“But Janet,” I protested, more concerned with convincing myself than with comforting her. “Janet, surely the chances of our being hit by anything big enough to do any real harm are pretty slight. There’s never been a ship damaged before.”
“That’s exactly why they think the time’s getting closer.” (She didn’t specify who they were.)
“Maybe so, but why should we think—”
“Because we’ve run into a swarm of them, that’s why! What other reason could they have for a drill so near the end of the trip? Sure, the last meteor was small, but—” She looked at me, her eyes dark. “It wouldn’t even have to hit the passenger decks. The oxygen tanks would be even worse. Or the fuel supply, or the engines—we’d go right on past Mars, out into space forever. Do you know what would happen if a ship ran low on air, Melinda?”
“I—I never thought about it.”
“They’d draw lots. It’s all set forth in the regulations, the ones they don’t publicize.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Because the air would last twice as long for half as many people, of course. The captain’s sworn to enforce it.”
It never occurred to me to ask her how she knew; I now suspect that this last bit of “information” came from some overdramatized TV series. But at the time, all I could think of was, Three weeks. If we can just get through the next three weeks— And then I remembered that the domes on Mars were vulnerable, too.
There is something particularly terrifying about the concept of lack of air. It’s so alien to your experience on Earth that you just can’t take it seriously at first. But when the idea gets through, it really throws you. Have you ever gone underwater without having a chance to fill your lungs first? Or been so exhausted from running that you couldn’t get your breath? In those situations there is air; you aren’t frightened, because you know those agonizing sensations will be gone in a few moments. But to be without air, to feel it rushing away through some deadly gap in a fragile shell, dispersing into nothingness, and to know that there’s no way it can be replaced. . . . Once I began to picture it, I was horror-stricken.
What I should have done was to discuss the whole thing with Dad. Dad had been an engineer, and though he wasn’t an expert on space, he undoubtedly knew a great deal more about it than Janet did, besides having more common sense! But you always tend to believe the worst of a situation, at least I always do, and somehow I got the idea into my head that the facts would upset Dad and that I ought not to burden him with them. I completely overlooked the likelihood that he would never have brought me aboard in the first place if the danger were anywhere near as great as Janet imagined.
So I went on worrying over it, all alone. I didn’t tell Alex, and at least I had sense enough not to spread it any further; instinctively I knew that rumors can mean trouble aboard a ship. Janet didn’t talk to anyone else, either, for she was too ashamed of the crack in her composure. We didn’t even mention it between ourselves again.
But it bothered me—bothered me more and more as time went on, instead of the reverse. I began counting the days, not until arrival on Mars, but until our scheduled return to Earth eight months in the future. Much of the time I was acutely conscious of each indrawn breath. Air . . . life . . . so scant within the ship, the only other source so incredibly remote! More than once I had a nightmare in which a gaping hole appeared in the floor between my feet and I was left gasping, spinning with bursting lungs toward a faint spark in the blackness that fell . . . and fell. . . .
Maybe it wasn’t entirely the result of my exaggerated physical fears. Maybe there was more symbolism to it than that; they say there are symbols behind everything. I wouldn’t have admitted it then, but underneath I must have been aware that what really frightened me wasn’t the unlikely possibility that Susie’s strong metal hull would be penetrated. The thought of what might lie outside the narrow, safe pattern I’d drawn for my life was more dismaying than all the empty void through which the Susan Constant was hurtling.
Part Three
MARS
Chapter 8
I first saw Mars from the observation bubble of the Susan Constant. Oh, I’d seen it from Earth, I suppose, but I never paid any attention to it then. On Earth, it’s difficult to think of Mars as a place, that tiny reddish star—well, not a star, of course, but in the sky it looks like one. It’s impossible to believe that such a tiny point of light can be the focus of people’s lives and people’s dreams.
As soon as we got close enough to see Mars as a disk, the captain turned Susie so that the observation bubble faced it and announced that people could go and look. Immediately there was a big rush; the homesteaders could hardly wait to get a glimpse of their new world. I wasn’t in any particular hurry, but Alex was, so we stood in line with everyone else.
At that time, the only feature we could make out was the glittering south polar cap, which happened to be at its largest. As the days passed, though, dark patches began to appear against the reddish face of the globe, splotches that Alex identified for me with pride, just as I might have pointed out North America to him if I’d been with him when he approached Earth for the first time. Syrtis Major was the most prominent, a conspicuous triangle. But there were others: Sinus Meridiani, Solis Lacus, Aurorae Sinus. . . . How foolishly romantic the old astronomers were! Utopia, Eden, the Fountain of Youth, the Sea of Pearls. I wonder what they would think if they could take a close look at some of the drab, uninteresting places they christened, and hear those idealized names in everyday use.
The names are doubly inappropriate, for Mars doesn’t have seas and continents, as those astronomers thought when the naming was done. A mare, sinus, or lacus is, when you get to it, a section of dry land—very dry—and not really dark, either, except by comparison. All in all, it’s a barren, dried-up wasteland of a world, at least it seemed so to me as I looked at it from space. To Alex it was beautiful! “Glowing,” “rich,” and “vivid” were some of the words he used. I had never really believed before that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
On the last night out there was a party. Almost everyone was in an exuberant mood; the discussion was noisier than usual, the singing louder, and the entertainment more nonsensical. The festivities showed no signs of breaking up by midnight, though the ship’s officers disappeared early for once. Finally I excused myself and went to bed.
I was torn two ways. On one hand, it was a tremendous relief to think that I’d soon be safely out of space and onto solid land; but on the other, I wasn’t looking forward to adjusting all over again. Susie might have her drawbacks, but she was a nice little world in a sense. On board I knew what to expect, at any rate. And besides, there was Alex.
I would miss him! I hadn’t thought before how I’d miss him. When you see a person every day for ten weeks—spend half your waking hours with that person, in fact—why, it’s something of a shock to realize that you aren’t going to be doing it anymore. Even if he’s just a casual friend and you’re in love with someone else, the idea’s a depressing one.
Naturally I would see him again. He had already invited Dad and me to have dinner at his home, with his parents; and Dad would undoubtedly reciprocate by taking us all out to a restaurant some night soon. But we wouldn’t have the constant, easy companionship we’d had aboard the ship. And I couldn’t go out with Alex even if he should ask me; that would be dating. Ross wouldn’t want me to, though Alex and I were only friends.
In the morning after breakfast we were sent to our cabins and told to strap down. Zero-g was nothing strange to me anymore; I’d been to the gym too often. What was odd was to have “up” and “down” shift within the cabin as power was applied. Strapped to my bunk, I wasn’t thrown around, and no high acceleration was used. But I was glad when the maneuvers were over and we were weightless again, in a stable parking orbit high above the surface of Mars.
Disembarkation was alphabetical, and “Ashley” being near the top of the list, Dad and I went down on the first shut
tle. Alex came to the vestibule to see us off. “Mel, I—I want you to keep this,” he said to me. “For a souvenir.”
“But I already have souvenirs,” I began, thinking of the little scrolls that had been distributed at the party the night before as well as of the digital snapshots that we’d all stored on our memory cards at one ship’s function or another.
“This is just something between the two of us.” He thrust it out to me, smiling. “It’s all I have to give you, here, and I’m afraid it doesn’t exactly suit your taste. But maybe it will remind you of the trip.”
It was the book I’d brought on board for him that first day, a novel that I’d long since read and returned. But he’d written inside, “To Melinda, my fellow adventurer,” and then “S.S. Susan Constant,” the date, and his signature. By that, he’d turned it into a thing that I would treasure.
“Thank you, Alex,” I said, wishing it didn’t sound so flat.
“There’s only one sort of thanks I want,” he told me. “Give my planet a chance! Don’t go down there bound and determined to hate everything.”
“Oh, Alex, I’ll try.”
“Don’t try. Just relax and enjoy it. Like zero-g, remember?” He gripped my hands between his strong ones. “Good-bye for now, Melinda.”
There are two colonies on Mars so far: Marsport, in the southern hemisphere, which is solely a government-sponsored experimental project, and New Terra. The latter is by far the largest and is the only place open to homesteading, so it was where practically all of Susie’s passengers were bound.
The shuttle was a near duplicate of the one we’d come up from Earth to the Susie on, but we were aboard less than three hours. Mars hovered above us on the TV screen, ruddy and swollen, until at some undefinable moment it became less a whole planet and more a broad surface. From the looks of things we were going to crash up into it; it already seemed to be crushing us. In actuality, what was happening was that the ship had been turned on its tail, and the braking rockets were blasting away with a full g of deceleration. That being more gravity than I’d felt for a long time, it seemed worse than the liftoff from Earth.
I don’t know what I had expected of the spaceport. Certainly not a terminal just like the one at Canaveral! Well, it wasn’t exactly like it, for it was much smaller, and naturally it was pressurized, though that didn’t show. Then too, there was much less bustle. But, except for being light on my feet, I might have been in any underground terminal on Earth.
We didn’t stay there long; we were herded directly to the monorail for the ride into the city. The loading chamber was underground, but before we’d got up much speed we saw daylight ahead and broke out onto the surface of Mars.
You can imagine a thing, and see pictures of it, and still not have any conception of it at all. I’d heard countless times that the Martian ground is red. But what does red mean? Brick-red, scarlet, rust-colored, vermilion? It’s all of those and more—the sand and the rocks both, the cliffs and the rippling hills. Rising out of all this redness, on the other side of a small crater, we could see the domes of New Terra, iridescent half spheres sparkling against the pinkish veil of the sky.
I had never thought there would be such a lot of domes! They looked as ephemeral as a cluster of soap bubbles, and as fragile. Actually, I knew, they were made of tough plastic, supported by air pressure from inside, and were in no danger at all of either collapsing or floating away. They could undoubtedly be punctured, though; a fair-sized meteor, for instance . . . I shivered. The same old thing again! For a moment or two I’d been overcome by the startling splendor of the scene; I’d forgotten what an unnatural sort of beauty it was.
A sudden burst of desperation made me uncomfortably aware of breathing again, and I moved back from the window. Canned air. Manufactured, imprisoned air; not only on the ship, but in the terminal, the monorail car, and in those deceptively lovely domes. And all around us, weird rolling landscapes where human beings could never walk without protection. It was a relief to plunge underground again, and to get out of the car into a perfectly ordinary-looking subway depot.
New Terra has two hotels: the Champs-Elysées, which is run by TPC under contract to Earth’s government, and the newer Mars Hilton. Dad and I were booked at the Hilton; our reservation had of course been confirmed before our visas were issued. (It would be a sad state of affairs for anyone to arrive on Mars without a place to sleep, and the Colonial authorities see to it that it doesn’t happen.) Our suite consisted of two tiny bedroom compartments with a sitting room between that wasn’t much larger. What with doors on three of its walls and the TV screen on the fourth, there wasn’t room for a window, but very few New Terran buildings have windows in any case, even on the floors above ground. Artificial lighting’s needed whether or not the rooms get any of the dome-filtered daylight; and if they don’t face on a mall, there wouldn’t be any view.
It was only a little after seventeen o’clock in New Terra (the Martian day is practically the same length as the terrestrial one—an extra minute and a half in each hour—and we left our watches at the hotel desk to be adjusted.) But we were both tired and ready for bed; after all, we’d had dinner hours earlier, before boarding the shuttle. I picked up my duffel bag, which though I was used to one-third gravity seemed startlingly easy to lift, and headed for my own compartment with the briefest of good-nights to Dad.
The compartment was such an improvement over my cabin on the Susie that its size didn’t faze me at first glance, but as I arranged my things I couldn’t help but think wistfully of a less encouraging contrast. If I were at Gran’s there’d be a window to open; the breeze would sweep in, fluttering the curtains and carrying with it the sound and smell of the sea. . . .
It seemed funny not to have said good night to Alex. Usually we’d been together until just before going to our cabins. But how silly! What a ridiculous thing to be bothered about, my first night on Mars.
I was bound to get over the feeling in a few days. Why, even missing Ross hadn’t loomed too large in my mind during the past weeks. Had I ever really missed Ross? I thought suddenly. Earth, the old routine, certainly I’d missed those terribly. I’d lain awake in that cramped upper berth and longed desperately to be back there; I’d shed a good many tears over it, in fact. But how long had it been since I’d even pictured Ross’s face? When I was homesick, it was less for Ross than for Maple Beach. How strange, when I’d always heard that people in love dream constantly of each other!
Of course, I’d been preoccupied; lately that awful, nagging fear had been absorbing all the emotion I could get up. Yet having arrived on Mars, why should I be less concerned about missing Ross than about missing Alex?
I slipped on my robe and went back to the sitting room, determined to write to Ross right away. Hardly anyone had written letters on the ship because transmission back to Earth was too expensive. In New Terra, though, the data-link facilities were more powerful, and I could probably afford to send one every week or so. Ross might have written to me already; why, I wondered, hadn’t I thought to check as soon as we arrived?
Picking up my handheld computer, I searched for the plug-in to the local Net, wondering whether it was linked to the TV screen or if I’d be stuck with my tiny one throughout our stay. Just then the door to Dad’s compartment opened and he called out, “Everything okay, Mel, honey?”
“Yes. I’m worn out, but I’m not sleepy.” He didn’t close the door, and after a minute or two I went on, “Dad?”
“Yes, honey?”
“Is ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’ true?”
Dad came over and stood beside me, his hands on my shoulders. “That depends on how much in love you are, I guess. With your mother and me it was always true.”
“Even before you were married?”
“Especially then.”
“Did you miss Mother when you weren’t with her? Did you think about her much?”
“All the time!” He smiled, remembering. “Finally I knew I cou
ldn’t do justice to my job without giving more attention to it, so I gave up the field bonus, and went back and married her. She wouldn’t let me turn down the next site I was offered; she went with me instead. Peru, it was. That was the year before you were born.”
What was wrong with me? I thought. How could I not feel that way? Would I move to Peru to be with Ross? Or suppose he had wanted to homestead on Mars, as Dad once had—but that was impossible to imagine, because Ross wouldn’t.
The next morning I was awakened by Dad’s voice, talking to someone on the phone. I couldn’t hear what he was saying; I lay there, not wanting to get out of bed and face the day, until he knocked on my door and called, “Come on, honey. We’re invited out to breakfast.”
Immediately I was wide awake. Alex had called much sooner than I’d thought he would! It must be Alex; after all, we didn’t know anyone else that well.
But it wasn’t. It was the president of the chamber of commerce. It seemed that he and his wife were anxious to show Dad and me around the city, starting right away. While I was puzzling over that, Dad remarked, “Better get out your fanciest dress for tonight, honey. We’re going to a dinner party at the governor’s.”
I dropped my hairbrush. “The governor? Do you know him, Dad?”
“No, but he’s very much interested in having my company open a branch here, you know.”
Well, I hadn’t known; or at any rate I hadn’t stopped to think. The last thing I wanted was to go to a formal dinner and have to talk to all those dignitaries. The dinners Ross’s mother had given had been bad enough. I’d dreaded them, but sometimes Mr. and Ms. Franklin had wanted their son to be present when they entertained, and I’d had no choice but to attend as his date. Often there had been important businessmen there, and Ross had been anxious for me to make a good impression; but I’d never been able to open my mouth. The food always tasted like so much sawdust to me on those occasions.
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