Journey Between Worlds (5 page)

After I was through I stood at the window and looked out across the grayed redwood deck at the sunlight glinting off the water through a brief break in the clouds. There was a ship near the horizon, moving slowly; I wondered where it was bound. Once people traveled on ships of the sea, not just for pleasure cruises but to get from one place to another. Once the word “ship” itself evoked pictures of wind and salt water, not of black emptiness and hard glittering stars. I wished that I had lived in those times.

On the bed I'd piled some odds and ends that seemed hardly worth keeping; I gathered them up and went across the hall to Gran's room to see if she wanted any of them.

Gran was sitting by the window with her feet on the ottoman. Her magazine was open but she wasn't reading; her eyes were closed. I hesitated in the doorway, realizing unhappily that I hadn't paid much attention to Gran since I'd been home, hadn't offered much in the way of sympathy for the illness that had kept her away from graduation. Just then she sat up and looked at me, and I went over and kissed her lightly on the cheek.

“Hello, Melinda dear,” Gran said brightly. “How did it go this morning? Did they give you your visa?”

“Yes, with no trouble at all. I guess I convinced them that I'm of good character and not too likely to get sick way out in the middle of nowhere.” I sat down on the edge of the ottoman. “Are you feeling better today, Gran?”

“Much better, thank you. Your father wants me to come to Florida to see you off. I might do just that; I could stay overnight and come back to Portland on Sunday, if it seemed too much of an effort to do the round trip in one day.”

“That would be wonderful,” I said, though I hadn't gotten to the stage of picturing the trip in detail. Florida, Canaveral Terminal—we'd be going there Saturday morning.

“Melinda,” Gran said, “I haven't given you anything for graduation yet. I was waiting for a time when you weren't so preoccupied.”

I flushed guiltily. Gran went on, “Get my jewel box, will you, dear?”

I went over to her dressing table and picked up the well-remembered green leather case that she'd shown me so often when I was a child. Gran took it from me. As she opened it, I caught sight of the locket that had been handed down from our ancestor, Melinda Stillwell, and I reached out to touch the gleaming gold.

“Do you remember how I used to play with this?” I asked.

“Very well. You used to love to hear about the covered wagon pioneers.”

“I used to wish I could have been one of them. Everything was so simple then. Not all citified and scientific, like today.”

She made no comment. Instead, she opened the bottom drawer of the case and took out a necklace of large silver beads. “These aren't of great value,” she told me, “but they were your mother's. She treasured them, and perhaps you will, too, more than anything new I could buy you.”

They were lovely. Dear Gran, she knew me so well! I'd always wanted something of Mother's to keep. My eyes filled as I clasped them around my neck and thanked her. For a moment I felt like throwing my arms around her, though Gran had never been one for hugging and kissing.

Putting the jewel box aside, I looked at her thoughtfully. “Gran,” I asked, “did you know that my mother wanted to go to Mars?”

“Of course, dear. She wrote me all about it.”

“Why didn't you ever tell me?”

“Why, when she died you were such a little girl; it wouldn't have meant anything to you then. Later—well, I never happened to mention it, that's all.”

It seemed strange that she hadn't, considering how often she'd talked of my mother. I stared at the framed portrait on Gran's bedside table, the portrait of Mother when she was my age. “Why did she want to, do you think?”

Gran smiled. “Anne was always proud of our family's traditions.”

“Dad said something like that. I don't see—”

“I might as well confess, dear, that I didn't want you to get too interested in the Colonies,” Gran admitted. “I was afraid that if you heard your parents had once planned to emigrate, you'd want to pick right up where they left off, as soon as you were old enough.”

“Oh, no!”

“I couldn't be sure. You're very like Anne in many ways, Melinda. Underneath.”

I couldn't be too much like her, I thought, because I certainly didn't share her ambition. And I didn't understand what Dad and Gran had meant at all, referring to family traditions the way they had.
I
was the one who cared about history; I was the one who wanted to live in the house at Maple Beach forever, even if it wasn't modern.

“I was very selfish, I know that,” Gran sighed. “You were all I had, dear. You still are.”

Somehow I hadn't thought of that side of it. I began quickly, “Gran, if
you
don't want me to—”

She went right on. “However, your father's been hoping to see Mars for many years, and I know how happy Anne would be that he's got the chance. I know how happy she'd be, Melinda, to see you going with him in her place. So I can't be sorry. Especially since it's only a visit and you'll be coming back.”

“Of course I'll be back, Gran darling,” I promised. “Just you wait, before you know it I'll be back here again, here to stay.”

Even then, I realized what a good thing it was that she hadn't let me finish what I'd begun to say. Because it wouldn't have been an honest out, though I did love her; I could never have looked Dad in the face, pretending to be making a big sacrifice for Gran's sake. With what she'd said about my going making Mother happy, though—well, I couldn't help wondering what Gran would have thought if Ross and I had presented a united front and I'd announced that I wasn't willing to do it. The whole thing was getting just too complex. Why did everything seem to be conspiring to get me on board that ship, when a few days before I'd have put a trip to Mars high on the list of totally pointless occupations?

After that talk with Gran, I more or less resigned myself to the inevitable. I did my best to respond to Dad's enthusiasm. I even phoned Julie and told her the news; she was tremendously excited and was all for giving me a going-away party. I had to make some excuse about not having time, though I'd have loved to see Julie and Lorene again; I just couldn't have gone to a party without Ross. Anyway, a party would only have resulted in a lot of useless bon voyage gifts, none of which would have fit into my weight allowance.

But in spite of the fact that I was going ahead with the preparations, I don't think I really believed in them. All that week, in the back of my mind there was a glimmer of hope, the thought of the one thing that could bring an end to the whole senseless business. Suppose when Ross phoned to apologize—and of course, he
would
phone—we were to end up setting our wedding date? I knew the only way I could back out would be for Ross and me to go to Dad and say, “Sorry, but we're getting married right away.”

Perhaps Ross knew it, too. Because he didn't phone at all. Every time the phone rang, that whole week, I rushed to it; never once was it for me.

So, one by one, the days slipped past, and long before I was ready it was Friday morning, then Friday afternoon, and finally, Friday evening. My last night on Earth, for the time being at any rate, and it seemed as if something dramatic ought to happen at such a time. Yet as it was, I didn't do anything very significant and spent most of the evening fooling around the house, fixing my hair, and sorting out stuff that there hadn't been room to pack. I went down to the beach for an hour or so, as usual. An awful waste! Or was it? On second thought I'm glad it was a “normal” evening, considering the wild things I've done since.

Departure from Earth was a less shattering experience than I had expected. It's all made to seem very normal—too normal, perhaps. If I'd been looking forward to something exciting, like the sailing of an old-time ocean liner, I'd have been disappointed.

Saturday morning we flew to Florida, and that was just like any flight, of course. Gran didn't go with us after all. She didn't even see us off at the airport, so the last memory I have of her is as she stood on the deck of the house, waving, with it all falling away beneath us as the taxi copter lifted us out toward the Portland-bound traffic pattern. In no time at all the house was only a speck, hardly discernible against the dazzle of the sea. I twisted around in my seat and looked back as long as I could, wanting to slow the passing moments.

I didn't cry. The year ahead was just something to be got through, that's all. I was determined to endure it. I didn't feel any sense of loss, for I didn't know yet how things are changed by time.

It was raining when we left Portland, and it was raining in Orlando, too. We took another taxi copter from the airport out to Canaveral Terminal. We could have waited for the scheduled helicopter; there was plenty of time. We had over three hours to make our connection, but we couldn't afford to take any chances because we were booked to go up on the last shuttle.

People who haven't known much about space often don't realize that the big interplanetary ships, the Colonial transports, never touch Earth. They're too big and unstreamlined; they aren't built for atmospheric flight. More than that, it would take far too much fuel to get off again. Then, too, there's the radioactivity from the nuclear drive, since the shielding of the passenger decks doesn't protect anything outside.

I'd learned all this in school, I guess, but it hadn't really penetrated, and at first I'd thought we'd be going directly onto the
Susan Constant.
Dad had explained it to me back at Gran's, though, so when we got to the terminal I knew more or less what to expect. In fact, I knew just enough so that I was beginning to feel not only unhappy, but nervous. Darn Ross anyway; why had he needed to say what he had about the perils of space travel?

Isn't it funny how you can accept one thing as a perfectly natural, inevitable risk of living, and be all upset over something else just because it's less common? I was well enough aware that there hadn't been an accident on a scheduled spaceship for years, and that in terms of percentages, a regular airliner was a lot more likely to crash. As a matter of fact, I knew that a car was a worse prospect than either, according to statistics; and I'd never thought twice about driving, any more than I'd questioned the flight from Portland to Orlando. Yet when I looked out across the field at those slim, gleaming rockets poised on their launch-pads, I got a definitely queasy feeling in my stomach.

You hear a lot about the discomforts of spaceships—acceleration, zero gravity, and all that—but you don't stop to think that most of it doesn't apply to commercial liners. The spacelines don't expect you to be astronaut material any more than the airlines expect passengers to have the physique of test pilots. They do accelerate at several gravities and the shuttles go into zero-g when the power's cut; even the big ships are weightless for a short time while they maneuver, before they put on spin. That's one reason a medical exam is required for your passport. But it's not anything like what astronauts go through. And besides, what with the spacesickness shots you get, and the tranquilizers—well, it just doesn't bother you.

But beforehand, your idea of all this is rather hazy. At least mine was. I looked around the terminal at the people getting ready to leave—middle-aged, many of them, and families with small children, babies, even—and told myself that there couldn't be anything to get panicky about. But it didn't change the way I felt inside.

Of course, only a small percentage of these people were going to Mars. Most of them were on their way to Luna City and the majority would be away only a few weeks for a business trip or a short vacation. There's lots of traffic between Earth and the Moon all the time; departures for Mars are comparatively rare. If we missed the
Susan Constant
there wouldn't be another for months. I confess that I'd have been awfully glad if I could have figured out some way to miss it.

That's not entirely true, though. When I looked at Dad and saw how elated he was, I knew I wouldn't want anything to spoil his trip, no matter how I felt secretly.

The one thing I just couldn't understand was why he was so anxious to go. I admit that most of the past week I'd avoided mentioning Mars, and usually when he had started to talk about the trip, I'd managed to change the subject. So maybe it was my own fault. I don't think Dad knew how to explain it, though. This longing to see Mars had been in the background of his mind for so long, it seemed perfectly natural to him, the way my wanting to stay at Maple Beach seemed natural to me.

“It won't be long now, Mel!” he said, as we carried our baggage over to the long TPC desk under the revolving triple globes emblem.

“I guess not,” I agreed.

He grinned at me. “I suppose you think I'm behaving just like a little boy.”

I said, “Of course not, Dad,” though that was exactly what I thought.

“I'm as excited as a little boy,” he told me. “I'm more thrilled than I used to be at Christmas. I remember the Christmas I was eight, my dad gave me a model ship—the
Fortune,
it was, which had just been put into service at the time. I feel like acting the way I did then! However, I'll try to maintain the appropriate dignity.”

“Is an executive supposed to be dignified?” I inquired, laughing.

“Well, I'm representing the firm, after all; can't give anyone the impression I'm an overgrown kid playing spaceman.” Suddenly he sobered, and put his hand on my arm. “Mel, honey—if only your mother were here. She wanted this so much.”