Podkayne of Mars

by Robert A. Heinlein

  I don’t want to ask the Surgeon, either, because it might attract attention to the Fries family. But I surely would like to have ESP sight (if there truly is such a thing) long enough to find out what is behind those two closed doors.

  I hope Clark hasn’t let his talents run away with him. Oh, I’m as angry at those two as ever . . . because there is just enough truth in the nasty things they said to make it hurt. I am of mixed races and I know that some people think that is bad, even though there is no bias against it on Mars. I do have “convicts” among my ancestors—but I’ve never been ashamed of it. Or not much, although I suppose I’m inclined to dwell more on the highly selected ones. But a “convict” is not always a criminal. Admittedly there was that period in the early history of Mars when the commissars were running things on Earth, and Mars was used as a penal colony; everybody knows that and we don’t try to hide it.

  But the vast majority of the transportees were political prisoners—“counterrevolutionists,” “enemies of the people.” Is this bad?

  In any case there was the much longer period, involving fifty times as many colonists, when every new Marsman was selected as carefully as a bride selects her wedding gown—and much more scientifically. And finally, there is the current period, since our Revolution and Independence, when we dropped all bars to immigration and welcome anyone who is healthy and has normal intelligence.

  No, I’m not ashamed of my ancestors or my people, whatever their skin shades or backgrounds; I’m proud of them. It makes me boiling mad to hear anyone sneer at them. Why, I’ll bet those two couldn’t qualify for permanent visa even under our present “open door” policy! Feeble-minded—

  But I do hope Clark hasn’t done anything too drastic. I wouldn’t want Clark to have to spend the rest of his life on Titan; I love the little wretch.

  Sort of.

  EIGHT

  We’ve had that radiation storm. I prefer hives. I don’t mean the storm itself; it wasn’t too bad. Radiation jumped to about 1500 times normal for where we are now—about eight-tenths of an astronomical unit from the Sun, say 120,000,000 kilometers in units you can get your teeth in. Mr. Savvonavong says that we would have been all right if the first-class passengers had simply gone up one deck to second-class passenger country—which certainly would have been more comfortable than stuffing all the passengers and crew into that maximum-safety mausoleum at the center of the ship. Second-class accommodations are cramped and cheerless, and as for third class, I would rather be shipped as freight. But either one would be a picnic compared with spending eighteen hours in the radiation shelter.

  For the first time I envied the half-dozen aliens aboard. They don’t take shelter; they simply remain locked in their specially conditioned staterooms as usual. No, they aren’t allowed to fry; those X-numbered rooms are almost at the center of the ship anyhow, in officers’ and crew’s country, and they have their own extra layer of shielding, because you can’t expect a Martian, for example, to leave the pressure and humidity he requires and join us humans in the shelter; it would be equivalent to dunking him in a bathtub and holding his head under. If he had a head, I mean.

  Still, I suppose eighteen hours of discomfort is better than being sealed into one small room for the whole trip. A Martian can simply contemplate the subtle difference between zero and nothing for that long or longer and a Venerian just estivates. But not me. I need unrest oftener than I need rest—or my circuits get tangled and smoke pours out of my ears.

  But Captain Darling couldn’t know ahead of time that the storm would be short and relatively mild; he had to assume the worst and protect his passengers and crew. Eleven minutes would have been long enough for us to be in the shelter, as shown later by instrument records. But that is hindsight . . . and a captain doesn’t save his ship and the lives depending on him by hindsight.

  I am beginning to realize that being a captain isn’t all glorious adventure and being saluted and wearing four gold stripes on your shoulders. Captain Darling is younger than Daddy and yet he has worry lines that make him look years older.

  QUERY: Poddy, are you sure you have what it takes to captain an explorer ship?

  ANSWERS: What did Columbus have that you don’t? Aside from Isabella, I mean. Semper toujours, girl!

  I spent a lot of time before the storm in the control room. Hermes Solar Weather Station doesn’t actually warn us when the storm is coming; what they do is fail to warn us that the storm is not coming. That sounds silly but here is how it works:

  The weathermen at Hermes are perfectly safe, as they are underground on the dark side of Mercury. Their instruments peek cautiously over the horizon in the twilight zone, gather data about Solar weather including running telephotos at several wave lengths.

  But the Sun takes about twenty-five days to turn around, so Hermes Station can’t watch all of it all the time. Worse yet. Mercury is going around the Sun in the same direction that the Sun rotates, taking eighty-eight days for one lap, so when the Sun again faces where Mercury was, Mercury has moved on. What this adds up to is that Hermes Station faces exactly the same face of the Sun about every seven weeks.

  Which is obviously not good enough for weather-predicting storms that can gather in a day or two, peak in a few minutes, and kill you dead in seconds or less.

  So the Solar weather is watched from Earth’s Luna and from Venus’ satellite station as well, plus some help from Deimos. But there is speed-of-light lag in getting information from these more distant stations back to the main station on Mercury. Maybe fifteen minutes for Luna and as high as a thousand seconds for Deimos . . . not good when seconds count.

  But the season of bad storms is only a small part of the Sun’s cycle as a variable star—say about a year out of each six. (Real years, I mean—Martian years. The Sun’s cycle is about eleven of those Earth years that astronomers still insist on using.)

  That makes things a lot easier; five years out of six, a ship stands very little chance of being hit by a radiation storm.

  But during the stormy season a careful skipper (the only sort who lives to draw a pension) will plan his orbit so that he is in the worst danger zone, say inside the orbit of Earth, only during such time as Mercury lies between him and the Sun, so that Hermes Station can always warn him of coming trouble. That is exactly what Captain Darling had done; the Tricorn waited at Deimos nearly three weeks longer than the guaranteed sightseeing time on Mars called for by the Triangle Line’s advertising, in order to place his approach to Venus so that Hermes Station could observe and warn—because we are right in the middle of the stormy season.

  I suppose the Line’s business office hates these expensive delays. Maybe they lose money during the stormy season. But three weeks’ delay is better than losing a whole shipload of passengers.

  But when the storm does start, radio communication goes all to pieces at once—Hermes Station can’t warn the ships in the sky.

  Stalemate? Not quite. Hermes Station can see a storm shaping up; they can spot the conditions on the Sun which are almost certainly going to produce a radiation storm very shortly. So they send out a storm warning—and the Tricorn and other ships hold radiation-shelter drills. Then we wait. One day, two days, or a whole week, and the storm either fails to develop, or it builds up and starts shooting nasty stuff in great quantities.

  All during this time the space guard radio station on the dark side of Mercury sends a continuous storm warning, never an instant’s break, giving a running account of how the weather looks on the Sun.

  . . . and suddenly it stops.

  Maybe it’s a power failure and the stand-by transmitter will cut in. Maybe it’s just a “fade” and the storm hasn’t broken yet and transmission will resume with reassuring words.

  But it may be that the first blast of the storm has hit Mercury with the speed of light, no last-minute warning at all, and the station’s eyes are knocked out and its voice is swallowed up in enormously more powerful radiation.

  The off
icer-of-the-watch in the control room can’t be sure and he dare not take a chance. The instant he loses Hermes Station he slaps a switch that starts a big clock with just a second hand. When that clock has ticked off a certain number of seconds—and Hermes Station is still silent—the general alarm sounds. The exact number of seconds depends on where the ship is, how far from the Sun, how much longer it will take the first blast to reach the ship after it has already hit Hermes Station.

  Now here is where a captain bites his nails and gets gray hair and earns his high pay . . . because he has to decide how many seconds to set that clock for. Actually, if the first and worst blast is at the speed of light, he hasn’t any warning time at all because the break in the radio signal from Hermes and that first wave front from the Sun will reach him at the same instant. Or, if the angle is unfavorable, perhaps it is his own radio reception that has been clobbered, and Hermes Station is still trying to reach him with a last-moment warning. He doesn’t know.

  But he does know that if he sounds the alarm and chases everybody to shelter every time the radio fades for a few seconds, he will get people so worn out and disgusted from his crying “Wolf!” that when the trouble really comes they may not move fast enough.

  He knows, too, that the outer hull of his ship will stop almost anything in the electromagnetic spectrum. Among photons (and nothing else travels at speed-of-light) only the hardest X-radiation will get through to passenger country and not much of that. But traveling along behind, falling just a little behind each second, is the really dangerous stuff—big particles, little particles, middle-sized particles, all the debris of nuclear explosion. This stuff is moving very fast but not quite at speed-of-light. He has to get his people safe before it hits.

  Captain Darling picked a delay of twenty-five seconds, for where we were and what he expected from the weather reports. I asked him how he picked it and he just grinned without looking happy and said, “I asked my grandfather’s ghost.”

  Five times while I was in the control room the officer of the watch started that clock . . . and five times contact with Hermes Station was picked up again before time ran out and the switch was opened.

  The sixth time the seconds trickled away while all of us held our breaths . . . and contact with Hermes wasn’t picked up again and the alarm sounded like the wakeful trump of doom.

  The Captain looked stony-faced and turned to duck down the hatch into the radiation shelter. I didn’t move, because I expected to be allowed to remain in the control room. Strictly speaking, the control room is part of the radiation shelter, since it is just above it and is enclosed by the same layers of cascade shielding.

  (It’s amazing how many people think that a captain controls his ship by peering out a port as if he were driving a sand wagon. But he doesn’t, of course. The control room is inside, where he can watch things much more accurately and conveniently by displays and instruments. The only viewport in the Tricorn is one at the top end of the main axis, to allow passengers to look out at the stars. But we have never been headed so that the mass of the ship would protect that sightseeing room from solar radiation, so it has been locked off this whole trip.)

  I knew I was safe where I was, so I hung back, intending to take advantage of being “teacher’s pet”—for I certainly didn’t want to spend hours or days stretched out on a shelf with gabbling and maybe hysterical women crowding me on both sides.

  I should have known. The Captain hesitated a split second as he started down the hatch and snapped, “Come along, Miss Fries.”

  I came. He always calls me “Poddy”—and his voice had spank in it.

  Third-class passengers were already pouring in, since they have the shortest distance to go, and crew members were mustering them into their billets. The crew has been on emergency routine ever since we first were warned by Hermes Station, with their usual one watch in three replaced by four hours on and four hours off. Part of the crew had been staying dressed in radiation armor (which must be very uncomfortable) and simply hanging around passenger country. They can’t take that heavy armor off for any reason at all until their reliefs show up, dressed also in armor. These crewmen are the “chasers” who bet their lives that they can check every passenger space, root out stragglers, and still reach the shelter fast enough not to accumulate radiation poisoning. They are all volunteers and the chasers on duty when the alarm sounds get a big bonus and the other half of them who were lucky enough not to be on duty get a little bonus.

  The Chief Officer is in charge of the first section of chasers and the Purser is in charge of the second—but they don’t get any bonus even though the one on duty when the alarm sounds is by tradition and law the last man to enter the safety of the shelter. This hardly seems fair . . . but it is considered their honor as well as their duty.

  Other crewmen take turns in the radiation shelter and are equipped with mustering lists and billeting diagrams.

  Naturally, service has been pretty skimpy of late, with so many of the crew pulled off their regular duties in order to do just one thing and do it fast at the first jangle of the alarm. Most of these emergency-duty assignments have to be made from the stewards and clerks; engineers and communicators and such usually can’t be spared. So state rooms may not be made up until late afternoon—unless you make your own bed and tidy your room yourself, as I had been doing—and serving meals takes about twice as long as usual, and lounge service is almost nonexistent.

  But of course the passengers realize the necessity for this temporary mild austerity and are grateful because it is all done for safety.

  You think so? My dear, if you believe that, you will believe anything. You haven’t Seen Life until you’ve seen a rich, elderly Earthman deprived of something he feels is his rightful due, because he figures he paid for it in the price of his ticket. I saw one man, perhaps as old as Uncle Tom and certainly old enough to know better, almost have a stroke. He turned purple, really purple and gibbered—all because the bar steward didn’t show up on the bounce to fetch him a new deck of playing cards.

  The bar steward was in armor at the time and couldn’t leave his assigned area, and the lounge steward was trying to be three places at once and answer stateroom rings as well. This didn’t mean anything to our jolly shipmate; he was threatening to sue the Line and all its directors, when his speech became incoherent.

  Not everybody is that way, of course. Mrs. Grew, fat as she is, has been making her own bed and she is never impatient. Some others who are ordinarily inclined to demand lots of service have lately been making a cheerful best of things.

  But some of them act like children with tantrums—which isn’t pretty in children and is even uglier in grandparents.

  The instant I followed the Captain into the radiation shelter I discovered just how efficient Tricorn service can be when it really matters. I was snatched—snatched like a ball, right out of the air—and passed from hand to hand. Of course I don’t weigh much at one-tenth gravity, all there is at the main axis, but it is rather breath-taking. Some more hands shoved me into my billet, already stretched out, as casually and impersonally as a housewife stows clean laundry, and a voice called out, “Fries, Podkayne!” and another voice answered, “Check.”

  The spaces around me, and above and below and across from me, filled up awfully fast, with the crewmen working with the unhurried efficiency of automatic machinery sorting mail capsules. Somewhere a baby was crying and through it. I heard the Captain saying, “Is that the last?”

  “Last one, Captain,” I heard the Purser answer. “How’s the time?”

  “Two minutes thirty-seven seconds—and your boys can start figuring their payoff, because this one is no drill.”

  “I didn’t think it was, Skipper—and I’ve won a small bet from the Mate myself.” Then the Purser walked past my billet carrying someone, and I tried to sit up and bumped my head and my eyes bugged out.

  The passenger he was carrying had fainted; her head lolled loosely over the crook of his
arm. At first I couldn’t tell who it was, as the face was a bright, bright red. And then I recognized her and I almost fainted. Mrs. Royer—

  Of course the first symptom of any bad radiation exposure is erythema. Even with a sunburn, or just carelessness with an ultraviolet lamp, the first thing you see is the skin turning pink or bright red.

  But was it possible that Mrs. Royer had been hit with such extremely sharp radiation in so very little time that her skin had already turned red in the worst “sunburn” imaginable? Just from being last man in?

  In that case she hadn’t fainted; she was dead.

  And if that was true, then it was equally true that the passengers who were last to reach the shelter must all have received several times the lethal dosage. They might not feel ill for hours yet; they might not die for days. But they were just as dead as if they were already stretched out stiff and cold.

  How many? I had no way of guessing. Possibly—probably I corrected myself—all the first-class-passengers; they had the farthest to go and were most exposed to start with.

  Uncle Tom and Clark—

  I felt sudden sick sorrow and wished that I had not been in the control room. If my brother and Uncle Tom were dying, I didn’t want to be alive myself.

  I don’t think. I wasted any sympathy on Mrs. Royer. I did feel a shock of horror when I saw that flaming red face, but truthfully, I didn’t like her, I thought she was a parasite with contemptible opinions, and if she had died of heart failure instead, I can’t honestly say that it would have affected my appetite. None of us goes around sobbing over the millions and billions of people who have died in the past . . . nor over those still living and yet to be born whose single certain heritage is death (including Podkayne Fries herself). So why should you cry foolish tears simply because you happen to be in the neighborhood when someone you don’t like—despise, in fact—comes to the end of her string?