“You can’t send down so many so fast,” he insisted. “There’s no infrastructure for them, physically or culturally. What’s developing are the worst kind of wildcat settlements, they’re like refugee camps or forced labor camps, and it’ll get reported like that back home, you know how they always use analogies to Terran situations. And that’s bound to hurt you.”
She stared at a spot about three feet in front of him. “Most people don’t see it that way,” she proclaimed, as if the room were full of listeners. “This is just a step on the path to full human use of Mars. It’s here for us and we’re going to use it. Earth is desperately crowded, and the mortality rate is still dropping. Science and faith will continue to create new opportunities as they always have. These first pioneers may suffer some hardships, but those won’t last long. We lived worse than they do now, when we first arrived.”
Startled at this lie, Frank glared at her. But she did not back down. Scornfully he said, “You’re not paying attention!” But the thought frightened him, and he paused.
He brought himself back under control, stared through the clear floor at the planet. As they were rotating with it they always looked down on Tharsis, of course, and from this high it looked like one of the old photographs, the orange ball with all the familiar markings of its most famous hemisphere: the great volcanoes, Noctis, the canyons, the chaos, all unblemished. “When was the last time you went down?” he asked her.
“L sixty. I go down regularly.” She smiled.
“Where do you stay when you descend?”
“In UNOMA dorms.” Where she worked busily to break the UN treaty.
But that was her job, that was what UNOMA had assigned her to do. Elevator manager, and also the primary liason with the mining concerns. When she quit the UN, she could take all the jobs she could handle from them. Queen of the elevator. Which was now the bridge for the greater part of the Martian economy. She’d have at her disposal all the capital of whatever transnationals she chose to associate with.
And all this showed, of course, in the way she rip-ripped around the brilliant glassine room, in the way she smiled at all his withering remarks. Well, she always had been a little stupid. Frank gritted his teeth. Apparently it was time to start using the good old USA like a sledgehammer, see if it had any heft remaining in it.
“Most of the transnationals have giant holdings in the States,” he said. “If the American government decided to freeze their assets, because they were breaking the treaty, it would slow down all of them, and break some.”
“You could never do that,” Phyllis said. “It would bankrupt the government.”
“That’s like threatening a dead man with hanging. A couple more zeroes on the figure are just one more level of unreality, no one can really imagine it anymore. The only ones who even think they can are exactly your transnational executives. They hold the debt, but no one else cares about their money. I could convince Washington of this in a minute, and then you just see how it blows up in you face. Whichever way it does, it wrecks your game.” He waved a hand angrily. “At which point someone else will occupy these rooms, and-” a sudden intuition-”you’ll be back in Underhill.”
That got her attention, no doubt about it. Her easy contempt took on a sudden edge. “No single person can convince Washington of anything. It’s quicksand down there. You’ll have your say and I’ll have mine, and we’ll see who has more influence.” And she rip-ripped across the room and opened the door, and loudly welcomed a gang of UN officials.
So. A waste of time. He wasn’t surprised; unlike those who had advised him to come, he had had no faith in the idea of Phyllis being rational. As with many religious fundamentalists, business for her was part of the religion; the two dogmas were mutually reinforcing, part of the same system. Reason had nothing to do with it. And while she might still believe in America’s power, she certainly didn’t believe in Frank’s ability to wield it. Fair enough; he would prove her wrong.
On the trip back down the cable, he scheduled video appointments on the half hour, for fifteen hours a day. His messages to Washington quickly got him into complex, transmission-delayed conversations with his people in the State and Commerce departments, and with the various cabinet heads who mattered. Soon the new president would give him a meeting as well. Meanwhile message after message, back and forth, leapfrogging around in the various arguments, replying to whichever correspondent got back to him first. It was complicated, exhausting. The case down on Earth had to be built like a house of cards, and a lot of them were bent.
Near the end, with the cable visible all the way down into the Sheffield socket, he suddenly felt really odd; it was a physical wave that passed through him. The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one gee. An image came to him: running out a long pier, wet uneven boards splashed with silver fish scales; he could even smell the salt fish stink. One gee. Funny how the body remembered it.
Once resettled in Sheffield, he went back to the continuous round of recording messages and analyzing the incoming replies, dealing with old cronies and with upcoming powers, all the talk patched together into a crazy quilt of arguments proceeding at different rates. At one point, late in the northern autumn, he was engaged in about fifty conferences simultaneously; it was like those people who play chess blind with a room full of opponents. Three weeks of this, however, and it began to come around, basically because President Incaviglia himself was extremely interested in getting any leverage he could over Amex and Mitsubishi and Praxis; and so he was more than willing to leak to the media his intent to look into allegations of treaty violations.
He did that, and stocks fell sharply in the relevant quarters. And two days later, the elevator consortium announced that enthusiasm for Martian opportunities had been so great that demand had exceeded supply for the time being. They would raise prices, of course, as their creed required; but also they would have to slow down emigration temporarily, until more towns and robotic townbuilders had been constructed.
Frank first heard this on a bar TV news report, one evening in a cafe over his solitary dinner. He grinned wolfishly as he chewed. “So we see who’s better at wrestling in quicksand, you bitch.” He finished eating and went for a walk along the rim concourse. It was only one battle, he knew. And it was going to be a bitter long war. But still, it was nice.
Then in the northern middle winter the occupants of the oldest American tent on the east slope rioted, and threw out all the UNOMA police inside, and locked themselves in; and the Russians next door did the same.
A quick conference with Slusinski gave Frank the background. Apparently both groups were employed by the roadbuilding subdivision of Praxis, and both tents had been invaded and attacked in the middle of the night by Asian toughs, who had slashed the tent fabric and killed three men in each tent, and knifed a bunch of others. The Americans and Russians both claimed the attackers were yakuza on a race rage, although it sounded to Frank like Subarashii’s security force, a small army that was mostly Korean. In any case, UNOMA police teams had arrived on the scene and found the attackers gone, and the tents in a turmoil; they had sealed the two tents, then denied permission for those inside to leave. The inhabitants had concluded they were prisoners, and enraged by this injustice they had burst out of their locks and destroyed the piste running through in their stations with welders, and several people on both sides had been killed. The UNOMA police had sent in massive reinforcements, and the workers inside the two tents were more trapped than ever.