I unbuckled and let myself drift up, enjoying the familiar weightlessness. I kicked off from the seat top and sealed down the faceplate of my suit, as I came up to the exit port with my fellow passengers.
The steward guided us into the lock, where we were greeted by a no-nonsense technician who directed us to grab a thin guideline and heave ourselves into the transfer tube. Another efficient technician, this one a woman, met us at the other end of the short passage, keeping us moving on into the station. It was a busy place, and there was no time for gawkers. There would be plenty of time to be struck dumb by the vast beauty of space later on. The romance of going to Mars was reduced to
“Keep it moving, hombre,” and a commicator’s order that all passengers for the Balboa report to Decontamination at once.
“Don’t they trust the Decon Earthside?” I asked the tech who was hanging up my suit in the six-sided locker tube.
She didn’t even look around. “Don’t wait around, amigo, get your ass to E deck.”
“Have my cargo pods been transferred?”
“Routine transfer through Decon. C’mon, I have to cycle this lock!”
I moved from the weightless center of the big can out through the radial tubes to the Point Eight gravity of the exterior skin, along with the others, past the clearly marked signs to Decon.
I overcompensated in an attempt to avoid a pinwheeling neophyte and bumped my head, not on the padded sides, but on a hatch edge. But in the main the sailing feeling was delightful, somehow much more real than dancing in the big ballroom on Station One. There, I had always been carefully VIPed, but this time I knew the station commander would not give me a personal tour. Diego Braddock was just a hired hand, a nobody.
I was pushed through Decon along with a couple of Marines destined for the Ares Center police garrison who were ahead of me, and a Redplanet Minerals geologist named Pelf behind me. We were resuited and hustled through to the smaller, all-purpose shuttlecraft that ran passengers and cargo hundreds of kilometers out to where the asteroid ships were in parking orbits.
We sailed silently past several of the older extended-flight ships, which had long lost their original global shape beneath the additions of domes, extra pods, stasis cylinders, antennae, modifications, exterior storage tetrahedrons, spidery cargo waldos, and vacuum-welded lumps studded with sensors. Most of these ships were now research vessels or served in the Earth-orbit-to-Moon-orbit run. The obliging copilot pointed out the passenger ship Emperor Ming-huang, one of the sleek new moon ships.
Just past it was the President Kennedy, under construction, and beyond, President Washington, with a swarm of shuttles and tugs transhipping cargo and passengers from Luna City.
“That’s the Neil A. Armstrong over there,” the pilot said.
“They’re modifying her again.” He laughed and said, “Ships may get old in space, but they rarely die.”
“Old ships never die, they just modify,” the copilot grinned, repeating the old cliché.
Pelf leaned past me to point ahead, where we could just see an irregular blot against the half-moon. “There!”
The pilot nodded and thumbed a stud. “Two-seventeen to Balboa NE-five, request approach computation check. Over.”
“Two-seventeen, this is Balboa NE-five. Confirm on Fifty-six-five, over.”
“Roger, Balboa, out.”
“Look,” Pelf said, “more.”
Ahead of us were the asteroid ships, mountain-sized rocks brought in, mostly from the Asteriod Belt, by PanLunar or Transworld, or by free-lancers. Clusters of sealed living and power units are sent out, the asteroids are found, their center of mass determined, and the big central corings made. The cylindrical units are inserted and sealed, the trim is checked, and if need be, big bull lasers cut off chunks to ballast the rock, and a ship is created. Skeleton crews bring them back into Earth orbit, where cargo holds are scooped out of the ancient rock, tunnels drilled to the surface, for access and observation ports, and a more careful study is made of how the asteroid is to be cut up for efficient self-destruction.
The asteroid ships literally consume themselves. The rock is cut up and fed to the fusion torch for fuel, the cuts monitored carefully to preserve the ship’s trim. The asteroid provides fuel, storage capacity, and protection from meteorites and radiation.
They aren’t pretty, but they are big and work better and faster than anything yet devised. The old ships had to carry their own fuel, whereas with these bulky beauties the ship is the fuel. The seven or eight months’ trip has been reduced to four or five weeks, and commerce is still picking up.
The copilot pointed at a work crew fitting a cylindrical unit into a large pitted rock twenty times its size. “That’s not the kind of ship Captain Laser uses.”
“Captain Laser,” snorted the pilot. “If my ship had visited as many alien planets as his and had been sabotaged, cut up, zapped, spacewarped, and eaten by intelligent dinosaurs as often as his, it would be in repair orbit ninety percent of the time.”
The two pilots began a good-natured argument about the adventures of the legendary space hero seen on television in eighteen languages, but I still watched the space ahead for our destination. Naturally, I had been to space stations before, and several times I had visited the Moon, on business usually, but twice for pleasure. The Moon was an exotic vacation, expensive but easily possible on any number of commercial flights.
Mars was a different matter.
For all practical purposes the Moon was dead, but there had been life on Mars, intelligent life, with an amazingly high civilization, even though we didn’t understand much of it yet. It seemed probable that it had developed early, for Mars was indeed younger than Earth, and its civilization developed with great speed, peaking and disappearing centuries before man was much more than a hunter and gatherer. Mars was as mysterious to us as Africa had been in the nineteenth century, when explorers were searching for the source of the Nile and discovering whole cultures, new species, and great wonders. With a trip to Mars, a lot of work, and a little luck, a man might get rich. He might be able to get himself up out of the mind-clogging morass of eight billion bodies and into sight of a slice of sky. Despite all the misfortunes, all the death and suffering, all the expense and disappointments, exploring Mars was romantic. And I hadn’t done anything romantic in a long time.
Wearing bulky all-purpose spacesuits we made the transfer from the shuttle to the receiving tube of the Balboa, gathering like sheep inside the big Richter lock, dutifully waiting until the experts told us what to do next.
We floated, weightless and awkward, bumping into each other as we waited, and some of us got upside-down to the others. Not that it mattered, for there would be no gravity until the big engines started pushing us out. But it was disorienting and confusing to most of us, and I saw some holding onto the guidelines and keeping out of the way of one clown who seemed to think kicking his legs and waving his arms would get him all right again, and that the faster he kicked, the quicker he would get back in sync with us.
Mercifully, a crewman snagged him and pulled him to a line, where he hung until the inner lock opened. I had been trying to see who my fellow passengers were, but the sexual and social anonymity of the suits prevented me.
A voice in our suit radios told us to start pulling ourselves along the safety lines that hung on all four walls of the square-cut passage beyond the lock, and we moved out in a ragged line. The more skilled and experienced soon shot through and went slithering off down the passage ahead, skimming the vacuum like seals. The rest struggled with our reflexes and eventually made it all the long way down through to the central core and another airlock.
The pressurized cylinder was the size of a small tower, with special cargo holds at the “front” end, passenger cabins next, then the service modules, the control room, and the fusion power plant at the
“back” or “bottom,” or what would be the bottom when the one-g thrust restored gravity.
I had no i
dea how they decided who bunked with whom, but I drew a cabin with the man named Franklin R. Pelf. He instantly offered his services as an experienced spacer, and I instantly disliked him, although he was polite and considerate.
“This old boat made the third trip to Mars, you know, I mean, of the asteroid ships. You know, the one with Bailey and Russell. Later on I’ll show you the laser scar on A Deck where Russell cut down Bailey, you know, on the way back, after he picked up that vitus worm.”
He was the original stick-with-me-kid type. “Maybe I should have gone out on the Spirit of the Revolution, or even the Leif Ericson III. They have great yums on those tubes, you know. But my business is just too urgent. I’m in pure ore, you know.”
No, I didn’t know. I was thinking about the historic old ship plugged into the inconceivably ancient chunk of space trash, equating it with the battered old tramp steamers of history, and romanticizing the hell out of it.
But Pelf wouldn’t leave me alone. Once he found out I was from Publitex he started feeding me endless canned pap about the eternal glories of Redplanet Minerals, the beauties of Grabrock, etcetera. I disliked him right from the start, and I never stopped. There was a sort of snake-eyed watchfulness about him that rang the alarm circuits honed by nearly two decades of wheeling and dealing in most of the countries of the world. If I were Brian Thorne instead of the easygoing Diego Braddock he would never have gotten within ten kilometers of me. That is one sort of protection that money can buy—sharp-witted sharpies who are your sharpies to watch out for other sharpies. But here I was, sealed in a small world of two hundred souls for a month, with a podmate whom I already disliked, and we hadn’t even left orbit.
We were still stowing luggage and he was well into the “Who are you, what do you do, how can you help me?” routine. Layered over it like chocolate frosting was the ever-present “Boy, can I help you!” pitch that I had heard from multimillionaire Arab rug merchants selling oil rights and billionaire service company czars and territorial senators and even a few out-back presidents, ministers, and regents of the throne. They do favors for you, and they expect them back. If you don’t take the favors you are not obligated, but getting out of taking them is often difficult; sovereign countries can make your refusal an international incident and beautiful women can attack your manhood. Pelf was somewhere in between.
I quickly sealed up my gear in the lockers and headed up toward the control decks. As Brian Thorne I would have been invited to the bridge during takeoff, but as Braddock the best I could wangle was permission to be in a pressurized observation blister as we set sail for the planet of the God of War.
Earth was below, all blue and white and beautiful, as familiar an unfamiliar sight as anyone on Earth has seen. A thousand films, ten thousand newscasts, have shown us ourselves, Spaceship Earth, in orbit around a minor star. The diminishing crescent of the Home Planet was as often seen as any vidstar. I remembered seeing it “live and direct” from the torchship American Eagle as she went off on the first manned trip to the moons of Jupiter. Only this time it was no wall screen, but the curved plastex dome before me. And out there, Earth’s billions. And Brian Thorne.
The intercom announced the impending firing of the torch and I checked my safety belt, although I knew the ship’s movement would be barely discernible at first. We would gradually increase speed until Turnover, then “back down” to Mars orbit.
There was the faintest of tremors and then, very slowly, the crescent of Earth slid to one side of the port, and we were starting into the long curve to the fourth planet.
I stayed in the blister until they called dinner and with a sigh I unbuckled myself and cycled through the lock. I grabbed the guideline and arrowed down to the ship’s lock.
I was smiling and I couldn’t help feeling the repetitive thrill of the threshold of adventure. I was going to Mars! I was a kid skipping school, an AWOL soldier, a felon out of prison. I felt much younger, an adventurer on his way!
Brian Thorne on Mars.
Brian Thorne versus the Queen of Deneb.
Brian Thorne and the Space Pirates of Medusa IV.
I entered the mess hall with a smile on my face. I started automatically toward the Captain’s table before I saw Pelf’s wave. Then I remembered that the pecking order was quickly established on a ship, whether in space or on the water. The Important Ones, relatively speaking, were at the Captain’s table the first night out. Everyone, or almost everyone, would make it sometime, but that first night or two would set the social order in cement. Diego Braddock was not invited tonight.
As I slid into my seat I was brought up to date by Our Genial Host, Franklin R. Pelf. He introduced me to the two Marines, to Quam Lem, an administrator going to the People’s Republic base at Polecanal, to a biologist and to an ecologist destined for the new colony at Northaxe.
But my eyes were on the Captain’s table. The Marine commander, an Ares Center politico, the owner of the Enyo and Eris mines near Northaxe, and the two doctors were just background, just spear carriers as far as I was concerned.
All I saw was the woman.
“Who’s that?” I interrupted Pelf’s calculatedly charming approach to the placid Quam Lem. He turned to me with irritation, quickly disguised. He followed my eyes to the only possible target. He smiled. It was a lizard’s smile. “Nice, huh?”
“Never mind the editorial. Who is she?”
“Nova Sunstrum.”
I tore my eyes away and looked at him. “But she looks oriental, or some sort of mixture.”
“She is. Her father practically owns Bradbury, and her mother was one of the first colonists the People’s Republic sent out to Polecanal.” His lizard’s grin grew intimate. “Would you like an introduction?”
I closed the armored leaves of my ego around me once again. The Don’t Give Away A Thing sign was lit.
“It’s a long voyage,” I said, digging into my salad. “I imagine I’ll run into her.”
Pelf grinned at me and murmured, “I’m certain you will,” and returned to his conversation with Quam Lem.
I didn’t look over at her again. Our eyes had met as I entered and she had been calmly expressionless, apparently listening to the politician next to her, the one with the polished charm. The contact had broken as I sat down.
Beautiful women, I’m happy to say, are not that novel in my life. Keeping them out of my life has been the problem for over fifteen years, ever since I appeared on the TIME list of the Top Hundred Bachelors. I knew there would be women on the Balboa, for they had constituted almost half of the original explorers and colonists, but I had been expecting technicians, a nurse or two, even an administrator or scientist, and certainly a few contract wives, each with a solid degree in some field necessary out there.
So I was not all that surprised at finding a physically beautiful woman, but I was surprised at finding magic. That sort of chemistry was just something I was neither looking for, nor expected. And I could not deny the electric charge of that magic, and it disturbed me. It had passed through my thoughts to “arrange” for some subsidiary of mine to send Arleen or Karin along, or perhaps the exotic Charla, someone to accompany me on the long voyage there and back. They would have jumped at the chance, mainly to have me, and my millions, alone to themselves. But I had decided I didn’t need that, and trusted none of them to keep silent. Taking a beautiful woman along would be like buying an ad in global prime time.
But here was a woman whose beauty had hit a resonating chord within me. She sat like a queen in the steel core of a battered, scarred old freighter. I smiled into my yoghurt. All I needed was fog outside the ports, a secret formula, Hitler’s great-grandson with plans to raise the swastika on red soil, a comic character or two, and a drunken doctor to perform the necessary brain surgery. Pelf was a secret agent and Nova Sunstrum was his accomplice. Quam Lem had some dastardly plot to take over Mars concealed in his spacesuit and the ancient race of Martians would be brought alive with the tanna leaves that the thin ec
ologist had secreted in the lining of his jumpsuit.
Brian Thorne and the Empress of Mars.
Strikes Again.
Blues.
I began to think that they had caught on back home and had staged the whole thing to “get it out of his system so he can settle down.”
I finished the meal, suited up, and headed toward the observation blister again, without so much as a look at Nova Sunstrum’s waist-long black hair, her tilted dark eyes, her golden skin, or her softly smiling mouth.
Only that’s just what Brian Thorne would have done. Let ’em come to me. Even the ones that played it smart and didn’t seem eager just placed themselves in my path for me to fall over.
Yup. that’s what the suave, worldly Brian Thorne would have done all right, so that’s what I did. Except that I was Diego Braddock and I was going on being Diego Braddock as long as possible. I stared out at the ever-so-slowly retreating blue-green-white-tan disk but I was seeing the dark eyes and the fall of black hair. Nova Sunstrum.
Nova Sunstrum.
There was an unconscious use of her sensuality that I found very exciting, even though I thought she was aware of much of her sexuality. A month of that kind of closeness would surely affect both the male and the bisexual females of the ship. Suddenly I saw the position she was in. She was not the only woman. There were two computer techs, a plump botanist, a brace of nurses, three contract wives with seven degrees between them, and a sturdy adminofficer ticketed through to the Russian base at Nabokov.
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