“Oh yes, I saw a lot. Of course you could make that particular observation about practically any man in Underbill and be right. That vixen was keeping us all as a harem.”

“Polyandry?”

“Two-timing, goddammit! Or twenty-timing.”

“Hmm.”

Desmond laughed at him.

Just after dawn they caught sight of a white column of smoke, obscuring the stars over a whole quadrant of the sky. For a while this dense cloud was the only anomaly they could see in the landscape. Then, as they flew on and the terminator of the planet rolled under them, a broad swath of bright ground appeared on the east-em horizon ahead-an orange strip, or trough, running roughly northeast to southwest across the land, obscured by smoke that poured out of one section of it. The trough under the smoke was white and turbulent, as if a small volcanic eruption were confined to that one spot. Above it stood a beam of light-a beam of illuminated smoke, rather, so tight and solid that it was like a physical pillar, extending straight up and becoming less distinct as the cloud smoke thinned, and disappearing where the smoke reached its maximum height of around ten thousand meters.

At first there was no sign of the origin of this beam in the sky- the aerial lens was some four hundred kilometers overhead, after all. Then Sax thought he saw something like the ghost of a cloud, soaring very far above. Maybe that was it, maybe it wasn’t. Desmond wasn’t sure.

At the foot of the pillar of light, however, there was no question of visibility-the pillar of light had a kind of biblical presence, and the melted rock under it was truly incandescent, a very brilliant white. That was what 5000°K looked like, exposed to the open air. “We have to be careful,” Desmond said. “We fly into that beam and it would be like a moth in a flame.”

“I’m sure the smoke is very turbulent as well.”

“Yes. I plan to stay windward of it.”

Down where the pillar of lit smoke met the orange channel, new smoke was spewing out in violent billows, weirdly lit from underneath. To the north of the white spot, where the rock had had a chance to cool, the melted channel reminded Sax of film of the eruptions of the Hawaiian volcanoes. Bright yellow-orange waves surged north in the channel of fluid rock, occasionally meeting resistances and splashing up onto the dark banks of the molten channel. The channel was about two kilometers wide, and ran over the horizon in both directions; they could see perhaps two hundred kilometers of it. South of the pillar of light, the channel bed was almost covered with cooling black rock, webbed by dark orange cracks. The straightness of the channel, and the pillar of light itself, were the only obvious signs that it was not some kind of natural lava channel; but these signs were more than enough. Besides, there hadn’t been any volcanic activity on the surface of Mars for many thousands of years.

Desmond closed on the sight, then banked their plane sharply and headed north. “The beam from the aerial lens is moving south, so up the line we should be able to fly closer.”

For many kilometers the channel of melted rock ran northeast without changing. Then as they got farther away from the current burn zone, the orange of the lava darkened and began to cake over from the sides with a black surface, broken by more orange cracks. Beyond that the channel surface was black, as were the banks on each side of it; a straight swath of pure black, running over the rust-colored highlands of Hesperia.

Desmond banked and turned south again, and flew closer to the channel. He was a rough pilot, shoving the light plane around ruthlessly. When the orange cracks reappeared, a thermal updraft bucked the plane hard, and he slid to the west a little. The light of the molten rock itself illuminated the banks of the channel, which appeared to be smoking lines of hills, very black. “I thought they were supposed to be glass,” Sax said.

“Obsidian. Actually I’ve seen some different colors. Swirls of various minerals in the glass.”

“How far does this bum extend?”

“They’re cutting from Cerberus to Hellas, running just west of Tyrrhena and Hadriaca volcanoes.”

Sax whistled.

“They say it will be a canal between the Hellas Sea and the northern ocean.”

“Yes, yes. But they’re volatilizing carbonates much too fast.”

“Thickens the atmosphere, right?”

“Yes, but with CO₂! They’re wrecking the plan! -We won’t be able to breathe the atmosphere for years! We’ll be stuck in the cities.”

“Maybe they think they’ll be able to scrub the CO₂ out when things are warmed up.” Desmond glanced at him. “Have you seen enough?”

“More than enough.”

Desmond laughed his unsettling laugh, and banked the plane sharply. They began to chase the terminator to the west, flying low over the long shadows of the dawn terrain.

“Think about it, Sax. For a while people are forced to stay in the cities, which is convenient if you want to keep control of things. You burn cuts with this flying magnifying glass, and fairly quickly you have your one-bar atmosphere, and your warm wet planet. Then you have some method for scrubbing the air of carbon dioxide-they must have something in mind, industrial or biological or both. Something they can sell, no doubt. And presto, you have another Earth, and very quickly. It might be expensive-”

“It’s definitely expensive! All these big projects must be setting the transnationals back by huge amounts, and they’re doing it even though we’re a good step on the way to two-seventy-three K. I don’t get it.”

“Maybe they feel two-seventy-three is too modest. An average of freezing is a bit chilly, after all. Kind of a Sax Russell vision of terraforming, you might call that. Practical, but…” He cackled. “Or maybe they’re feeling rushed. Earth is in a mess, Sax.”

“I know that,” Sax said sharply. “I’ve been studying it.”

“Good for you! No, really. So you kntiw that the people who haven’t got the treatment are getting desperate-they’re getting older, and their chances of ever getting it seem to be getting worse. And the people who have gotten the treatment, especially the ones at the top, are looking around trying to figure out what to do. Sixty-one taught them what can happen if things get out of control. So they’re buying up countries like bad mangoes at the end of market day. But it doesn’t seem to be helping. And here right next door they see a fresh empty planet, not quite ready for occupation, but close. Full of potential. It could be a new world. Beyond the reach of the untreated billions.”

Sax thought it over. “A kind of bolt-hole, you mean. To escape to if there’s trouble.”

“Exactly. I think there are people in these transnationals who want Mars terraformed just as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.”

“Ah,” Sax said. And was silent all the way back.

Desmond accompanied him back into Burroughs, and as they walked from South Station to Hunt Mesa, they could see across the treetops of Canal Park, through the slot between Branch Mesa and Table Mountain to Black Syrtis. “Are they really doing things as stupid as that all over Mars?” Sax said.

Desmond nodded. “I will bring you a list next time.”

“Do that.” Sax shook his head as he pondered it. “It doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t take into account the long run.”

“They are short-run thinkers.”

“But they’re going to live a long time! Presumably they’ll still be in charge when these policies collapse on them!”

“They may not see it that way. They change jobs a lot up at the top. They try to establish a reputation by building a company very quickly, then get hired upward somewhere else, then try to do it again. It’s musical chairs up there.”

“It won’t matter what chair they’re in, it’s the whole room that’s going to come down! They aren’t paying attention to the laws of physics!”