[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires Read online

  Mithredath did not look up. Nor did he look up at the sound of his servants—no, his ex-servants, he thought dully—walking away.

  They were some time gone when at last the eunuch began to emerge from his shock and despair. He picked up a sherd. Because one man had died, his own life, abruptly, was as shattered as the pot from which the broken piece had come, as shattered as long-ago Athens.

  He climbed slowly to his feet. Perhaps he could beg one of his darics back from Polydoros. It would feed and lodge him for a couple of weeks. Then he could—what? At the moment, he had no idea. For that matter, he did not even know if the Hellene would give him the gold.

  One thing at a time, he thought. He stopped a man and asked the way to the bankers’ street. The man told him. Nodding his thanks, he tossed the potsherd on the pile and started off.

  LEAPFROG

  James P. Hogan

  Fall had come to the northern hemisphere of Mars. At the north pole, the mean temperature had fallen to -125°C—cold enough to freeze carbon dioxide out of the thin Martian atmosphere and begin forming the annual covering that would lay over the permanent cap of water-ice until spring. In the southern polar regions, where winter had ended, the carbon dioxide was evaporating. Along the edge of the retreating fields of dry ice, strong winds were starting to raise dust. During the short but hot southern summer, with Mars making its closest approach to the sun, the resulting storms could envelop the planet.

  Edmund Halloran watched the surface details creep across the large wallscreen at one end of the mess area of Yellow Section, Deck B, of the interplanetary transfer vessel Mikhail Gorbachev, wheeling in orbit at the end of its six-month voyage from Earth to bring the third manned mission to the Red Planet. The other new arrivals sitting around him at the scratched and stained green-topped aluminum tables—where they had eaten their meals, played innumerable hands of cards, and talked, laughed, and exchanged reminiscences through the long voyage out—were also strangely quiet as they took in the view. Unlike the other views of Mars that they had studied and memorized, this was not being replayed from transmissions sent back from somewhere on the other side of millions of miles of space. This time it was really on the outside of the thin metal shell around them. Very soon, now, they would be leaving the snug cocoon with its reassuring routine and its company of familiar faces that they had come to know as home, to go down there. They had arrived.

  The structure had lifted out from lunar orbit as a flotilla of three separate, identical craft, independently powered, each fabricated in the general form of a T, but with the bar curved as part of the arc of a circle, rather than straight. On entering the unpowered free-fall phase that would endure for most of the voyage, the three ships had maneuvered together and joined at their bases to become the equispaced spokes of a rotating Y, creating comfortable living conditions in the three inhabited zones at the extremities. The triplicated design meant that in the event of a major failure in any of the modules, everybody could get home again in the remaining two—or at a push, with a lot of overcrowding and at the cost of jettisoning everything not essential to survival, even in a remaining one. The sections accommodated a total of 600 people, which represented a huge expansion of the existing population of 230 accrued from the previous two missions. Some of the existing population had been distributed between a main base on Lunae Planum and a few outlying installations. The majority, however, were still up in MARSIANSKAYA MEZHDUN-ARODNAYA ORBITAL ‘NAYA STANTSIYA, or “Mars International Orbiting Station,” awaiting permanent accommodation on the surface. In the Russian Cyrillic alphabet this was shortened to MAPCMOC, yielding the satisfyingly descriptive transliteration MARSMOS in English, which was accepted as the standard international language.

  The region coming into view now was an area roughly twenty degrees north of the equator. Halloran recognized the heavily cratered area of Lunae Planum and the irregular escarpment at its eastern edge, bounding the smoother volcanic plain of Chryse Planitia. Although he knew where to look, he could see no indication of the main base down there. He picked out the channels emerging from the escarpment, where volcanic heating had melted some of the underground ice that had existed in an earlier age, causing torrential floods to pour out across the expanse of Chryse, which lay about a kilometer lower.

  An announcement from the overhead speakers broke his mood of reverie. “Attention please. The shuttle to MARSMOS is now ready for boarding. Arrivals holding disembarkation cards ninety-three through one hundred twenty should proceed through to the docking area. Ninety-three through one hundred twenty, to the docking port now.”

  Halloran rose and picked up his briefcase and a bag containing other items that he wanted to keep with him until the personal baggage caught up with them later. As he shuffled forward to join the flow of people converging toward the door, a voice spoke close behind him. “It looks as if we’re on the same trip across, Ed.” He looked around. Ibrahim and Anna, a young Egyptian couple, were next in line.

  “I guess so,” Halloran grunted. Ibrahim was an electronics technician, his wife a plant geneticist. They were both impatient to begin their new lives. Why two young people like these should be so eager and excited about coming to a four-thousand-mile ball of frozen deserts, Halloran couldn’t imagine. Or maybe he couldn’t remember.

  “We’ll be going straight down from the station.” Ibrahim gestured toward Anna; she smiled a little shyly. “The doctors want her to adapt to surface conditions as soon as possible.”

  Anna’s pregnancy had been confirmed early in the voyage. Although the baby wouldn’t be the first to be born on Mars, it would be one of a very select few. The knowledge added considerably to Ibrahim’s already exuberant pride of first fatherhood.

  “It may be a while before I see you again, then, eh?” Halloran said. “But I wouldn’t worry about not bumping into each other again. It’s not as if there are that many places to get lost in down there yet.”

  “I hope it won’t be too long,” Ibrahim said. “It was good getting to know you. I enjoyed listening to your stories. Good luck with your job here.”

  “You too. And take good care of Anna there, d’you hear.”

  They moved out through the mess doorway, into a gray-walled corridor of doors separated by stretches of metal ribbing. Byacheslav, one of the Russian construction engineers, moved over to walk beside Halloran as they came to the stairway leading up to the next deck, where the antechamber to the docking port was located. He was one of the relatively few older members of the group—around Halloran’s age.

  “Well, Ed … it would be two years at least before you saw Earth again, even if you changed your mind today.”

  “I wasn’t planning on changing my mind.”

  “It’s a big slice out of what’s left of life when you get to our end of it. No second thoughts?”

  “Oh, things get easier once you’re over the hump. What happens when you get over the top of any hill and start going down the other side? You pick up speed, right? The tough part’s over. People just look at it the wrong way.”

  Byacheslav smiled. “Never thought about it that way. Maybe you’re right.”

  “How about you?”

  “Me? I’m going to be too busy to worry much about things like that. We’re scheduled to begin excavating the steel plant within a month. Oh, and there was something else… .” Byacheslav reached inside his jacket, took a billfold from the inside pocket, and peeled out Unodollar tens and ones. “That’s to settle our poker account—before I blow it all in the mess bar down at Mainbase.”

  Halloran took the money and stuffed it in his hip pocket. “Thanks… . You know, By, there was a time when I wouldn’t have trusted a Russian as far as I could throw one of your earthmovers. It came with the trade.”

  “Well, you’re in a different business now.”

  “I guess we all are.”

  They entered the antechamber, with its suiting-up room and two EVA airlocks on one side, and passed through the open doors of
the docking port into the body of the shuttle. To align with the direction of the Mikhail Gorbachev’s simulated gravity, the shuttle had docked with its roof entry-hatch mating to the port, which meant they had to enter down a ladder into the compartment forward of the passenger cabin. The seats were small and cramped, and Halloran and Byacheslav wedged themselves in about halfway to the back, next to a young Indonesian who was keeping up a continuous chatter with someone in the row behind.

  “Do you know where you’re going yet, Ed?” Byacheslav asked as they buckled themselves in.

  “Probably a couple of weeks more up in orbit, until the new admin facility is ready down below,” Halloran replied. “The director I’ll be working for from MCM is supposed to be meeting me at MARSMOS. I should find out for sure then. I guess it depends on you construction people.”

  “Don’t worry. We won’t leave you stuck up here… .” Byacheslav looked at Halloran and raised his eyebrows. “So, one of the directors is meeting you personally, eh? And will they have a red carpet? If that’s the kind of reception an administrator gets, I think I’m starting to worry already. I can see how the whole place will end up being run. That was what I came all this distance to get away from. Hmm … maybe I’ve changed my mind. Perhaps we will leave you up here.”

  Halloran’s rugged, pink-hued face creased into a grin. “I wouldn’t get too carried away if I were you. He’s based up at MARSMOS most of the time, anyway. I’m just here to take care of resource-allocation schedules. Nothing special. They used to call it being a clerk.”

  “Now I think you’re being too modest. There’s a lot more to it than scratching in ledgers with pens these days. You have to know computer systems. And in a situation like this, the function is crucial. You can’t tell me you’re not good.”

  “Don’t believe a word of it. It’s just Uncle Sam’s way of retiring off old spy chiefs in a world that doesn’t need so many spies anymore.”

  Halloran sat back and gazed around the cabin. All of the passengers were aboard and seated, and the crew were securing the doors. The metaphoric umbilical back to Earth was about to be broken. It had been over thirty years ago when he joined the Agency. Who would have thought, then, that two months after turning fifty-five, he’d have found himself at a place like this, starting with a new outfit all over again?

  And of all outfits to have ended up with, one with a name like Moscow-Chase-Manhattan Investments, Inc., which controlled a development consortium headed by the Aeroflot Corporation, the Volga-Hilton Hotels group, and Nippon Trans-Pacific Enterprises. Similar combinations of interests had opened up the Moon to the point where its materials-processing and manufacturing industries were mushrooming, with regular transportation links in operation and constantly being expanded, and tourism was starting to catch on. If the U.S. space effort hadn’t fallen apart in the seventies and eighties, America could have had all of it, decades ahead of the Soviets. As it was, America was lucky to have come out of it, along with Europe and some of the other more developed nations, as junior partners. The Second Russian Revolution, they called it. Back to capitalism. Many people thought it was better that way.

  In the case of Mars, of course, the big obstacle to its similar development was the planet’s greater distance from Earth, with correspondingly longer flight times. But that problem would go away—and usher in a new era of manned exploration of the outer Solar System—when the race to develop a dependable, high-performance, pulsed nuclear propulsion system was won, which would bring the typical Mars round-trip down to somewhere around ten days. Although some unforeseen difficulties had been encountered, which had delayed development of such a drive well beyond the dates optimistically predicted in years gone by, the various groups working feverishly around the world were generally agreed that the goal was now in sight. That was the bonanza that MCM was betting on. Thirty years ago, Halloran would have declared flatly that such a coordination of Soviet and Western interests under a private initiative was impossible. Now he was part of it. Or about to be…

  He found himself wondering again if the Vusilov who would be meeting him could be the same Vusilov from bygone years. Possibly the KGB had its own retirement problems, too. But in any case, after all the months of wondering, it would be only a matter of minutes now before he found out.

  The shuttle nudged itself away from the docking port, and Halloran experienced a strange series of sensations as it fell away from the Mikhail Gorbachev, shedding weight as it decoupled from the ship’s rotational frame, and then accelerated into a curving trajectory that would carry it across to the MARSMOS satellite.

  “MARSMOS has increased tenfold in size in the last six months,” Byacheslav commented. “You’ll probably have more places to discover there in the next couple of weeks than I’ll have down on the surface.”

  “There’ll need to be, with all these people showing up,” Halloran said.

  Even before the arrival of the two previous manned missions, a series of unmanned flights had left all kinds of hardware parked in orbit around Mars. In a frenzy of activity to prepare for the arrival of the third mission, the construction teams from the first two had expanded the initial station into a bewildering Rube-Goldberg creation of spheres, cylinders, boxes, and domes, bristling with antennas, laser tubes, and microwave dishes, all tied together by a floating web of latticeworks and tethering cables. And the next ship from Earth, with another six hundred people, was only two months behind.

  There was a brief period of free-fall, and then more disorienting feelings of unbalance came and went as the shuttle reversed and decelerated to dock at MARSMOS. When Halloran unfastened his restraining straps, he found himself weightless, which meant that they were at the nonrotating section of the structure. Using handrails and guidelines, the newcomers steered themselves out through an aft side-door into an arrivals area where agents were waiting to give directions and answer questions.

  After receiving an information package on getting around in MARSMOS, Halloran called Moscow-Chase-Manhattan’s number and asked for Mr. Vusilov.

  “Da?”

  “Mr. Vusilov?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Ed Halloran.”

  “Ah, Mr. Halloran! Excellent!” The voice sounded genial and exuberant. “So, you are arrived now, yes?”

  “We docked about fifteen minutes ago. I’ve just cleared the reception formalities.”

  “And did you have a pleasant voyage, I trust?”

  “It dragged a bit at times, but it was fine.”

  “Of course. So you are still liking the idea of working with us at MCM? No second regrets, yes?”

  A reception agent murmured, “Make it brief, if you wouldn’t mind, Mr. Halloran. There is a line waiting.”

  “None,” Halloran said. “Er, I am holding up the line here. Maybe if I could come on through?”

  “Yes, of course. What you do is ask directions to a transit elevator that will bring you out here to Red Square, which is a ring—a joke, you see, yes? This is where I am. It is the part of MARSMOS that rotates. First we have a drink of welcome to celebrate, which is the Russian tradition. You go to the south elevator point in Red Square, then find the Diplomatic Lounge. Our gentlemen’s club here, comfortable by Martian standards—no hard hats or oily coverups. There, soon, I will be meeting you.”

  With no gravity to define a preferred direction, the geometry inside the free-fall section of MARSMOS was an Escherean nightmare of walls, planes, passages, and connecting shafts intersecting and going off in all directions, with figures floating between the various spaces and levels like fish drifting through a three-dimensional undersea labyrinth. Despite the map included in the information package, Halloran was hopelessly lost within minutes and had to ask directions three times to the elevator that would take him to the south terminal of Red Square. To reach it, he passed through a spin-decoupling gate, which took him into the slowly turning hub structure of the rotating section.

  The elevator capsule ran along th
e outside of one of the structural supporting booms and was glass-walled on two sides. A panorama of the entire structure of MARSMOS changed perspective outside as the capsule moved outward, with the full disk of Mars sweeping by beyond, against its background of stars. It was his first close-up view of the planet that was real, seen directly with his own eyes, and not an electronically generated reproduction.

  As the capsule descended outward and Halloran felt his body acquiring weight once again, he replayed in his mind the voice he had heard over the phone: the guttural, heavily accented tone, the hearty, wheezing joviality, the tortured English. It had sounded like the Vusilov, all right. Perhaps he had upset somebody higher up in the heap, Halloran thought—which Vusilov had had a tendency to do from time to time—and despite all the other changes, the old Russian penchant for sending troublemakers to faraway places hadn’t gone away.

  Direction had reestablished itself when he emerged at the rim. Halloran consulted his map again and found the Diplomatic Lounge located two levels farther down, in a complex of dining areas and social rooms collectively lumped together in a prize piece of technocratese as a “Communal Facilities Zone.” But as he made his way down, austere painted metal walls and pressed aluminum floors gave way to patterned designs and carpeting, with mural decorations to add to the decor, and even some ornaments and potted plants. Finally he went through double doors into a vestibule with closets and hanging space, where he left his bags, and entered a spacious, comfortably furnished room with bookshelves and a bar tended by a white-jacketed steward on one side. On the other, vast windows looked out into space, showing Phobos as a lumpy, deformed crescent. Leather armchairs and couches were grouped around low tables with people scattered around, some talking, others alone, reading. The atmosphere was calm and restful, all very comfortable and far better than anything Halloran had expected.

  And then one of the figures rose and advanced with a hand extended. He was short and stocky, with broad, solid shoulders, and dressed casually in a loose orange sweater and tan slacks. As he approached, a toothy grin broadened to split the familiar craggy, heavy-jowled face, with its bulbous, purple-veined nose—a face that had always made Halloran think of an old-time prizefighter—from one misshapen, cauliflower ear to the other.