Red Planet Run Read Online Free

a friendly visit?” I drained my glass.
    Helen watched me refill it a third time. “You’re pouring that stuff down like it tastes good. Take it easy.”
    “Judging is dry work.”
    “So it seems, but I’d prefer you sober to hear what I came here to say.”
    “And what’s that?”
    “I want you to go to Mars.”
    Helen Ricadonna had always been a past master of the non sequitur but this was going a bit far, even for her. “You want me to go to Mars.”
    “Yes.”
    There was a pause while I listened to the babble around me and looked at Helen, her hair, completely white now, standing up as usual in a corona all around her head. I wondered, not for the first time, if she cultivated the likeness to Einstein. Her ego was certainly up to the task. I drained my glass and signaled Birdie for another pitcher. “You may not want me drunk, but I’ve got the feeling I need to be to listen to what comes next.” The pitcher arrived and I poured. “You want me to go to Mars,” I repeated.
    “Yes, for a year, a Martian year. The ship has already been built; in fact, it’s en route to Outpost as we speak. ETA is two weeks. It’s an interesting design; I think you’ll like it. It’s an airship.”
    I stared at her. “An airship? What, like a dirigible? What did they call them—zeppelins?”
    “No, this one’s soft-sided.”
    My glass paused in midair. “You mean a balloon?”
    “Well, yes. Two actually, one inside the other. The cabin’s a toroid.” Her ephemeral smile came and went. “I know how much you like toroids.”
    A balloon. “I see.” I drank. “Mind telling me why you want me to go to Mars in the first place?”
    She had a one-word answer ready and waiting. “Cydonia.”
    “Cydonia.”
    “Yes, Cydonia. You do know where and what Cydonia is, don’t you?”
    “Yes,” I said, aping her tone of sweet reason. “I know where and what Cydonia is; it’s a bunch of ruins in the northern hemisphere of Mars, first sighted in the next-to-last decade of the last century, confirmed by Eurospace’s Endeavor IV probe three years ago, best guess is E.T. built it five hundred thousand years ago, plus or minus a century, function unknown, builders unknown, so what?”
    “So what?” Helen looked as scandalized as an impenetrable shield of dignity and equally unshakable sense of decorum would allow. “Aren’t you interested in finding out exactly what is there?”
    I shrugged, mostly to annoy her.
    “Star, a lot of the hard data and most of the educated guesses about Cydonia were destroyed when World War Three took out JPL and Houston. But now there is Prometheus.”
    I groaned, and wished for the millionth time we’d never found evidence that the Asteroid Belt used to be a planet. “Oh God, not you, too. You and Brother Moses, God help me. I can’t handle another half-baked theory-cum-revelation about the advance guard of heavenly host sent to Terra by the One True God from the One True Planet.”
    She went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “If there is anything at Cydonia, it may predate what happened on Prometheus. There may be records—”
    “Always supposing we could read them.”
    “—equipment—”
    “Always supposing we could run it.”
    “—and evidence that whoever built Cydonia may have destroyed Prometheus.”
    I couldn’t help it, I laughed. “Helen,” I said when I could, “that ranks right up there with the Big Lie.” The Big Lie was just that, a fabricated message from the “Beetlejuicers” that Frank and Helen arranged to be intercepted by the Odysseus II deep-space probe back in the eighties when space exploration and colonization were dead in the water, or at the very least becalmed. Frank and Helen decided to send the space program back to sea with a handmade gale that developed into an entirely unexpected hurricane when the real aliens we called Librarians showed up on Terranova.
    All experience is an archway wherethrough, the poet said, and yet… for the first time I