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Nitrogen Plus
by Jack Williamson
We are delighted to have a new story by Jack Williamson. In his ninety-third
year, Mr. Williamson continues to produce remarkable work. A recent
novella, “The Ultimate Earth” ( Analog , December 2000), is currently a Hugo
finalist, and his latest novel, Terraforming Earth , has just been released by
Tor Books.
****

Some optimist in the Star Survey christened the planet New Earth. It was
warmed by a Sun-like star. The mass and gravity were only slightly less than Earth’s,
the day very slightly longer. The oceans were water, and water ice capped the poles.
The surface air pressure was near Earth normal.
“A perfect world!” my uncle boasted. “Except for one odd feature. The
atmosphere is nearly pure nitrogen, with a whiff of carbon dioxide but hardly a trace
of oxygen. A survey lander discovered that, and never returned. Tough luck for the
crew, but good news for me. I got the planet for a song.”
He wanted me to terraform it.
“A slice of apple pie,” he scoffed when I shrank from the problems. “Just
sow the seas with engineered algae spores. Wait for photosynthesis to release
oxygen out of the water.”
“How long would that take?”
“What’s time?” His pudgy fingers snapped the years away. “Fly home for a
holiday and back there again. Ninety-seven light-years each way. Two centuries for
the spores to work. Only a weekend for you, what with the relativistic time
contraction. You’ll have a paradise planet ready to welcome our colonists and get
home again with your own ticket to immortality.”
Immortality? I wanted to strangle him.
He is immortal, with his own imperial sense of time, but the members of his
tight little fellowship are jealous of their secrets and slow to admit outsiders. Not that
I’d longed to become his eternal handyman or abandon my own place and time for a
life of interstellar adventure.
Yet he is my uncle. He’s a legendary interstellar tycoon, enormously wealthy.
His enemies like to paint him as a devouring octopus with a thousand arms writhing
though the galaxy. As a child I had dreaded his sudden fits of rage when some
unlucky flunky failed to please him. Yet I had learned to tolerate him.
Hard enough to love, he’s a short, shrewd, dynamic man with a round baby
face. His fat cheeks are pink and hairless from the precious micro-machines in his
blood, which sharpen his wits and preserve him from illness or age. He can seem
genial and generous enough, so long as you please him.
My father, two years younger, had been the unlucky brother. A disappointed
idealist, a failed artist, an ill-starred lover. When my uncle offered him a chance at
immortality, he refused it because he thought people should be equal. His
avant-garde art found no buyers. My mother left him for another eternal. He vanished
from Earth the year I was five. My uncle adopted me, sent me though expensive
schools, promised me a fine future in his companies. When he named me his
personal agent on New Earth, I knew I had to go.
***
I found a crew at the Skipper’s Club. That’s an ancient building inhabited by
ancient starmen who run a sort of hiring hall and retirement home for skipship crews.