Red Mars (Mars Trilogy, #1) - Kim Stanley Robinson Page 0,126

it into an aerobraking orbit around Mars, thus burning it up in the atmosphere. This would satisfy UNOMA protocols forbidding the kind of mass destruction that a direct impact would cause, but it would still add huge quantities of water and separated hydrogen and oxygen to the atmosphere, thickening it with precisely the gases they needed most. “It could raise the atmospheric pressure by as much as fifty milli-bars.”

“You’re kidding!” The pre-arrival average at the datum had been between seven and ten millibars (Earth’s sea level averaged 1,013), and all their efforts so far had only raised the average to around fifty. “One iceball will double the atmospheric pressure?”

“That’s what the simulations indicate. Of course with the initial level so low, doubling is not as impressive as it sounds.”

“Still, that’s great, Sax. And it’ll be hard to sabotage.”

But Sax didn’t want to be reminded of that. He frowned slightly, and slipped away.

John laughed at his skittishness, and went to the door. Then he stopped to think, and looked up and down the hall. Empty. And no video monitors in Sax’s offices. He went back in, grinning at his own furtive tiptoes, and glanced around at the paper chaos on Sax’s desk. Where to start? Presumably his AI would be the repository of anything interesting, but probably it would only respond to Sax’s voice, and would surely keep a record of any other inquiries. Quietly he opened a desk drawer. Empty. All the drawers in the desk were empty; he almost laughed out loud, stifled it. There was a stack of correspondence on a lab bench, and he picked through it. Mostly notes from the biologists at Acheron. At the bottom of the stack was a single sheet of unsigned mail, with no return address or origin code. Sax’s printer had spit it out without any identification that John could see. The message was brief:

“1. We use suicide genes to curb proliferation. 2. There are so many heat sources now on the surface that we don’t think anyone can tell our exhaust from the rest of it. 3. We simply agreed we wanted to get off and work on our own, without interference. I’m sure you understand now.”

After a minute of staring at this John whipped his head up and looked around. Still alone. He glanced at the note again, put it back where he had found it and walked quietly out of Sax’s offices, back to the guest quarters. “Sax,” he said admiringly, “you tricky congress of rats!”

The train to Burroughs carried mostly freight, thirty narrow cars of it, with two passenger cars up front, running over a superconducting magnetic piste so quickly and smoothly that it was hard to believe the view; after John’s endless plods cross-country in rovers, it was almost frightening. The only thing to do was flood the pleasure centers in the old brain with omegendorph and sit back and enjoy it, looking out at what appeared to be some kind of terrain-following supersonic flight.

The piste had been routed roughly parallel to the 10° N latitude; eventually the plan was to ring the planet, but so far only the hemisphere between Echus and Burroughs had been finished. Burroughs had become the biggest town in the far hemisphere; the original settlement had been built by an American-based consortium using a French-led EC design, and was located at the upper end of Isidis Planitia, which was in effect a huge trough where the northern plains made a deep indentation into the southern highlands. The sides and head of the trough counteracted the planet’s curvature in such a way that the landscape around the town had something like Terran horizons, and as the train flew down the great trough Boone could see across mesa-dotted dark plains to horizons some sixty kilometers away.

Burroughs’s buildings were almost all cliff-dwellings, cut into the sides of five low mesas that were grouped together on a rise in the bend of an ancient curving channel. Big sections of the mesas’ vertical sides had been filled by rectangles of mirrored glass, as if postmodern skyscrapers had been turned on their sides and shoved into the hills. A startling sight, in fact, and far more impressive than Underhill, or even Echus Overlook, which had a great view but could not be seen. No, the glass-sided mesas of Burroughs, on their rise over a channel that seemed to be begging for water, with a view out to distant hills; these features combined to give the new town