Journey Between Worlds

by Sylvia Engdahl

  From where we sat we could see the school copter busily ferrying people in from the parking compound—it was running every five minutes instead of keeping to the regular schedule—but we couldn’t see who was getting off. We would have gone over to the copter pad if it were not that students had been told to keep away because of the crowds; arriving parents were being directed over to the quad. Julie’s folks hadn’t come yet, either, but they were local people and would be arriving on the monorail instead of driving in from the airport.

  The stereo system had been shut off temporarily and we could hear the school band tuning up somewhere in the background. The fountain splashed noisily off to our left. (I marvel, now, at the amount of water used in fountains on Earth!) I twisted my hands in my lap and wished that sixteen o’clock would hurry up and come.

  “Where’s Ross?” Julie asked.

  “Oh, meeting his folks, I guess. He said they might not see me until afterward.” This should be a happy, exciting time, I was thinking; instead, it was flat and empty. Perhaps the evening would be flat, too. I could hardly wait until it was over and I was on my way out to Maple Beach.

  Just as the loudspeakers came on and told us to start lining up, Julie spotted her parents. I was left standing there, knowing that it was foolish to wait any longer. Even if Dad did come, I couldn’t talk to him until after it was over; the band was already starting on the introduction to the march.

  But when he came rushing down the steps from the copter pad, I forgot everything except what a joy it was to see him, and it didn’t matter if I ever went inside for the ceremonies or not.

  The first thing I noticed was how excited he seemed, and how happy. Dad grabbed my hands and then hugged me tight, almost smashing my mortarboard, and I began to think I’d been silly to wonder if he cared anything about my graduation. Of course he cared. He was positively ecstatic!

  Then he thrust the long white envelope into my hands. From that point on, everything I’d ever known or felt or believed in began to come apart.

  “Mel, honey,” Dad said. “It’s all settled! They’re sending you. I didn’t tell you because I wasn’t sure; I was so afraid you’d be disappointed—”

  “Sending me where?” I began, but just then the band burst out with the main chorus of the march from Aida and the line started to move.

  “Happy graduation, honey!” Dad shouted, and he disappeared in the mob of people pouring in through the now-closing doors. I had to run to find my place in line, and by that time we were already moving into the auditorium. I started to stick the envelope away under the white folds of my gown, but as I did it I caught sight of the imprint in its top left-hand corner.

  Whenever I hear Aida, I’ll close my eyes and I’ll see that envelope again, just the way it was as I first looked at it. The triple globes—blue, white, and red—and the tall blue lettering, Three Planets Corporation. The triple globes as I’d seen them a thousand times on billboards and in magazines and on TV: blue for Earth, white for the Moon, and red for Mars. The words slanted in blue script across the front of the envelope: SPACELINER RESERVATIONS. The precise computer-printed characters on the ticket inside, confirming that Melinda Ashley held Berth 2, Cabin G-11, in the S.S. Susan Constant, departing at 0415 Greenwich mean time on June 10 for the planet Mars.

  I didn’t hear one word of the graduation speeches. The thrill you’re supposed to get from such a solemn occasion bypassed me completely.

  Dad, Dad, I thought that day, you must know me better than this. You must know this isn’t necessary, that I don’t even want it.

  That there isn’t anything I want less! I knew very little about Mars at the time, but I had a general idea of what that ticket must have cost; even for a man who’s well-to-do, interplanetary fares are out of sight. I appreciated Dad’s wanting to give me a really supercolossal graduation gift to make up for all those years. But I didn’t want a trip to Mars, I wanted to be with him.

  What I didn’t know yet was that Dad had just received an assignment from his firm to investigate the feasibility of their opening a branch office on Mars.

  Chapter 2

  I still don’t like to think about graduation day. I still hate to relive that evening, the first evening that I knew we were going to Mars.

  What surprised me most was that Dad was so happy about it. We sat on one of the benches in the quad and talked while I was waiting for Ross to get his car packed. (I’d explained about our date, when Dad wanted to take me out for something to eat.) I held the ticket envelope next to my diploma, my damp fingers making a soiled blotch over the triple globes.

  “Aren’t you excited, honey?” Dad demanded.

  Excited wasn’t the word for it. Flabbergasted would have been closer. But I was trying to act calm while I got up courage to tell Dad that I’d rather not go to Mars at all.

  It wasn’t that I was afraid to go. I wouldn’t want anyone to get that idea. Or maybe I was and didn’t know it; but if so it wasn’t physical fear, not then. I had as matter-of-fact an attitude toward space travel as most people have, though I had no personal interest in it, not being the scientific type. But going to Mars is not like going to Europe. For one thing, you’re gone longer. At the very least, I would miss two or three terms of college. For another, a different planet is so—well, so foreign.

  Not that I was thinking about those drawbacks then. I was thinking about Ross. Perhaps, after all, it had been wrong not to have told Dad long ago how I felt about Ross. Since I hadn’t, though, it seemed wisest to bring up the educational angle first.

  “Dad,” I began, “what about the university? I’ve been admitted; I’m supposed to start in September.”

  Dad smiled. “It won’t hurt anything for you to wait, Melinda. You’ll learn more from a trip to the Colonies than from a year at school in any case, but if you want to forge ahead for your freshman exams, you can study on the ship. There won’t be much else to do en route, you know.”

  I was silent. I had never encountered anyone who’d gone on a spaceship as a fare-paying passenger instead of as a crew member. There aren’t many such people, except for the homesteaders, whose fare is paid by the government and whose passage is strictly one way. Dad explained that I’d been right in thinking he couldn’t afford the fare. His company was paying it. If my mother had been living she would have been entitled to accompany him, and since she wasn’t, he’d talked them into sending me in her place.

  “The firm’s anxious to get someone from the home office out there right now,” he told me. “Someone who’ll be back here by next year, when the government appropriation for the Colonies comes up for review again. There’s going to be a lot of public discussion about the value of Mars, and it will be a good thing for at least one of our managers to have some firsthand knowledge of the situation.”

  I tried another tack. “But why do they need you for this job, Dad? Aren’t there other men who’d be willing to go?” I’d always had the impression that Dad was enough of a key man in the organization to have pretty much the last word about his assignments.

  He laughed. “I outrank them, Mel. I’ve waited years for this opportunity, and at last I’m high enough up in the firm to have first crack at it.” He sounded as pleased as if he had just been elected president of something.

  “You—you chose the assignment yourself ?”

  “Well, I made the right people aware of how I’d feel if I were offered it.”

  “Dad, what do you mean, you’ve waited years? I never knew—”

  “That I planned to emigrate to the Colonies once?”

  “To homestead—you?”

  “It was all settled. Our application had been accepted, conditional on our passing the medical exam. Then your mother . . . well, that was when they discovered the heart condition, Mel. We had to give it up.”

  “My mother wanted to go to Mars?” Why, I thought, I would have gone, too. I would have been a Martian.

  “She did, very much. It was in her blood, she sai
d; her ancestors were pioneers.” He sighed. “That was a long time ago. When she died I was over the age limit for a nonresident job, and, of course, I wouldn’t have wanted to homestead without her even if single immigrants had been allowed. But later, I began to hope that I could go for a trip someday. I’ve been lucky, Mel; it’s worked out.”

  I don’t think he noticed how quiet I was. He tightened his arm around my shoulders and grinned at me. “It was a close thing. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to fix it so you could come along. Mel, honey, what if I’d had to choose between going to Mars and having you with me?”

  What could I say? It just goes to show how two people can have the closest possible family relationship and still not know anything about each other at all. I had never dreamed that Dad was the kind to have any interest in other planets, and he apparently was assuming that because he wanted to go so much, I must feel the same way. And I couldn’t blame him. What had I ever done to give him any other idea? When had I ever put any of my real thoughts and feelings into a letter? I had written reams of the casual, newsy stuff that it seemed a father would want to hear. But, it suddenly occurred to me, he hadn’t been the only one who’d failed to give much thought to what the person on the other side of the correspondence truly cared about.

  I’d gotten into a fine fix! Because I couldn’t go, I just couldn’t. Why, I’d lose almost a whole year out of my life, and I knew that Ross would be furious. It would upset everything, all the neatly planned steps leading up to the safe, permanent future that I had dreamed about for so long. Ross might not wait a year. If I wasn’t with him at the university, he might start dating someone else. He might change his mind about the wedding, want to put it off. He might develop different ideas, so that by the time we were married he might not be willing to live at Maple Beach anymore.

  And what use would there be in it? I was an old-fashioned girl at heart; all this space business had always seemed pretty pointless to me. What was wrong with Earth, for goodness sake? The things that were significant, all of history in fact, had happened right there. That first Melinda—the one who’d come as a settler to the Oregon Country and worked so hard to make a home—what would she have thought of people turning their backs on everything that was natural?

  I wanted to be with Dad, but not enough to risk everything for the sake of a trip I wouldn’t even enjoy. Not after the way I’d laughed at girls who would do just about anything to get on board a ship, though I knew they’d be envious. Yet I didn’t want to hurt Dad’s feelings. He’d tried so hard to arrange my passage that I couldn’t come right out and tell him to give the ticket back. I’d have to think of something, but it could wait until tomorrow. Tomorrow we would be at Gran’s and I could walk on the beach for a while and think; that was bound to be a help.

  I didn’t mean to tell Ross that night, and sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if I hadn’t. It just slipped out, really. We were in the car, on our way to Portland. Ross couldn’t help but notice that I wasn’t being the best of company; in fact I just wasn’t responding to him at all.

  Ross swung around the last curve of the road from school, eased into the expressway traffic pattern, and put the car on automatic. Then he folded back the wheel and pulled me over to him. We were in the 120 klicks-per-hour lane; there’d been no free slots in the faster ones, so it was going to be a long drive.

  After a while he said, “What’s the matter, Mel? This is Grad Night, remember? What goes?”

  “Nothing. I’m tired, that’s all,” I lied.

  “I thought you’d be happy now that your dad’s showed up.”

  “I was glad to see him, of course.”

  “Did he say where he’s taking you this summer?”

  “Please let’s not talk about it, Ross.”

  “Hey, I wasn’t going to argue. I promised, didn’t I?”

  I realized that since Dad was going to Mars and I didn’t intend to go with him, Ross and I wouldn’t be separated after all. He could come out to Gran’s whenever he wanted to. I was anxious to please him by telling him so, I guess, or maybe I thought he’d help me to deal with the problem of Dad. Maybe in the back of my mind was the thought that he just might be willing to move the wedding up to this summer, and would talk to Dad about it himself. At any rate I broke the news. I said, “There’s been a change of plans. Dad wants me to go to Mars with him.”

  Ross took his arm away and stared at me. “You’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. He’s really going to Mars.”

  “Even if he is, you don’t expect me to believe he’d drag you along. What are you trying to do to me, Mel?”

  I drew back, surprised. Ross hadn’t been at all like himself over the whole business of my leaving him for the summer, but surely he knew I wasn’t the kind of girl who’d tease him deliberately. Did he think I was making it up so that he’d beg me not to go?

  “It’s true,” I said. “If you don’t believe me look at my ticket.” I pulled it out of my purse and shoved it at him.

  Ross examined it carefully, even reading the fine print on the back. Then he laughed. “You’re not going to use this, are you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Your father sure has his nerve. He’s hardly talked to you all this time, and now he expects to snatch you up and take you off to some strange planet fifty million miles away.”

  That was the wrong thing to say, and Ross should have known better. I mean, how did he expect me to react? As a matter of fact I’d been thinking something along those general lines myself; but what I said was, “You’ve got it all wrong, Ross. Dad’s trying to do something wonderful for me. It’s a graduation present.”

  “Doesn’t he care how you feel about it? Why, Mel, you could get killed!”

  “Oh, I don’t think so, Ross. It’s not an especially dangerous trip; I’d be on a regular scheduled spaceliner. He’s going.”

  A new thought struck me, though: What if something should happen to Dad? What if we never saw each other again? I’d have missed such a lot; and besides, for a moment I heard him saying, Mel, honey, what if I’d had to choose. . . . It dawned on me that he did want me with him very much, and I was forcing a choice on him after all. Two chances that would never come again, this trip he’d always hoped for—a big step in his career probably—against the last time to get acquainted with me as a daughter before I got tied down by college and a job.

  “Dad does care,” I insisted. “It’s just like I told you before, only this Martian assignment came up, and—well, I guess he thought I’d be even more thrilled than if we went to Europe or something.”

  “Thrilled? Mel, you don’t want to go cruising around in space.”

  I couldn’t recall having mentioned to Ross that I didn’t. “Some people,” I said stiffly, “would call it a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “Well, you’re a normal, levelheaded person and the only opportunities you need are right here on Earth.”

  I don’t know why this made me so mad, because it certainly wasn’t something I disagreed with. It was just the way he said it, as if I were four years old and had to be educated for my own good. I was tired, and had had just about all the strain I could take for one day. So I came right back at him. “Who are you, Ross Franklin, to tell me what opportunities I need?”

  “I guess someone has to tell you, if you can even consider anything so stupid.”

  “What’s stupid?”

  “Well, the Martian colonies in the first place, for one thing. All the money that’s been poured into that piece of barren rock, all the lives lost—it’s useless.”

  Dad and Mother couldn’t have thought it entirely useless, I thought, if they had really planned to homestead. And I had heard that many notable people considered the Colonies the hope of the human race, though I didn’t pretend to understand their reasoning. At the moment, I couldn’t remember very much of what we’d had in school about Mars, and I doubted that Ross could, either.
r />   “Just because you and I wouldn’t like it doesn’t mean that everyone who goes is crazy,” I ventured.

  Ross wasn’t to be budged. “What else can you call it?” he said angrily. “That’s one thing I always liked about you; you weren’t one of those spacestruck girls—girls who go around with their heads in the clouds thinking there’s something worthwhile about wanting to get away from the problems we’ve got right here. You were interested in settling down.”

  “I’m still interested in settling down.”

  “Well, act like it, then.”

  “I don’t know how we got started on this, Ross,” I said. “I wouldn’t be staying on Mars, anyway—”

  “You aren’t going at all!”

  “Well, I said I wasn’t.”

  He didn’t even hear me. “Everything else aside, you can’t afford to miss a year of college. Even if I’d let you be away that long.”

  “Dad thinks I could study on the ship.”

  “You’ve got to get your teaching credentials just as soon as you can, so you can work while I’m in law school.”

  “Oh? You mean you’d rather I didn’t do anything that might interfere with my supporting us?” I was close to tears. I had planned to teach while Ross was in law school, but after all, that wasn’t exactly why we were getting married.

  “I mean I won’t let you disrupt everything we’ve planned, Melinda. I gave in about the summer vacation, but not about this. You can’t go, and that’s final.”

  You can’t go. Not any discussion about what I might miss out on, or how hurt Dad would be if I refused. Just, you can’t.

  “Since when have you had the right to make my decisions?” I asked.

  His hand closed tight on mine. “You’re my girl, Mel. You’ve always been my girl.”