The Best of Joe Haldeman (69 page)

We hadn’t put on the Mars suits for the flight down; they were too bulky to fit in the close-ranked seats—and I guess there wasn’t any disaster scenario where we would still be alive and need them. So the first order of the day was to get dressed for our new planet.

We’d tested them several times, but Paul wanted to be super-cautious the first time they were actually exposed to the Martian near-vacuum. The airlock would only hold two people at once, so we went out one at a time, with Paul observing us, ready to toss us back inside if trouble developed.

We unpacked the suits from storage under the deck and sorted them out. One for each person and two blobby general-purpose ones.

We were to leave in reverse alphabetical order, which was no fun, since it made our family dead last. The lander had never felt particularly claustrophobic before, but now it was like a tiny tin can, the sardines slowly exiting one by one.

At least we could see out, via the pilot’s screen. He’d set the camera on the base, where all seventy-five people had gathered to watch us land, or crash. That led to some morbid speculation on Card’s part. What if we’d crash-landed
into
them? I guess we’d be just as likely to crash into the base behind them. I’d rather be standing outside with a space suit on, too.

We’d seen pictures of the base a million times, not to mention endless diagrams and descriptions of how everything worked, but it was kind of exciting to see it in real time, to actually be here. The farm part looked bigger than I’d pictured it, I guess because the people standing around gave it scale. Of course the people lived underneath, staying out of the radiation.

It was interesting to have actual gravity. I said it felt different and Mom agreed, with a scientific explanation. Residual centripetal blah blah blah. I’ll just call it real gravity, as opposed to the manufactured kind. Organic gravity.

A lot of people undressed on the spot and got into their Mars suits. I didn’t see any point in standing around for an hour in the thing. I’m also a little shy, in a selective way. I waited until Paul was on the other side of the airlock before I revealed my unvoluptuous figure and barely necessary bra. Which I’d have to take off anyhow, for the skinsuit part of the Mars suit.

That part was like a lightweight body stocking. It fastened up the front with a gecko strip and then you pushed a button on your wrist and something electrical happened and it clasped your body like a big rubber glove. It could be sexy-looking if your body was. Most people looked like big gray cartoons, the men with a little more detail than I wanted to see.

The outer part of the Mars suit was more like lightweight armor, kind of loose and clanky when you put it on, but it also did an electrical thing when you zipped up, and fit more closely. Then clumsy boots and gloves and a helmet, all airtight. The joints would sigh when you moved your arms or legs or bent at the waist.

Card’s suit had a place for an extension at the waist, since he could grow as much as a foot taller while we were here. Mine didn’t have any such refinement, though the chest part was optimistically roomy.

Since we did follow strict anti-alphabetical order, Card got the distinction of being the last one out, and I was next to last. I got in the airlock with Paul, and he checked my oxygen tank and the seals on my helmet, gloves, and boots. Then he pumped most of the air out, watching the clock, and asked me to count even numbers backward from thirty. (I asked him whether he had an obsession with backward lists.) He smiled at me through the helmet and kept his hand on my shoulder as the rest of the air pumped out and the door silently swung open.

The sky was brighter than I’d expected, and the ground darker. “Welcome to Mars,” Paul said on the suit radio, sounding really far away.

We walked down a metal ramp to the sandy rock-strewn ground. I stepped onto another planet.

How many people had ever done that?

Everything was suddenly different. This was the most real thing I’d ever done.

They could talk until they were blue in the face about how special this was, brave new frontier, leaving the cradle of Earth, whatever, and it’s finally just words. When I felt the crunch of Martian soil under my boot it was suddenly all very plain and wonderful. I remembered an old cube—a movie—of one of the first guys on the Moon, jumping around like a little kid, and I jumped myself, and again, way high.

“Careful!” came Paul’s voice over the radio. “Get used to it first.”

“Okay, okay.” While I walked, feather light, toward the other airlock, I tried to figure out how many people had actually done it, set foot on another world. A little more than a hundred, in all of history. And me one of them, now.

There were four people waiting at the airlock door; everyone else had gone inside. I looked around at the rusty desert and stifled the urge to run off and explore—I mean, for more than three months we hadn’t been able to go more than a few dozen feet in any direction, and here was a whole new world. But there would be time. Soon!

Mother was blinking away tears, unable to touch her face behind the helmet, crying with happiness. The dream of her lifetime. I hugged her, which felt strange, both of us swaddled in insulation. Our helmets clicked together and for a moment I heard her laugh.

While Paul went back to get Card, I just looked around. I’d spent hours there in virtual, of course, but that was fake. This was hard-edged and strange, even fearsome in a way. A desert with rocks. Yellow sky of air so thin it would kill you in a breath.

When Card got to the ground, he jumped higher than I had. Paul grabbed him by the arm and walked him over.

The airlock held four people. Paul and the two strangers gestured for us to go in when the door opened. It closed automatically behind us and a red light throbbed for about a minute. I could hear the muffled clicking of a pump. Then a green light and the inside door sighed open.

We stepped into the greenhouse, a dense couple of acres of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. A woman in shorts and a T-shirt motioned for us to take off our helmets.

She introduced herself as Emily. “I keep track of the airlock and suits,” she said. “Follow me and we’ll get you square.”

Feeling overdressed, we clanked down a metal spiral stair to a room full of shelves and boxes, the walls unpainted rock. One block of metal shelves was obviously for our crew, names written on bright new tape under shelves that held folded Mars suits and the titanium suitcases.

“Just come on through to the mess hall after you’re dressed,” she said. “Place isn’t big enough to get lost. Not yet.” They planned to more than double the underground living area while we were here.

I helped Mother out of her suit and she helped me. I needed a shower and some clean clothes. My jumpsuit was wrinkled and damp with old sweat, fear sweat from the landing. I didn’t smell like a petunia myself. But we were all in the same boat.

Paul and the two other men in Mars suits were rattling down the stairs as we headed for the mess hall. The top half of the corridor was smooth plastic that radiated uniform dim light, like the tubes that had linked the Space Elevator to the Hilton and the
John Carter.
The bottom half was numbered storage drawers.

I knew what to expect of the mess hall and the other rooms; the colony was a series of inflated half-cylinders inside a large irregular tunnel, a natural pipe through an ancient lava flow. Someday the whole thing would be closed off and filled with air like the part we’d just left, but for the time being everyone lived and worked in the reinforced balloons.

It all seemed pretty huge after living in a space ship. I don’t suppose it would be that imposing if you went there directly from a town or a city on Earth.

The mess hall wasn’t designed for everyone to crowd in there at once. Most of the colonists were standing around at the far end. There were two dining tables with plenty of empty chairs for us new people. We sat down, I guess all of us feeling a little awkward. Everybody sort of staring and nodding. We hadn’t seen a stranger since the Hilton—but then none of these Martians had seen a new person since the last ship, fifteen months before.

I looked through the crowd and immediately picked out Oz. He gave me a little wave and I returned it.

The room had two large false windows, like the ones on the ship, looking out onto the desert. I assumed they were real-time. Nothing was moving, but then all the life on the planet was presumably right here.

You could see our lander sitting at the end of a mile-long plowed groove. I wondered whether Paul had cut it too close, stopping a couple of hundred feet away. He’d said the landing was mostly automatic, but I didn’t see him let go of the joystick.

There was a carafe of water on the table, and some glasses. I poured half a glass, careful not to spill any, feeling everybody’s eyes on me. Water was precious here, at least for the time being.

When Paul and the other two came into the room, an older woman stepped forward. Like many of them, men and women, she was wearing a belted robe made of some filmy material. She was pale and bony.

“Welcome to Mars. Of course I’ve spoken with most of you. I’m Dargo Solingen, current general administrator.

“The first couple of ares”—Martian days—”you are here, just settle in and get used to your new home. Explore and ask questions. We’ve assigned temporary living and working spaces to everyone, a compromise between the wish list you sent a couple of weeks ago and...reality.” She shrugged. “It will be a little tight until the new module is in place. We will start on that as soon as the ship is unloaded.”

She almost smiled, though it looked like she didn’t have much practice with it. “It is strange to see children. It will be an interesting social experiment.”

“One you don’t quite approve of?” Dr. Jefferson said.

“You may as well know that I don’t. But I was not consulted.”

“Dr. Solingen,” a woman behind her said in a tone of warning.

“I guess none of you were,” he said. “It was an Earth decision.”

Oz stepped forward. “We were polled. Most of us were very much in favor.”

The woman who had cautioned Solingen joined him. “A hundred percent of the permanent party. Those of us who are not returning to Earth.” She was either pregnant or the only fat person in the room. Looking more carefully, I saw one other woman who appeared to be pregnant.

You’d think that would have been on the news. Maybe it was, and I missed it, not likely. Mother and I exchanged significant glances. Something was going on.

~ * ~

3. MOVING IN

It turned out to be nothing more mysterious than a desire for privacy on the women’s part, and everybody’s desire to keep Earth out of their hair. When the first child was born, the Earth press would be all over them. Until then, there was no need for anyone to know the blessed event was nigh. So they asked that we not mention the pregnancies when writing or talking to home.

I shared a small room with Elspeth and Kaimei—an air mattress on the floor and a bunk bed. We agreed to rotate, so everyone would have an actual bed two-thirds of the time.

There was only one desk, with a small screen and a clunky keyboard and an old VR helmet with a big dent on the side. The timing for that worked out okay, since Elspeth had classes seven hours before Eastern time, and Kaimei three hours later. We drew up a chart and taped it to the wall. The only conflict was my physical science class versus Kaimei’s History of Tao and Buddhism. Mine was mostly equations on the board, so I used the screen and let her have the helmet.

Our lives were pretty regimented the first couple of weeks, because we had to coordinate classes with the work roster here, and leave a little time for eating and sleeping.

Everybody was impatient to get the new module set up, but it wasn’t just a matter of unloading and inflating it. First there was a light exoskeleton of spindly metal rods that became rigid when they were all pulled together. Then floorboards to bear the weight of the things and people inside. Then the connection to the existing base, through an improvised airlock until they were sure the module wouldn’t leak.

I enjoyed working on that, at first outdoors, unloading the ship and sorting and pre-assembling some parts; then later, down in the lava cave, attaching the new to the old. I got used to working in the Mars suit and using the “dog,” a wheeled machine about the size of a large dog. It carried backup oxygen and power.

About half the time, though, my work roster put me inside, helping the younger ones do their lessons and avoid boredom. “Mentoring,” they called it, to make it sound more important than babysitting.

One day, though, while I was just getting off work detail, Paul came up and asked whether I’d like to go exploring with him. What, skip math? I got fresh oxygen and helped him check out one of the dogs and we went for a walk.

The surface of Mars might look pretty boring to an outsider, but it’s not at all. It must be the same if you live in a desert on Earth: you pretty much have the space around your home memorized, every little mound and rock—and when you venture out it’s “Wow! A different rock!”

He took me off to the left of Telegraph Hill, walking at a pretty good pace. The base was below the horizon in less than ten minutes. We were still in radio contact as long as we could see the antenna on top of the hill, and if we wanted to go farther, the dog had a collapsible booster antenna that went up ten meters, which we could leave behind as a relay.