Journey Between Worlds (22 page)

“I'm not a relative.”

“No, but—” He stopped short, embarrassed. Suddenly I knew what he had started to say:
But Alex is—and this involves Alex!

Kathy said, “Mel, have you ever given any serious thought to staying in the Colonies?”

“Permanently, you mean? I couldn't!”

“Why not?”

“Why—why I couldn't, that's all. I'm going to live at Maple Beach.”

“In other words, you haven't opened your mind to the possibility.”

“I've honestly tried to figure out how people can want to stay here.”

“Always with that one premise, though—that as far as you're concerned, you've got to go back to Earth in order to be happy.”

“But I do have to. I know it's hard for people here to understand, but it's just the way I am; I belong on Earth. I can't even imagine feeling any other way.”

Kathy said thoughtfully, “Is the imagining really so impossible, Mel? How would you feel right now, for instance, if you had decided to stay here? Have you ever really pictured yourself as a Colonial and looked at things under that premise instead of the other one?”

“I guess I haven't. But I'm
not—
”

“Forget that. Pretend that you are—temporarily, to yourself, I mean.”

“Is that what you mean by opening my mind to the possibility?”

“In a way. It might be an interesting thing to try.”

“I know how to make it more interesting,” Paul said suddenly.

“What's that?” I asked, intrigued.

“You aren't going to like this.”

“I'd like to hear it, though.”

“All right.” Giving me a searching look, he began, “Suppose you were a Martian, a permanent resident of New Terra, without any of the particular problems you do have but with the same job and the same friends as you have now. What would you be doing this Saturday?”

“Saturday? Why, I suppose I'd—” Too late, I saw the trap. “Paul Conway, you're trying to get me to go on that ridiculous Phobos expedition.”

He nodded calmly. “Guilty as charged.”

“You and Alex are two of a kind! Why are you always trying to get me into things like that?”

“Maybe to solve the problem you say has no solution.”

“You mean that if I go maybe I'll discover that I'm crazy about floating around in a pressure suit and forget all about Earth. It's not so simple.”

“No, of course it's not.” He hesitated. “This is going to be hard to explain. We could talk about it all night and still not cover it. But I'll try. Look, we're not a—a slice of Earth under glass here. Yet as long as you look at the Colonies that way, that's what you're going to see. A terrarium, a cage. You could live under these domes for fifty years and get used to all the ‘incredible inconveniences, ' as Janet put it, and you might convince yourself that it was okay; but it wouldn't be. You wouldn't be happy because it would still be a prison with bars.”

“I know! That's exactly what I'm afraid of.”

“No, it isn't,” Kathy said gently. “You're afraid of what's outside the bars. The unknown. The bars are all in your own mind.”

That was true, I thought suddenly. There were no bars for Paul and Kathy. There were none for Alex. There had been none for Dad.

Paul went on, “A Martian doesn't have quite the same outlook as a Terrestrial; he doesn't see Earth as a standard to measure by, he just takes Mars as it is.”
And there's one particular Martian he's talking about,
I thought. “In order to understand, you've got to put yourself in a situation that's peculiarly Martian, only doing that isn't enough in itself. If you go into it with a ‘grin and bear it' attitude, you won't learn anything except that you
can
grin and bear it, which you already know.”

“That's like Janet's ‘survive, maybe; but adapt, never!' theory,” I reflected. “So far I've just pictured—surviving?”

“You're on the right track. If you made the sort of experiment Kathy was talking about, carried it through pretending that you were a Colonial—”

“Is that the reason Alex wants me to go to Phobos?” I asked directly. “The one he won't tell me?”

“Not quite. He's got something a little more specific in mind, nothing you need to worry about right now.” Paul stood up. “End of sermon. I apologize; normally I try to avoid inflicting that sort of thing on my friends.”

“But you've helped, Paul,” I said warmly. “Thanks. I'll . . . think about it.”

“I wish you would. Good night, Mel.” He started toward the boys' bedroom, saying to Kathy, “I'll check on the kids before I turn in. Coming?”

As Kathy rose to join him, I stopped her. “Kathy? What if I do this and nothing changes? I mean, I really don't see how—”

“Why, then you'll know, won't you?” With some hesitation, she went on, “But if you do find out that it's an adjustment you can't make, then—then I think I would stop dating Alex, if I were you. You're making it very rough for him, you know.”

“Am I?”

“You are. Darn it, I shouldn't say anything to you, but Alex is the closest thing Paul and I have to a brother, and we—well, frankly, Mel, we'd hate to see this dragged out any longer.”

I stared at the floor. Somehow it hadn't occurred to me that the hopelessness of it all might be hurting Alex, too.

Paul paused in the doorway. Abruptly he said, “Mel, I'm going to break my own rule. There's something else I think you ought to know.”

Kathy raised her eyebrows, but he shook his head at her and went on. “You mustn't ever let him know you've heard this, but Alex has been investigating job opportunities on Earth. Not seriously; he's just toying with the idea, so far—”

“Earth?” I said incredulously. “But that's crazy! Alex didn't like living on Earth, I know he didn't; everything he cares about and believes in is here. And even the gravity was hard on him. He'd be the very last person to go back.” Alex, working on Earth? I thought. Alex commuting to one of those dismal metropolitan centers? Alex, a junior cog in one of those huge, impersonal companies? It wouldn't be only the triple weight that would drag him down. He'd be short of money for a long time after paying off his passage; it would be high even with his TPC discount, since he couldn't go as a student again. And if he ever did get enough together to start his own business, it would be just like thousands upon thousands of other businesses. No new cities to build, no unexplored lands—and as for any hope of getting into politics . . .

“You must be mistaken, Paul,” I said. “Alex would be miserable on Earth. There'd be no challenge for him at all. Why, it would be worse than staying on Mars would be for me, even.”

“I think so, too,” he agreed.

“For goodness' sake, then, can't you stop him? Whatever would make him consider such a thing in the first place?”

“Haven't you guessed, Mel?” murmured Kathy.

I got the point. It was a possibility I hadn't even considered, and I knew that I couldn't consider it now. “All right,” I said resolutely. “I'll go to Phobos. And if that doesn't change the way I feel, I'll move from here, and I—I won't see Alex again. Not at all, ever.”

It's funny how when you wake in the morning, you look forward to a day without having any idea at all of where that day will bring you. You may know what you're going to be doing, and you may have a fairly good picture of whether it will be pleasant or not; but you can't really imagine the outcome. For all you know, the day might hold the most glorious instant of your life or the thing that's your worst fear. That's a bit scary, if you think about it!

The day we went to Phobos was like that. I was trying not to look ahead at all. Early that morning, when Charlene woke me as she usually did with her gleeful three-year-old chatter, I pulled myself out of bed and dressed and brushed my hair, telling myself,
This is just an ordinary day. I live on Mars, and this is what it feels like!
But the day was not ordinary, and no amount of effort on my part could make it so. Sometimes you have to take things as they come.

I had consented to the trip not because I thought it could possibly change anything, but because it was a postponement of the time when I'd have to break off with Alex. Nevertheless, I was bound and determined to make it an honest test. Throughout the day I was truly going to pretend that I was staying on Mars, and not once was I going to console myself with the thought of Maple Beach. I was going to find out how it would feel, though I was very sure that it would be a feeling that I wouldn't like. I had been trying it out for the past few days. Kathy was right; that sort of mental adjustment gives you a whole new slant on things. But a new slant isn't enough, always. Perhaps it might be, if you could really maintain it when something rocks the boat—but you can't, of course.

The first part of the trip was uneventful. The shuttle we went in was an older, smaller model than those I'd encountered before, and carried no crew besides the pilot. Alex and I were the only adults along, since it was necessary to make room for as many eighth graders as possible. The kids were exuberant. We kept them in line with some assistance from Alicia, who had been elected class chairman for the occasion. During the flight we let them unstrap two at a time and taught them the rudiments of zero-g maneuvering; that was a full-time job that left me no chance to think about anything else.

I had some bad moments after we landed on Phobos, during the suiting-up process. A modern pressure suit isn't much like those bulky, restrictive ones used in the early days of space travel, and in fact it really isn't too uncomfortable, especially under low-g conditions. It has all the necessary conveniences, such as heating and cooling arrangements and a nippled water tank in case a person gets thirsty. But still, a spacesuit is a spacesuit, and its wearer is dependent on an air tank strapped to his back, which to me was the ultimate instrument for keeping me aware of the fact that the amount of air available was strictly limited.

“Didn't you ever do any scuba diving on Earth?” Alex asked me.

“No, and besides, that's different because you can always come to the surface,” I argued. But with all those appraising eyes on me—you know how kids are!—I couldn't do anything but act as if putting on a spacesuit were a normal, everyday occurrence for me.

Alex and the pilot checked everyone's gear very carefully and saw to it that the helmets were adjusted properly and the suit radios were working before they opened up the ship. Those radios allowed everyone to hear all that anyone said, so there had to be some strict rules about obeying orders to keep quiet. (Since nobody wanted to be confined to the ship, we didn't have too much difficulty in enforcing them.) If you need to talk privately to anyone in a suit, you switch off your radio and simply touch helmets; Alex and I did that whenever we didn't want the kids to overhear.

Phobos is so close in that Mars fills half its sky; in crescent phase there's a huge red arc, one of the most fantastic sights I've ever seen. Full phase is even more spectacular. The kids were less interested in admiring the view than in jumping around, however, and we had to have a very strict rule about that. Everyone stayed hooked to a safety line—because it's possible to jump right off Phobos! It's actually been known to happen. The means of rescue, a rocket-powered scooter, was at hand; but our pilot wasn't at all anxious to use it.

The gravity on Phobos is so low that in effect it's zero; actually you weigh one thousandth of what you would on Earth, just enough to know where the ground is. I could, therefore, move much as I would have under zero-g, but I wasn't quite so disoriented. And the rocky terrain gave the illusion of being on a real planet because I didn't notice how close the horizon was, in spite of Phobos being only ten miles in diameter.

It was a strange new environment all right; yet somehow it didn't seem dreadful to me, except for the air tank business. Probably that was because I was so busy keeping track of the kids. As a matter of fact, though, I think my first impression was a kind of exhilaration. The funniest thing began to happen to me. Not only was it fun to float around under zero-g again, but along with the weight of Mars' gravity, another weight seemed missing, too: the weight of Earth. Of longing for Earth, I mean. I kept thinking,
I don't have to worry about that today. I can worry about it some other time, but today I am Martian, and I am free to enjoy this!

But of course, my first impressions of Phobos are hard to sort out from the later ones.

 

 

The primary purpose of the shuttle trip had been to bring supplies to the Phobos research station. That station was merely a small pressurized hut in which two men could live for reasonably long periods, plus a collection of unpressurized storage sheds and weird-looking scientific equipment. The two scientists currently in residence came out to greet us when we arrived, and as we chatted the pilot handed them their mail, which included, as it happened, not only the usual discs of private e-mail, but a package from Earth. A package of any kind is an event to a Colonial, but a package of food is an unheard-of bonanza. And in this case it would have been better if it had remained unheard of.

I don't know what kind of food was in the package, but whatever it was, it was happily shared as soon as those two men got back to the hut and out of their suits. Thank heaven there wasn't room for us in there, so they could share it with us! Because whatever they ate was contaminated, and they were both deathly ill within the hour.