Journey Between Worlds

by Sylvia Engdahl

  “Oh, I didn’t think about that.” I blushed. The idea of a domed, pressurized cattle range was pretty ridiculous, I realized. “Please don’t let us interrupt you,” I said. “Go ahead and finish.”

  I nibbled at my own lunch but as he ate, I watched him. He was a few years older than I was, probably in his early twenties, with wavy brown hair, cut rather short, and gray eyes. And there was something about the way he moved that puzzled me. Very slow and deliberate, as if he were thinking about it.

  “All passengers for the 13:45 shuttle, connecting with the S.S. Susan Constant, check in please,” announced the loudspeakers. “All passengers for the S.S. Susan Constant, bound for Mars, report to gate three to weigh in.”

  “That’s us, I’m afraid,” Dad said, taking a final bite of his sandwich.

  The young man closed his book and laid it down. “Might as well leave it for the busboy,” he said regretfully. “It’s a good thriller, but I doubt if it’ll find its way into New Terra’s electronic library. I’ll never know how it came out.”

  “It can’t weigh much,” I protested. “Take it along. Surely they’ll let you keep it.”

  “Not a chance. They never make any exceptions; a fellow I know lost a good phone cam by miscalculating.”

  “Couldn’t he have mailed it?”

  “He could if he’d had that kind of money—more than the thing was worth, by a lot.”

  I don’t know why I said what I did then. I didn’t even know his name, and I’ve never been quick to take up with people. There was just something about him, I guess, that made me want to talk to him again.

  “Let me carry your book aboard,” I offered, to my own surprise. “My duffel bag was nearly half a kilo under what I expected, so I must be entitled to be that much heavier than before at the gate.”

  “Would you? Say, that’s awfully nice of you.” He handed it over. “You can read it, too, when the trip begins to get monotonous.”

  “I’d like to,” I agreed, though at the moment monotony was the least of my worries.

  “All passengers for the 13:45 shuttle . . .” the public address system began again. We gathered up our things and started for the gate. There was another long line ahead of us at the entrance to the boarding lounge. All the passengers who had friends or relatives seeing them off had waited till the last minute to say good-bye, naturally, so there were a lot more people crowded around than could possibly fit into one shuttle. Couples were hugging and kissing each other, babies were yelling, and old ladies were crying; it was hectic. It was a relief to have our passports checked and our weights recorded, and get through into the red-carpeted lounge.

  I wasn’t overweight at all, even with the book, probably because I’d eaten so little the past few days. They were particular, though. The woman ahead of me had a long argument with the flight attendant over her little boy’s fleece-lined jacket. “But it’s cold on Mars,” she kept insisting.

  “Not where you’ll be going, ma’am. And it puts him over his allowance, so I’m afraid we can’t let him wear it unless you want to give up something else. That’s your privilege, of course.”

  “People are funny,” our friend said to me softly. “Imagine starting out for Mars without knowing that a coat’s just about the most useless article anybody could cart along.”

  “I thought Mars really was cold,” I said, thinking of the treasured sweater that was taking up so much space in my own baggage.

  “Well it is, outside—usually so cold that a coat couldn’t be much help. But the groundcars are heated, and you can’t get out of them without a pressure suit anyway, if you want to breathe.” His tone was one of quiet amusement.

  I felt my face grow hot, and I wished that I had taken the trouble to find out just a little more about where I was going beforehand. For the second time I’d displayed my ignorance. Imagine starting out for Mars without knowing, he’d said. How much else was there that he’d think me silly not to know?

  The outer gate of the lounge was already open when we got there, and the elevators were taking people down to the access tunnel. Dad and I stepped into one just as the doors closed, and were separated from our lunch companion. There were several questions I had wanted to ask—for one thing, he’d said he was going back to the Colonies, so he must have been to Mars before; and for another, from the way he’d talked it was obvious that he was planning to stay. He didn’t look like a person who’d want to live on Mars. But, I remembered, Dad and Mother had once wanted to live there, so I supposed you couldn’t go by looks. Still, Dad had admitted that he felt like a little boy when it came to space, and there was definitely nothing little-boyish about this man. He had a kind of poise I hadn’t felt in anyone before. I could tell he wasn’t nervous about the trip, or excited, either. Happy, maybe, but not excited.

  The access tunnel was deep below the field in order to withstand the rockets’ blast force. As we came out of the elevator we saw that there was a monorail waiting for us. We were practically the last load to come down; the loudspeakers were warning, “Last call for the 13:45 shuttle . . . all passengers for the S.S. Susan Constant should now be checked in.”

  In the tunnel my hands turned to ice. I sat there staring at the blue lights flashing past us, and I forgot all about the puzzling young man. All too soon we were whisked into another elevator, and up beside the ship. “We’re in compartment B,” Dad said casually. I wasn’t ready to feel casual about being anywhere inside a spaceship.

  The compartment had large, foam-padded seats, arranged in a circle, which converted to acceleration couches, reclining all the way back. The flight attendant was going around helping people to get all the straps fastened and seeing that everything was locked into place. Before long a second flight attendant came up through the center hatch from the lower compartment and began to dispense the spacesickness and tranquilizer shots. The people across from us had children, one of whom promptly set up a wail. I watched sympathetically. There are advantages to being four years old; you don’t have to hide your feelings.

  The flight attendant was very reassuring. “This won’t hurt one bit, honey,” she told the child. (It didn’t; the stuff came in its own little tube, with a charge of compressed air or something—no needle.) The intercom speaker over our heads came to life with an amplified hum. “This is your captain speaking,” a calm voice told us. “On behalf of Tri Planets Corporation I would like to welcome you aboard. Our flight time today will be four hours, fifteen minutes; rendezvous with the S.S. Susan Constant will be completed at approximately 23:00 Greenwich mean time. We are now in the final phase of countdown and will be lifting off about twenty minutes from now. If you have any questions, one of your flight attendants will be glad to help you.” As he finished, soft music filled the compartment.

  I lay back and fixed my eyes on the rivets in the ceiling, wondering if they would broadcast the countdown. On a plane you can at least see what’s happening; they retract the boarding tube, taxi out to the runway, and so forth. In this ship there was nothing to watch. Any minute, I could be pinned to the couch by goodness knows how many g’s of acceleration.

  The seat next to me was empty. “It was reserved,” the flight attendant said, “but the lady must have changed her mind at the last moment.”

  “She may show up yet,” Dad said.

  “It’s too late now; we’ve sealed the airlock.”

  “Sealed” had a very permanent sound. I was thinking that the holder of that seat had shown a good deal of sense, when the young man whose lunch table we had shared appeared at the hatch. He came directly toward us and sat down beside me. “Hi,” he said. “I heard there was an empty seat up here, and since you weren’t in the compartment below—”

  “Would you like your book?” I asked him. “My things are fastened down under here, but I guess there’s time for me to get it. They won’t weigh us any more, will they?”

  “No, but don’t bother now,” he said. He reddened, for a moment losing the air of cool
confidence. “Say, I hope you don’t think that’s why I came up!”

  I shook my head, not knowing what to say.

  He went on, smiling, “I wanted to know more about you, that’s all. Are you a university student? Biology? Geology?”

  “Not yet. Not on Mars, I won’t be.”

  “Then how did they happen to let you emigrate? You’re at least sixteen, so you can’t be with homesteading parents—”

  “I’m not an emigrant,” I told him hastily. “Dad and I are on a trip. For his firm.”

  His eyes questioned the way in which I’d emphasized “emigrant” as if it were a category in which I’d hate to be placed. But then they lit up again. “I was sure you were something special,” he said. “That is, I didn’t think you could have the experience for a nonresident job on Mars; the career people we get are older.”

  “We?”

  “The Colonies. I’m a Colonial citizen; I was born on Mars. My home’s in the city of New Terra. By the way, I’m Alex Preston.”

  “And I’m Melinda Ashley.” I was staring at him again. I simply couldn’t think of Alex as a Martian! He wasn’t any different from anyone else. Well, hardly any different; there were those few little things I’d noticed, but there wasn’t anything Martian about those differences. Not that I could have said just what I thought Colonials would be like.

  The music stopped and the intercom burst out again, evidently a recording this time. “We are now beginning the final two minutes of countdown. Liftoff minus one hundred twenty seconds . . . one hundred second . . .”

  Alex buckled his straps with quick, practiced fingers and got his seat reclined just as the flight attendant hurried over for a last check before taking her own position. I glanced at Dad; his eyes were closed and there was a big smile on his face.

  “Eighty seconds . . . sixty . . . fifty . . .”

  Alex leaned over and touched my hand. “Why so quiet, Melinda? You’re too solemn!”

  “Forty . . . thirty . . .”

  “Oh, I was just wondering what on earth I’m doing aboard this spaceship,” I said. My voice sounded terribly tragic, I think.

  He laughed. Then suddenly I did too, at the utter inappropriateness of the idiom, and when liftoff hit us we were both still laughing.

  That was the second time I surprised myself with Alex. There were lots more times to come.

  Part Two

  SPACE

  Chapter 5

  Right from the beginning Alex was a person that I could talk to. I’ve never been a talkative person; that’s one reason I’m shy and find it hard to make friends. I never know what to say to people. Even Dad and I never had a great deal to say to each other, which was too bad considering how much we both wanted to be close. But with Alex it was different. He always came out with something that I just naturally replied to, or at any rate something interesting enough to make me content with listening. Alex and I had more real conversations during the trip to Mars alone than Ross and I had had during the whole time we were dating. It seemed funny, because I was in love with Ross, while Alex was just someone I met boarding a ship.

  The acceleration that accompanied liftoff wasn’t really very bad (though I wouldn’t want to go through it too often). I felt somewhat woozy and relaxed from the shots, but I don’t think I would have panicked anyway. The worst part was the immobile, helpless feeling more than the actual pressure: the feeling of being unable to stir, to draw a deep breath, even. And the awful, ear-shattering noise! But those things didn’t last long. Besides, there was Alex next to me, and I couldn’t help but find comfort in the thought that he’d been through this before. Why that seemed more significant than the simple fact that shiploads of people did it every day, I couldn’t imagine.

  When the rockets cut off we went right into zero gravity, and it felt as if the bottom had dropped out of everything—which was exactly what had happened because there wasn’t any “bottom” or “top” anymore. Zero-g has sometimes been called “free fall” and that’s literally true, for it doesn’t make any difference that the fall’s not toward Earth, but away from it. This condition affects human beings in various ways. Some people love it; it’s the kind of floating that used to be possible only in dreams. Others are just plain sick, and this would include a pretty large group if it weren’t for those antinausea shots. Still others are terrified—after all, as I learned in Psychology I, fear of falling’s one of the two basic fears a baby’s born with—and I suspect that I would have come out in the latter category, except that Alex didn’t let me.

  He raised his seat, then started to undo his straps so that he could reach over and raise mine. The flight attendant rushed right over and started to protest. (She floated through the hatch upside down, as it happened—no wonder their uniforms have pants instead of skirts—and turned so that her feet pointed toward the “floor” more for the passengers’ benefit than for any practical reason.) “Sir, passengers are not allowed to—”

  Alex pulled his card wallet out of his pocket. “Even with this?” he inquired, holding something out to her.

  “Sorry, Mr. Preston. Certainly you may unstrap.”

  I looked at him and asked, tactlessly maybe, “Are you a VIP or something?”

  He smiled. “Not at all. It’s just that I have a card to show that I know how to handle myself in zero-g.” He released the lock on my seat and it sprang forward so that I was sitting up. “It used to be that they wouldn’t let anyone unstrap on these short hauls, but as the proportion of experienced space travelers grew, so did the protests. Now they honor the cards. I’m afraid that won’t help you or your dad, though.”

  “I don’t want to move around!” I declared fervently.

  “I won’t argue because they aren’t going to let you anyway. But you’d be surprised at how much fun it is once you get a taste of it.”

  “Where did you learn?” I asked. “You’re not an astronaut, are you?”

  “No. I learned on a trip to Phobos, when I was twelve. All Colonial kids do.”

  “For fun?”

  “Partly. You might call it a compensation for the centrifuge, which isn’t so pleasant.”

  “Centrifuge, like the way they test astronauts? Why did you have to do that if you weren’t going to be one?”

  “Because I knew that I might want to come to Earth someday. And Earth’s gravity is three times what I was born to.” He grinned at me. “If I hadn’t trained for it, Earth to me would have been something like that liftoff was to you.”

  Slowly I took this in. I’d known Martian gravity was low, but the implications hadn’t struck me before. No wonder he’d moved slowly and deliberately back at the terminal. “How could you train for it?” I asked.

  “In a special gym, under spin. Ever since eighth grade, an hour a day. You work up gradually, of course. It prepares you to accept terrestrial gravity, but not to enjoy it. This is the first time I’ve been really comfortable since I landed last year!”

  “I’m glad I wasn’t born on Mars.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” he agreed. “But if you had been, you wouldn’t have had to come to Earth; lots of people don’t. It used to be that most families wanted their kids to go sooner or later, the way the early American colonists sent their sons home to England to be educated. But that attitude’s getting to be old-fashioned.”

  “You’re not sorry you came, are you?”

  “No, I wouldn’t have missed it for anything. I could have gotten my master’s degree just as well on Mars, I suppose. But I wouldn’t have seen as much.”

  “I should think,” I said hesitantly, “that now you’ve had a chance to live normally—well, that it would be awfully hard for you to go back, if it weren’t for the gravity, that is. I mean, it might be better for you if you hadn’t come.”

  Alex stiffened. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t have known what you were missing. That is, you’d have known, but you probably wouldn’t have cared in the
same way.” I was struggling with what was, for me, an unfamiliar concept. It was hard to imagine anybody regretting having come to Earth; yet for someone who’d been born a Martian, it must be terribly upsetting to come knowing that he couldn’t stay long.

  But Alex didn’t understand me. “Perhaps I’ve given a wrong impression,” he said quietly. “Melinda, I was kidding about not getting used to Earth gravity! I could have, of course, if I’d had any reason for wanting to stay.”

  I was confused, and sorry that I’d allowed the conversation to get so personal. It was none of my business why he was going back to Mars; perhaps his family needed him, or maybe he had run out of money and couldn’t get a job. He wasn’t a citizen of any country on Earth, after all.

  He went on, “You’re assuming quite a lot, aren’t you, thinking that I’d be happier on Mars if I hadn’t seen Earth?” There was a sharp tone in his voice; without meaning to, I’d somehow made him angry.

  By that time all I wanted to do was drop the subject, but I asked, “What am I assuming?”

  We were interrupted by the flight attendant who, much to my relief, had come to serve tea. The spacelines operate on the same theory as the airlines used to, which is that passengers will cause less trouble, and will think that they’re getting more for their money, if they are kept constantly occupied with something to eat. Or maybe they feel that if anyone’s nervous, the sight of other people eating will seem reassuring; and that’s probably true. At any rate, in spite of its being just after lunch by Florida time and the middle of the night by Greenwich, we were offered a bountiful selection of such goodies as could be adapted to zero-g conditions, as well as our choice of coffee, tea, or soft drinks. The beverages came in closed containers with sipping tubes, for you can’t pour a liquid that’s weightless; you’ve got to suck.

  Since most of us had to stay strapped down, we couldn’t look at the view, and there were no viewports anyway. There was, however, a wide screen closed-circuit TV setup over our heads, on which they showed Earth. It was beautiful, but it was hard to take in the fact that it wasn’t just a video, like so many I’d seen before. For this reason it didn’t make a very deep impression on me until later when I saw the real thing from the Susie. Then, too, my mind was well occupied with the mere thought of being in space, plus the nagging question, What was I assuming that he could have resented?