Journey Between Worlds

by Sylvia Engdahl

  I intended to study too, so that I’d be able to qualify for advanced standing in some of my college subjects, but I didn’t accomplish much. I didn’t know how to go at it. I had no college reading lists yet, and the library didn’t contain basic texts other than ones on subjects related to Mars, which weren’t relevant. In any case, there was a time limit on the library booths and I wasn’t used to reading much on the small screen of my handheld computer; our rooms at school had been equipped with desktop screens. When I’d covered the history selections—superficially, I’ll admit, for somehow I couldn’t concentrate well enough to actually study them—I came to a not-too-reluctant standstill.

  You may well ask why I didn’t spend more time with Dad, since that was the whole point of the trip in the first place. Well, it just never seemed to come off, that’s all. There wasn’t anything we could do together. We exhausted what we had to say to each other merely by sitting at the same table for one or two meals a day. We’d been apart too long; we were strangers and didn’t have enough mutual interests. Poor Dad, he wanted to reach me. I wanted, desperately, to reach him. I’d sit there trying to come up with something to say, and I’d just freeze; I never have been good at small talk. Until those weeks aboard Susie, I hadn’t known that I’d inherited this characteristic from him.

  Of course, Dad had studying to do, too: e-files of material on the firm’s proposed Martian operations, with which he’d have to be thoroughly familiar in order to make effective use of his time there. And he’d found friends in his own field. So at first we made elaborate excuses, and then after a while we just accepted the fact that we’d meet daily for breakfast, and that would be it.

  If it hadn’t been for Alex, I would have been terribly lonely. I’d be sitting in the lounge and Alex would come along, and we’d talk. Or sometimes we’d be asked to play bridge; before long a tournament got going and we joined that, as partners. It was a very effective time consumer. There was also a chess tournament, but though Alex taught me to play I didn’t try it often; the others on board were experienced, and much too good for me. I did watch a lot. Alex himself was an expert and had climbed to third place before the trip was over.

  Then, too, after the first week or so we went to the gym fairly frequently; when I found that I wouldn’t be seeing much of Janet, I changed my mind about not joining the classes. Alex helped me pass the zero-g test for my card, and he was right, it was fun! Once I’d learned to relax and simply float, it was marvelous. At first, though, I was so nervous and tense that I just couldn’t get the hang of it. I’d close my eyes, and it would feel like an elevator out of control, and I’d want to get out of there! Finally Alex got stern with me and made me let go.

  “Look, Mel,” he said. “It’s new and it’s different, sure. You’re fighting it, that’s why you thrash around that way. Relax. Relax and enjoy it!” Eventually I did; that was all it took. Before long I didn’t even need the antinausea shots.

  In the evening, we participated in whatever was planned. We sat together for movies; we were roped into some silly skit one night and were runners-up for the booby prize; side by side, we joined in the singing of the old songs. songs that were popular long before the spaceship Susan Constant ever set forth on a wider sea than any known to the sailors who originated them: “The Mermaid,” “Blow the Man Down,” “Shenandoah.” On the night of the midcrossing party, we even danced (normally there wasn’t room, but they piled the tables up, easy enough to do in one-third gravity, to clear the space). But it wasn’t like dating. We were friendly, never more than that; we didn’t even hold hands. I didn’t feel that I was doing anything that Ross could object to.

  I never got too well acquainted with any of the homesteaders. In the first place, they were all married couples, older than I was and absorbed by their careers as well as by their accustomed social pattern. Yet the big thing that separated us was not the difference in our ages and interests, but the wide gulf in our attitudes. Particularly our attitudes about Mars. The surprising thing was that the gulf was just as wide between Alex and me, if not wider; yet with Alex, it wasn’t the same kind of barrier. It was never mentioned between us any more than it was mentioned between me and Dad. Alex simply went on talking about Mars in a casual way that seemed more a sincere pride in the Colonies than a deliberate attempt to convert me.

  If he was making an effort, it didn’t succeed. Because, though I enjoyed listening to Alex, I enjoyed it in the same way a person might enjoy hearing someone tell about the inhabitants of some other solar system—she’d be interested, but she wouldn’t think of it as real life. Or at any rate she wouldn’t connect it with her own life. It would remain foreign and exotic to her even if it were factual. I imagine many Americans once thought of Africa and Asia in the same way. Alex could just as well have been an anthropologist describing tribal cultures, for all I connected the things he told me with him, as a person.

  I remember once, over tea one afternoon, he mentioned that he had been almost ten years old before he had gone Outside—outside the domes, that is. My reaction was, “Didn’t you feel imprisoned all those years, before? I can’t imagine little boys on Earth being penned up like that.”

  He laughed. “You must have a funny idea of what our cities are like. Sure, I looked forward to going Outside, just as you probably looked forward to a vacation at the beach. But I had plenty of chances around home to get into mischief, and I took full advantage of them. Kids on Mars act just the same as they do anyplace else.”

  One of the things more permissible in the social climate of the Susie than under ordinary circumstances was serious discussion, and the significance of space exploration was an inexhaustible topic. The talk seemed to get around to it whenever a group gathered. It was all rather over my head, but Alex thoroughly enjoyed it. And he took it as seriously as some people do bridge scores; at times he got really angry. Of course Alex was something of a fanatic on the subject, as most Colonials are.

  I remember one evening in particular, when we were sitting around after dinner, finishing our coffee. Dad happened to be with us, as well as an older man, a Professor Goldberg who was on his way to spend a sabbatical at the University of Mars. We were discussing a letter to the editor that had appeared in the Interplanetary Observer, one of the current magazines beamed out to us from Earth, which Dad had happened to read and was summarizing for the professor. Down at the other end of the dining room a bunch of the homesteaders were singing; someone had found a guitar among Susie’s recreational supplies, and we could hardly hear ourselves talk.

  “Anyway,” Dad shouted, “this fellow wound up with the old ‘we had better solve all the problems on this world before we take a chance on messing up any others’ line.”

  “That makes me furious!” Alex yelled back. “Of all the mistaken theories about space that I ran into on Earth, that’s the most shortsighted.”

  “Why?” I ventured. “It sounds logical enough to me.”

  All three of them jumped on me as if I’d just come out in favor of slavery. “Mel, honey, you just haven’t gone into it,” Dad began, but Alex said rather sharply, “With your interest in history I should think you could see the fallacy easily enough.”

  “In the first place,” Professor Goldberg said, “we can’t ever solve all the problems on Earth. We’re human. We can make progress—we have made progress: Peace is better assured than it was a hundred years ago; the standard of living has risen all over the world; racial equality is a reality now, and freedom for the individual is more widespread than it was in the twentieth century—”

  “It was the conquest of space that helped to bring about peace,” Alex interrupted. “Energy went into that which would otherwise have gone into war.”

  Like in the poem, I thought. Nightmare, endless wars . . . then we turned spaceward.

  “More than that, though,” the professor went on, “for the human race to stay cooped up on one world would lead only to a terrible sort of stagnation. It would create prob
lems, not solve them.”

  “Stagnation or something worse,” said Alex darkly, “with the population situation the way it is. Without a frontier for expansion, neither today’s living standard nor freedom could last—and there’d eventually be violence.”

  “I really don’t think that we need to worry too much about that anymore, though,” said the professor. “The Colonies are well established now.”

  “Yes, but there’s this new debate over the appropriation coming up,” Alex said. “Someday we’ll be self-sufficient, but now—”

  “I forget, you Colonials are a bit sensitive on that subject,” the professor replied. “Still, I don’t think the ultimate fate of colonization is in much danger. Think how much opposition there was initially, yet that didn’t stop people. It won’t stop the next step, either—the stars.”

  “Human beings won’t ever be stopped from moving on,” Alex said firmly. “The need for challenge, for seeing what’s over the hill—it’s built in. It’s a fact of nature.”

  Dad turned to me. “Your mother once said something like that, Mel. She told me, ‘My ancestors crossed the plains in a covered wagon. The woman in the family, Melinda, didn’t want to go, but her husband, Jess, said that he aimed to see the Oregon Country and nobody was going to stop him. Jess believed that since God put Oregon there, it must be in the nature of people to want to see it.”

  I was silent, sipping my coffee. Was that true, that my ancestor Melinda Stillwell had to be talked into going west? How little I really knew about her!

  The group of homesteaders clustered around the guitar player was still holding forth with one song after another, rousing songs from old-time musicals like Oklahoma!, My Fair Lady, and Paint Your Wagon. The current melody was one I’d always loved:

  I was born under a wanderin’ star,

  I was born under a wanderin’ star.

  Staying put can kill you,

  Standing still’s a curse,

  To settle down can drive you mad

  But moving on is worse.

  I was born under a wanderin’ star. . . .

  Alex said, “In the nineteenth century they called it ‘Manifest Destiny.’ I know that term was often used politically, in a nationalistic sense. But there was more to it than that.”

  “Much more,” the professor agreed. “It fired people’s imaginations, and the reason it did was that underneath, there was an idea there that had nothing to do with nationalism—an idea that was valid. The idea that the human race will keep on moving, that we’ve got to expand or perish.”

  I could scarcely hear him, what with the volume of the chorus:

  Aching for to stop and always aching for to go;

  Searching, but for what I never will know.

  I was born under a wanderin’ star,

  A wanderin’ . . . wanderin’ star.

  The conversation drifted on to other things, then; but it set me to thinking. The colonists’ viewpoint might not be as silly as I had believed.

  But if my mind was opening a little, Janet’s wasn’t, and she was getting a reputation around the ship that I didn’t thoroughly see the reason for. Nobody could expect every person to be overjoyed at the prospect of spending some time on Mars. Why wasn’t she just as much entitled to her opinion as anyone else?

  I said this to Alex once, and his reaction surprised me. “Melinda,” he said seriously, “would you be offended by a piece of advice from old Uncle Alex here?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Don’t stay too close to Janet, then. You can’t help seeing her often while you’re sharing a room with her, but she’s not exactly the person I’d pick for a role model.”

  “I don’t think you’re being fair to Janet,” I protested. “Just because she doesn’t see eye to eye with you about Mars—”

  “It’s not that. It’s the superior way she acts, as if she knows everything there is to know, and what’s more, as if everything Martian must be slightly inferior to its Terrestrial counterpart. She won’t win many friends by it in the Colonies, and neither will you.”

  “I don’t think I know everything!” I bristled. “And I’m perfectly aware that Colonials aren’t inferior to anyone.”

  “But different?”

  “Yes, of course, different; they’d have to be, to—”

  “You see what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t see,” I said. “Look, the life people lead on Mars may seem normal enough to you because you were there before you saw Earth, but it doesn’t to me, and I just can’t look at it any other way.”

  “I know you can’t, now. I hope someday you’ll change your mind. But whether you do or not, why not give us Martians the benefit of the doubt? Give us credit for being human, anyway!”

  Indignantly I demanded, “Now who’s acting superior?” Alex did sound like an uncle sometimes! He was only a few years older than I was, but he’d grown up too fast; people did, I supposed, in the Colonies.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just a suggestion. Don’t start off on the wrong foot, Melinda. You’re too nice a girl.”

  I thought about that conversation a good deal after it was over with. In spite of my having assured Alex that I wouldn’t be offended by his advice, it bothered me. I had thought it was I who was keeping the distance, because of Ross, because of—well, a lot of things. It was somehow upsetting to feel that Alex might not really like me, that in some ways I might not measure up to his standards.

  We were almost two months out when a thing happened that crystallized the fear I’d so far been denying. It was a perfectly ordinary afternoon; we were in the middle of a bridge game. All of a sudden a rhythmic, raucous squawk began to come out of the intercom speakers. Back at the beginning of the trip we had been told what to do if an alarm sounded—all passengers were to gather in the dining room, where Alex and I already were. But I hadn’t imagined it really happening. As the incessant bleating continued, icy tentacles slid up my spine and clutched at the base of my mind.

  The couple we were playing with, a young doctor from India and his bride, moved their chairs together; he put his arm around her. She looked at him with big, luminous eyes and asked what I had not dared to put into words: “Have we been hit by a meteor?”

  Her husband didn’t know what to say. But Alex told us calmly, “It’s probably more or less of a drill. Sometimes there’s a hit, too small to be dangerous, but the automatic alarm system picks it up and they go through with the alert on general principles.” He smiled at me. “Can’t disillusion the public about space travel being exciting, you know.”

  That was exactly what had happened; before long the captain came in and assured us that there was nothing to worry over. The hole wasn’t big enough for there to be any hurry about patching it, and no pressure had been lost. He apologized for putting us through the drill, but explained that it was necessary to keep in practice in case there ever was a real emergency.

  That was that; the passengers who’d been busy elsewhere drifted out, and we went on to finish the game. But later, when I went to my cabin to dress for dinner, I found Janet lying on her bunk, doing nothing, with an abnormally blank and frozen look.

  “Why, what’s the matter?” I asked. “Aren’t you feeling well, Janet? Should I call the nurse?”

  She turned on me in fury. “I hate it!” she choked. “It’s not right that a person should have to risk her life to establish her professional standing! I know just as much about extraterrestrial microbes from studying texts as I’ll ever learn on Mars—there’s no life to speak of on Mars anyway. Why should the University of Mars be the only place to work with specimens from the outer planets, when everybody knows that Earth’s quarantine laws are archaic? I wish I hadn’t come; I wish I’d told them I wouldn’t do it and made them waive that stupid requirement. I wish we’d never even discovered Mars!” Unaccountably, she began to sob.

  I stared at her. This wasn’t like Janet, not at all. She was so self-assured, usually. Then I realized wh
at the trouble was. Janet was scared! Underneath that icy exterior, she was absolutely terrified.

  I felt sick. So I wasn’t the only one. Janet, with all her experience, her scientific training, was as awed by space as I was. More so, even; her fright wasn’t the same as the vague fears that I’d so far managed to talk myself out of. Janet knew—or thought she knew—something specific.

  I sat down on the edge of the bunk and gripped her shoulders. “Janet, what is it? What’s happened?”

  Her face was red and distorted from crying, and she didn’t stop shaking. “Don’t you know? Don’t you know what that meteor alarm business was all about?”

  “Alex said it was just standard procedure, a drill.”

  “Well, of course he would. When will you learn that those idiots won’t ever admit how foolish and dangerous the whole thing is? Grow up, Melinda!”

  I thought it over. He had admitted one thing, perhaps, the very first day. Janet had said, “Are you trying to tell us that it’s guaranteed to be all fun and games aboard this ship?” And Alex had answered, “I’m not saying that . . . we all know better.” I hadn’t thought anything of it. With all my doubts, I hadn’t imagined that we were facing a calculated danger.

  “It’s just one gigantic gamble,” Janet was saying. “The fact that there hasn’t been a major disaster on a spaceliner yet makes it all the worse; the chances are increasing. It’s not reasonable to think that ship after ship can go all these millions of miles without being struck by anything big, or that the domes on Mars can stand indefinitely, either. Think how many craters there are on Mars! Government officials won’t admit how worried they are, and naturally TPC won’t. The colonists have their heads in the sand. But sooner or later something’s going to happen. It’s like earthquakes—you can live right on top of a fault for years, but eventually—”