I leaned back against Alex’s shoulder and craned my neck to stare upward. We saw them as they were never seen through Earth’s atmosphere, or in the Susie, either, when she was under spin. White and pure and unblinking, they shone like a thousand Christmas Stars at once. There was one that was much bigger and brighter than the others, though; a disk more than a point.
“What’s that?” I asked. “Alex, I think it’s moved since I’ve been watching!”
“That’s Phobos.”
“The little moon, you mean—the one that goes around Mars in only seven hours or so?”
“Yes. Say, that’s another thing you ought to do, Mel—go to Phobos. I’ll have to see what I can arrange.”
“Don’t you dare!” I protested, laughing. I was beginning to be wary of Alex’s ideas about what might be good for me to do. “Can we see Earth?” I asked, to change the subject.
“No, not now, it’s too close to the horizon. It’s an evening star or a morning one, you know, because it’s closer to the sun than we are.”
I gazed out at the glittering arc of the Milky Way. All those suns, less widely spaced near the center of the galaxy, and lots of them with planets—according to Alex, according to Paul, even, planets where humans will someday walk. Below in the restaurant, caroling had replaced the recorded music. “Hark! the herald angels sing, glory to the newborn King!” The volume increased as the singers came up the stairs. “Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth. . . .” The sons of Earth, I thought. Even now, more than two thousand years and fifty million miles away from Bethlehem, we are all the sons and daughters of Earth. We always will be, no matter how far from it we go.
Alex reached for my hand and for a moment gripped it tight. “Mel—”
“Yes, Alex?”
“I—well, I—”
I turned to see his face, then quickly pulled my hand away and stepped back. He was not looking at me as if I were Alicia now.
“I’m sorry, Melinda,” Alex said. “It’s nothing. No, maybe there is something. Look, are you getting married just as soon as you get back to Earth?”
“Married?” Somehow I hadn’t thought much about it recently. “Yes, I guess so. Sometime during the summer, anyway.”
“That’s definite?”
“Yes, it’s what Ross and I have planned ever since our junior year.” And I must tell Dad, I resolved. Why hadn’t I told Dad during all the time we’d been together? He wouldn’t object, he’d be happy for me; and he must have guessed anyway, since I wouldn’t date anyone else.
“Well, look,” Alex persisted, “if you were ever to change your mind or anything, you’d let me know, wouldn’t you?”
“Let you know? But Alex, I’ll only be here another three weeks.” Three more Sundays, I thought suddenly. “I’m not going to change my mind before that. That is, I’m not ever going to change it—oh, you know what I’m trying to say!”
“I know,” he said softly. “It’s just that, well, I hope I’ll hear from you to know you’ve made it safely back to Maple Beach and all, and—and I wouldn’t want to send you a wedding present if you weren’t getting married.”
Three more Sundays. Of course I could hardly wait to get back home, and yet it was impossible to believe that after three more Sundays I would never see the Prestons or the Conways again. I would never see Alex again. What would it be like to look at this red planet from my window at Maple Beach, and imagine all of them still living on it?
Those three weeks went even faster than the three before my final exams, I think. I was nearing the end. There was no need to be homesick so near the end. I could even relax a little, the way Alex was always telling me to, and not bother to worry over anything. And maybe that’s why I gave in at the very last minute and went Outside.
Dad and I were going home on the Susan Constant, which had made a round trip while we had been on Mars, although several other ships had arrived during our stay. And, by the same alphabetical scheme that had put us on the first trip down when we arrived, we were assigned to go up on the first scheduled shuttle.
It takes more than a day to load a departing liner because Mars has only a few shuttles. That means that the first people to board have to leave a day early, and we were going on a Saturday morning. A few days before, during our last dinner at the Prestons, Alex said to me casually, “It’s a pity you aren’t going to be here Saturday, Mel. Alicia has to go Outside to finish a school project, and I promised to take her. It would be the ideal opportunity for you.”
“Ideal from whose point of view?” I said lightly, though I knew perfectly well what he meant.
“Mel,” Alex insisted, “you’ll be sorry when you get home. Your friends will ask you what Mars looks like, and you won’t be able to tell them.”
“That’s not why you want me to go.”
“Maybe it isn’t. But it will be fun, Mel. Remember how I had to talk you into trying zero-g, that first week on Susie?”
I did remember, and I remembered that he had been right. I also remembered that if he went Outside on Saturday morning, he wouldn’t be able to see us off at the spaceport. And surely nothing could happen to me on my last day! Feeling very reckless, I said, “All right. If we can change our shuttle reservations, I’ll go with you.” That put it nicely into the hands of fate, I thought.
Changing our shuttle reservations proved to be easier said than done, however; lots of people had reasons for wanting an extra few hours on Mars. There was only one seat left on a flight late enough to do me any good. Dad said, “Take it, Mel. I’ll keep to the original plan and meet you on board Susie.”
Early Saturday morning, after we checked out of the hotel, I kissed him good-bye at the monorail station on my way to the airlock to meet Alex and Alicia. We stood talking for a few minutes, waiting for the train to arrive. “When is the firm going to open its office here?” I asked him.
“In a year or so. These things take time to arrange, but I’ve done all the groundwork. There’s no question about its being both feasible and desirable. That’s what I’ve said in my final report, the one I transmitted yesterday.”
“Dad—do you want to head up that office?” I finally came right out with the thing that had loomed in my mind for some time as a distinct possibility.
“It’s not a question of my wanting to. They will choose someone younger, Mel. You can’t turn back time, and my time for pioneering is long gone.” He smiled at me. “It’s not a thing to feel sad about, honey. I’ve been offered a vice presidency! And when it comes to Mars, I can contribute more back on Earth just by my influence.”
The train was ready to board. Though we were only going to be separated for a few hours, I hugged him tight. Just before he stepped into the car, Dad turned back to me. “Has it been as big a thrill for you as it has been for me? Mel, honey, have you enjoyed being on Mars?”
I knew what he wanted me to say. “Of course I have, Dad,” I told him. “I’m awfully glad I came.”
The last, at least, was true.
Chapter 11
The seasons aren’t noticeable in New Terra, but Mars has them: spring, when the frost of the polar cap melts, sending rivulets of moisture down the arid rills; summer, when the usual drought returns, and dust storms often haze the otherwise cloudless sky; fall, which is summer only more so; and winter, which is similar but colder. Not that even summer is warm, but in winter the temperature is always far, far below freezing.
The day we went Outside was a glorious late summer one, without a dust cloud in sight. People can walk around on the surface of Mars in pressure suits, but I drew the line there! We went out in a pressurized groundcar that was rented by the hour. There is a complicated ritual for checking equipment and emergency supplies; Alex went through it matter-of-factly with the airlock attendant while I tried not to watch. Then we got in and Alex checked the seals on the car door while the attendant closed the inner door of the lock. Soon a low, nerve-jarring whine started; they were pumping
the air out. I pressed my lips together, sorry that I wasn’t on the shuttle with Dad.
“Relax,” Alex told me firmly. “You’re holding your breath! You aren’t going to feel anything.” And we didn’t; when the lock pressure was low enough, the outer door simply opened, and we drove out onto a well-worn track in the red sand.
Alicia’s school project involved photographing the city from the outside for a classroom display. She thought it a fine assignment; they had literally drawn them out of a hat and most of the class was stuck with things that could be done inside the domes. I was merely thankful that she hadn’t drawn rock collecting, for which we would have had to use suits.
We headed in the direction of a ridge a little way off where Alex thought we would get a good view. There was no danger of getting lost, since we would never be out of sight of the domes, but we had to stay in radio contact anyway; it’s a requirement that groundcars be tuned in to the Ground Control frequency at all times.
“Think of all that virgin territory out there,” Alex said, pointing off in the distance. “Most of it’s never been seen, let alone driven through.”
“Never seen!” I asked. “After all the years the Colony’s been here?”
“The part within range of these groundcars has been covered fairly thoroughly,” he told me. “But since the atmosphere won’t support aircraft, there’s no way to go any farther except in one of the shuttles, and that’s an awkward business. A shuttle can only make spot landings, and it can’t be gone when there’s a ship in port.”
“The terrain’s been photographed from orbit, though,” Alicia said.
“Yes, and from the research station on Phobos, but that’s not the same thing as surface exploration. Mars has about the same land area as Earth, allowing for Earth’s oceans, and it will take a long time to explore it all.”
He swung the car around so that we would get a good close-up of the domes and stopped. “There, Alicia. Try it from here.” She knelt on the seat and pressed her camera close to the window to snap the first shot.
“Can I download a copy to keep before I leave, Alicia?” I asked.
“Sure, Mel.”
“I want one, too.” Alex said. “But I want to take my own.” She nodded and handed the camera over to him. But it wasn’t at the view that Alex pointed it, nor was it at his sister. I might have fixed my hair better, if I had known beforehand.
“I love this!” Alicia exclaimed as we started to drive again. She added wistfully, “I wish today could go on and on forever.”
“So do I,” Alex muttered, not taking his eyes from the bumpy terrain ahead of us.
“Do you like it Outside as much as all that?” I asked him.
“That wasn’t what I was thinking of.”
“Oh,” I said unhappily. Endings were always hard, I thought. I shouldn’t have come; I should have known it would only draw it out.
Alicia teased, “You better watch out, Mel. Alex would like it if we got stuck out here, and you missed the ship.”
“I wish it were as simple as that.” He threw me a grin. “You trust me, don’t you, Mel?”
“Probably I shouldn’t,” I said good-naturedly, “but I do.”
“I was right again, wasn’t I? Being out here isn’t so bad?”
I had to admit that it wasn’t. It’s funny—with some people, if they’re always right, it only makes you resentful. You begin to wish they’d be wrong once in a while! But with Alex I never felt that way, except on rare occasions when we were both mad. He was right, but he wasn’t trying to prove anything by it. The warm circle of his confidence spread out to include me, and it was a thing to depend on, not to resist. He made me feel confident, too.
Out there in the sunlight nothing seemed very frightening, and my nervousness was almost gone. From our vantage point the city was breathtakingly beautiful, rising out of the richly colored ground as it did, and there was a certain thrill in being afloat in the Martian wilderness that was more pleasant than I had expected. It would have been a pity not to have come; it’s true enough that you miss a lot by setting limits for yourself.
Especially since whatever bounds you set don’t really make you secure.
We were called back before the morning was half over. The controller wouldn’t tell us anything over the radio; he made it sound like a routine order, as if he needed the car for a priority job or something. When Ground Control tells you to do a thing, you do it, so Alex turned back immediately.
“It’s too bad, though,” he complained. “Just when you were starting to enjoy yourself.” Alicia was loudly indignant, though she had enough pictures. I sat silent; inexplicably, the dread of disaster was returning.
When we got into the airlock, we could see through its inner window that another man was waiting with the lock attendant; as soon as the pressure equalized and we got the doors open, he came forward. It was Paul.
I knew something was wrong just from his voice—it was his minister’s voice, not that of the friend I’d laughed and joked with so often. He took my arm and led me into the crowded little Ground Control office. “Melinda,” Paul said, “I don’t know any way to tell you this except directly. There’s been an accident. . . .”
There are some things you can never be safe against, no matter how well you plan your life. Change is one of them; how young I was when I thought I could live forever at Maple Beach, and never change! Fear is another. And still another is grief.
The Susan Constant wasn’t hit by a meteor; she was hit by the shuttle during an abortive rendezvous attempt. The people killed didn’t die from lack of air. Their death was no worse than any death in a collision, and I’ve been assured that it was instantaneous. The accident wasn’t even unique to space; what happened was just plain equipment malfunction, of the sort that has occurred countless times on Earth since humans first began to have equipment.
It could have been much, much worse. That first shuttle carried more supplies than passengers, and Susie herself had only a skeleton crew aboard. All in all, less than twenty people were killed out of the two hundred or more who might have been involved. That was little consolation to me, though, since one of those people was Dad.
There was absolutely nothing anybody could have done about it. As Janet once told me, rather too triumphantly I thought, “it was bound to happen sooner or later.” But not because space is a particularly dangerous place; only because life is dangerous. There have always been accidents, and there always will be. They are rarer now than they once were, but the possibility is always there, on Earth or on Mars or anywhere. Knowing that is part of living.
This philosophic view of it wasn’t my first reaction, of course. It’s something that Paul couldn’t get across to me until a great deal later. That first day all I could think of was that once, the very last day on Mars, I’d denied my fears long enough to go Outside with Alex—and look what had happened! I’d been sure that something awful would occur if I went, and it had.
“Don’t say that!” Alex told me insistently. “That’s completely irrational. It’s backward, even; your dad didn’t change his shuttle reservation, you did. If you hadn’t come Outside with us, you would have been killed, too.”
That was true enough, but it wasn’t exactly a comforting thought.
To the Colonies, while the death of twenty people was a terrible tragedy, the loss of Susie and of the shuttle was a matter of even more serious concern. The full implications of this didn’t hit me until the following day, when I had cried all I could for the time being, and the sedative Alex’s mother had given me had finally forced me into more than twelve hours of exhausted sleep.
The previous day had not been my last one on Mars. My last day on Mars had retreated somewhere into the dim, unpredictable future. The Susie was not going to Earth and there were almost two hundred people like myself who would be competing for places on the sister ships that would be arriving at rarer-than-normal intervals. Yet compared with the problem of outbound shipping, our
plight was not very significant. New Terra, already short of supplies, was going to be still shorter.
The Preston family was discussing this at the lunch table when I dragged myself out of bed to join them. (I’d stayed with them overnight; only when I woke up did I realize that I had been given Alicia’s bed and that she had spread some blankets on the floor.) “It’s hard to believe,” Ms. Preston was saying. “The Susan Constant was an institution. I guess we all expected she’d last as long as the city.”
“I can’t bear it,” Alicia said tearfully. “Poor Susie—she was such a nice old ship, and it wasn’t her fault! I never got to go aboard her. Now I’ll never go to Earth in her—” Seeing me, she broke off. Alex scowled at his sister and got up to stand beside me.
Alicia apologized rapidly. “Mel, I’m sorry! I didn’t think—that is, I didn’t mean—”
I tried to smile. Because I really couldn’t blame Alicia; I knew that if that sort of feeling hadn’t been overshadowed by my sorrow for Dad, I might have grieved for Susie, too.
“I hope you don’t think we’re all being sentimental over a ship at a time like this,” Mr. Preston said to me. “Our chief concern is for those men and women, naturally. All the same, the destruction of the ships themselves is a real blow because of what it’s going to mean here. You realize, don’t you, Mel, that they can’t be replaced very soon?”
I nodded, not trusting myself to speak calmly. A spaceship is just not a thing for which a spare can be kept in reserve. A liner like the Susan Constant costs billions, and can’t be built overnight in any case. Even replacement of the shuttle would be a major proposition, and a shuttle couldn’t travel at Susie’s speed; if a new one started out from Earth right away it wouldn’t arrive for more than a year, the current positions of the two planets being unfavorable. Doing without that shuttle was going to be hard on the Colonies, not only because loading and unloading of the remaining liners and freighters would be slowed down, but because exploration of Mars itself would have to be cut back.
Journey Between Worlds Page 13
