Authors: Ken Kalfus
Miss Keaton accepts that they will not be returning to Cambridgeshire after all. She recognizes, reluctantly and painfully, that she has entertained a series of vague expectations about what would happen once the Equilateral was completed, and what her life with Thayer would be like once their years of toil and privation were behind them. She was of course hideously mistaken. A return to England, even at this hour of the Equilateral’s accomplishment, can provide only further reminders of her error. The sterile, static desert comforts her in the daytime; the sky, as always, relieves her at night.
In any case, the correspondence now arrives in a torrent, with open-ended questions and tentative, unreliable answers about what is being seen on the ever-closer Martian surface. Government ministers, newspapermen, the Concession’s governors, and the world’s public await the Red Planet’s response to the Equilateral, which they expect even though the Flare has gone unseen. Miss Keaton must continuously consult with Thayer, while the girl hardly leaves his side and their robes and common baldness set them apart. With Miss Keaton, Thayer expresses in precise, professorial language the apparent complexities of
planetary motion, the varying illumination of distant celestial bodies, relative atmospheric conditions, and the vagaries of human eyesight; when he turns to the girl, he manages to communicate what’s necessary with subvocal murmurs and primitive gestures.
Thayer initially seems revitalized by the Equilateral’s completion—he doesn’t speak of the Flare—and then by the hosannahs that reach them on the Great Sand Sea. Yet Miss Keaton detects a certain weakness, an occasional palsy, and a moment of inattention or incomprehension when she addresses him. It’s several weeks before she becomes accustomed to Thayer’s hairlessness, as well as to the robe and the new, less penetrative cast of the blue eyes that radiate from the shadows of his white cowl. They’re as bright and cool as ever, yet often they seem fixed on an object elsewhere. His hand takes a moment to find the teacup that she offers him. They don’t speak of this either.
No, he can’t speak of the Flare; he can hardly think of the events that led to the mistimed firing. Days of obscurity are followed by electric nights when Thayer believes the lighting of the petroleum still lies in the future. At other times the Earth remains fixed in its place in the sky of Mars, and the Flare continues to burn, casting on the fourth planet’s sere sands the permanent shadow of man’s greatest accomplishment.
Δ
One aspect of the attack on Point A unreported in the press is that the Mahdists spared the observatory, thoughtlessly sweeping past it. Only one of the men stopped. He dismounted, approached
the building, and smashed the lock with an ax. He stepped inside the windowless shed, still breathing hard from his ride, and pondered the object in the murk. He circled around the cold steel barrel. He tentatively pressed a lever extending from above his head and was startled when the roof slid open. The stars were revealed in a rush, and he knew that the machine was not a gun. Embarrassed by his fright, he realized then that it was not a weapon at all, but something utterly foreign, directly connected to something in the infinite. Unsettled by the encounter, he left the shed open but didn’t lay a hand on the instrument.
In the long course of the unusually clear-skied summer, Earth continues to close the distance with Mars, which gets more intense scrutiny than it ever has before. New controversies erupt, in particular over the discovery of canals radiating from the Elysium Basin in the northern temperate zone, one apparently extending toward Mnemosyne, the other to Arcadia. Thayer’s colleagues struggle to find France-Lanord’s markings around Hellas, in the planet’s more easily observed southern hemisphere.
Point A receives hourly bulletins from the Concession, which forwards detailed reports from the world’s planetary astronomers. Their observations are often at odds with each other, entire networks of waterways being erased from one night to the next. Thayer fires back in reply, demanding that they look again for the features that he’s identified, but he sadly expects them to fail. He knows the corresponding visual weaknesses and strengths of his colleagues: whose eyes are capable of resolving close double stars but are unable to recognize faint shadings or patterns on a planetary surface; whose eyes are easily blinded
by a disk’s full illumination; whose optic nerves are connected to brains of plodding imagination. He can very nearly predict which astronomer won’t see what.
Δ
Mars is now seventeen seconds across, no more than a tiny fraction of the eyepiece’s field of view, yet for Thayer it’s enormous, five times its apparent size last October when it emerged from behind the sun. As always the planet is featureless upon immediate viewing, but the image is steady and the object shows itself to be a three-dimensional solid, almost graspable. It’s a marble we can insert into our mouths, roll around on our tongues, taste, and take care not to swallow. He peers deeply into the ocher pit and, after a long while, a single phantom makes itself known, followed by the rumor of another. Thayer holds very still, save to caress the fine-motion screw centering the planet. The girl stands behind him and Miss Keaton stands behind her. Thayer murmurs something. Then he sharply takes in his breath. His eyes never leave the eyepiece. His lower lip trembles.
The markings at Peneus, almost in the center of the disk, have been extended on either side, from Hellespontus to Malea. But the regions bordering the excavations have not deepened their shades and become verdant, as is usually the case with the canals at springtime. Another line is also becoming apparent, from Hellespontus to the Hellas Basin, completing the figure.
The bald, hooded man shudders and exhales.
“It’s very clear,” he announces when he finally pulls away from the eyepiece. He speaks to both women, though only one may understand. “This is the most important discovery yet. Now we know what they’re constructing north of Mare Australe. Those aren’t canals. No one constructs a triangular canal. It’s obvious. They’ve responded to our Equilateral by excavating their own, conveniently situated to be observed from Earth!”
“A triangle …” Miss Keaton murmurs, trying to make herself recognize the implications, even though what she is most aware of is that Thayer has stepped away from the telescope to make way for the girl.
The bald, hooded girl again shows enormous patience at the eyepiece, before scratching a figure on the palm of her small, delicate hand. It’s a triangle. She holds up her hand for both to see, as if the diagram will remain visible there.
At the eyepiece, Miss Keaton tries to approach the girl’s stillness, but she finds herself distracted, in no position to peer through the murk of space at a faraway turning stone. Thayer’s feature refuses to resolve itself. She thinks she may see the same new Hellas canal they observed in May, but she’s not even sure of that.
When she finally pulls back from the telescope, Thayer’s watches her intently, waiting for confirmation. Offering confirmation will be much easier than withholding it, and also the best thing for Thayer’s precarious health. But Miss Keaton finds herself rebelling against confirmation. She hasn’t seen the triangle.
Thayer turns away, and wipes the absence of confirmation from his mind.
Δ
Miss Keaton cables Thayer’s report to the Concession, which relays it to the International Astronomical Congress. No one will remark the absence of the second observer’s name. The world’s leading astronomers are notified.
Corroborations shortly flood the wires in return, from Professor Verzola in Padua, from Professor Belokovsky at Pulkovo near St. Petersburg, from Professor Barnard at Lick in California, and from Professor Max Wolf in Heidelberg. At the same time, as Thayer has anticipated, the skeptics who have opposed the Equilateral, calling him a fraud, now deny that the new markings are as regular as he claims. These are the men, now in the despised minority, who denied they saw canals even when they were made manifest in the world’s greatest telescopes, in the best conditions. Thayer smirks as he reads their dissents.
“Fools,” Miss Keaton agrees, but a keen observer would have noticed in the epithet a shimmer of a quaver.
“Blockheads,” Thayer asserts.
Miss Keaton admires the skills of their European and American correspondents, and of course Sanford Thayer remains the world’s keenest practitioner of the astronomical science and its attendant arts. Time and again Thayer has been the first man to see planetary features and starry phenomena that were later confirmed by his colleagues. Miss Keaton suspects that her
inability to distinguish the Mars Equilateral lies within herself, and that this failure reflects a weakness more profound than a defect in her eyesight. She has never before failed to see what Thayer has discovered.
Δ
The International Astronomical Congress calls an extraordinary conference at the Royal Albert Hall, the greatest gathering of astronomers in history. They come to London, their suitcases bulging with reports and sketchbooks. They give interviews to the press and lectures to a paying, clamoring public. At midday we may walk into a cigar shop and overhear two gentlemen arguing declinations and hours of right ascension. The visitors erect their portable telescopes on every green at evening dusk.
Isolated at Point A, Thayer nevertheless enjoys his success. The cables report that many of his early opponents occupy the Hall. Having once regarded him as a charlatan, the best of them have been won over to the Equilateral’s vital purpose by evidence and argument, the others by the accelerating prestige of Martian studies, which have brought opportunities for research sinecures and academic advancement. Thayer reads that as his colleagues filed into the Hall this morning, they shouted their huzzahs to him.
For three days the astronomers present their observations of the new markings in Hellas, confirming and amplifying Thayer’s findings. The dozens of journalists who crowd the wings, smoking cigarettes, consider the reports dry and repetitive, but they abruptly lift their pens when Professor Hector France-Lanord
presents what he says are the most definitive measurements of the figure’s size. Several preceding speakers have noted that it appears to be larger than our own Equilateral. Without raising his voice, or showing any suggestion of satisfaction or enthusiasm, France-Lanord reveals that the Mars triangle is in fact 921 miles on a side,
precisely
three times as large.
The implications surge through the hall and spill onto the streets, where the newsboys are hawking special editions almost before he has returned to his seat. We’re aware of the arduous human labor that has been required to dig the simple geometric figure Great Sand Sea. In order to excavate an Equilateral whose lines are three times as long, in a fraction of the time, Mars must possess a level of engineering expertise millennia beyond man’s, just as we suspected. The newspapers illustrate steam-driven earth-moving equipment the size of cathedrals and an under-race of tireless, single-minded giants.
Yet the astronomers are made uneasy by the question of why the inhabitants of Mars have so fastidiously tripled the size of their Equilateral. The immediate speculation in the hall, on the streets, and in government ministries across Europe is that they’re mocking the Concession’s laborious progress across the Western Desert. They’re acknowledging our primitive intelligence while simultaneously asserting their superiority. In any kind of social exchange, Earth will remain the subordinate partner. Some of the newspapers urge their governments not to accept any cut or condescension. One writer suggests that our neighbors’ need to impress demonstrates a lack of confidence, which has been diminished by their accelerating senescence and their awe of man’s virility.
In his cables to London, dictated to Miss Keaton, Thayer disputes these uninformed, hysterical interpretations, announcing that he’s pleased, and indeed gratified, by the Hellas triangle’s extent. As members of a younger race, the men of Earth will have much to learn from Mars, but our neighbors’ prompt, enthusiastic response is rather a gesture of fellowship, and a promise that the wealth of Mars’ civilization will be shared. If our Equilateral has been a sort of peace offering to the fourth planet, then the gift has been returned handsomely.
Δ
One moonless September night while Thayer and the girl sleep, and the entire camp at Point A is silent save for the unclassified, unknowable desert fauna, Miss Keaton unlocks the observatory. Mars rests at the edge of Aries, brighter than Sirius, already near minus-two magnitude. Phobos and Deimos spark from opposite sides of the planet, whose features gradually materialize. The south pole is soon visible, much smaller than it was before maximum elongation. The Hellas Basin has moved into the center of the disk, showing a certain brightness. Within Hellas, however, she detects only shifting shadows. Even now, as our world celebrates the discovery of an equilateral triangle drawn on the surface of another, she’s unable to see the figure at all.
After months of almost hourly telegraphed observations, analysis, instructions, and arguments, the cable from Point A suddenly falls silent and the Earth’s capitals are plunged into confusion. October the twelfth, the date of Mars’ closest approach, is imminent. Unrequited appeals are sent back across the line. The Concession insists the telegraphic equipment is operating properly, but the newspapers declare that the lines must have been severed by the Mahdists, or very likely they have overrun Point A again and put Thayer himself to the torch. Sir Harry convenes with the ministers of the Great Powers to consider a military relief force.
Something is wrong indeed, but not with the telegraphic equipment. Thayer’s been put to the torch by the resurgent fever; his metabolism’s been overrun. No cool compress, no water splashed in his face, and no alcohol bath can bring down his temperature. The girl works with tight-lipped urgency. The astronomer is unconscious most of the time. When he’s awake he insists that she allow light into the sickroom, which is already fully illuminated.