Journey Between Worlds

by Sylvia Engdahl

  One of the first times I went to the Prestons’ they had other guests: Alex’s cousin Paul Conway, the minister, and his wife, Kathy. Kathy and I hit it off right away. She was a small, auburnhaired girl who didn’t look old enough to be a teacher, let alone the mother of three children; and she had a warm, easy laugh. Paul didn’t seem old enough or solemn enough to be a minister, either, though actually he was in his thirties. He had been educated on Earth, as Alex had, and had met and married Kathy there.

  “I grew up in Chicago,” she told me. “Right in the middle of that jam-packed, smog-ridden labyrinth that’s had no improvements since the twentieth century. Too many people, too much noise, and too much weather—not just cold winters, but heat and humidity and temperatures that change every day, not to mention snow and rain.”

  But there were easier escapes than this, I thought. “What really made you come to Mars?” I asked curiously.

  She closed her hand over Paul’s. “Need you ask?”

  I shook my head, unconvinced. They were so obviously in love, and yet was that enough? A normal person’s life was bound to Earth. If she’d been born a Martian, that was one thing; but if she hadn’t, the unnatural conditions in the Colonies offered no permanence, no foundation on which to build anything enduring. A marriage had to be enduring, and weren’t there some things that were more basic, more important even than love? Yet Kathy had given birth to her children on Mars. She expected to die on Mars.

  “Don’t kid the girl!” Paul chuckled. “Don’t give her the idea that I dragged you off without giving you any say in the matter.”

  “Well, I didn’t have to marry you.”

  Alex said, “I think Mel really wants an answer, Kathy. Do you have any reasons of your own for being here, or are you just putting up with it for Paul’s sake?”

  “Of course I have reasons. This is an exciting place to be. And there are three very personal ones—Charlene, Teddy, and Ellen.”

  “You left out Paul Junior and Tim. And who in the world are those last two?”

  “The ones we haven’t had yet. Seriously, Paul and I could have had our first two sons on Earth. We could never have managed the excess population tax for more, nor would we have felt it was right to increase Earth’s population. That’s one reason we feel that what we’re doing to develop the Colonies is important, important for the human race, I mean.”

  “You mean because Earth is overcrowded?” I asked. “But from that standpoint, what difference does it make whether you have children here, or you stay on Earth and don’t have them? If Mars is populated by people who wouldn’t have been born on Earth anyway, how does that help Earth’s problem?”

  Alex said, “The number of people on Mars hasn’t anything to do with it, Mel. It’s a well-known fact that Earth’s population increases much faster than people can emigrate to Mars, in spite of all that’s been done to control the birth rate. Even if we had twice as many ships that would be true. But it’s not the point.”

  “The point is that here on Mars we’re learning how to colonize a new planet,” Paul said. “The technology, the know-how, is being developed.”

  “So that someday, when Earth is really out of room, other worlds can be colonized, too,” Kathy added.

  “Yes. Because someday—not in our time, but someday—the human race will be in great danger if it can’t expand. Many of us believe that that danger can be averted if we start learning what we have to know before it’s too late.” Paul continued.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “There aren’t any other planets that we could ever colonize. Venus is too hot and the outer planets are too cold, and they all have such dense, poisonous atmospheres that even domes wouldn’t be any protection.”

  “Right,” said Alex. “There aren’t any other planets, not in our solar system.”

  I stared at him. “You mean—the stars?” I demanded. “Seriously?”

  “It’s a very serious matter.”

  “But look, Alex, I wasn’t much on science in school, but even I know that it’s not considered feasible to go to the stars. Not ever.”

  He laughed. “You also know enough about history to know that there was a time when it wasn’t considered feasible to go to the moon.”

  Paul interrupted, “When they first did go to the moon, many people wondered why. They questioned whether it was worth all the money and effort spent on it. The same thing was true of Mars. And many people still think that the money appropriated for the Colonies could be better spent to raise the standard of living on Earth.”

  I flushed, unwilling to confess that I’d always thought pretty much along those lines myself. I wanted to find out what Paul was driving at.

  “I believe that’s a shortsighted view of things,” he went on. “I believe that we’re morally obligated to have as much concern for future generations as for our own.”

  Kathy said, “It’s like parents choosing to raise their own standard of living rather than to provide for the future of their kids. You wouldn’t consider that very admirable, would you?”

  “No—but I still don’t see how colonizing Mars is helping. I don’t see how we know that it will ever enable us to colonize planets of other stars.” I looked down at my plate, deep in thought. Where was the line between the real and the fanciful? Some things were hard to believe, but still true: that we could be sitting in an ordinary-looking room on the planet Mars, eating synthetic chicken off blue-rimmed plates, for instance. Yet other things . . . Interstellar travel? Surely, in stories! But seriously?

  “We don’t know,” said Paul. “I have faith that it will, because colonization is the only truly long-range hope I can see for humanity. There isn’t any other answer. The day will come when Earth cannot support its population. Maybe they’ll resort to compulsory control, enforced by methods that would destroy every vestige of individual choice—”

  “Or maybe,” Kathy said, “there’ll be a war that will kill off half the people and set civilization back thousands of years.”

  “I refuse to believe that there has to be a choice between those alternatives,” Paul told me. “I think the need for it can be prevented if we start in time. But we’ve got to proceed step by step. Mars is one of those steps.”

  “The key to interstellar expansion’s not going to be handed to us when it’s so late in the game that the average man in the street can see that we need it,” Alex said. “Not without any preparation.”

  “I suppose not,” I agreed doubtfully. Put that way, it sounded important enough. But oh, dear—it was very idealistic and all that, but it wasn’t the whole answer. Not for an individual person, that is. Kathy didn’t act as if she were making a noble sacrifice for the sake of future generations; she acted as if she liked Mars. As if she was comfortable in New Terra, and happy to stay. And everybody I met felt the same way.

  I’ll have to admit that all the people on Mars seem to be—well, nice. Of course, it’s the most selective society that has ever existed, because of all the screening that goes on before immigrants are accepted. (Selective in a good way, I mean. Naturally the people are of all races and nationalities and come from all kinds of backgrounds, but none of them are criminals or moochers or anything.) All the people are fairly smart, too; they’d have to be to hold the kinds of jobs that are available. But more than that, there isn’t any sort of snobbishness among New Terrans.

  It’s a curious fact, but most Martians have more money than they know what to do with. They may have been penniless when they arrived; lots of homesteaders are. But Colonial pay has to be high to attract nonresidents to temporary jobs, since there aren’t enough homesteaders with the skills necessary to cover all the essential ones. Also, practically all the permanent settlers have either earned or inherited homestead rights on top of their salaries. Although prices are high, there’s hardly anything to buy; and luxuries aren’t available at any price, even through private import, because so much space on the ships has to be given over to priority shipments.
And with the twenty-kilo baggage limit enforced the way it is, everybody starts even as far as possessions are concerned.

  When I first began to understand this, it seemed awfully frustrating. What good was mere money if you couldn’t use it? “It’s so pointless,” I protested to Alex. “Giving up all the things money’s good for, just to accumulate it. Even homestead rights don’t amount to any more than that.”

  Alex was shocked. “You’re confused, Mel. Nobody cares about the money, accumulating it, that is. It’s doing something with it that’s important. If you have more than you need to live on you can afford to invest in things with long-term benefits. There’s a lot we can manufacture from Martian minerals once we can afford to bring in the equipment. That’s got to wait till we have more people, but someday—why, we’ll be able to export, and have more ships so we can import more things. We’ll be self-sufficient eventually; we won’t need any subsidy from Earth at all. And we’ll have independent government, too.”

  Well, this was a subject dear to Alex’s heart, and I soon learned not to get him started on it unless we had at least an hour to spare. Colonial self-sufficiency, that’s the big dream! New cities, gleaming like the alabaster ones in the old song, cleaner than Earth’s and without poverty. Local industries, new jobs—unlimited opportunity for everybody. New Terra’s only the beginning; there’ll be other cities, and all sorts of exciting challenges to come.

  “Do you really think it’s practical?” I inquired meekly once. “I mean, in such an artificial environment. Being so dependent on power for air and water and all.”

  “All cities are artificial environments, even on Earth. Some of them have been since way back in the twentieth century. What do you think would happen if the power went out in a place like New York or Los Angeles? Or if the water system failed?”

  “I don’t want to think about it.”

  “They’d be in just as bad a way as New Terra would, I can tell you that. That dome up there doesn’t make us dependent, Mel; modern civilization does. It’s true everywhere, only here you can see it.”

  “I’d rather not see it, thank you. I’m a country girl at heart.”

  “If we don’t start building cities off Earth, the time will come when Earth has no country left. What then?”

  What indeed? The same unanswerable argument. We always seemed to get back to that.

  Of course, Alex didn’t really think that everything on Mars was perfect; he was too much of a realist for that. “I get carried away,” he confessed. “It’s not going to be as grand as I make it sound, I suppose. But we dream. That’s what pioneers have always done, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe it is,” I admitted.

  “You should know,” he said with a grin. “You with your romantic ideas about your pioneer ancestors.”

  “Oh, Alex, that’s not the same thing.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “They weren’t trying to develop a technology or anything. They lived off the land; it was a good land, and that’s why they settled it. They didn’t have to fight it, make it into something that it wasn’t.”

  “You mean it’s still just the same as it was before they arrived?”

  “Don’t try to confuse the issue!” I sputtered. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, but do you? Why do you like history, Mel?”

  “Well, I—I guess because life used to be so much simpler in the old days, so much more understandable.”

  “Yet history’s the story of change.”

  “That’s a depressing way to look at it.”

  “Why? I think it’s exciting. And you’re wrong about things being more understandable in the past; they weren’t, not to the people that lived then. It’s only true looking back.”

  “The pioneers who came to Oregon didn’t have the kind of problems you do on Mars!”

  “No. They had their own. Disease, starvation, fighting with the native Indians—and by the way, at least you’ve got to admit we aren’t taking land on Mars from people the way Americans took land from the Indians, which makes our kind of pioneering quite an improvement.”

  We got into discussions like this often, not only about Mars, but about other subjects: the news from Earth, movies we’d seen—all sorts of topics. It was stimulating. Ross never discussed anything with me, and he wasn’t interested in the whys of things. I’d hardly noticed until I began to get his letters. They were dull, really; he never seemed to have much to say. I told myself that Ross wasn’t particularly good at expressing his feelings in words and that it wasn’t fair to judge him by them. I read the letters over, trying to picture just what we had done on our dates, and it was surprisingly hard to remember. Ross had been there, that’s all. And when we were in love, what difference did something like talking together make? What Alex and I had was friendship, which seemed another thing entirely.

  The days dragged along. Dad got more enthusiastic about the Colonies all the time. He was finding not only that it would be good for his firm to have a Martian branch, but also that the firm’s investment would be beneficial to Mars, and that made him very happy. As he got busier, the social whirl subsided a bit, much to my relief. I still hated formal parties, although I had more or less inured myself to them except for gatherings that included a Madame Lin, who had not yet forgiven me for my no-longer-expressed Terrestrial provincialism. Ms. Ortega had become almost a friend; she was really a kind, motherly person, and I felt less uncomfortable at her dinners than at the others.

  On my birthday Dad gave a dinner in my honor in one of the hotel banquet rooms. (It was sweet of him, and I did my best to enjoy it; I couldn’t help thinking, however, how much nicer it would have been to be with Ross—or with Alex.) Also, somehow he got me a new dress, a lovely gold one. I still don’t know how he managed it. I had been borrowing frequently from Janet and from Kathy, and he realized that it’s awfully frustrating for a girl to be the official hostess for her father when she hasn’t any suitable clothes.

  I went to church each Sunday, not only because I wanted to hear what Paul’s sermons would be like (he was very dignified in the pulpit, almost a stranger) and because I knew Alex would be there, but even more because it was a link with home. The same hymns, the same ritual, so many millions of miles away! I could imagine Gran back at Maple Beach hearing those same lovely words. It wasn’t the denomination I’d been brought up in, and naturally the church itself didn’t look a bit like any I’d seen before, though I had to admit that inspiring effects could be obtained with low-gravity architecture. But some things, I guess, are universal. Whatever had made me think that a human settlement on Mars would be alien?

  Alex and I got into the habit of going home after church either with his parents or with Paul and Kathy Conway and spending all afternoon and evening there. Occasionally Dad joined us, though his work kept him well occupied even on weekends. I didn’t see Alex on weekdays, and I didn’t know whether he was dating anyone or not; if he was, he never mentioned her. Most of his friends seemed to be young married couples, but then all the homesteaders are married, and even the second-generation Colonials tend to marry young.

  When I saw how Kathy had fixed up her living room, I stopped thinking that a person can’t be individualistic in an apartment. She hadn’t had much more to work with than Ms. Preston, though she had managed to bring a few personal doodads from Earth, but the effect was entirely different. Not better, exactly, but unique. For instance, Paul and Kathy’s place boasted a window. Not a real one, of course, but a mural draped to look real. As to where Kathy had acquired such a huge painting—well, not being an artist herself, she’d projected a color slide on the wall and filled it in from that. It just goes to show what imagination can do. The most striking thing about Kathy’s window, though, and the thing that made it believable, was that she hadn’t chosen a scene from Earth the way I probably would have. It was a Martian landscape, with red hillocks and all; and it wasn’t half so desolate looking as I’d have thought it would be.
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br />   The Conways’ home was always a lively place because of the kids: Paul Junior and Tim, who were five and four, respectively, and little Charlene, who was not quite three. It surprised me that Kathy was so cheerfully nonchalant about them. Those kids meant more than anything in the world to her, but she never seemed to worry! She even sent them out to play by themselves, and since there was no yard, that meant the public park.

  I asked her about it once. “But there’s really nothing that could happen to them, you know,” Kathy said. “Not here. Now if I had to keep track of a child in a place like Chicago or L.A., where there’s traffic to contend with, or contagious diseases, not to mention whatever unsavory characters might be wandering around the streets—”

  The boys were old enough to know about Earth, and they had a thousand questions about it.

  “Billy Johnson says on Earth you can get a glass of water without paying for it,” Paul Junior announced. “He says you can even splash in water. That isn’t true, is it?”

  “Of course it’s true.”

  “Can you get free Cokes, too?”

  “No, you have to pay for Cokes.” Hadn’t Kathy ever told them? I wondered. It was a while before it occurred to me that if she had, they might not have distinguished her stories about Earth from the ones she’d told them about Peter Rabbit or the Three Bears.

  “Maybe I’m going to Earth someday,” Paul Junior told me. “When I’m big.”

  “I wouldn’t want to go to Earth,” Tim broke in. “It’s too far away.”

  How sad, I thought, for it to be so far away! I’d always wanted children, wanted to give them love and warmth and security and faith in humanity’s traditions. Earth’s traditions. It was another matter to bring them into a hostile, artificial world, a world where they’d be trapped inside a sealed dome under which they could never draw a breath of unfiltered air, and where they’d be exposed to countless dangers, yet would know few if any of the natural experiences of growing up.