by John Varley
Dad knows a bit about cheap motels. He is the fourth generation in the hospitality industry in our family. My great-great-grandparents opened a little two-story drive-up just down the road from Cape Canaveral and called it the Seabreeze. About the time John Glenn took his first trip into space, they renamed it the Blast-Off Motel. My grandmother inherited it, and my dad spent all his early life there. In that time it went downhill quite a bit. It was never very fancy, but by the time Dad met Uncle Travis and Uncle Jubal, Grandma was about to go bankrupt. And then the whole Red Thunder thing happened, and it changed his life.
Mine, too. Without that trip, I’d surely be growing up as an Earthie.
Makes me shiver just to think about it.
Because when all is said and done, the only place that sucks more than Mars does, is the Earth.
2
REASON #2 THAT Mars sucks: exercise.
Mom says I shouldn’t complain. If I was on Earth, she says, I’d be doing the same thing, only it would be spread out over the whole day, including the nighttime, when I was asleep. Did I say Mom can find the bright side of anything? Well, she can. I mean, she does have a point, but adding in the extra exercise I’d get just by inhaling and exhaling at night as a cherry on the top of the hot fudge sundae of life is exactly what I’d expect of Mom.
Like I said before, since the chances of you being an Earthie are overwhelmingly better than the chance of you being a sensible person, I’ll explain what I’m talking about.
The fact is, more than once I’ve run into Earthies who got here and didn’t know Mars has less gravity than the Earth does. The surface gravity of Mars is a little more than one-third of a gee. Thirty-eight percent, to be precise. A gee is the acceleration of gravity on Earth. I mass about 180 pounds. That means I weigh about 68 pounds on Mars.
Mom’s point being, if I was on Earth I’d be carrying that full 180 around all day long. Everything would be almost three times as hard to do as it is here. Walking upstairs to the top of the Red Thunder Hotel, twenty stories, would leave most people breathing hard. I thought for a long time that’s one of the reasons why so many of the Earthies that come here are real, real fat. It must be tough for them at home, but here they can dance and jump and run . . . though it’s not a pretty sight. Mars must be a delightful place to visit for fat people. I pictured travel agencies advertising for real porkers. But Mom said no, it’s just that more Earthies are fat than Martians. (Well, she didn’t say Earthies, she never does. Some people think it’s an insulting term. She says “People from Earth,” or “Earthlings.” The funny thing, an Earthie once told me they don’t like being called Earthlings. She said it was creepy. Go figure.)
So by now you’re wondering what’s the big problem. I’ll admit, it’s not immediately obvious. I see vids of people walking around on Earth, and they just look . . . weary. Not their faces; they may be smiling and laughing, having fun. It’s their body language. They move like people who are exhausted, plodding along, tromp tromp thud thud. Gravity pulls their faces down. By the time they’re thirty, they’re starting to look old. Gravity kills, no question about it, and you don’t have to fall off a building to know that. Just look at a fifty-year-old Earthie.
The fact is, if you never went back to Earth—went “back home” as most of the grown-ups put it—it wouldn’t be a problem. Get it now? Some people here have emigrated for their health, they’d be dead already if they’d stayed in a one-gee field. They’re never going “home,” Mars is home, whether they like it or not. If they like it, they can be perfectly happy here with just the reasonable exercise that their doctors recommend, though a lot of them admit that they’re homesick.
For the rest of us, it’s a choice we have to make. Some people say it’s easy, no big deal, but they’re wrong. I’ve been here since I was five. Mars is home to me. But I have some memories of Earth, I’ve been back four times, and for many decades to come, Earth is going to be the place. You know what I mean?
The place. The place where it’s happenin’, dude, as Dad would say.
The place where most of the interesting people are. The place where the new stuff comes from. Sure, we’ve got our music here, some fairly good groups. The Red Brigade had a few tunes that scored some heavy downloads—you say “Red Brigade” and most English-speaking kids on Earth would know who you’re talking about—but most of them aren’t much more than pressurized garage bands.
All the other cool stuff comes from the Blue Planet, too. For a while there kids on Earth were wearing stereos that had been designed on Mars, but other than that, the things people are wearing come from where they’ve always come from: Los Angeles, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay. The cool places.
If you’re interested in history, like I am, most of it’s on Earth. We’ve got exactly one real historic spot on Mars: the Red Thunder landing site, where they built a replica of the ship. Everybody goes there to get their picture taken. All the earlier robot landers were gathered up and put in the museum to prevent vandalism.
So what are you going to do? It’s a documented fact: Every year you stay on Mars makes it harder and harder to ever return to Earth. Well, harder to return and lead anything like a normal life.
So that awful day I was doing what I have done two hours per day for most of my life. Working out. There’s two places to do that. There’s a gym at school, and one beneath the hotel where me and my sister, Elizabeth, and other hotel workers and their children do our sweating, in the basement, beneath the big gym with a view where the Earthie guests are encouraged to exercise and usually don’t. I seldom go there. It’s no fun watching a little Earthie girl press twenty pounds more than you can. I’d finished my hundred with my right arm and was up to fifty or so with my left.
I’m not one to wear my stereo when I work out. No special reason, I just don’t like to, and neither does Elizabeth. So I was on the chin bar with my eyes bare naked, as we say, when I saw something I’d only seen a couple of times before. Everybody in the gym stopped what they were doing and stared off into cyberspace.
“Uh-oh,” I said. Beside me, Elizabeth paused with her chin just over the bar and glanced at me.
“What?”
I gestured with my head, and we both dropped to the mat and scrambled for our gym bags. I got out my brand-new MBC V-Crafter 2030 stereo with the cool gold-tinted bug-eye lenses and the black-and-gold Burroughs school colors tiger-stripe pattern on the wings. While I was doing that I heard a few people gasping. Somebody assassinated? A spaceship crash? A blowout? I put them on and ticked the flashing red NEWS icon. A window opened in the middle distance, the stereo effect making it seem to hang motionless over the running track. In the center of the window was a view of Planet Earth, hanging there like a blue agate with swirls of white.
Only there was something wrong with it. Somebody had made a fine white scratch mark on it, straight as a jet contrail, right over the Atlantic Ocean.
Only . . . the scratch extended out to the northeast, right to the edge of the window. A rocket launch?
Then I realized that if I could see the scratch from that distance—and the window superscript said this picture was from a camera on the moon—it had to be a big scratch.
You can’t see the pyramids from the moon. You can’t see the Great Wall of China, no matter what they might tell you. You can see Manhattan Island and Hawaii with a pair of good binoculars and a steady hand; I know, I’ve done it.
You could have seen this scratch with your bare eyes.
Big.
I wasn’t getting any sound. I looked around and saw several people cupping their ears, like you do when you’re listening intently to your stereo. Were they not hearing anything, like I was, or just concentrating, blocking out external sounds? I smacked the side of the left wing of the set and heard static, and that irritated the sore spot on my temple, under the wing, where the little vibrator with the bio-battery (guaranteed for twenty years!) had been implanted at the store when I bought the set. Simple a
s an ear-piercing, they told me. For some reason I’d had a bad reaction on that side—“I swear, Ray, this is the first time this has ever happened!”—and I’d had to wear a little donut-shaped pad over there until a few days before. One more smack . . .
Hah! Now it was working. No moving parts, and about the highest tech of all high tech until they figure out how to implant the whole stereo-computer display right into your head and eyeballs, and yet a good whack fixes it sure as it fixes a balky washing machine. One of life’s mysteries.
“We have calls in to the Lunar Observatory, but the system seems to be overloaded at this time,” the female announcer’s voice was saying. “The image you are seeing is live, from the Armstrong Observatory in the Sea of Tranquility.” As she spoke that relativistic lie, the camera began a zoom in toward the white line, giving me a view that was somewhere between three and twenty minutes old.
We call it live. But I couldn’t interact with anyone on Earth concerning whatever it was I was seeing until—I ticked up another small window, this one showing the current Earth-Mars lagtime—almost thirty minutes.
The streak was still there, like a scratch on the imaginary window that floated in my field of vision just above the warning track. Then it was gone.
“This is tape of the event,” the announcer was saying. I couldn’t tell any difference from what we’d been seeing before. The Earth hadn’t rotated, the cloud patterns were identical. Of course, it takes at least an hour to see much change in either of those things. Then, suddenly, there it was again. One moment a clear shot of the Atlantic Ocean, northern spring, with South America just about centered in the southern hemisphere, North America off to the northwest quadrant, the lights of Europe and western Africa speckling the eastern limb of the globe. The day/night terminator slanted down from Hudson Bay to Maine to the bulge of Brazil; it would be getting dark in the West Indies and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States soon. The next moment, the streak appeared fully formed. I centered a cursor over the spot where the streak began, and my stereo informed me it was about twenty-five degrees north latitude, sixty degrees west longitude, just above that little curve of flyspecks called the Leeward and Windward Islands.
It just didn’t add up. What could make a thing like that?
Then they shifted back to the live picture, and the camera pulled back. And pulled back some more, and more, until we were getting the widest angle shot we could get from the moon with that lens with the Earth still centered, and I heard people gasp. I might even have been one of them. The streak just kept going, right to the edge of the picture. Maybe five or six Earth diameters, bright and white and perfectly straight. Lenses changed again, and now the Earth was a blue marble . . . and still the streak extended to the edge of the picture. Each Earth diameter was about eight thousand miles. I ticked up a ruler and positioned it over the streak. The part I could see was over almost a quarter of a million miles long. If the Earth was a clock, the streak was a hand pointing between one and two.
“Is it fading a little?” somebody asked.
“No, it’s getting bigger,” said somebody else.
“Wider,” Elizabeth corrected. “It’s getting wider, and it’s a little fainter.”
I thought she was right. There was no wind where this streak was, but if it was a gas cloud of some kind, you’d expect it to expand in space.
“Down there at the bottom, where it hits the Earth,” came another voice. “Isn’t it getting wider? Sort of a cigar shape?” I thought it was more of an oval, an ellipse, but it was plain enough. I felt my skin prickle in goose bumps.
“Something hit the Earth,” I said.
“Yeah, but . . .”
“No, that doesn’t make sense.”
“Sure it does,” I said. “See, it came in from two o’clock, and it hit in the water.”
“No, why would it leave a trail like that? An asteroid wouldn’t leave a trail—”
“Would a ship leave a trail like that?”
“No ship I ever saw. It’s big, and it’s still expanding.”
“Plus, look how fast it must have been moving before—”
Somebody did that fingers-in-the-lips whistle that I’ve never been able to master, and we all looked for the source. To no one’s surprise, it was Matt Kaminsky, the senior captain of the swimming team.
“Let’s pool, people,” he said.
No, he wasn’t talking about taking a dip in the lap pool behind me. He meant he thought we ought to pool all our cyber resources, link up, so we’d all be on the same page, more or less. I had five windows running at that time, all different news sources. No telling what everybody else was watching. There being no objection, the motion carried. We all switched our stereos into network setting, and Matt pointed to the east wall of the gym. Windows began appearing in a mosaic as we all turned to face it, hanging a few inches out in front of the equipment there. They were stabilized windows, meaning that if I turned my head, they stayed there in front of the wall, didn’t move with my field of vision. Now we knew we were all seeing the same stuff at the same time. There were all the usual suspects: CNN-Mars, EuroTV, TeleLuna, CBS. Some showed talking heads and print crawl lines, others were picking up different angle shots of the streak from various manned and unmanned satellites and orbital resorts. A couple were showing tourist-eye views from people who just happened to be looking at that part of the Earth when the streak appeared. There was no point in that, really; the resolution wasn’t as good, and being closer to the Earth didn’t reveal any new detail.
Matt pulled up a few more windows, including some I had never seen. There was a public feed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a false-color image from the United States National Weather Service. That one looked interesting, but I didn’t know how to interpret it. There was something happening at what I was thinking of as the impact point, something with a lot of reds and yellows, and I thought I could almost see it expanding as I watched. I checked the count clock that had started when the urgent bulletin came in. We’d been watching for eight minutes, and the event had happened no more than five minutes before that. The visible-light image was just white in the impact area, a lozenge of what looked like a puffy white cloud that was growing. Unseen producers were running recordings backward and forward at high speed, and they all showed the same thing. The streak would appear instantaneously, fully formed, and then the white area would expand until it froze in real time. Big as that area was, we couldn’t see it growing in the live feeds.
All the windows were showing the same view, but from widely different angles. From a satellite over the North Pole it was possible to see that the streak seemed to graze the Earth’s atmosphere, maybe dip into the ocean.
Wait a minute, I thought.
“Wait a minute,” I said, before the thought was fully formed in my mind. Several heads turned in my direction.
“Maybe I had it backwards,” I said, and wondered why I’d said it. Then I had it.
“I think that streak is moving away from the Earth. I think it hit on a tangent, right there above the ocean, and . . . sort of . . . skipped.”
“Like chucking stones over water?” Matt asked. I could hear he wasn’t buying it. “You know how fast it had to be traveling to—”
“Well, it had to be going fast,” I said. “To just appear like that.”
“I make it the speed of light,” somebody said. “Or close enough as not to make much difference.”
“How do you figure?”
“The distance covered, that we can see from some of these views, is about a quarter of a million miles, and I can’t see which direction it came from. That means some small fraction of a second. It takes light—”
“Look, look!” somebody else shouted. “The JPL screen!”
That window was showing a slowed-down rerun from some distant satellite with a high-shutter-speed camera. Frame by frame, we could see the streak form. It definitely began on the ocean and shot off to the northeast very quickly, even
slowed down as it was. Down at the bottom of the window was a clock counting off hundred-thousandths of a second, and a computer-generated computation of speed: .999c. C, in case they didn’t teach any physics in your school, is the speed of light in a vacuum: 186,000 miles per second.
Nobody had anything to say when that figure came up.
I began to realize this was going to be one of those Where were you? moments. Where were you when you heard about New Delhi and Islamabad? For my parents, it was Where were you on September 11, 2001? For Grandma it was John Kennedy’s assassination, and before that it was Pearl Harbor. This was going to be that bad. I didn’t quite know how or why yet, but I felt it.
A few seconds later most of the screen cleared for a moment, and then somebody appeared, same shot, in all of them. It was a black woman—short, judging from the shoulders on either side of her—and she looked out of breath, like she’d run all the way to the cameras. The crawl at the bottom of the windows identified her as the Honorable Shirley Tsange, acting director of UNGWS. I ticked the acronym and was told it stood for United Nations Global Warning System. There was a lot of shouting from reporters off-screen, flashes going off, the usual turmoil of the press pack.
She started speaking without preamble, raising her voice almost to a shout until she got some quiet. She was reading from a prepared statement.
“At 1836 Greenwich Mean Time, a high-speed object of unknown origin impacted the North Atlantic Ocean at approximately sixty-seven degrees west longitude and twenty-four degrees north latitude. The global early-warning system had no indication at all of this object prior to impact, but the impact itself triggered numerous automatic systems that have been monitoring and extrapolating possible effects of the impact since that time. Ten minutes ago the data became alarming enough that I, acting for the director of the UNGWS, issued a tsunami alarm, which went out immediately. The following countries are expected to be immediately affected, in order of their proximity to the impact:
