This is a fan translation of Road to Mars (Дорога к Марсу) by fifteen Russian science fiction writers.
This chapter was written by Igor Minakov.
I claim no rights to the contents herein.
Note: Footnotes can be found at the end of the chapter.
Chapter 30
Black and White Movie
"There are celestial sights more dazzling, spectacles that inspire more awe, but to the thoughtful observer who is privileged to see them well there is nothing in the sky so profoundly impressive as these canals of Mars. Fine lines and little gossamer filaments only, cobwebbing the face of the Martian disk, but threads to draw one's mind after them across the millions of miles of intervening void…"
The old man threw the book away. Lifting its pages, it fell on the worn Bukharan rug. On the yellowing title page, he could just barely make out the black letters, washed out like Martian canals on an overexposed photographic plate: "Mars as the Abode of Life by Percival Lowell, A.B., LL.D."
"Idiot," the old man grunted.
There was bitterness on his pale, wrinkled face.
His entire life had been devoted to the struggle. He'd written comprehensive articles, but the newspapers and magazines refused to print them. He'd sent letters to the Imperial Academy of Sciences. They would respond politely and coolly, without getting into disputes on the merits. He'd even sent a telegram to Flagstaff, Arizona, to the observatory of his scientific opponent Percival Lowell, but never got a reply. A provincial Russian teacher and amateur astronomer was too insignificant a person compared to the famous American. A dim luminary next to a first-magnitude star. Actually, pretty far away.
The old man tugged at his thinning beard in thought, then took a decisive step towards his desk. On the way, he stepped on Lowell's book but didn't even notice it. He sat into the squeaking chair and pulled a piece of paper closer. He dipped a simple student quill into the intricate-looking inkwell given by his fellow teachers as a birthday gift. He raised the steel quill over the sheet the way an executioner raised his sword over the accused.
Enough articles and letters. He was going to write his own book where he would lay out the results of his many years of observations and conclusions. Careful conclusions, supported by the observations, but deafening to that entire pack of scammers that was misleading the trusting masses with their nonsense about canals and the Martians that had supposedly built them. The book was going to make him famous. Put him on the same pedestal as Galileo, Herschel, Brahe, Lomonosov, goddamn it!..
The quill was shaking in the old man's hand. A drop of ink was growing on the tip of the quill, threatening to turn into a shapeless blot on the sheet. What should he start with? The dry scientific words should probably be kept for the main part, but he should start with more poetic words. The people loved that.
All right then…
"It was a clear night. His fingers were frosty. Moisture was freezing in the corners of the tired eyes. But the observer feared just one thing: for the warm red ball in the telescope eyepiece to suddenly lose its incredible clarity. And the vision of the wondrous world that was almost as if rediscovered by the simple schoolteacher would disappear forever.
He just needed to get the drawing done in time…
Canals, you say? No, not canals! The dry plains of the north. The gigantic hills of the south. The dark eye of a volcano. The largest one in the observable universe! And a crack furrowing through the crimson face — a scar on the cheek of the war god.
He just needed to get the drawing done in time…"
And now, nearly thirty years later, the old man was warmed by that blinding joy that had flowed over him back then, when he was young, enthusiastic, genuinely believing in his star…
Yes, he had to remember that star, the dull spark next to Mars that no one had seen either… The star had been moving. The observer couldn't believe his eyes: no planets, no moons had ever shown such agility, but this one was almost like being carried by the unseen sails of the Sun. There it was glowing next to the ball of Mars, and then it was gone. Where?! Eclipsed by the Red Planet?!
The observer had waited for it to appear on the other side of Mars, but visibility then worsened. The war planet grew dull, quivering in the air streams. Those damned canals appeared on its disk again. The observer nearly cried, but there was nothing to be done anymore. The god of war had once again hidden his face under a mask.
Forever?..
"Well, is anyone going to tell me what this is?" Anikeev muttered, not really addressing anyone in particular.
The rest of the Ares crew, at least those who were on their feet, were behind him. And what was there to say?! They'd gotten the mysterious Storage 2 compartment open. Actually, it had opened on its own. And none of them knew why. Maybe it was just time… Fine, it didn't really matter. The important thing was what they'd found there. A plastic panel with a bulging monitor that looked very much like the screen of an antique TV. Their first impression was that it was just a decoration concealing the real innards. But the decoration turned out to be functional. The screen had suddenly turned on by itself and started showing a film. A documentary. Black and white. About humanity's discovery of Mars. It was interesting. At any other place and time. The spacers had known most of the facts mentioned in the film since they were schoolboys, but there were interesting parts too.
For example, the information on a secret American project codenamed Tripod. The project had been undertaken in the late 1930s-early 1940s. It ended with a secret training exercise involving the joint efforts of the National Guard and the police to repel a potential invasion from Mars. In particular, the legendary "The War of the Worlds" radio broadcast by Orson Welles had been a part of the training exercise, which most of the citizens, naturally, didn't know.
But the commander of the Ares was more interested in another fact previously unknown to him. If the creators of the film were to be believed, then an amateur Russian astronomer had written a book at the start of the previous century where he talked about a very different viewpoint on the fourth planet in the Solar System. The image of Mars he'd drawn was far closer to the modern ideas than the ones prevalent over a hundred years ago. The information about the old schoolteacher's discoveries could be disregarded, if not for two circumstances. First was the amateur astronomer's name… There were legends of an oddball ancestor in the Anikeev family, a schoolteacher who'd dedicated his life to studying the Red Planet. And second, the Ares commander's great-great-grandfather's unpublished work mentioned Mars having a third moon on a meridional orbit!
The Italian politely moved the Commander away from the "blue screen," ran his fingers over the plastic panel that blocked the entrance to Storage 2. Then he pushed it slightly with his shoulder.
"Monolithic," he concluded.
"What do you mean?" Bull inquired.
"The panel with the screen is a single whole with the compartment," Piccirilli explained. "See, not even a tiniest seam…"
"So it's an AI after all…" Jeubin muttered.
"Apparently," the Italian agreed. "Just one thing I don't understand. What's up with this… documentario?"
"We're being prepared for something," Anikeev said.
"First contact?" Bull inquired.
The Commander shook his head.
"Not only," he replied. "And not so much as…" He suddenly leapt up, nearly hitting his head on the ceiling. "Andrei!"
Oh, Tsuryupa, you son of a bitch… Kartashov thought, stretching blissfully, like a cat waking up.
The medical sensors were falling off him like dry scales. Along with the sickness. Along with death! And along with his past life. And past ignorance.
Kartashov threw a glance at the bulkhead separating his box from the rest of the ship. The bulkhead obediently turned transparent. He saw Anikeev, Jeubin, Bull, and Piccirilli standing in front of a small screen that was showing some black and white film. A silent one too. With subtitles!
Those MIT guys are a bunch of jokers, Kartashov thought. Giving a supercomputer an imitation of an antique TV screen and showing an imitation of a silent film on it… Whose idea was that?
The spacers wouldn't get much information, of course. Sad but true. Their had only one task right now: getting to Mars. The rest was in the hands… or whatever they had… of those Crickets.
Kartashov looked at another bulkhead and mentally "washed out" a window in it. He looked at the "orange ball of Mars," casually turned it from orange to green and blue. It really was a beautiful planet… A dream!
…The Crickets had been hopping from star to star before finding a planet they liked, but the aliens got somewhat unlucky. The fourth planet in the family of the yellow dwarf was circling dangerously close to the asteroid belt: the system's construction waste. And very soon they learned that one asteroid, about the size of the Moon, would soon turn the fourth planet into a hopelessly dead desert. The Crickets could've easily vaporized Thanatos, as human astronomers dubbed the ancient space killer, but, following their strange ethics, the aliens hadn't felt it right to change the fate of even a useless world. But the Crickets' code of ethics didn't forbid them from duplicating the planets they needed…
All right, Kartashov told himself, pulling away from the marvelous sight of the green-and-blue Mars that only he could see at the moment, time to show myself…
He walked through the bulkhead and appeared in front of the shocked commander of the Ares, who hadn't even noticed that the astrobiologist appeared from inside the wall.
"Andrei!" Anikeev said in shock. "You're alive!"
"Something like that," Kartashov replied. "Ready for duty."
Yes, I'm ready, he repeated silently. Unlike poor Givens, whose time hasn't yet arrived… But that's a secret for now…
Zhang looked at his comrade expectantly, waiting for him to continue, but Hu remained silent.
"Why are you being silent?" Zhang finally asked. "What's going on with that Russian module?"
"The module is actually American," Hu said. "It's a supercomputer. It's the real ship commander, but the crew doesn't know that." Hu was silent for a moment. "But they do know something else now…"
"What?! Zhang asked impatiently.
"The Western barbarians are now aware that Huǒxīng [Footnote 1] is a shapeshifter…"
Zhang smiled.
"Excellent!" he exclaimed. "Then our competition is going to be a fair one."
"And we most definitely mustn't lose it," Hu went on. "It's one thing for the Ares crew to land on a lifeless plain, and it's completely different if it's flowering fields. The flowering "Fire Star" must be claimed by China. The Russians, Americans, French, Arabs, whoever can settle the stone planet!"
"And if they manage to get to Huǒxīng when it's flowering?"
"In that case, we must stop them, even at the cost of our—"
He was interrupted. A red light appeared on the console, followed immediately by an alarm. Hu reached for the controls.
"Too late!" he exclaimed.
Footnotes
1) Mars in Chinese. It means "fire star."