Old Mars

The leviathan would trundle up into the town, deploy its hydraulic grapples, and begin stuffing the bone city, piece by piece, into its mechanical maw. It would grind up the town, house by house, separating metal and stone from the ossiferous material that the Martians had built the place from. The valueless stone would be spat out, the metal compacted and excreted like cubic droppings.

The metal was valuable, but it was the bone that really mattered. It would be pulverized, sacked, and stacked on a detachable trailer that rolled along behind the behemoth. As a trailer was filled, it would be detached and another put in its place. Then the loaded trailer would be hooked to a tractor, and the eight-wheeler would head off across the dry sea until it met the Martian road-and-canal network. Then it would go to one of the newly built Earthman towns that were surrounded by farms whose soil, even after lying fallow for thousands of years, was not all it might be.

The ground bones of Martian cities would fertilize the crops that would feed the tens of thousands of Earthmen arriving each month as the silver-rocket armada continued to cross the black gulf between the worlds.

Mather was one of the most recent arrivals. He had been unable to secure funding to come to Mars as an archaeologist. The new old world needed brawny pioneers, not pointy-headed academics, he was told. Archaeologists objected to the destruction of the ancient Martian cities, so the company was being careful not to let any of them anywhere near them.

So Mather had concocted a résumé that should not have withstood even the most cursory scrutiny, but New Ares Mining Corporation had lucrative contracts to fulfill and was desperate for men to mine the bone cities. Mather was on the next rocket out.

The trip was long and the quarters close. The men he would be working with soon deduced that Fred Mather had not come, as they had, from the coal mines of Kentucky or the oil leases of west Texas. His hands were too soft and his neck not rough enough. The crew chief, Red Bowman, a veteran of the Alaska gold fields, marked him down as a city-boy tenderfoot on a job that had no slack to cut for greenhorns.

Mather worked quickly, quartering the town on foot, placing the transponders according to a rough map made from an aerial photograph snapped by a New Ares rocket. Two hours after he began, he threw the switch on the last device, then walked back to where he had left the jeep.

He lifted the hood, removed the cover of the carburetor, and dropped a pinch of Martian grit into its barrel. Then he radioed base to say that the vehicle wasn’t running right—he suspected dirt in the carburetor or fuel line—so he would stay the night in the town and repair the faulty part in the morning.

“I wouldn’t want to risk overturning the jeep coming home in the dark,” he said. “Those roads can ice up pretty bad, I hear.”

Bowman was on his supper break. The radioman said, “Roger that. Talk to you tomorrow. Base out.”

In the dwindling sunlight, Mather dug under the jeep’s front seat for the scuffed satchel that contained his field notebook. He equipped himself with a heavy-duty flashlight.

“Okay,” he said to himself, “let’s see what we can accomplish.”

It was no good saying to the directors and shareholders of New Ares Mining Corporation that the bone cities of Mars were a priceless asset. New Ares accountants and engineers had already worked out the figures: The cities were only priceless in that they were free for the taking; the profits from mining them, however, would start in the tens of millions and climb sharply into the hundreds. It was conceivable that, if Mars filled up and more of the bone-built dead towns were found, New Ares’ earnings could eventually total a billion.

“Imagine,” one of Mather’s workmates had said on the trip out, as they swung side by side in their hammocks in the passenger hold. “A billion dollars. And we’re gonna be part of that.”

“Yeah,” Mather had said. “Imagine.”

The Martians had built their towns mostly out of stone and metal, crystal and glass. They had run water through channels in the floors—to cool the rooms and, Mather hypothesized, their slender feet—and grown fruit hydroponically from the walls.

But in some parts of the planet, there had once been a fashion—perhaps it was a ritual requirement—for building in bone. Martian architects had designed houses walled and floored in thin sheets of ossiferous material that must have been peeled like veneer from the huge bones of gigantic sea creatures. Sometimes, the great ribs and femurs were used whole as structural members, trimmed and squared or rounded to the needed dimensions, often ornately carved into pillars and lintels. Still more of the stuff had been crushed into powder, then bound together with burnt lime to make a durable concrete for roads and doorsteps.