Read Online Rainbow Mars by Larry Niven - Free Book Online

recordings of dolphin and whale song.”
    â€œWe have a live whale!”
    â€œYes … hadn’t occurred to me. Anyway, these things certainly don’t have Martian on file. You and the Martians will have to talk until the translator can correlate some of your words.”
    Svetz unrolled a screen to cover the cylinder wall. Now it was just another floor.
    The Earth turned full.
    It came to him that being trapped in a tiny spacecraft with Miya Thorsven for two years wouldn’t be half bad. Two more years returning, if Mars didn’t kill them. He looked around the cabin, wondering how they could get privacy. Zeera had never shown interest in any man or woman … which reminded him. “Zeera. How’s Wrona?”
    â€œI brought her to the Center. She can go home with Hillary if the mission lasts overnight.”
    Overnight?… Oh. “Zeera, do you like Space better than Time?”
    â€œI never told you, did I? When I was a little girl I wanted to live with Martians. We should’ve merged the two Bureaus then instead of waiting.”
    â€œAnother fantasy fulfilled?”
    Miya snapped, “Oh, get off that, Hanny!”
    â€œHere’s another,” he said. “Marooned with two beautiful women, millions of klicks from planet Earth, for … four years, Zeera?”
    She laughed. “Four years without Wrona, doesn’t that bother you?”
    â€œIt’s not four years for her. ”
    â€œWon’t bother us either. Have a look at this.” She showed him what Ra Chen had built into what would have been storage space for provisions. “It’s an advance on the temporal interrupt that we’ve been using to stop the X-cages. We call it Fast Forward or FFD.”

15
    Eight klicks per second is fast. Svetz never saw the large X-cage return. Telltales in front of Zeera told him when it came, how hard it pushed, and when it was gone. He only saw the Earth shrinking behind, and Mars like a glowing heart in Taurus.
    Zeera said, “Miya, you’ll appreciate this next move.” She engaged the Fast Forward.
    Svetz trusted the machines of the Institute for Temporal Research without understanding them. He simply enjoyed the show.
    The slowly dwindling Earth shrank abruptly to a bright point. The sun itself was shrinking. The pink pinpoint that was Mars grew brighter … grew conspicuous.…
    â€œI wondered where all the provisions were,” Miya said lightly, but she had a death grip on her armrests. “This is time travel too, isn’t it?”
    â€œMinimally. We have to put ourselves in the right path before we engage, and then the vehicle just follows the path, the geodesic. We can’t change course or dodge, or fight either, I suppose, but we’re hard to hurt. The Heads say that if we hit an asteroid, it’s good odds we’ll go right through it.”
    Svetz asked, “Which Head?”
    â€œBoth. Grinning like fools,” said Zeera. She was working at the keyboard. Pictures scrolled across one of the displays. “Svetz, have you seen these?”
    In the display screen, Mars came up fast. An edge of horizon became a shield volcano of awesome size.
    â€œIt’s the view from the Tanker?”
    â€œYeah. Watch.”
    The viewpoint dropped toward a vast crater, its bottom a glittering asterisk of mirrors; dropped past the rim, slowed above a rocky ledge … but lines and tiny numbers overlay everything he saw. Zeera said, “The Tanker, the Pilgrims, all the pictures that came back, Ra Chen and Gorky have been turning it all into maps. We can’t get lost.”
    She wasn’t looking at him. Svetz realized he was missing the view.
    The bright orange point had become a disk. Not a disk now: a whirling sphere expanding much too fast. “That’s close enough,” Zeera said, and Mars jarred to a stop, as large as a full Earth seen from the Moon.
    Thus far the trip had