Journey Between Worlds

by Sylvia Engdahl

  Dad was deep in a discussion with the man on his left, who was a nonresident engineer returning to Mars from his biennial vacation. They’d found they had a lot to talk about, most of it hopelessly technical. So after we finished eating I was thrown back on Alex, although really I wished that I didn’t have to be. I thought of pretending to be asleep, but I suspected that already he knew me too well to think I’d sleep under such conditions. He’d respect my privacy if I tried it, but his feelings might be hurt, and I didn’t want that.

  As it turned out, though, I had nothing to worry about. Our conversation was simply friendly, and I didn’t once get the vague sense of inadequacy—that uncomfortable, unsure feeling—that Alex’s response to my assumptions had brought on before.

  Alex told me that he had come to Earth for a year of graduate work, and that he had just received his master’s degree in business administration from the University of California. The Colonies, I learned, had a greater shortage of administrators than of scientists. He talked quite a bit about Mars, and it wasn’t until afterward that I recognized any pattern in the way he described it.

  “My folks were among the original settlers,” he explained. “My dad works for TPC, which is why I could afford the trip to Earth; they discount fares for employees’ families on top of the student rate. I’m taking a job with them myself for the time being, though someday I want to start a business of my own.”

  I wondered what sort of business, and why he thought that Mars would be a good place for it, but I didn’t like to ask him. Alex went on, “Mom’s a medical technician at St. John’s Center.”

  “Have you any other relatives on Mars?”

  “I’ve a sister, Alicia, who’s thirteen. Then there’s my cousin Paul and his family. Paul is a minister.”

  I don’t know why that surprised me. Naturally there are churches in the Colonies just like anywhere else, but somehow you don’t think of a minister as being interested in going to Mars. I found out that Paul had been born in New Terra, the same as Alex, and that his father had been one of the chaplains for the first little group of colonists and had helped to lay out the city.

  “Paul’s wife Kathy teaches in the West Dome elementary school,” Alex said. “She and Paul already have three kids, and they’re planning on five.”

  “Five children?”

  “Yes, that’s one of the advantages that draws homesteaders, you know—no population tax like Earth’s. In the Colonies it’s the other way around; Mars wants more people, so couples who want large families can have them.”

  “What are some of the other advantages?” I inquired. I wasn’t just making conversation, because I really wanted to know; it didn’t seem as if there could be very many.

  From the way Alex went on, however, Mars might as well have been the Promised Land. He mentioned a whole list of things, and what it boiled down to was Opportunity: not only the homesteaders’ rights sort of opportunity, but the opportunity to build something, which maybe you don’t find too often on Earth anymore. I didn’t have any real conception then of what he was trying to say; I remember, though, how happy he looked when he spoke of it.

  Alex also told me a lot about the Susan Constant, which he’d traveled in before. “The Susie’s not luxurious,” he admitted. “A trip in her’s not much like what I’ve heard of ocean cruises. She’s an old ship, after all; she carried the first load of colonists, which is why we Martians have a special affection for her. On the whole she’s comfortable enough. Some things will take getting used to, for you. Like water rationing.”

  I realized just in time that he must have grown up with water rationing and avoided stumbling into a remark that would make me feel foolish again. “Who was she named after?” I asked. “The Susan Constant, I mean.”

  “Not a ‘who’—a ship from ancient history. One of the ones that founded the first permanent Virginia colony, in 1607.”

  “Did you study much history?”

  “Quite a bit. Mostly on the side; I didn’t have much time in college with my course load in business management, but I wanted to take advantage of the university library on Earth while I had it.”

  “I’m going to major in history,” I told him.

  “Then we have an interest in common.” He sounded really glad about it, not just polite. “Did you ever stop to think what a coincidence it was, the first Elizabethan Age being the time of the first attempt to colonize North America, and the second Elizabethan Age being when the first offworld base was established on the Moon?”

  I hadn’t, in spite of Dad’s folks being English and my having had world history in school as well as American history. But I knew about the starting of the Virginia colonies: the lost one, on Roanoke Island, and the one that succeeded, which became Jamestown. “That must have been an exciting age to live in,” I said.

  “Yes,” he agreed. “But no more so than the early twenty-first century, do you think?”

  “Well, more romantic, anyway.”

  “Really?” He paused, then went on, “There’s a poem I like, about the colonization of America, Western Star, by Stephen Vincent Benét. Have you ever read it?”

  “I don’t think so. Do you know it by heart?”

  “Well, not all of it; it’s a whole book. I guess I remember one piece that particularly impressed me, though. One that refers to that same Virginia colony.”

  “Go ahead,” I urged.

  “I’ll try.” He thought for a moment, then began slowly, recalling each line. If there were gaps, they weren’t noticeable.

  Is there Cathay beyond? Can Englishmen

  Live there and plant there and breed there?

  No one knows.

  And yet, I know this much. It must be tried.

  My one man’s life hath seen this England grow

  Into a giant from a stripling boy

  Who fenced about him with a wooden sword

  And prattled of his grandsire’s wars. . . .

  —The long, ruinous wars that sucked us dry,

  . . . Nightmare, endless wars. . . .

  Then we turned seaward. Then the trumpets blew.

  And, suddenly, after the bloodshot night And the gropings in

  the dark,

  There were new men, new ships, and a new world.

  There was another brief pause, and I was about to speak; but Alex remembered more and went on.

  And yet, how did we dare, how did we dare! . . .

  How did we dare to send our sailors out

  Beyond all maps? . . .

  I should know well, having some part in it,

  And I look backwards on it, and I see

  A grave young madman in a sober dress

  Who, each day, plans impossibilities

  And, every evening, sees without surprise

  The punctual, fresh miracle come true.

  And such were all of us. . . .

  “That says it beautifully,” I said. “How people of those times must have felt.”

  “Of course. But can you guess what really strikes me about it?”

  “Besides what I just said?”

  “Yes. It’s about more than just the founding of Virginia. If you think of ‘Cathay’ in a symbolic sense, you only have to change three words in that excerpt to make it apply equally well to the exploration of space.”

  “What three words?”

  “You just substitute ‘Earthmen’ for ‘Englishmen,’ ‘Earth’ for ‘England,’ and ‘spaceward’ for ‘seaward.’ ”

  I thought about it. “Why, that’s true! Only make it ‘Terra’ instead of ‘Earth,’ so as not to spoil the meter.” (It does work; he wrote it out for me later. I still have it in the folder where I keep hard copy.)

  Alex smiled at me. “You’ll do well in literature, besides in history.”

  Shyly, I smiled back. I tried to imagine Ross quoting poetry, and I couldn’t. Not that Ross wouldn’t be capable of remembering it; he had a memory like a computer for anything to do with finance or politi
cs. He wasn’t a bit like the men who can’t talk on any topic except sports. But he never stopped to consider what would be likely to interest me. It was nice to be asked to share, for a change.

  Astonishingly soon, the flight attendant was asking Alex to strap down again for rendezvous. We didn’t have to recline this time since the maneuvering acceleration didn’t exceed one gravity. (It felt like more, after weightlessness, but Alex assured me that it wasn’t.) Then in a few moments we were back to zero-g again, and eventually some bumps indicated that we were docking with the Susie.

  The lower compartment was nearest the exit, so we had to wait until it was emptied before they even let us unstrap. Then the flight attendant took us over to the hatch one at a time because she didn’t want us crashing into each other. Climbing down the steps was easy enough, as long as we held on, and the other flight attendant was waiting at the bottom to help us through the double airlocks into the Susan Constant’s vestibule.

  I was disappointed not to get even a glimpse of the Susie from the outside, but we never were outside; outside was vacuum. I had seen pictures and knew that she was huge, and shaped rather like a dumbbell, with the power plant in one sphere and the passenger decks in the other. But all I saw when I went aboard was a perfectly ordinary passageway with doors opening off at the sides and some steps going off at unbelievable angles. The Susie’s flight attendants, who wore red uniforms instead of blue, came to meet us and escort us to our staterooms. We wouldn’t be allowed to walk around by ourselves until the ship broke contact with the shuttle and got her spin back.

  That was where I was separated from Alex and also from Dad. I already knew that I’d be sharing my stateroom, for there’s no room to spare on a spaceship and all the cabins are double. I wasn’t prepared for just how small it would be, though. (If you’ve ever seen one of those “sleeping cars” they have in railroad museums, you’ve got the general idea.) There was barely room to stand up next to the double-deck bunk. And of course, no window. When the flight attendant closed the door behind him, I thought for a minute I was going to get claustrophobia after all, especially since that door wouldn’t open again. Then I saw the sign on it: THIS EXIT IS AUTOMATICALLY SEALED DURING MANEUVERS AND ZERO-GRAVITY. IN CASE OF EMERGENCY RING FOR THE ATTENDANT. I spotted the bright red “panic button” and felt a little better.

  The cabin lights were dim, and my roommate was lying on the lower bunk with a blanket pulled up over her and the safety net loosely fastened; all I could see of her was the back of a blonde head with short, tousled curls. She didn’t move when I came in, or even when there was a knock and another flight attendant appeared with my duffel bag. I wondered if she was sick until I remembered that by ship’s time it was nearly midnight.

  I didn’t want to go to sleep. I wanted to go out and find Dad. I wanted him to hug me tight and call me “Mel, honey” in that comfortable, affectionate way of his that I was coming to depend on, and maybe tell me once again just why it was that we were in this cramped, chilly cocoon of a ship on our way to Mars. But there was no way to do that, so without bothering to undress I clambered onto the upper bunk—which wasn’t really up, of course—and buried my face in my arms.

  Eventually I did fall asleep because I was worn out. Sometime later, about the time that would have been dawn if there were any dawn in space, we sailed. I never knew it. It was a low-g maneuver; I didn’t wake to feel the weight seeping back into me as the Susan Constant slowly eased into her outbound orbit, toward another world.

  Chapter 6

  Dear old Susie—she was a good ship. It wasn’t her fault that my ten weeks aboard were for the most part such miserable ones. Maybe if I hadn’t drawn Janet Crane for a cabinmate, I would have been spared a lot of trouble. Looking back, though, it’s hard to know how many of my problems were caused by her influence, and how many I would have brought upon myself in any case.

  It wasn’t that Janet and I didn’t get along. On the contrary, we got along very well indeed, and decided right off that we saw eye to eye about a lot of things. To start with, we must have been the only two people on the ship who hated the very idea of going to Mars. If they’d matched roommates by computer they couldn’t have done a better job of putting women with the same attitudes together.

  Not that on the surface we were anything like each other. Janet was much older, in the first place; eventually I found out that she was almost thirty, though she didn’t look it. More to the point, she had striking silver-blonde hair, blue eyes, and a figure that made me look very much the schoolgirl by comparison. And her clothes! How she ever got a wardrobe like that into twenty kilos, I’ll never know. I suppose everything was featherweight. Of course, she hadn’t committed the faux pas of cramming in a sweater, not because she knew enough about Mars to foresee that she wouldn’t need one, but because Janet wasn’t the kind who wore sweaters.

  But to give the idea that Janet Crane was more interested in her appearance than in anything else would be entirely wrong. She couldn’t have cared less about the impression she made on men, or women either, except from the professional standpoint. Janet was a Scientist, with a capital “S”; she was a biologist, and someday she intended to be a top biologist.

  The difficulty was that top biologists have to have experience with extraterrestrial microorganisms as well as with the life found on Earth. Most of them do a year of graduate work at the University of Mars before even getting their doctorates. Janet, who already had hers, had put the trip off because she didn’t want to go; but the time had come when she couldn’t advance any further in her career until she got it over with. Moreover, she wouldn’t be eligible for the student fare much longer.

  On that first morning, we went to the dining room together as soon as the intercom in our cabin announced that breakfast was being served. It was good to be able to stretch my legs after being cooped up for so long. And I felt extraordinarily light and buoyant because the Susie’s spin produced only one-third gravity, the same as surface gravity on Mars.

  It’s surprising when you stop to think of it that the spinning of a ship on its axis feels like gravity, not like spin. I mean, wouldn’t you think that you’d know you were going round and round, and get dizzy? But you don’t; you can’t detect any motion at all. You can’t tell any difference between the centrifugal force and real gravity. Of course, it’s a little disconcerting to have the floor curve upward ahead of you, yet find it level when you get there. And the gravity isn’t the same everywhere; it gets less as you go toward the center of the sphere. That’s why the staterooms, dining room, and lounge are all next to the outer hull, with crew quarters and cargo space inboard. I had a general idea of the layout from what Alex had told me, though I’m sure I would have gotten lost if there hadn’t been colored arrows on the wall pointing the way.

  Dad was waiting for me near the entrance to the dining room; I introduced Janet, and we went in and found a table. I looked around but didn’t see Alex anywhere. Pretty soon another woman joined us, since all the tables were for four.

  “I don’t suppose we’re going to get very fancy meal service,” Janet said.

  As a matter of fact, the dining room was fixed up quite attractively, with an orange carpet and tabletops in a matching tone, and gold and beige fabric covering the walls. The chairs were comfortable, too, though they weren’t upholstered; they didn’t need to be, with the low gravity. What did she expect, crystal chandeliers? But I looked around, and the tables were jammed awfully close together, and the food did come all in one course—in compartmented trays instead of on china—and there wasn’t any choice of menu. I said, “I guess we’d better get used to things being sort of primitive. They probably aren’t any better on Mars.”

  Dad looked at me in a rather puzzled way, and I remembered how careful I’d been to avoid telling him anything at all about what I expected of Mars. But when Janet commented, “The plumbing is certainly primitive enough,” I found myself agreeing heartily.

  “I don’t think �
��primitive’ is the right word,” said Dad. “Different from what you’re used to, maybe. But it was a feat of very sophisticated engineering to fix things so that more than two hundred people can live for ten weeks in a self-contained environment like this.”

  “I guess so. But how long do they expect us to get along without any water to wash in? All I’ve had so far are those premoistened towel things.” I remembered Alex’s remark about getting used to water rationing, and went on, “Maybe to a Martian it doesn’t matter, but—”

  The other woman at our table, a Madame Duprés, interposed icily, “I think you’ll find Martian cities considerably cleaner than cities on Earth.” (She was right, by the way; because they’re sealed and the air is manufactured, no dirt can get in.)

  Well, of course I hadn’t meant to imply that Martians weren’t clean personally, only that they didn’t see anything abnormal in having to make do with a limited supply of water. Somehow it hadn’t come out right! My cheeks burned; the woman was probably another colonist and had thought I was insulting her. Whatever could I say?

  I was saved by the ringing of a gong; everyone stopped talking and looked up to see a flight attendant standing on the dais at one end of the room, with a microphone in her hand. “Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I hope that you’ve all enjoyed your breakfast, and that you had a comfortable night, though for some of you I know it was a short one—”

  “Comfortable?” muttered Janet. “Who does she think she’s kidding?”

  The woman went on, “I’m Ms. Gonzalez, your head flight attendant. Right after this meal my staff and I will show you around the ship and explain some of the things you’ll need to know. But first, I want to introduce the man you’re all anxious to meet: Captain Bjornsen.”