“So what do you say?”
“I’ll do it,” Art said.
William Fort didn’t fool around. The moment Art agreed to take the Mars assignment, his life speeded up like a video on fast forward. That night he was back in the sealed van, and then in the sealed jet, all alone this time, and when he staggered up the jetway it was dawn in San Francisco.
He went to the Dumpmines office, and made the round of friends and acquaintances there. Yes, he said again and again, I’ve taken a job on Mars. Salvaging a bit of the old elevator cable. Only temporary. The pay is good. I’ll be back.
That afternoon he went home and packed. It took ten minutes. Then he stood groggily in the empty apartment. There on the stove-top was the frying pan, the only sign of his former life. He took the frying pan over to his suitcases, thinking he could fit it in and take it with him. He stopped over the cases, full and shut. He went back and sat down on the single chair, the frypan hanging from his hand.
After a while he called Sharon, hoping partly to get her answering machine, but she was home. “I’m going to Mars,” he croaked. She wouldn’t believe it. When she believed it she got angry. It was desertion pure and simple, he was running out on her. But you already threw me out, Art tried to say, but she had hung up. He left the frying pan on the table, lugged his suitcases down to the sidewalk. Across the street a public hospital that did the longevity treatment was surrounded by its usual crowd, people whose turn at the treatment was supposedly near, camping out in the parking lot to make sure nothing went awry. The treatments were guaranteed to all U.S. citizens by law, but the waiting lists for the public facilities were so long that it was a question whether one would survive to reach one’s turn. Art shook his head at the sight, and flagged down a pedicab.
He spent his last week on Earth in a motel in Cape Canaveral. It was a lugubrious farewell, as Canaveral was restricted territory, occupied chiefly by military police, and service personnel who had extremely bad attitudes toward the “late lamented,” as they called those waiting for departure. The daily extravaganza of takeoff only left everyone either apprehensive or resentful, and in all cases rather deaf. People went around in the afternoons with ears ringing, repeating, What? What? What? To counteract the problem most of the locals had earplugs; they would be dropping plates on one’s restaurant table while talking to people in the kitchen, and suddenly they’d glance at the clock and take earplugs out of their pocket and stuff them in their ears, and boom, off would go another Novy Energia booster with two shuttles strapped to it, causing the whole world to quake like jelly. The late lamented would rush out into the streets with hands over their ears to get another preview of their fate, staring up stricken at the biblical pillar of smoke and the pinpoint of fire arching over the Atlantic. The locals would stand in place chewing gum, waiting for the time-out to be over. The only time they showed any interest was one morning when the tides were high and news came that a group of party-crashers had swum up to the fence surrounding the town and cut their way inside, where security had chased them to the area of the day’s launch; it was said some of them had been incinerated by takeoff, and this was enough to get some of the locals out to watch, as if the pillar of smoke and fire would look somehow different.
Then one Sunday morning it was Art’s turn. He woke and dressed in the ill-fitting jumper provided, feeling as if he were dreaming. He got in the van with another man looking just as stunned as he felt, and they were driven to the launching compound and identified by retina, fingerprint, voice, and visual appearance; and then, without ever really having managed to think about what it all meant, he was led into an elevator and down a short tunnel into a tiny room where there were eight chairs somewhat like dentist’s chairs, all of them occupied by round-eyed people, and then he was seated and strapped in and the door was shut and there was a vibrant roar under him and he was squished, and then he weighed nothing at all. He was in orbit.
After a while the pilot unbuckled and the passengers did too, and they went to the two little windows to look out. Black space, blue world, just like the pictures, but with the startling high resolution of reality. Art stared down at West Africa and a great wave of nausea rolled through every cell of him.
He was only just getting the slightest touch of appetite back, after a timeless interval of space sickness that apparently in the real world had clocked in at three days, when one of the continuous shuttles came bombing by, after swinging around Venus and aero-braking into an Earth-Luna orbit just slow enough to allow the little ferries to catch up to it. Sometime during his space sickness Art and the other passengers had transferred into one of these ferries, and when the time was right it blasted off in pursuit of the continuous shuttle. Its acceleration was even harder than the take-off from Canaveral, and when it ended Art was reeling, dizzy, and nauseated again. More weightlessness would have killed him; he groaned at the very thought; but happily there was a ring in the continuous shuttle that rotated at a speed that gave some rooms what they called Martian gravity. Art was given a bed in the health center occupying one of these rooms, and there he stayed. He could not walk well in the peculiar lightness of Martian g; he hopped and staggered about, and he still felt bruised internally, and dizzy. But he stayed on just the right side of nausea, which he was thankful for even though it was not a very pleasant feeling in itself.
The continuous shuttle was strange. Because of its frequent aerobraking in the atmospheres of Earth, Venus, and Mars, it had somewhat the shape of a hammerhead shark. The ring of rotating rooms was located near the rear of the ship, just ahead of the propulsion center and the ferry docks. The ring spun, and one walked with head toward the centerline of the ship, feet pointing down at the stars under the floor.
About a week into their voyage Art decided to give weightlessness one more try, as the rotating ring was without windows. He went to one of the transfer chambers for getting from the rotating ring to the nonrotating parts of the ship; the chambers were on a narrow ring that moved with the g ring, but could slow.down to match the rest of the ship. The chambers looked just like freight elevator cars, with doors on both sides; when you got in one and pushed the right button, it decelerated through a few rotations to a stop, and the far door opened on the rest of the ship.
So Art tried that. As the car slowed, he began to lose weight, and his gorge began to rise in an exact correspondence. By the time the far door opened he was sweating and had somehow launched himself at the ceiling, where he hurt his wrist catching himself before hitting his head. Pain battled nausea, and the nausea was winning; it took him a couple of caroms to get to the control panel and hit the button to get him moving again, and back into the gravity ring. When the far door closed he settled gently back to the floor, and in a minute Martian gravity returned, and the door he had come in through reopened. He bounced gratefully out, suffering no more than the pain of a sprained wrist. Nausea was far more unpleasant than pain, he reflected — at least certain levels of pain. He would have to get his outside view over the TVs.
He would not be lonely. Most of the passengers and all of the crew spent the majority of their time in the gravity ring, which was therefore fairly crowded, like a full hotel in which most of the guests spent most of their time in the restaurant and bar. Art had seen and read accounts of the continuous shuttles that made them seem like flying Monte Carlos, with permanent residents made up of the rich and bored; a popular vid series had had just such a setting. Art’s ship, the Ganesh, was not like that. It was clear that it had been hurtling around the inner solar system for a good long time now, and always at full capacity; its interiors were getting shabby, and when restricted to the ring it seemed very small, much smaller than the impression one had of these kinds of ships from watching history shows about the Ares. But the First Hundred had lived in about five times as much space as the Ganesh’s g ring, and the Ganesh carried five hundred passengers.
Flight time, however, was only three months. So Art settled down and watched TV, conc
entrating on documentaries about Mars. He ate in the dining room, which was decorated to look like one of the great ocean liners of the 1920s, and he gambled a bit in the casino, which was decorated to look like one of the Las Vegas casinos of the 1970s. But mostly he slept and watched TV, the two activities melting into each other so that he dreamed very lucidly about Mars, while the documentaries took on a very surreal logic. He saw the famous videotapes of the Russell-Clayborne debate, and that night dreamed he was unsuccessfully arguing with Ann Clay-borne, who, just as in the vids, looked like the farmer’s wife in American Gothic only more gaunt and severe. Another film, taken by a flying drone, also affected him deeply; the drone had dropped off the side of one of the big Marineris cliffs, and fallen for nearly a minute before pulling out and swooping low over the jumbled rock and ice on the canyon floor. Repeatedly in the following weeks Art dreamed of making that fall himself, and woke up just before impact. It appeared that parts of his unconscious mind felt that the decision to go had been a mistake. He shrugged at this, ate his meals, and practiced his walking. He was biding his time. Mistake or not, he was committed.
Fort had given him an encryption system, and instructions to report back on a regular basis, but in transit he found there was very little to say. Dutifully he sent off a monthly report, each one the same: We’re on our way. All seems well. There was never any reply.
And then Mars swelled up like an orange thrown at the TV screens, and soon after that they were there, crushed into their g couches by an extremely violent aerobraking, and then crushed again in their ferry’s chairs; but Art came through these flattening decelerations like a veteran, and after a week in orbit, still rotating, they docked with New Clarke. New Clarke had only a very small gravity, which barely held people to the floor, and made Mars appear to be overhead. Art’s space sickness returned. And he had a two-day wait before his reservation for an elevator ride.
The elevator cars proved to be like slender tall hotels, and they ran their tightly packed human cargo down toward the planet over a period of five days, with no gravity to speak of until the last couple of days, when it got stronger and stronger, until the elevator car slowed and descended gently into the receiving facility called the Socket, just west of Sheffield on Pavonis Mons, and the g came to something like the g in the Ganesh’s g ring. But a week of space sickness had left Art completely devastated, and as the elevator car opened, and they were guided out into something very like an airport terminal, he found himself scarcely able to walk, and amazed at how much nausea decreased one’s desire to live. It was four months to the day since he had gotten the fax from William Fort.
The trip from the Socket into Sheffield proper was by subway, but Art would have been too miserable to notice a view even if there had been one. Wasted and unsteady, he tiptoed bouncily down a tall hallway after someone from Praxis, and collapsed thankfully on a bed in a small room. Martian g felt blessedly solid when he was lying down, and after a while he fell asleep.
When he woke he could not remember where he was. He looked around the little room, completely disoriented, wondering where Sharon had gone and why their bedroom had gotten so small. Then it came back. He was on Mars.
He groaned and sat up. He felt hot and yet detached from his body, and everything was pulsing slightly, though the room lights appeared to be functioning normally. There were drapes covering the wall opposite the door, and he stood and walked over, and opened them with a single pull.
“Hey!” he cried, leaping back. He woke up a second time, or so it felt.
It was like the view out an airplane window. Endless open space, a bruise-colored sky, the sun like a blob of lava; and there far below stretched a flat rocky plain — flat and round, as it lay at the bottom of an enormous circular cliff — extremely circular, remarkably circular, in fact, for a natural feature. It was difficult to estimate how distant the far side of the cliff was. Features of the cliff were perfectly clear, but structures on the opposite rim were teensy; what looked like an observatory could have fit on a pin-head.
This, he concluded, was the caldera of Pavonis Mons. They had landed at Sheffield, so really there could be no doubt about it. Therefore it was some sixty kilometers across the circle to that observatory, as Art recalled from his video documentaries, and five kilometers to the floor. And all of it completely empty, rocky, untouched, primordial — the volcanic rock as bare as if cooled the week before — nothing at all of humanity in it — no sign of terra-forming. It must have looked exactly like this to John Boone, a half century before. And so … alien. And frig. Art had looked into the calderas of Etna and Vesuvius, while on vacation from Tehran, and those two craters were big by Terran standards, but you could have lost a thousand of them in this, this thing, this hole…
He closed the drapes and got slowly dressed, his mouth imitating the shape of the unearthly caldera.
A friendly Praxis guide named Adrienne, tall enough to be a Martian native but possessing a strong Australian accent, collected him and took him and half a dozen other new arrivals on a tour of the town. Their rooms turned out to be on the city’s lowest level, though it wouldn’t be lowest for long; Sheffield was in the process of burrowing downward these days, to give as many rooms as possible the view onto the caldera that had so disconcerted Art.
An elevator took them up nearly fifty stories, and let them out in the lobby of a shiny new office building. They walked out its big revolving doors and emerged on a wide grassy boulevard, and walked down it past squat buildings faced with polished stone and big windows, separated by narrow grassy side streets, and a great number of construction sites, as many buildings were still in various stages of completion. It was going to be a handsome town, the buildings mostly three and four stories tall, getting taller as they moved south, away from the caldera rim. The green streets were crowded with people, and the occasional small tram running on narrow tracks set in the grass; there was a general air of bustle and excitement, caused no doubt by the arrival of the new elevator. A boom town.
The first place Adrienne took them was across a boulevard to the caldera rim. She led the seven newcomers out into a thin curving park, to the nearly invisible tenting that encased the town. The transparent fabrics were held in place by equally transparent geodesic struts, anchored in a chest-high perimeter wall. “The tenting has to be stronger than usual up here on Pavonis,” Adrienne told them, “because the atmosphere outside is still extremely thin. It’ll always be thinner than the lowlands, by a factor of ten.”
She led them out into a viewing blister in the tent wall and, looking down between their feet, they could see through the blister’s transparent deck, straight down onto the caldera floor some five kilometers below them. People exclaimed in delicious fright, and Art bounced on the clear floor uneasily. The width of the caldera was coming into perspective for him; the north rim was just about as far away as Mount Tamalpais and the Napa hills when one descended into the San Jose airport. That was no extraordinary distance. But the depth below, the depth; over five kilometers, or about twenty thousand feet. “Quite a hole!” Adrienne said.
Mounted telescopes and display plaques with map drawings enabled them to spot the previous version of Sheffield, now lying on the caldera floor. Art had been wrong about the caldera’s untouched primeval nature; an insignificant pile of cliff-bottom talus, with some shiny dots in it, was in fact the ruins of the original city.
Adrienne described with great gusto the destruction of the town in 2061. The falling elevator cable had, of course, crushed the suburbs east of its socket in the very first moments of the fall. But then the cable had wrapped all the way around the planet, delivering a massive second blow to the south side of town, a blow which had caused an undiscovered fault in the basalt rim to give way. About a third of the town had been on the wrong side of this fault, and had fallen the five kilometers to the caldera floor. The remaining two-thirds of the town had been knocked flat. Luckily the occupants had mostly evacuated in the four hours between
the detachment of Clarke and the second coming of the cable, so loss of life had been minimized. But Sheffield had been utterly destroyed.
For many years after that, Adrienne told them, the site had lain abandoned, a wreck like so many other towns after the unrest of ‘61. Most of those other towns had been left in ruins, but Sheffield’s location remained the ideal place for tethering a space elevator, and when Subarashii began organizing the in-space construction of a new one in the late 2080s, construction on the ground had rapidly followed. A detailed areological investigation had found no other faults in the southern rim, which had justified rebuilding right on the edge, on the same site as before. Demolition vehicles had cleared the wreckage of the old town, shoving most of it over the rim, and leaving only the easternmost section of town, around the old socket, as a kind of monument to the disaster — also as the central element of a little tourist industry, which had clearly been an important part of the town’s income in the fallow years before an elevator had been reinstalled.
Adrienne’s next point on the tour led them out to see this preserved bit of history. They took a tram to a gate in the east wall of the tent, and then walked through a clear tube into a smaller tent, which covered the blasted ruins, the concrete mass of the old cable facility, and the lower end of the fallen cable. They walked a roped path that had been cleared of wreckage, staring curiously at the foundations and twisted pipes. It looked like the results of saturation bombing.
They came to a halt under the butt end of the cable, and Art observed it with professional interest. The big cylinder of black carbon filaments looked nearly undamaged by the fall, although admittedly this was the part that had hit Mars with the least force. The end had jammed down into the Socket’s big concrete bunker, Adrienne said, then been dragged a couple of kilometers as the cable had fallen down the eastern slope of Pavonis. That wasn’t that much of a beating for material designed to withstand the pull of an asteroid swinging beyond the areosynchronous point.
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