Journey Between Worlds

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.

“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.”

“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.

“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 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.

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.”

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.

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.

Slowly, I took in the fact that I might be stuck on Mars for a long time. Most of the other ships were freighters that used slow, economical orbits or that carried only those passengers authorized by government priority. And though departing liners were normally less crowded than arriving ones, Mr. Preston warned me that there was talk of temporarily converting most of the cabin space on incoming ships to cargo space, to make up for the urgently needed supplies Susie would have carried. If that happened, the ship probably wouldn’t be converted back for the return trips. For one thing, there wouldn’t be the crew or facilities aboard. An extra passenger could be taken on in an emergency, of course, but I wasn’t an emergency case; my personal feelings didn’t constitute any sort of crisis, except to me.

Dad . . . and now Maple Beach, and Ross, beyond my reach. When the only thing in the world I wanted was to be back there. Gran. If only I could talk to Gran! Or walk on the beach, as I always did when there was an unhappy fact to be faced. At the beach house, the winter surf would be crashing on the sand below and the gulls screeching overhead, and the blue-papered west bedroom would be dark and empty, the lovely old quilt neatly folded across the foot of the mahogany bed. . . .

That afternoon, Alex and I walked along the West Mall away from the Etoile, between the too-neat beds of marigolds and Shasta daisies and other terrestrial flowers, looking up through the dome at the shut-out sky and talking. “Oh, Alex,” I said, “why? Why did it have to happen?”

“Maybe Paul could make a try at it, I don’t know.” He stopped, and turned to face me. “I do know this much, Melinda. It wasn’t because you came to Mars. You mustn’t ever think that it was.”

“That’s like saying that if firearms hadn’t been invented no one would ever have been shot. True, maybe, but meaningless, because who’s to say what else would have happened?”

“It’s not easy to be objective about a thing like this,” he went on, “but all the same you’ve got to try. Ever since the conquest of space began there have been occasional disasters; yet we can’t give up space travel because of that, any more than people abolished automobiles because of the traffic deaths, or stopped using coal because men were trapped in the mines sometimes.”

“Some people will say that we should, especially with all this debate over the Colonial appropriation going on right now. There are going to be some emotional appeals in the Terrestrial press. They won’t be pleasant reading, Mel. You’ll have to remember that if that kind of thinking’s followed through to its logical conclusion, we might as well all live out our lives in our own homes without ever venturing out of the front door. And even there we wouldn’t be safe; I seem to remember reading that one of the first men to orbit Earth was injured by a fall in his own bathtub. Lord, I know it’s hard to accept! But if you’re completely honest with yourself and think of your dad, you know that’s what he’d tell you.”

“Don’t be sorry you came, Mel,” Alex pleaded. “Your dad wouldn’t want you to be. I know he wouldn’t. He told me once how happy he was to have had the chance to come, because seeing Mars had been a dream of his for such a long time. Don’t be sorry he got the thing he wanted.”

“My mother wanted to come to Mars, too,” I said slowly. “She couldn’t, because of her heart, but maybe if she’d come sooner—before it was so bad—she wouldn’t have died from it at all. It’s true that there’s less heart disease here because of the low gravity, isn’t it?”

“In any case,” I told Alex, “I’m not sorry I came with Dad. If I hadn’t, we would never have been together at all.” I began to cry again. “Alex, I was never close to him! Not close the way your family is. I wanted to be, but I just couldn’t. He was more like a friend than a father.”

“Maybe that was better than the other way around. I’ve seen a lot of kids who weren’t friends with their parents, who won’t have the good memories of their dads that you have.” He pressed my hand. “I know that’s not going to help. I—I don’t know what to say, Mel.”

Reluctantly I drew my hand away and started walking again, swiftly this time. “Don’t try,” I said as he caught up with me. “Don’t try; there isn’t anything anyone can say.”

The public memorial service for the people who had been killed was held in the City Auditorium, and was conducted by the leaders of New Terra’s six major religions. The music was beautiful, the eulogies inspiring, and I sat through it dry-eyed. I didn’t feel any emotion at all. It was unlike most Colonial funerals in that there was no need for a closed-circuit TV hookup to the cemetery, which is located Outside within a nearby circle of low hills. There’s been a monument erected there since, though, with all the names.

I was much more affected by the private service that Paul held. What surprised me was the number of people there: not just the Preston family, but Dad’s business associates and a lot of the church members. None of them could have felt any obligation, for they’d all been at the official memorial service. But they came. The Ethiopian couple, Mr. and Ms. Ortega—even Madame Lin, who I’d been sure was so cool to me. Many of them came up to me afterward and asked if there was anything they could do.

“Why are they acting like this?” I whispered to Kathy. “It’s just the same as it would be at Maple Beach. Yet I’m not one of them. They all know what I think about Mars.”

“For heaven’s sake, Mel,” Kathy replied, “when will you understand that Earth or Mars has nothing to do with it? They liked and respected your father, and they sympathize with you. Isn’t that enough?”

In spite of everyone’s sympathy, however, I felt very much alone. Gran wrote to me, of course, and that was some help; but there isn’t any real answer to sorrow, other than the one that time brings.

My most immediate problem was finding a place to live. There was no chance of getting back into the Hilton, and the Champs-Elysées was full, too. Nor could I go on staying with the Prestons; even if they had been able to get hold of another bed, there would have been no place to put it in Alicia’s tiny room. I finally decided that the best thing for the time being was to go to Janet’s, since her room happened to have a convertible sofa. Janet was scheduled to leave on the Oregon Trail, which was due in another ten weeks, and I’d then have to make other arrangements; but I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

“It’s perfectly all right,” she assured me. “We Terrestrials have got to stick together. You don’t know how glad I’ll be to have your company, Mel. I’ve been awfully lonely.”

The first night at Janet’s, while she was off at an evening lab session, I wrote a long letter to Ross. I was feeling sorry for myself, I guess; anyway, I poured out all my longing to be back on Earth as well as all my grief. And I said something else, I’m not quite sure why. “It’s not fair,” I wrote, “to expect you to go on indefinitely without dating. Ross, darling, I want you to know that I won’t mind if you go out with other girls before I get back. I’m afraid we are going to have to put off our wedding for a terribly long time.”

Mail travels fast between planets, much faster than ships. When the relative positions of Earth and Mars are favorable it takes only a day or two, even allowing for the long queues, and transit to the relay stations when the planets aren’t in line doesn’t add much time. Before the week was out I got back a message that I didn’t know quite what to make of.

I had gone a little overboard, maybe, in the things I had said to Ross about the fix I was in. But, naturally, I hadn’t expected him to do anything about it. After I’d sent the letter off, it had occurred to me that there might possibly be an element of “I told you so” in his reply. However, I wasn’t at all prepared for what happened.

“Dear Mel,” Ross had written. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to do any dating without you. You’re my girl; you always will be. Darling, I am terribly sorry about your dad, but thankful that you were not on that shuttle, too. How did it happen that you weren’t? Luck must be watching out for you, and I’m going to do all I can to help it along. I’ll see to it that you get back to Earth where you belong without any more delay, so don’t worry on that score, either. Got to rush now—I’ll let you know just as soon as I can.”

This was certainly a hopeful-sounding note, and I couldn’t see why I felt disturbed over it. Ross was assuring me that he wouldn’t think of dating anyone else; surely, I thought, the thing I felt when I first read that couldn’t have been disappointment! Had I, underneath, wanted an excuse to see Alex on less of a brother-sister basis?

But my uneasy feeling seemed stronger than that. What had Ross meant, that he’d see that I got back to Earth without any delay? How wonderful if he could! I told myself that perhaps I was just afraid to get my hopes up, for I really didn’t see how Ross could help at all. Why, he himself had once mentioned how hard it was to get reservations on a spaceliner. Suddenly I remembered the exact words he’d used. It takes pull to get a place on one of those ships on short notice. My father had to fix it up for somebody once. . . .

“I’m afraid there’s not a chance in the world, Mel. I thought we explained that to you.” He hesitated. “You realize, don’t you, that the fact that Dad and I work for TPC doesn’t mean we have any power to—”

“I suppose if someone had a ticket he wasn’t going to use, he could sell it for more than the regular fare. But I should think that that would be a pretty rare case.”

“Mel, wherever there’s a government priority list for anything, there’s a way to get on that list. Usually there’s a way to get placed at the top of it. It’s in the same class as fixing tickets, buying votes, and cheating on the income tax; some people don’t see anything wrong in it.”

“Oh,” I said in a low voice. “I’ve been just—naive, I guess.” Very naive, maybe. I had often heard that Ross’s father had “connections” in various branches of the government; I’d assumed this meant merely that he was a successful attorney, and had met a lot of people. I had never stopped to think what might be implicit in the words “pull” and “fix it up.”