Martian Time Slip

They would get along well, his father and his boy. Both shrewd and practical, and yet both haphazardly romantic, as witness his father's impulse to buy land somewhere in the F. D. R. Mountains. It was a last gasp of hope springing eternal in the old man; here was land selling for next to nothing, with no takers, the authentic frontier which the habitable parts of Mars were patently not. Below him, Jack noted the Senator Taft Canal and aligned his flight with it; the canal would lead him to the McAuliff dairy ranch with its thousands of acres of withered grass, its once prize herd of Jerseys, now bent into something resembling their ancestors by the unjust environment. This was habitable Mars, this almost-fertile spiderweb of lines, radiating and crosscrossing but always barely adequate to support life, no more. The Senator Taft, directly below now, showed a sluggish and repellent green; it was water sluiced and filtered in its final stages, but here it showed the accretions of time, the underlying slime and sand and contaminants which made it anything but potable. God knew what alkalines the population had absorbed and built into its bones by now. However, they were alive. The water had not killed them, yellow-brown and full of sediment as it was. While over to the west--the reaches, which were waiting for human science to rare back and pass its miracle.

The archaeological teams which had landed on Mars early in the '70s had eagerly plotted the stages of retreat of the old civilization which human beings had now begun to replace. It had not at any time settled in the desert proper. Evidently, as with the Tigris and Euphrates civilization on Earth, it had clung to what it could irrigate. At its peak, the old Martian culture had occupied a fifth of the planet's surface, leaving the rest as it had found it. Jack Bohlen's house, for instance, near the junction of the William Butler Yeats Canal with the Herodotus; it stood almost at the edge of the network by which fertility had been attained for the past five thousand years. The Bohlens were latecomers, although no one had known, eleven years ago, that emigration would fall off so startlingly.

The radio in the 'copter made static noises, and then a tinny version of Mr. Yee's voice said, "Jack, I have a service call for you to add. The UN Authority says that the Public School is malfunctioning and their own man is unavailable."

Picking up the microphone, Jack said into it, "I'm sorry, Mr. Yee--as I thought I'd told you, I'm not trained to touch those school units. You'd better have Bob or Pete handle that." As I know I told you, he said to himself.

In his logical way, Mr. Yee said, "This repair is vital, and therefore we can't turn it down, Jack. We have never turned down any repair job. Your attitude is not positive. I will have to insist that you tackle the job. As soon as it is possible I will have another repairman out to the school to join you. Thank you, Jack." Mr. Yee rang off.

Thank you, too, Jack Bohlen said acidly to himself.

Below him now he saw the beginnings of a second settlement; this was Lewistown, the main habitation of the plumbers' union colony which had been one of the first to be organized on the planet, and which had its own union members as its repairmen; it did not patronize Mr. Yee. If his job became too unpleasant, Jack Bohlen could always pack up and migrate to Lewistown, join the union, and go to work at perhaps an even better salary. But recent political events in the plumbers' union colony had not been to his liking. Arnie Kott, president of the Water Workers' Local, had been elected only after much peculiar campaigning and some more-than-average balloting irregularities. His regime did not strike Jack as the sort he wanted to live under; from what he had seen of it, the old man's rule had all the elements of early Renaissance tyranny, with a bit of nepotism thrown in. And yet the colony appeared to be prospering economically. It had an advanced public works program, and its fiscal policies had brought into existence an enormous cash reserve. The colony was not only efficient and prosperous, it was also able to provide decent jobs for all its inhabitants. With the exception of the Israeli settlement to the north, the union colony was the most viable on the planet. And the Israeli settlement had the advantage of possessing die-hard Zionist shock units, encamped on the desert proper, engaged in reclamation projects of all sorts, from growing oranges to refining chemical fertilizers. Alone, New Israel had reclaimed a third of all the desert land now under cultivation. It was, in fact, the only settlement on Mars which exported its produce back to Earth in any quantity.