Authors: Ken Kalfus
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Ballard has left. Despite the midday heat and his fragility, despite the girl’s murmured entreaties, Thayer again struggles from his camp bed, shuffles toward the tent’s opening, and pulls back the flap. He wants to see what the engineer was talking about—the petulant workers, the spoiled machinery—but everything material has been washed from the visible spectrum in the fulsome light. His pupils can’t sufficiently contract. And the desert is as empty and cold as interplanetary space.
Two years earlier they had arrived at this place, a point determined by sextant and chronometer, at 25 degrees 40’ 26” north latitude, 25 degrees 10’ 6” east longitude. “Point A!” Thayer declared. Two hundred sixty men and one woman dismounted.
No man-made structure was visible from one horizon to the next. They knew there were none for many horizons beyond. Nor was there evidence of vegetation. The only significant geographical feature gently upwelled in the south, a rise of perhaps thirty feet. Here, where the easternmost part of the Libyan Desert slides into the western expanses of the Egyptian Khedivate, the Great Sand Sea was like a page of untouched foolscap. Thayer surveyed the desolation with supreme satisfaction, even a shudder of triumph. Although a single spade had yet to cleave the sands, he congratulated himself, after an arduous decade-long campaign, for having summoned into his employ the vast resources—financial, political, and scientific—that had transported them to this until-now remote location.
He called for the dowsers, hoping against hope.
No water was found, but within weeks Point A had been
established as a settlement, its walls of canvas rippling against the winds. Caravans arrived daily, from Nag Hammadi and Alexandria. Descending from their mounts, the drivers’ desert-scorched faces betrayed awe, disapproval, and an impatience to be paid and be gone. Hundreds of men were soon quartered and dispatched to erect quarters for thousands more. The men swore while machinery groaned, cables sang themselves taut, and camels brayed. Thayer surveyed the activity, as even-tempered as always, consulting with Ballard as the preparations unspooled onto the desert floor from blueprints drawn in London.
In those several weeks so much effort was expended, so many challenges were overcome, and such bitter sacrifices were made that it was painful for some to contemplate that these were only the preliminary tasks being accomplished, and that each would generate myriad labors further. The commencement ceremonies were assigned to the twenty-ninth day of April 1892—the second of the Mohammedan month of Shawwal 1309. High officials from six European countries, the United States, Egypt, and the Sublime Porte were summoned to this exercise, along with lords of industry and finance and senior ecclesiastics. Although these men sent representatives of modest rank, mostly second vice consuls and assistant concessionaires, neither the envoys’ low status and heat fatigue nor the bleakness of the environment could diminish the proceedings’ pageantry and historic gravity. An Egyptian royal band in full military dress played the anthem of each participating nation, as well as selections from Bizet and Offenbach, the horns glaring under the morning, then noonday, then afternoon sun.
Before making his remarks, Thayer stepped out from under the canopy that provided shade to the Europeans. The sudden passage into the sun made him look, for a moment, like a man on fire. He
was
a man on fire, and not because of the sun.
“Gentlemen,” Thayer began, looking out over the toweled heads of the fellahin. They shifted warily in their sandals and loin wraps, uncertain why the dragomen had interrupted their work to assemble them there. They had demanded and received assurances that they would be paid for the day. “My friends,” Thayer added, with further generosity.
He thanked every official who had contributed to the endeavor, whether present or not. He recalled the strenuous, much-opposed campaign, from the moment of its conception in his Cambridge study, to the cautious and fraught acceptance by his colleagues, to the gratifying, unprecedented outpouring of public support, to the Khedive’s far-seeing, gracious awarding of the Concession, to the surveyors’ courageous expeditions across unexplored desert, to the first structures raised at Point A. He paid respect to the Ottoman Sultan, these sands’ nominal sovereign. He praised the governors in London.
He concluded:
“What we will accomplish here in the coming months and years will prove the supreme and definitive achievement of our times. The century has already witnessed the mixing of ocean waters, the erection of ziggurats that dwarf biblical towers, cities of churning millions, instantaneous telegraphy between the continents, the spreading of civilization to the world’s darkest regions, and, in an increasing number of countries, introduction of the universal franchise. With all due respect to the admirable
men who executed these endeavors, they cannot measure up to ours, neither in scale, nor in invested capital, nor in physical effort, nor, especially, in the benefits to be reaped by mankind. For this undertaking has no equal. Our intellects, our hearts, our muscles, and our common faith in the Creator will ensure that the century will close here, on this sterile plain, with the first communication from the leading men of our planet, across the chasm of space, to the most intelligent inhabitants of another.”
The astronomer wasn’t exaggerating the scope of the enterprise and never has, not in his first letter on the subject to
Philosophical Transactions
, nor in the papers subsequent, nor in the countless Sunday supplement interviews to which he has submitted. As of today, nine hundred thousand men labor to realize his vision, shifting the frozen currents of the Great Sand Sea, two hundred thousand more than the numbers employed in the excavation of the Suez Canal thirty years earlier. Thousands are in fact either veterans of Suez or the sons and grandsons of veterans; they are descendants, too, of pyramid-builders. According to Thayer’s calculations, to which he has brought the same rigor as to those with which he has determined occultations, quadratures, elongations, and disk illumination, they will have excavated 1,027 billion cubic feet of sand upon the enterprise’s successful completion. The men are committed to putting down 4,605 square miles of shallow pitch, produced in the constantly running factories located at Point A, Point B, and Point C. The Concession’s petroleum use, twenty-two million English barrels pumped from newly discovered fields in Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Persia and transported to the Equilateral by pipeline laid
for this purpose, surpasses the total amount that has ever been extracted from the Near East. It will be consumed in a single night. A dozen men have already given their lives for this project, several in harrowing circumstances.
The financial effort has been no less heroic. As of this date the Mars Concession has been capitalized at sixteen million pounds sterling, twice as much as Suez, funded by massive state expenditure and private investment, not least the collection of small coins from the schoolchildren of six nations, their ha’pennies, sous, and pfennigs inserted into the slots of thousands of little tin boxes emblazoned with Giovanni Schiaparelli’s most revealing map. It has drawn extravagantly from the coffers of several European and American banks. It may draw from them again. Demanding cooperation among rival governments and financial enterprises from one end of the civilized world to the other, the Equilateral is the greatest international peacetime undertaking in the history of man. It has spawned new legislation, new protocols, and new treaties. In the marshaling of human resources regardless of national origin, it suggests the only possible future for human life on Earth, even though its every single effort is, in the final analysis, destined to be apprehended far from terrestrial soil.
The geometry to which Professor Sanford Thayer has devoted his genius will initially consist of a single simple figure, a triangle whose sides are equal. This figure, so easy to draw on a sheet of foolscap, requires more vigorous exertion when carved into the desert, each side 306 miles and 1,663 yards in length, precisely 1/73rd of the Earth’s circumference at Base AB’s latitude, each side a trench five miles in width. Further labor is
required to pave the trenches with pitch, and then to pour a twelve-inch layer of petroleum on their surfaces. In a series of computations confirmed by the world’s leading astronomers, Thayer has determined that in daytime the desert’s perfect black triangle cast upon the white sands, incontrovertible proof of terrestrial intelligence, will be visible to indigenous observers equipped with telescopes on the planet Mars. Their attention will be seized. Then sometime before dawn on June 17, 1894, at the moment of Earth’s most favorable position in the Martian sky, the petroleum pooled in the trenches on each side of the Equilateral will be ignited simultaneously, launching a Flare from the Earth’s darkened limb that across millions of miles of empty space will petition for man’s membership in the fraternity of planetary civilizations.
The Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli, observing the planet Mars from the Brera Observatory in Milan during its 1877 approach, was the first to discern water-bearing channels, or what he termed
canali
, on its surface. In the English-language press, the word was invariably translated as “canals,” suggesting that their provenance was artificial. Schiaparelli and his colleagues at first cautioned the public against a hasty interpretation, but, peering through the atmospheric haze of the two planets in subsequent close encounters, they saw that each waterway was cut geometrically along a great circle: the shortest, most efficient distance from one point on a sphere to another, just as one would expect if the channels were purposefully excavated. The seasonal thickening and darkening of the lands adjacent to the channels implied the vernal germination of irrigated crops, like the famous greening of Egyptian fields after they’ve been inundated by the Nile every year. Circular regions of growth bloomed at the canals’ intersections, which were evidently desert oases. The waterways’ growth from one opposition to the next revealed ongoing excavations that far surpass Austria’s abyssal Adelbert Mine, the railway tunnel
beneath the River Severn, the Kiel Canal, the Suez Canal, and the other massive earth-moving projects that have challenged this century’s terrestrial engineers.
The popular imagination was inflamed, as we may recall. The papers issued bulletins describing a civilization in its thirst-wracked death throes, struggling for survival. Poets apotheosized the planet: the American Oliver Wendell Holmes described “the snows that glittered on the disk of Mars”; his compatriot Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reflected: “And earnest thought within me rise, / When I behold afar, / Suspended in the evening skies, / The shield of that red star.” Romances, operettas, military marches, dramas and masques, ballets, political polemics and satires, music hall lectures, and religious sermons employed Mars as a subject, a metaphor, an exemplar, a prop, and a foil. An advertisement for Pears’ soap in the
Illustrated London News
portrayed an elegantly robed copper-hued Martian beauty performing her toilet on the edge of a shimmering watercourse plied by gondolas. In Paris, the great patissier Louis-Ernest Ladurée offered a strawberry-cream-filled profiterole that he called Le Sang du Mars.
While tempering the public’s most extravagant speculation and expectation, science soberly confirmed the evidence for Martian life. Indeed, the presumption that intelligence was confined to our trivial little globe was shown to be as simply minded Earth-centered as the pre-Copernican notion that the sun, moon, and planets turned around it. In the following decade, every twenty-six months when the two planets approached each other, celebrated astronomers like Camille Flammarion and Hector France-Lanord built on Schiaparelli’s observations of a vast
Martian irrigation network. Leading scientists, philosophers, and politicians, as well as ordinary men, contemplated communication with the fourth planet—but only one man possessed the audacity, persistence, and powers of persuasion to effectuate a plan for making contact.
The press amplified every one of Thayer’s proposals; the public clamored to have them answered. Bankers met with statesmen. Foreign secretaries gathered. An agreement was reached with the Khedive of Egypt to establish a “concession,” a consortium of private and public interests that would assume responsibility for excavating the Equilateral on Egyptian soil. Sir Harry was named to lead a Board of Governors from every participating nation. Treaties, protocols, codicils, and memoranda were signed, some of them necessarily as removed from public scrutiny as certain celestial objects. To establish a chancellery from which to direct the labors that were to be expended on the Great Sand Sea, the Mars Concession took possession of a three-story gray brick palace in Pall Mall, designed by Sir Christopher Wren during the reign of Queen Anne. Important men of government, finance, and enterprise now roam its shadowed, chandeliered hallways. Great oak doors are firmly shut. Documents are copied and filed. Telegraphic messages are dispatched day and night.
Thayer has visited Mars House but once, to pay a courtesy call on Sir Harry.
While the astronomer tumbles back to his sickbed to dream of Ballard’s latest report, allowing it to swirl and sink within the currents of his fever, his private secretary, Miss Adele Keaton, is engaged elsewhere in Point A, at the transport bureau, where there are troubling discrepancies in the accounts. “Eight tankers went out, but only one came back,” Miss Keaton observes, gazing hard at the Turkish bookkeeper.
The young man blinks beneath his tarbush.
“What do you say to that?”
“Madam?”
“Last Wednesday eight full water tankers were dispatched to the crews at mile one-seventeen on Side AB. Only one returned. What happened to the other seven?”
The Turk doesn’t reply, apparently surprised by her powers of speech. Miss Keaton, who’s wearing a sun hat and a long white muslin dress, recognizes that the man is uncomfortable talking to an unmarried woman, especially about a professional matter, even though she regularly comes to review the books. She knows that the bookkeeper’s hiding behind his discomfort
to avoid answering the question. Now he buries a long finger into his glossy mustache and slides the finger slowly beneath his nose. Is this a sign? Is it a rank provocation or a nervous mannerism? Miss Keaton studies the ledger. She will have to dispatch a courier to Point B in the event that the drivers were sent there in error, but she knows the missing tankers, and their drivers, are not at Point B. They won’t be at Point C either. Seven thousand five hundred gallons of water have gone missing.