Old Piece of Work

Amongst my father's papers I found a piece I wrote for a class over thirty years ago. I just scanned it, did some OCR and cleanup, and a very small trace of editing, mostly of punctuation.

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Property Rights

Black against black, the spaceship was designed to absorb all energy that might give away her position if reflected. She lumbered out of the orbit of her slowly turning homeworld, and with one precise expenditure of energy began the long journey outward.

Her sole passenger had requested a far destination, and the ship complied with the customary random selection of vectors. These were assembled and adjusted to strike a proper balance between energy usage and course camouflage. At certain times throughout the voyage, an angular adjustment would be made to the ship's heading, and later another, and then another still. In this way, no inference could possibly be made about the ship's destination by anyone left behind. Thus, privacy was assured.

Content now to wait with the undying patience of her race, the passenger thought of the wonderful solitude of the long journey ahead. In particular she dwelt with relish on the cool, clean deserts and unpolluted, deliciously thin atmosphere of her chosen destination. As her ship accelerated to within a significant fraction of light-speed, her ancient carapace glowed happily.



"I can't believe they're going through with it," said Curtis, looking grimly at the huge pumping plant perched on the cliff's edge. "It's so ugly, and it's completely destroying the gorge."

The plant sat like a great toy left by some monstrous child, all alone in the desert save for a scattering of dwellings and an airstrip for the support personnel.

"Well, it ain't much, but it's home," said Dr. Rezayani.

"You know that's not what I mean. Industrial-type places are supposed to be ugly. I mean the fact that it's here. This is one of the great natural wonders of the solar system and you've got those big pipes running right down into it, as if the thing on the edge had its belly slit and was spilling its intestines."

"Nice comparison. I always thought it looked like one of those parasitic fig trees you have down in Australia." With a lunge at the controls, Dr. Rezayani sent the airplane into a tight parabola. They curved around so they could get a better look at the six pipes that ran down the ancient rock walls and into the twilit depths below.

Curtis surreptitiously held his stomach as they fell towards the narrow valley floor, five kilometers beneath the level plain above. He shook his head disapprovingly. The big pipes gave out several tens of meters above the bottom, and out of them flowed a continuous, uneven torrent of water. The water splashed against rocks that had been dry for millions of years, to run in a muddy red river between the boulders and cliffs and collect in a young lake some kilometers hence.

"What can I say, Doctor? I'm appalled."

"You can call me Bill. You might as well, cause I'm going to call you Joe."

"What's it like, destroying nature, undoing God's work for the sake of a few years of mankind?"

"Oh, for God's sake!" Rezayani skimmed the surface of the lake, looking out at the plane's reflection in the smooth waters. Out towards shore, the vast, scarred cliffs of the gorge reflected redly.

"I keep forgetting about you young, God-fearing conservationist types. You seem to forget that the entire history of man is the undoing of God's work. That is if hunting wolves, planting corn and building roads is 'undoing'. What, do you want this place to remain a barren, lifeless, useless desert?"

"No, but this is a priceless landmark! This is the Hetch¬Hetchy, multiplied a thousand times.”

Curtis glared at Rezayani, then sat back in his chair with his arms crossed. He watched the further shore approach, looked down as they passed over the young beach. It continually rolled back as the water volume of the lake increased by the hour.

"Hetch-Hetchy?" the engineer said quizically. "Oh yes. But they reclaimed that."

"It took a hundred years to do it. How long will it take to reclaim this place?"

"What's to reclaim? We know Mars is barren of indigenous life. There are no trees to replant or meadows to reseed, nor are we drowning any helpless Martian prairie dogs. The place is dead. It is empty. It is lifeless. It is given to Man to reclaim it, just as he has reclaimed the deserts of Sind."

Curtis took out his binoculars. "So the arrogance of Man continues unabated."

He gazed through the eyepieces at the vast panorama unfolding ahead. Under the dark blue Martian sky, the cliffs and formations of Valles Marineris, the Mariner Valley, sat back patiently, awaiting inundation. Red, brown, sometimes of a faintly greenish hue, they rose for thousands of meters above the boulder-strewn valley floor. -Here in the main valley the walls were separated by dozens of kilometers at their bases. Yet on some of the side branches the bottoms were too narrow even for a four-wheeled land vehicle.

"Fly over to the walls. Let's have a look at the rocks."

Dr. Rezayani complied and banked the plane to starboard. The oversized ceramic-alloy wings flapped slightly in the thin Martian atmosphere. Looking back to the right, Curtis could see the thick vapor trail left by their hydrogen-combustion engine. In its small way, even this airplane was contributing to the humidification process, which was just a part of the wider process of making the planet habitable.

Curtis knew the logic behind flooding the valley. The planet Mars was a global desert. Evidence for the existence of wide rivers and streams was everywhere, but the streams had dried up and seeped into the vast subterranean aquifers millennia ago. Now, the only water on the planet's surface was contained in the polar ice caps.

But hundreds of meters beneath the surface the water remained, locked into a substructure of permafrost so huge and water-rich it boggled the mind. Water couldn't exist on the surface when humans first arrived, for the air was too cold and thin. It would immediately freeze, then sublimate into the low- pressure carbon dioxide atmosphere. But the first stage of terraformation, the seeding of the planet with genetically-engineered plants and lichens, had transformed the atmosphere. It was now an oxygen-nitrogen mix, the carbon dioxide having become a minority component. It was of a much greater pressure than before. The atmosphere was now suitable for earthlife, and it was time for the second stage.

This involved creating great reservoirs by repairing the ancient waterways and filling them with water forced out of the subterranean permafrost. These sinuous, artificial lakes would serve for irrigation of the third stage, which involved introducing vast automated farms to transform the dry red deserts into life-giving fields. Also they would provide a watery surface area to aid in the humidification of the air, and might even be stocked with fish.

Put how far should Man go in redirecting nature to his own whim? Curtis and others like him felt they were going too far already. To make Mars livable was perhaps a necessary insult, but to so thoroughly transform the face of the planet was a slap in the face of God.

The plane decelerated as they approached the mouth of a tributary. Tall pillars of rock stood on either side, stone sentinels to only one of the many collections of wonders Curtis strove to defend. As they glided into the canyon, he was reminded of his first visit to New York City, and the tall buildings that almost blotted out the sky. Red and brown striated rock formations rose incredibly high on each side and down into the shadowy depths below.

There seemed to be a smile on Rezayani's serious face. He pulled the plane to the side and started accelerating again. Ahead were the Twelve Brothers, a collection of pillars and arches carved by the whistling winds of untold years. Curtis had never seen them except in video, and he held his breath at the wonder of them.

"You like getting a close look at things, don't you?" said Curtis, as they continued to accelerate towards the great windowed wall.

"Mm-hmm," replied the engineer. He was clearly concentrating on a slit between two pillars, arched over in red stone. He started positioning the airplane for a tight curve that would lead them right to it.

"Don't do it," Curtis mumbled, and gripped the seat.

Rezayani winked, slammed the plane over on it side and yanked at the throttle for all he was worth. Curtis’ stomach lurched as the G's pressed into him. Through a squint he saw the wall hurtling at them and felt the plane shudder as it burst through a barrier of air. He heard the engine's rumbling whine blare back at them, echoing off the rocks. Then they were through, and easing into a glide.

A few minutes later Curtis managed to speak again. "Gee, and you want to drown this place, and deny that pleasure to your grandchildren? How thoughtless."

"By then, there will be a Martian Air Authority of some kind and they won't be able to do it anyway. Besides, they can always get a submarine."

"Right. Rich kids can always play. Meanwhile the rest of us have to look at old pictures to imagine what used to be. Look at those rocks there. Who would have imagined such shapes were possible? And you're going to drown thousands of such sculptures, never to be seen and enjoyed by future generations. Why don't you just fill up the valley halfway? Then, at least, some of this will be preserved."

"Halfway?" Rezayani faced him, eyes intent. "What do you mean, halfway? So that Man can halfway survive on this cold world? There is no halfway. Mars has no lakes, and as yet, no great forests. We need all the water volume we can get, and filling this valley is the best and most cost-effective way to start. Maybe later we'll put up levees and make big shallow lakes out on your precious deserts, but we need a deep-water reservoir, and we need it now.

"There is no halfway, Joe. I'm here to build an ocean."

"What, the Rezayani Sea? Mare Williamis?"

"No joke, Joe. Mankind needs room, and this whole planet is ours for the taking. We must make it into another Earth. We must transform it completely, or the effort will eventually fail. There's really no safety margin. What Mars was, can never be again. The place is ours, and we must change it to suit us."



She was awakened by the scream of alarms and a tension that vibrated throughout the ship. Every intelligent subsector of the spacecraft was buzzing with an electricity of excitement, of dread, of danger.

She rolled out of the mating hammock and into the life-support cocoon. Around her the ship's controls hummed into life. Information flooded into her awareness via viewscreens and implants; analyses were made, conclusions drawn. And at what she saw her old carapace glowed hot and angry.

Flooding over the ship at lightspeed was a burst of electromagnetic energy. It was of a very narrow spectral band, containing signals that were anything but random. It was not the beacon of a pulsar, or the last scream of a dying sun, or some unexpected resonance among the random noises of the distant galaxies. Though extremely weak, it was recognizably the call of an unknown intelligent species.

It was radio, the most basic remote communication known.

Her initial response was pleasure at the discovery. An intelligent race was always a welcome find, for if it could be studied it was invariably interesting. However, the danger inherent in unknown intelligent species was great. Sometimes they developed quickly and hungrily, and destroyed much before being stopped. Caution was the more common trait amongst surviving sentients. Interstellar transmissions sometimes drew aggressive races to their source as wild beasts to a feast. For that reason her own people had learned to squelch or disguise all outgoing signals, and built ships to absorb rather than reflect.

These signals were evidence of a young race, primitive, no doubt precocious, probably dangerous. And as she studied the signals and their incidence of radiation, it became all too clear. The home of this newly technological race of beings and her destination were the same.

She relaxed into an introspective posture, and pondered this. She had been to the planetary system in question once before, on an inspection tour shortly after the purchase. There had been several moons and planets that might harbor life, though only one was truly inundated in it. That was the third planet out, and the most developed creatures there, as she recalled, were sentient, but only barely so. They were loosely organized into social units, but were in a state of complete developmental stasis. Moreover they were physically frail, and prone to a wide variety of diseases.

She had never given the species very good survival odds, despite their high birth rate. Besides, her visit had been a mere one thousandth of a galactic year ago. The third planet of this system had circled its sun perhaps two hundred and fifty thousand times since then, no more. Hardly enough time for dull, short-lived cave dwellers to develop radio.

As her ship drew nearer to the star and its system that was her goal, more information bombarded her sensors. Traveling as she was at nearly half lightspeed and in the opposite direction, the signals received were effectively compressed in time. Thus she could judge their rate of development by analyzing their transmissions as a function of distance. What she found shocked her.

Those cave-dwellers must indeed have developed, and with unprecedented speed. The most primitive radio signals, those first detected, were only 150 to 200 local years old. As she progressed, higher frequencies and more sophisticated transmission schemes followed one after the other with amazing rapidity. It was as though the race responsible had grasped the fundamentals of electromagnetic physics and applied them to new technologies in mere decades, local time.

This was the wink of an eye. She had taken longer to woo and consume a single mate.

She had traveled far in a bid to enjoy some of the priceless solitude that was so important to her kind. It was for the solitude she had purchased the fourth planet of this system so long ago, and it was for the time to enjoy it she had worked so hard ever since. She had known the third planet was inhabited, but that was irrelevant so long as the denizens thereof remained mere animals. She had in fact taken an option on the entire solar system, in the hopes that someday the new lifeforms would prove useful.

But there was absolutely no room in her plans for these animals to become intelligent, much less aggressive. She was of a race who prized solitude and hard-won property above nearly everything else; certainly above such diversions as scientific curiosity or a mundane, impractical mercy. Her only hope now was that these creatures would somehow avoid the discovery of space travel, and at least leave her property alone.

And upon that thought the finalizing data was received. The high-frequency, relatively sophisticated signals now being received no longer radiated from a single planetary source. By the evidence of orbital perturbations, the creatures of the third planet had moved on to their moon, they had sent probes to all the other planets, and judging by the radio traffic had established a colony on the fourth planet itself.

The traveler glowed a dull yellow in frustration. There was no choice, then.

She decelerated into the system, aware that these still- primitive creatures could not detect her. With a sense of resignation, she activated the magnetic sweepers, drawing energy from the star ahead. One or two passes through the orbits of the two offending planets ought to disrupt their natural magnetic shields sufficiently. Soon their atmospheres would be swept away; hopefully their deaths would be swift and merciful.

Unhappy but determined, she moved in to claim her property rights.