Journey Between Worlds (11 page)

“Anyway,” Dad shouted, “this fellow wound up with the old ‘we had better solve all the problems on this world before we take a chance on messing up any others' line.”

“That makes me furious!” Alex yelled back. “Of all the mistaken theories about space that I ran into on Earth, that's the most shortsighted.”

“Why?” I ventured. “It sounds logical enough to me.”

All three of them jumped on me as if I'd just come out in favor of slavery. “Mel, honey, you just haven't gone into it,” Dad began, but Alex said rather sharply, “With your interest in history I should think you could see the fallacy easily enough.”

“In the first place,” Professor Goldberg said, “we can't ever solve all the problems on Earth. We're human. We can make progress—we
have
made progress: Peace is better assured than it was a hundred years ago; the standard of living has risen all over the world; racial equality is a reality now, and freedom for the individual is more widespread than it was in the twentieth century—”

“It was the conquest of space that helped to bring about peace,” Alex interrupted. “Energy went into that which would otherwise have gone into war.”

Like in the poem, I thought.
Nightmare, endless wars . . . then we turned spaceward.

“More than that, though,” the professor went on, “for the human race to stay cooped up on one world would lead only to a terrible sort of stagnation. It would create problems, not solve them.”

“Stagnation or something worse,” said Alex darkly, “with the population situation the way it is. Without a frontier for expansion, neither today's living standard nor freedom could last—and there'd eventually be violence.”

“I really don't think that we need to worry too much about that anymore, though,” said the professor. “The Colonies are well established now.”

“Yes, but there's this new debate over the appropriation coming up,” Alex said. “Someday we'll be self-sufficient, but now—”

“I forget, you Colonials are a bit sensitive on that subject,” the professor replied. “Still, I don't think the ultimate fate of colonization is in much danger. Think how much opposition there was initially, yet that didn't stop people. It won't stop the next step, either—the stars.”

“Human beings won't ever be stopped from moving on,” Alex said firmly. “The need for challenge, for seeing what's over the hill—it's built in. It's a fact of nature.”

Dad turned to me. “Your mother once said something like that, Mel. She told me, ‘My ancestors crossed the plains in a covered wagon. The woman in the family, Melinda, didn't want to go, but her husband, Jess, said that he aimed to see the Oregon Country and nobody was going to stop him. Jess believed that since God put Oregon there, it must be in the nature of people to want to see it.”

I was silent, sipping my coffee. Was that true, that my ancestor Melinda Stillwell had to be talked into going west? How little I really knew about her!

The group of homesteaders clustered around the guitar player was still holding forth with one song after another, rousing songs from old-time musicals like
Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady,
and
Paint Your Wagon.
The current melody was one I'd always loved:

Alex said, “In the nineteenth century they called it ‘Manifest Destiny.' I know that term was often used politically, in a nationalistic sense. But there was more to it than that.”

“Much more,” the professor agreed. “It fired people's imaginations, and the reason it did was that underneath, there was an idea there that had nothing to do with nationalism—an idea that was valid. The idea that the human race
will
keep on moving, that we've got to expand or perish.”

I could scarcely hear him, what with the volume of the chorus:

 

 

The conversation drifted on to other things, then; but it set me to thinking. The colonists' viewpoint might not be as silly as I had believed.

But if my mind was opening a little, Janet's wasn't, and she was getting a reputation around the ship that I didn't thoroughly see the reason for. Nobody could expect every person to be overjoyed at the prospect of spending some time on Mars. Why wasn't she just as much entitled to her opinion as anyone else?

I said this to Alex once, and his reaction surprised me. “Melinda,” he said seriously, “would you be offended by a piece of advice from old Uncle Alex here?”

“Of course not.”

“Don't stay too close to Janet, then. You can't help seeing her often while you're sharing a room with her, but she's not exactly the person I'd pick for a role model.”

“I don't think you're being fair to Janet,” I protested. “Just because she doesn't see eye to eye with you about Mars—”

“It's not that. It's the superior way she acts, as if she knows everything there is to know, and what's more, as if everything Martian must be slightly inferior to its Terrestrial counterpart. She won't win many friends by it in the Colonies, and neither will you.”

“I don't think I know everything!” I bristled. “And I'm perfectly aware that Colonials aren't inferior to anyone.”

“But
different
?”

“Yes, of course, different; they'd have to be, to—”

“You see what I mean.”

“No, I don't see,” I said. “Look, the life people lead on Mars may seem normal enough to you because you were there before you saw Earth, but it doesn't to me, and I just can't look at it any other way.”

“I know you can't, now. I hope someday you'll change your mind. But whether you do or not, why not give us Martians the benefit of the doubt? Give us credit for being human, anyway!”

Indignantly I demanded, “Now who's acting superior?” Alex did sound like an uncle sometimes! He was only a few years older than I was, but he'd grown up too fast; people did, I supposed, in the Colonies.

“Sorry,” he said. “It's just a suggestion. Don't start off on the wrong foot, Melinda. You're too nice a girl.”

I thought about that conversation a good deal after it was over with. In spite of my having assured Alex that I wouldn't be offended by his advice, it bothered me. I had thought it was I who was keeping the distance, because of Ross, because of—well, a lot of things. It was somehow upsetting to feel that Alex might not really like me, that in some ways I might not measure up to his standards.

 

 

We were almost two months out when a thing happened that crystallized the fear I'd so far been denying. It was a perfectly ordinary afternoon; we were in the middle of a bridge game. All of a sudden a rhythmic, raucous squawk began to come out of the intercom speakers. Back at the beginning of the trip we had been told what to do if an alarm sounded—all passengers were to gather in the dining room, where Alex and I already were. But I hadn't imagined it really happening. As the incessant bleating continued, icy tentacles slid up my spine and clutched at the base of my mind.

The couple we were playing with, a young doctor from India and his bride, moved their chairs together; he put his arm around her. She looked at him with big, luminous eyes and asked what I had not dared to put into words: “Have we been hit by a meteor?”

Her husband didn't know what to say. But Alex told us calmly, “It's probably more or less of a drill. Sometimes there's a hit, too small to be dangerous, but the automatic alarm system picks it up and they go through with the alert on general principles.” He smiled at me. “Can't disillusion the public about space travel being exciting, you know.”

That was exactly what had happened; before long the captain came in and assured us that there was nothing to worry over. The hole wasn't big enough for there to be any hurry about patching it, and no pressure had been lost. He apologized for putting us through the drill, but explained that it was necessary to keep in practice in case there ever was a real emergency.

That was that; the passengers who'd been busy elsewhere drifted out, and we went on to finish the game. But later, when I went to my cabin to dress for dinner, I found Janet lying on her bunk, doing nothing, with an abnormally blank and frozen look.

“Why, what's the matter?” I asked. “Aren't you feeling well, Janet? Should I call the nurse?”

She turned on me in fury. “I hate it!” she choked. “It's not right that a person should have to risk her life to establish her professional standing! I know just as much about extraterrestrial microbes from studying texts as I'll ever learn on Mars—there's no life to speak of on Mars anyway. Why should the University of Mars be the only place to work with specimens from the outer planets, when everybody knows that Earth's quarantine laws are archaic? I wish I hadn't come; I wish I'd told them I wouldn't do it and made them waive that stupid requirement. I wish we'd never even discovered Mars!” Unaccountably, she began to sob.

I stared at her. This wasn't like Janet, not at all. She was so self-assured, usually. Then I realized what the trouble was. Janet was scared! Underneath that icy exterior, she was absolutely terrified.

I felt sick. So I wasn't the only one. Janet, with all her experience, her scientific training, was as awed by space as I was. More so, even; her fright wasn't the same as the vague fears that I'd so far managed to talk myself out of. Janet knew—or thought she knew—something specific.

I sat down on the edge of the bunk and gripped her shoulders. “Janet, what is it? What's happened?”

Her face was red and distorted from crying, and she didn't stop shaking. “Don't you know? Don't you know what that meteor alarm business was all about?”

“Alex said it was just standard procedure, a drill.”

“Well, of course
he
would. When will you learn that those idiots won't ever admit how foolish and dangerous the whole thing is? Grow up, Melinda!”

I thought it over. He had admitted one thing, perhaps, the very first day. Janet had said, “Are you trying to tell us that it's guaranteed to be all fun and games aboard this ship?” And Alex had answered, “I'm not saying that . . .
we all know better.
” I hadn't thought anything of it. With all my doubts, I hadn't imagined that we were facing a calculated danger.

“It's just one gigantic gamble,” Janet was saying. “The fact that there hasn't been a major disaster on a spaceliner yet makes it all the worse; the chances are increasing. It's not reasonable to think that ship after ship can go all these millions of miles without being struck by anything big, or that the domes on Mars can stand indefinitely, either. Think how many craters there are on Mars! Government officials won't admit how worried they are, and naturally TPC won't. The colonists have their heads in the sand. But sooner or later something's going to happen. It's like earthquakes—you can live right on top of a fault for years, but eventually—”

“But Janet,” I protested, more concerned with convincing myself than with comforting her. “Janet, surely the chances of our being hit by anything big enough to do any real harm are pretty slight. There's never been a ship damaged before.”

“That's exactly why they think the time's getting closer.” (She didn't specify who
they
were.)

“Maybe so, but why should we think—”

“Because we've run into a swarm of them, that's why! What other reason could they have for a drill so near the end of the trip? Sure, the last meteor was small, but—” She looked at me, her eyes dark. “It wouldn't even have to hit the passenger decks. The oxygen tanks would be even worse. Or the fuel supply, or the engines—we'd go right on past Mars, out into space
forever.
Do you know what would happen if a ship ran low on air, Melinda?”

“I—I never thought about it.”

“They'd draw lots. It's all set forth in the regulations, the ones they don't publicize.”

“I don't understand.”

“Because the air would last twice as long for half as many people, of course. The captain's sworn to enforce it.”

It never occurred to me to ask her how she knew; I now suspect that this last bit of “information” came from some overdramatized TV series. But at the time, all I could think of was,
Three weeks. If we can just get through the next three weeks—
And then I remembered that the domes on Mars were vulnerable, too.

There is something particularly terrifying about the concept of lack of air. It's so alien to your experience on Earth that you just can't take it seriously at first. But when the idea gets through, it really throws you. Have you ever gone underwater without having a chance to fill your lungs first? Or been so exhausted from running that you couldn't get your breath? In those situations there
is
air; you aren't frightened, because you know those agonizing sensations will be gone in a few moments. But to be without air, to feel it rushing away through some deadly gap in a fragile shell, dispersing into nothingness, and to know that there's no way it can be replaced. . . . Once I began to picture it, I was horror-stricken.