Old Mars

“OK,” said Stone. “What’s the score? Oh, and don’t forget to tell me more about those indigo flame sapphires. Presumably they come into your deal at some point. Let’s hear it. I have plenty of time to listen.”

Krane did not smile in reply. “Unfortunately,” he said, “you haven’t.”

3 The Star Bomb

“THERE WAS A WAR,” SAID THE BRONZED TERRAN. “WE WEREN’T ready for it. We thought we’d earned an era of peace. But we had enemies who hated all we stood for. A tribe that had hidden itself underground years earlier, after my people had defeated it. We have our own technology, but that earlier race—the Sheev—developed horrendous weapons. They never used most of them because everyone got scared at the same time. So the weapons, with many of the scientific instruments that helped make them, were locked away by common consent. We didn’t know about one particular cache. Our enemy discovered it. An n-bomb probably powerful enough to destroy a whole planet. They planned to use the underground Ia canal to float it under our city, Varnal of the Green Mists, and blow us up. Meanwhile, our scientists found out about it. Thanks to many of the enemy’s own people rebelling against their leaders, who were perceived as reckless, we defeated them. Only when we were discussing terms did we learn about the n-bomb and where it was. It would shortly be directly under Varnal, and would blow within hours.

“We got our best people down there. They could find no way of stopping the thing from detonating. All they could do was adjust the timer. Which they set about doing. By unlocking seven wards in sequence, the timer could be advanced but not neutralized. So the first thing our scientists did was to set the timer to detonate close to a million years into our future. The maximum the timer allowed. We figured that would be more than enough time to find a solution. I thought that Mars would no longer be highly populated by then. We would work on the problem until we had it licked. A million years—plenty of time! The second thing we did was to move the bomb away from the city. We did this by floating it farther on down the canal until it was under a barren, uninhabited part of the planet. Are you familiar with the Ia trans-Martian canal and its story?”

Stone jerked his thumb at the roof. “All the old canals have dried up. There’s nothing left of them apart from traces of their beds. And no records, of course. Pretty much everything was lost during the great “four-millennia cannonade,” when asteroids and meteors pounded Mars to dust, down to most of her farthest shelters. There are a few freak survivals. Nothing much. The canals were deep and wide once, designed to get the most from dwindling water supplies. The meteors leveled them. But this Ia canal? It was underground?”

“My clan’s ancestors planned to build this great underground canal, protected from all foreseeable danger, completely encircling the planet, with branches serving other local systems. The canal was named for an ancient water goddess, Ia. Ia would connect to a series of hubs serving other canal systems. Its creators thought that it would, through the trade it would stimulate, bring peace to the entire planet. Ia would circle Mars from pole to pole, where the melting ice caps would continuously refill it. The project was abandoned long before my time.”

“Abandoned? What happened?” In spite of his circumstances, Stone found the story engaging. “It sounds a great idea.”

“During construction at the Pataphal cross-waterway intersection, after hundreds of miles of the Ia system had already been built, a terrible disaster struck. A whole section of the great Nokedu Cavern floor, which had been tested and found solid, fell away. Hundreds were killed. More of the cavern kept falling, until it formed a massive chasm, miles deep and far too wide to bridge. Black, unfathomable, the Nokedu Falls dropped deep into the planet’s heart. The entire project was abandoned. It was considered folly to attempt another sub-Martian watercourse. No more would have been said had not an extraordinary phenomenon occurred maybe a month after the project was closed for good. A guard reported seeing the canal slowly filling with water!

“Some freak of natural condensation created a system that had the effect of filling the Ia canal with enough water to float a good-size barge. But of course, at Nokedu the water again rushed into the great chasm. Damming didn’t work. It became pretty clear that the water had to circulate. Several expeditions had been made into the Nokedu Deep to find the cause of the phenomenon. The expeditions were lost or returned without success. The water supply remained continuous. Then, about five hundred years in your past, a quake dislodged the bomb.”

Mac played dumb. “What—and sent it down the falls where it could explode harmlessly?”