. “Martin, sometimes you're too skeptical. What's that expression—'You shouldn't look a gift horse in the mouth.’ These aliens have reduced the orbital energy and angular momentum of Mars by astronomical amounts. They've turned the planet from a waterless wasteland with a thin unbreathable atmosphere to one nearly as nice as our own. They've given it an ozone layer and a magnetic field strong enough to keep us safe from ultraviolet rays and solar radiation. They were even thoughtful enough to create north and south magnetic poles so we can use a compass. And you're complaining that they didn't get things ‘right’ down to a few decimal places!"

  Her fiancée brushed his hand forward across the top of his head. “I still wonder, though. What's in it for them? And what if they don't want any uninvited guests?"

  "After all the good they've done, you still think these aliens might be hostile? If they were, they could have swatted Earth into the Sun as easily as one
of those baseball players you like so much hits a home run!"

  Katerina shook her head. “I think the reason we haven't seen the aliens yet is that they're expecting us to show how interested we are in what they've done. They want to see if we're willing to make the effort to go to Mars and visit them."

  Martin gazed across the field at the brightly lit rocket. “I hope you're right. And I'm glad enough people in the world agree with you."

  Katerina took his hand and clasped it tightly. Far above them the starry heavens listened patiently to their questions, but kept its secrets hidden behind a silent twinkling smile. Martin's eyes drifted to Venus. The second planet hung high in the west, its familiar golden brightness unchanged from his childhood. Unlike Mars, that world seemed a beacon of normalcy in a changing solar system.

  Except it wasn't. Whatever unknown power had remodeled Mars had also elected to send Venus drifting out to a new orbit 143 million kilometers from the Sun. Despite its dramatically closer distance to Earth, the planet was no brighter because its crushing carbon dioxide atmosphere and sulfuric acid clouds were dissipating and reflecting less sunlight. No one could explain where the vast quantities of hydrogen needed to start the torrential rains drenching its cooling flat surface had come from, or how so much oxygen was being liberated. Nonetheless, the instruments on the Vespucci orbiter clearly showed the shallow ocean of scalding but liquid water covering most of its previously searing arid landmass.

  Those same superhuman forces had also made Earth's sister world spin like a tilted top with a new day just over twenty-five hours long. Though none could predict exactly how long it would take, someday a reborn Venus would be as hospitable as the new Mars was now and ready for human exploration.

  Martin sighed. That adventure was for another time and another crew. He and Katerina had their own planet to worry about first....

  * * * *

  The wind shrieked by Martin's ears like the wordless chorus of Invaders from Mars. Pain lanced through his chest with every panted breath as he ran, too terrified to glance back at what might be pursuing him. Visions of the recycled Martian war machines from Robinson Crusoe on Mars swooping down at any second made his back prickle, waiting for the searing caress of a heat ray to incinerate him.