And yet the link with his father remained, and it would be shored up in a little while by his father’s first trip off Earth; he had always wanted to visit another planet before it was too late–before his death, in other words. Leo was determined. But despite improvements in the big interplan ships, travel was hazardous. That did not bother him. Nothing would deter him; he had already made reservations, in fact.
“Gosh, Dad,” Jack said, “it sure is wonderful that you feel able to make such an arduous trip. I hope you’re up to it.” He felt resigned.
Across from him his employer, Mr. Yee, regarded him and held up a slip of yellow paper on which was written a service call. Skinny, elongated Mr. Yee in his bow tie and singlebreasted suit . . . the Chinese style of dress rigorously rooted here on alien soil, as authentic as if Mr. Yee did business in downtown Canton.
Mr. Yee pointed to the slip and then solemnly acted out its meaning: he shivered, poured from left hand to right, then mopped his forehead and tugged at his collar. Then he inspected the wrist watch on his bony wrist. A refrigeration unit on some dairy farm had broken down, Jack Bohlen understood, and it was urgent; the milk would be ruined as the day’s heat increased.
“O.K., Dad,” he said, “we’ll be expecting your wire.” He said good-bye and hung up. “Sorry to be on the phone so long,” he said to Mr. Yee. He reached for the slip.
“An elderly person should not make the trip here,” Mr. Yee said in his placid, implacable voice.
“He’s made up his mind to see how we’re doing,” Jack said.
“And if you are not doing as well as he would wish, can he help you?” Mr. Yee smiled with contempt. “Are you supposed to have struck it rich? Tell him there are no diamonds. The UN got them. As to the call which I gave you: that refrigeration unit, according to the file, was worked on by us two months ago for the same complaint. It is in the power source or conduit. At unpredictable times the motor slows until the safety switch cuts it off to keep it from burning out.”
“I’ll see what else they have drawing power from their generator,” Jack said.
It was hard, working for Mr. Yee, he thought as he went upstairs to the roof where the company’s copters were parked. Everything was conducted on a rational basis. Mr. Yee looked and acted like something put together to calcu late. Six years ago, at the age of twenty-two, he had calculated that he could operate a more profitable business on Mars than on Earth. There was a crying need on Mars for service maintenance on all sorts of machinery, on anything with moving parts, since the cost of shipping new units from Earth was so great. An old toaster, thoughtlessly scrapped on Earth, would have to be kept working on Mars. Mr. Yee had liked the idea of salvaging. He did not approve of waste, having been reared in the frugal, puritanical atmosphere of People’s China. And being an electrical engineer in Honan Province, he possessed training. So in a very calm and methodical way he had come to a decision which for most people meant a catastrophic emotional wrenching; he had made arrangements to emigrate from Earth, exactly as he would have gone about visiting a dentist for a set of stainless steel dentures. He knew to the last UN dollar how far he could cut his overhead, once he had set up shop on Mars. It was a lowmargin operation, but extremely professional. In the six years since 1988 he had expanded until now his repairmen held priority in cases of emergency–and what, in a colony which still had difficulty growing its own radishes and cooling its own tiny yield of milk, was not an emergency?
Shutting the ‘copter door, Jack Bohlen started up the engine, and soon was rising above the buildings of Bunchewood Park, into the hazy dull sky of midmorning, on his first service call of the day.
Far to his right, an enormous ship, completing its trip from Earth, was settling down onto the circle of basalt which was the receiving field for living cargoes. Other cargoes had to be delivered a hundred miles to the east. This was a firstclass carrier, and shortly it would be visited by remoteoperated devices which would fleece the passengers of every virus and bacteria, insect and weed-seed adhering to them; they would emerge as naked as the day they were born, pass through chemical baths, sputter resentfully through eight hours of tests–and then at last be set free to see about their personal survival, the survival of the colony having been assured. Some might even be sent back to Earth; those whose condition implied genetic defects revealed by the stress of the trip. Jack thought of his dad patiently enduring the immigration processing. Has to be done, my boy, his dad would say. Necessary. The old man, smoking his cigar and meditating . . . a philosopher whose total formal education consisted of seven years in the New York public school system, and during its most feral period. Strange, he thought, how character shows itself. The old man was in touch with some level of knowledge which told him how to behave, not in the social sense, but in a deeper, more permanent way. He’ll adjust to this world here, Jack decided. In his short visit he’ll come to terms better than Silvia and I. About as David has . . .
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.