Chapter 18

There was a tremendous explosion underneath Guppy. Suddenly, a whole segment of Auburn Space Port was engulfed in falling dust and dirt. Dammit, another attempt by The True Believers to wreck our space efforts! Guppy had been put in the idle storage area for holding while we decided what to do with her. From our point of view, Guppy was obsolete, but we had not yet decided how to dispose of her. I was even toying with the idea of selling her to NASA, but I had not come to a final conclusion.

The space ship was not damaged by the explosion, even though the blast had been powerful enough to lift the ex-submarine a few feet off the ground. As a matter of course, we always set the impervious field on when a ship was standing idle so that it would not be damaged by any number of possible incidents, sabotage being one of them.

Our security crew was good, but they were not perfect. They concentrated on protecting the lives of our people, our guests, and our customers. That meant that there were holes in our security screen, and a determined person could get through, especially if he did not care whether he lived or died. Fortunately, in this case, the only injuries were minor from falling debris, but the fanatics of The True Believers were getting bolder and bolder. I couldn't help worrying that, one day, they would be successful in doing some real damage.

I called for a staff meeting with Hadly Johnson, our Chief of Security. "Sorry about that, Boss, but an analysis of the security camera tapes showed that this explosion was caused by three guys slipping in and dragging sleds of what we assume must have been explosives behind them. The cameras also show that they went up with the explosion. These guys are getting more and more desperate, and we simply cannot be everywhere!"

"Yeah, Hadly, nobody is blaming you or your people. I just wanted to know if there was anything that we could do to stop them within any sort of reason. But, from what you say, we are already doing everything that can be done. It looks to me like the only new thing that we can do is move out of their reach."

"A good idea, Boss, but I don't know where that could be."

"What do you think of moving to Mars?"

I had toyed with the idea of terraforming Mars for some time, and even had a team working on the problem. The essential problems were that Mars lacked a molten core and a significant moon. Well, we could fix the moon problem, but we were stymied by the molten core question. I had even asked ET to see if his people had ever come up with a trick that we could use, but we drew a big flat zero there.

We had to have the molten core so that Mars could develop a strong magnetic field to deflect the solar wind. Until that problem was solved, there was no way to keep an atmosphere around the planet. The only initial idea for melting the Martian core was a series of hydrogen bomb explosions, but that would take more bombs than existed on Earth at the time. Besides, I didn't think that any nation was going to give up its hydrogen bombs, even if we did pay a fair price for them. Dammit, there had to be a solution, and one of our bright physical chemists came up with a possible answer.

Jeff Davis proposed that we find an asteroid large enough to do the job, accelerate it to FTL, and bring it back into real space at Mars' core. The result of two solid objects trying to occupy the same space at the same time would generate a literal Hell of an explosion and produce the heat we needed to melt anything!

We could build a small spaceship, maybe the derelict Guppy, to provide the acceleration for an asteroid and bring that back into real space at Mars' core. Wow, were we in luck! Jeff, who was now head of his own team, calculated that all we had to do was to fill the unnecessary space within Guppy with concrete and that should be enough mass to do the job.

We decided that we would be fools to try this without at least one dry run, so we found a planet with a solid core in a solar system that nobody wanted. We had charted thousands of systems around the galaxy, so it only took a few minutes for our computers to search the data base for a planet to fill our needs. We found one in the Orion constellation that had a planet almost identical to the current description of Mars, so that became our target.

Likewise, we had no trouble finding an asteroid of the same mass as the filled Guppy, so we were ready for the experiment. Chu Ping, our best pilot, was assigned to coordinate activities. A rig was built on the surface of the asteroid bullet to function like the Guppy, and the controlling computer program was loaded in to guide the last flight of the asteroid. I have to admit that I held my breath as the asteroid was flipped into FTL and brought out at the center of the target planet.

Damn, what a disappointment! Nothing seemed to happen. Of course, being in the nominal vacuum of space, we could not have heard the explosion, but we all expected to see something happen on the surface of the planet. Surely, there would at least be a minor earthquake. But, we couldn't see a blasted thing happen! We assumed that the experiment had been a failure and were turning to leave the viewscreens when we heard cheering from the instrumentation people.

We had forgotten to allow for the transit time for the shock wave to reach the surface. The instruments had registered the vibration from the explosion, and the temperature sensors were already indicating an increase in temperature well below the surface. Before we left, the sensors were indicating temperatures as high as 4,500 degrees Celsius at the core and climbing. By the end of the week, there was the beginning of a magnetic field!

Word spread like wildfire around the galaxy, and we had several races approach us about purchasing the newly awakened planet. Furthermore, we were approached by others to do the same job for them on specific planets in their own systems. Wow, we suddenly had a new division of our corporation: "Genesis."

Well, we decided that Genesis had done such a good job with the unwanted asteroid that there was no point in wasting Guppy. A suitable asteroid was quickly found and sent to the center of Mars. Within a month, the solar wind was being deflected from around Mars, and we were in business for terraforming. A contraption similar to the one used to reactivate Mars was used to bring in another asteroid to act as a suitable moon. The additional moon was necessary to stabilize the rotation of Mars so that it would not wobble unduly, similar to what Luna did for Earth.

The Genesis division was growing by leaps and bounds, but we still gave terraforming Mars the highest priority. Jeff Davis was not interested in taking on administrative duties, so a suitable manager was hired, and Jeff was returned to his laboratory where he was supremely happy. Jeff also received a suitable financial reward, for which his wife was happy.

Once we knew that Mars was now a going concern, we started moving our operation from Auburn to the new base on Mars, also called "Auburn." Mars still did not yet have a livable atmosphere, since it was very thin and mostly carbon dioxide. Therefore, Auburn, Mars, was all under domes, but that was a minor nuisance that we knew was not going to last forever. Most of our employees were very happy to move to Mars, since it was such a great adventure.

We found some high-altitude plants suitable for genetic modification, and adapted them for the reduced sunlight on Mars. They thrived on Mars and soon were busy making free oxygen for us on a planet-wide basis. Our biologists and other scientists calculated that we would have a breathable oxygen level in 87 years, with a five year margin for error.

The other two things we needed were water and nitrogen. Water was there beneath the surface, we just had to melt it and bring it up. Now that the solar wind was not blowing the atmosphere away, we had no compunction about bringing the water to the surface. Mostly, we used geothermal energy for this job.

Nitrogen represented a separate problem. A lot of study went into this, but we finally had to settle for bringing in nitrogen from Jupiter. It was expensive, but, fortunately, we had the resources. The nitrogen was captured in huge balloons and towed to Mars. A whole industry was set up to separate the useful gases from the nitrogen for resale, and the nitrogen was released into the atmosphere. Even at our current frantic rate, it was going to take over 50 years to get enough nitrogen into the atmosphere to duplicate the atmosphere on Earth.