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This was the big one, the project toward which Cowles had angled for over a decade, the beginning of the largest venture in mankind’s history. And Griffin was part of it… if only as the security man who would keep these multinational billionaires from murdering each other. The 1,333 men and women taking their slow trips into the heart of the primordial solar system would be much more a part of it, if they chose.

And if they didn’t, there would be no Barsoom Project.

And if there were no Barsoom Project, then… very soon, by geological time, there might be no life on Earth.

The turgid protostellar whirl was clearing now. Sunlight boiled away the nearer comets, leaving residues that would become asteroids; boiled the atmospheres from even the closer planets. The planets flashed and flamed from time to time as smaller bodies smashed into them. The viewpoint moved toward one such body, a glowing, cratered, lumpy sphere that grew clearer as its atmosphere dissipated.

Griffin wrenched his mind out of the illusion and brushed the controls before him in the cart. Of the hundred and fifty computer-driven carts gliding through an embryonic cosmos, he and

Marty had the only cart equipped with manual override. In case of emergency, he could reach another cart within moments. There was no reason to expect any such emergency, but…

He whispered to Marty, “Let’s peek in on them.” Marty nodded-he still had a death-grip on Alex’s elbow-and Alex rattle-tapped instructions to the heat-sensitive vidplate before him.

It lit. It became a quad splitscreen, and in each quadrant a cart appeared. Each cart seated ten visiting dignitaries. At upper-left were intense, serious visitors from the United Kingdom. Only one, a rotund woman in her fifties, was smiling broadly, clapping with childish glee.

Upper-right held officials from International Labor Union 207, the energy people. The international unions were more powerful than some nations. Certainly they were prime candidates for the offer that IntelCorp and Cowles wished to make.

Chitchat broke off, heads swiveled right, mouths gaped. A gargantuan gas-sheathed snowball roared directly at 207’s cart. A smaller cornet grazed it. A tenor scream split the air as the comet flared blindingly and passed on the right.

They laughed and slapped each other on the backs, none knowing who among them had screamed.

Lower-left was the Pan-African coalition… members who were not currently embroiled in war.

What a mess. Africa was a jungle, all right. A jungle of artificially drawn lines, so complex that things might not sort themselves out for another century. National boundaries, tribal boundaries, industrial boundaries, and union boundaries all writhed and fluxed and left bloody tracks behind, year after year for the past century. Project Barsoom might straighten them out might give some of these political entities cause to fix them in place. A reason to forget the past, for the sake of the future.

Lower-right, ten young Tolkien elves, inhumanly tall and slender, yelled and laughed and ducked a passing comet. That was IntelCorp, the company formed by the partnership of Genera! Electric and Falling Angel Enterprises.

Wiser heads within those companies, understanding that massive success and massive inertia are two sides of a coin, had split off some of the best young minds from the GE think tanks. These maniacs were backed with a hundred eighty million dollars and linked with the creative whirlwinds behind Falling Angels, the rogue technological “nation” orbiting Luna. The zero-gravity laboratories of Falling Angels were responsible for the Tokyo-Seoul expansion bridge, as well as a revolution in high-tensile engineering.

The result was one of the most effective think tanks in history. They already held eight percent of the most productive patents issued in the past decade, and the best was yet to come.

The sun had dimmed. The solar system was finally settling down. The cratered sphere in the foreground was drifting closer. Its rocks had breathed forth a new atmosphere, pink in hue and not thick enough to block the topography… and as the orange-red sphere grew huge, clean white polar caps and a lacing of long gray-green lines were suddenly apparent. Two cratered moons rose over the planet’s eastern curve.

There was laughter from the carts. “ In 1877, Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli observed a network of single and double lines crisscrossing the surface of the planet. Canali means ‘channels’ or ‘grooves’ in Italian, but the word was mistranslated into ‘canals,’ which implies intelligent design… "

“Quite a show, eh?” Marty grinned in the dark: a new moon. “I want to sign up right now.”

“Get out your Mark card if you’ve got the money. They’ll be passing the hat pretty quick.” Alex continued to look at Marty’s black silhouette. “We haven’t done any mat work for over a month. Have you been working the treadmill?”

“Sure. Well, not every day.” He sighed guiltily. “Guess I’m gonna pay for that, huh?”