Leo said, “Listen, Jack, we just gotta get going on that trip.”
“Christ,” Jack said, “this is my job.” He gestured angrily. “I thought you wanted to meet him–he’ll be over here any time now. She sends him over–”
Breaking in, Leo said, “Look, son, I came millions of miles to have a look at that land. Now are we going to fly there or not?”
Jack said, “We’ll wait until the boy comes, and we’ll take him with us.”
“O.K. ,” Leo said. He wanted to avoid friction; he was willing to compromise, at least as much as was humanly possible.
“My God, here you are for the first time in your life on the surface of another planet. I should think you’d want to walk around, take a look at the canal, the ditch.” Jack gestured over toward the right. “You haven’t even glanced at it, and people have been wanting to see the canals–they’ve argued about their existence–for centuries!”
Feeling chagrined, Leo nodded dutifully. “Show me, then.” He followed Jack from the workshop, outdoors into the dull ruddy sunlight. “Cold,” Leo observed, sniffing the air. “Say, it’s sure easy to walk around; I noticed that last night I felt like I weighed only fifty or sixty pounds. Must be because Mars is so small–right? Must be good for people with cardiac conditions, except the air’s so thin. I thought last night it was the corned beef that made me–”
“Leo,” his son said, “be quiet and look around, will you?”
Leo looked around. He saw a flat desert with meager mountains in the far distance. He saw a deep ditch of sluggish brown water, and, beside the ditch, a mosslike vegetation, green. That was all, except for Jack’s house and the Steiner house a little farther on. He saw the garden, but he had seen that last night.
“Well?” Jack said.
Being obliging, Leo said, “Very impressive, Jack. You’ve got a nice place here; a nice little modern place. A little more planting, landscaping, and I’d say it was perfect.”
Grinning at him crookedly, Jack said, “This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this.”
“I know that, son, and I’m exceptionally proud of what you’ve accomplished, you and that fine woman.” Leo nodded solemnly. “Now can we get started? Maybe you could go over to that other house where that boy is and get him, or did David go over? Maybe David’s getting him; I don’t see him around.”
“David’s at school. He was picked up while you were sleeping.”
Leo said, “I don’t mind going over and getting that boy, Manfred or whatever his name is, if it’s O.K. with you.”
“Go ahead,” Jack said. “I’ll come along.”
They walked past a small ditch of water, crossed an open field of sand and sparse fernlike plants, and arrived at the other house. Leo heard from within the sound of small girls’ voices. Without hesitation he ascended the steps to the porch and rang the bell.
The door opened and there stood a big, blond-haired woman with tired, pain-filled eyes. “Good morning,” Leo said, “I’m Jack Bohlen’s dad; I guess you’re the lady of the house. Say, we’ll take your boy with us on a trip and bring him back safe and sound.”
The big blonde woman looked past him to Jack, who had come up on the porch; she said nothing, but turned and went off back into the interior of her house. When she returned she had a small boy with her. So this is the skizo little fellow, Leo thought. Nice-looking, you’d never know in a million years.
“We’re going on a ride, young man,” Leo said to him. “How does that sound?” Then, remembering what Jack had said about the boy’s time-sense, he repeated what he had said very slowly, dragging each word out.
The boy darted past him and shot down the steps and off toward the canal; he moved in a blur of speed and disappeared from sight behind the Bohlen house.
“Mrs. Steiner,” Jack said, “I want you to meet my father.”
The big blonde woman put out her hand vaguely; she did not seem to be all there herself, Leo observed. However, he shook hands with her. “Glad to meet you,” he said politely. “Sorry to hear about the loss of your husband; it’s a terrible thing, something striking like that, without any warning. I knew a fella back in Detroit, good friend of mine, did the same thing one weekend; went out of the shop and said goodbye and that was the last anybody saw of him.”
Mrs. Steiner said, “How do you do, Mr. Bohlen.”
“We’ll go round up Manfred,” Jack said to her. “We should be home late this afternoon.”
As Leo and his son walked back, the woman remained where she was on the porch, looking after them.
“Pretty odd herself,” Leo murmured. Jack said nothing.
They located the boy, standing off by himself in David’s overflow garden, and presently the three of them were in the Yee Company ‘copter, flying above the desert in the direction of the line of mountains to the north. Leo unfolded a great map which he had brought with him and began to make marks on it.
“I guess we can talk freely,” he said to Jack, nodding his head toward the boy. “He won’t–” He hesitated. “You know.”
“If he understands us,” Jack said drily, “it’ll be–”
“O.K., O.K.,” Leo said, “I just wanted to be sure.” He carefully refrained from marking the place on the map that he had heard would be the UN site. But he did mark their route, using the gyrocompass reading visible on the dashboard of the ‘copter. “What rumors have you heard, son?” he asked. “About UN interest in the F.D.R. range?”
Jack said, “Something about a park or a power station.”
“Want to know exactly what it is?”
“Sure.”
Leo reached into his inside coat pocket and brought out an envelope. From it he took a photograph, which he handed to Jack. “Does this remind you of anything?”
Glancing at it, Jack saw that it was a picture of a long, thin building. He stared at it a long time.
“The UN,” Leo said, “is going to build these. Multipleunit dwellings. Whole tracks of them, mile after mile, with shopping centers, complete–supermarkets, hardware stores, drugstores, laundries, ice cream parlors. All built by slave equipment, those construction automatons that feed themselves their own instructions.”
Presently, Jack said, “It looks like the co-op apartment house I lived in years ago when I had my breakdown.”
“Exactly. The co-op movement will be in with the UN on this. These F.D.R. Mountains were once fertile, as everybody knows; there was plenty of water here. The UN hydraulic engineers believe they can bring enormous quantities of water up to the surface from the table below. The water table is closer to the surface in these mountains than anywhere else on Mars; this is the original water source for the canal network, the UN engineers believe.”
“The co-op,” Jack said in a strange voice, “here on Mars.”
“They’ll be fine modern structures,” Leo said. “It’s quite an ambitious project. The UN will be transporting people here free, providing their passage right to their new homes, and the cost of buying each unit will be small. It will take quite a big slice of these mountains, as you might guess, and as I heard it, they expect it to be ten to fifteen years before the project is completed.”
Jack said nothing.
“Mass emigration,” Leo said. “This will ensure it.”
“I guess so,” Jack said.
“The appropriations for this are fantastic,” Leo said. “The co-op alone is putting up almost a trillion dollars. It has huge reserves of cash, you know; it’s one of the richest groups on Earth–it has greater assets than the insurance group or any of the big banking systems. There’s not a chance in the world that with them in on it the thing could fail.” He added, “The UN has been negotiating with them for six years on this matter.”
Finally, Jack said, “What a change it will mean for Mars. Just to have the F.D.R. range fertile–that alone.”
“And densely populated,” Leo reminded him.
“It’s hard to believe,” Jack said.
“Yeah, I know, boy, but there’s no doubt of it; within another few weeks it’ll be generally known. I knew it a month ago. I’ve been getting investors I know to put up risk capital . . . I represent them, Jack. Alone, I just don’t have the money.”
Jack said, “You mean, your whole idea is to get here before the UN actually takes the land. You’re going to buy it for very little and then resell it to the UN for much more.”
“We’re going to buy it in great pieces,” Leo said, “and then at once subdivide. Cut it up into lots, say, one hundred feet by eighty. Title will be in the hands of a fairly large number of individuals: wives, cousins, employees, friends of the members of my group.”