by Joe Haldeman
“Eventually. Guess I’ll be one of the kids from Earth for a while.”
“Not for long, I hope.” He brightened. “Privacy isn’t such an issue there, either, finding a time and place. My roommate wouldn’t mind getting lost for a couple of hours, and you’ll pick one you can trust.”
Kaimei or Elspeth, for sure. “Unless they stick me with Card.”
“They wouldn’t be that cruel.” He stood and hugged me and gave me a long kiss. “I’d better move along. You’ll be okay?”
“Sure. I’m sorry. But I can wait.” I didn’t start crying until he was gone.
16
A NEW WORLD
Someday, I thought, maybe before I’m dead, Mars will have its own space elevator, but until then people have to get down there the old-fashioned way, in space-shuttle mode. It’s like the difference between taking an elevator from the top floor of a building or jumping off with an umbrella and a prayer. Fast and terrifying.
We’d lived with the lander as part of our home for weeks, then as a mysterious kind of threatening presence, airless and waiting. Most of us weren’t eager to go into it.
Before we’d made our second orbit of Mars, Paul opened the inner door, prepared to crack the air lock, and said, “Let’s go.”
We’d been warned, so we were bundled up against the sudden temperature drop when the air lock opened, and were not surprised that our ears popped painfully. It warmed up for an hour, and then we had to take our little metal suitcases and float through the air lock to go strap into our assigned seats, and try not to shit while we dropped like a rock to our doom.
From my studies I knew that the lander loses velocity by essentially trading speed for heat—hitting the thin Martian atmosphere at a drastic angle so the ship heats up to cherry red. What the diagrams in the physical science book don’t show is the tooth-rattling vibration, the bucking and gut-wrenching wobble. If I’m never that scared again in my life, I’ll be really happy.
All of the violence stopped abruptly when the lander decided to become a glider, I guess a few hundred miles from the landing strip. I wished we had windows like a regular airplane, but then realized that might be asking for a heart attack. It was scary enough just to squint at Paul’s two-foot-wide screen as the ground rose up to meet us, too steep and fast to believe.
We landed on skis, grating and rumbling along the rocky ground. They’d moved all the big rocks out of our way, but we felt every one of the small ones. Paul had warned us to keep our tongues away from our teeth, which was a good thing. It could be awkward, starting out life on a new planet unable to speak because you’ve bitten off the tip of your tongue.
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 supercautious the first time they were actually exposed to the Martian near vacuum. The air lock 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, because of 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. Paul had touched me all over, but he’d never seen me without a top. I waited until he was on the other side of the air lock 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, 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.
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 there was room to put on a little weight if I loved Mars cooking.
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 air lock with Paul, and he checked my oxygen tanks 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 clear but 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 air lock, 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 six of them waiting at the air-lock 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 six 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 muffled 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 air lock held five 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. “Home again,” Paul said.
17
THE LAND OF OZ
We stepped into the greenhouse, a dense couple of acres of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. The air was humid and smelled of dirt and blossoms. A woman in shorts and a tee shirt, cut off under her breasts, motioned for us to take off our helmets.
She introduced herself as Emily. “I keep track of the air lock 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.
We walked through a medical facility, bigger than anything we’d seen since the Hilton. No people, just a kind of medicated smell. Forty or fifty feet wide, it all seemed pretty huge after living in a spaceship. I don’t suppose it would be that imposing if you went there directly from a town or a city on Earth.
The murmur of voices was pretty loud before we got to the mess hall. It sounded like a cocktail party, though the only thing to drink was water, and you don’t dare spill a drop.
The mess hall was big enough for about two dozen people to eat at once, and now there were a hundred or so, sitting on the tables as well as the chairs, milling around saying hello. We twenty-six were the first new faces they’d seen in a year and a half—about one Martian year, one “are,” pronounced air-ee. I’d better start thinking that way.
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 multicellular life on the planet was presumably right here.
You could see our lander sitting at the end of a pair of mile-long plowed grooves. 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.
I saw Oz immediately and threaded my way over to him. We shook hands, then hugged. He was a little bit shorter than me, which was a surprise. He held me by both shoulders and looked at me with a bright smile, and then looked around the room. “It’s pretty strange, isn’t it? All these people.”
Seventy-five new faces after seeing the same two dozen for months. “They look like a bunch of Martians.”
He laughed. “Was the landing rough?”
“Pretty awful. But Paul seemed in control.”
“He was my pilot, too. Good old ‘Crash’ Collins.”
“ ‘Crash’?”
“Ask him about it someday.”
An Asian woman a little taller than Oz came over, and he put his arm around her waist. “Josie, this is Carmen.”
We shook hands. “I’ve seen your picture,” she said. Josie Tang, Oz’s lover. “Welcome to our humble planet.”
I tapped my foot on the metal plate. “Nice to have real gravity.”
“The same no matter where you go,” Oz said. “I’ll give you a tour after the formalities.”
When Paul and the other two came into the room, an older woman started tapping on a glass with a spoon. 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 sols”—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 modules are 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. This will be an interesting social experiment.”
“One you don’t quite approve of?” Dr. Jefferson said.
“You probably 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, the Corporation.”
“That’s right,” Solingen said. “This is an outpost, not a colony. They don’t have families on Moonbase or even Antarctica.”
Oz cleared his throat. “We were polled. Most of us were very much in favor.” And most of them did call it “the colony,” rather than Mars Base One.
The woman who had cautioned Solingen continued. “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.
(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.)
Solingen went on to talk about work and living schedules. For those of us in school, study schedules would continue as on the John Carter, and we’d be assigned light duties “appropriate to our abilities.” Probably fetch-and-carry or galley slave, as we called kitchen work on ship.
Then she introduced each new arrival, stating where they were from, what their specialties were, and lists of honors and awards, all from memory. It was an impressive performance. She even knew about us youngsters—Mike Manchester’s national (Canadian) spelling bee, Yuri’s solo with the St. Petersburg Orchestra, and my swimming medal, an extremely useful skill on this planet.
The way she looked at me left no doubt who it was who forbade Paul from being with me. I would try to stay out of her way.
People got together with friends or coworkers—almost everybodyhad been working along with one of the Martian teams en route—and moved toward the workstations and labs to talk. Oz and Josie took me and Card for a guided tour.
We’d already walked through the “hospital,” an aid station about three
meters wide by ten long. It was connected to the changing room by an automated air lock; if there was an accident with the main air lock, it would seal off the whole colony.
That was the standard size for most of the buildings, three by ten meters, but most of them were divided into smaller sections. The mess hall where we all met was about two-thirds that size, two hundred square meters for a hundred not-too-crowded people, the rest of the space a very compressed kitchen and pantry.
About half of the overall floor space was “cabins,” more like walk-in closets, where people slept. Most of them were two meters long by a meter wide, three meters high, with upper and lower bunks for two people who had better be compatible. The bunks folded up to the wall, and desks for working or reading folded down. Four of the cabins were a half meter longer, for seven-footers.
The walls were colorful, in sometimes odd combinations. Each unit, twelve to thirty-two people, voted on a weekly color scheme. The walls glowed a comforting warm beige or cool blue most places, but there were bright yellows and moody purples and a Halloween orange.
We walked down the main corridor, about a meter wide, past six rows of cabins. The last bunch of sixteen had temporary partitions and improvised bunks, where most of us newcomer Earthlings would sleep. In normal times, that would be the recreation area, so people had real motivation to set up the new living areas we’d brought.
Then there were three large work areas, which besides labs and computer stations contained separate rooms for administration, power regulation, and environmental control—water, air, and heat. Finally, there was an air lock leading to the biosciences laboratory, where there were strict controls. We tried to be careful not to contaminate the Martian environment, and conversely, if there were dormant alien microorganisms in the rock and soil specimens, we didn’t want to let even one of them into our air and water. The consensus was that it was unlikely Martian microbes could affect us, but who wants to put it to the test? The whole area was kept at a slightly lower air pressure than the rest of the colony, discouraging leaks.