Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

by Marsbound (v1. 0) [lit]

  I stepped out onto the balcony to get some non-air-conditioned air and was startled to see the Space Elevator, a ruler-straight line of red light that dwindled away to be swallowed by the darkness. Maybe the first two miles of fifty thousand. I hadn't seen it in the daylight.

  The stars and the Milky Way were brighter than we ever saw them at home. I could see two planets, but neither of them was Mars, which I knew didn't rise until morning. Dad had pointed it out to me on the way to the airport, which seemed like a long time ago. Mars was a lot dimmer than these two, and more yellow-orange than red. I guess “the Yellow Planet” didn't sound as dramatic as the red one.

  I went back down to the restaurant in time to get some ice cream along with a sticky sponge cake full of nuts and fruit. Nobody said anything about my absence. Card had probably been threatened.

  Dad treated me in his delicate girl-in-her-period way, which I definitely was not. I'd gotten a prescription for Delaze and wouldn't ovulate until after we got to Mars. The download for the Space Elevator had described the use of recyclable tampons in way too much detail. With luck, I'd never have to use them in zero-gee, on the John Carter. Vacuum sterilizes everything, I suppose, so it was silly to be squeamish about it. But you're allowed to be a little irrational about things that personal. I managed to push it out of my mind for long enough to finish dessert.

  Card and I tried TV after dinner, but everything was in Spanish except for CNN and an Australian all-news program. There was a Japanese Game Boy module, but he couldn't make it work, which didn't bother me and my book at all.

  The room had a little fridge with an interesting design. Every bottle and box was stuck in place with something like a magnet. If you plucked out a Coke or something, the price flashed in the upper right-hand corner of the TV screen, and a note said it had been added to your room bill.

  The fridge knew we were underage, and wouldn't let go of the liquor bottles. But we were evidently old enough for beer—a sign said the age was eighteen, but the fridge wasn't smart enough to tell whether it was serving me or my brother. So I had two beers, which helped me get to sleep, but Card stayed awake long enough to build a pyramid of six cans. I guess I could have been a responsible older sister and cut him off, but there wasn't going to be a lot of beer out on the Martian desert.

  * * * *

  5. Pizza hunt

  Our parents didn't say anything about the $52 added to our room bill for beer, but I suppose they took one look at Card and decided he had suffered enough. He'd told me he'd had beer “plenty of times” with his sag pals at school. Maybe it was the nonalcoholic variety. This was strong Dutch beer in big cans, and six had left a lasting effect. He was pale and quiet when we left the hotel and seemed to turn slightly green when we got aboard the boat, rocking in the choppy waves.

  They didn't put the Earth end of the Space Elevator on dry land, because it had to be moveable in any direction. Typhoons come through once or twice a century, and they need to get out of the way. The platform it sits on can move more than two hundred miles in twenty-four hours, far enough to dodge the worst part of a storm. Or so they say; it's never been put to the test.

  The ribbon cable that the carrier rides also has to move around in order to avoid trouble at the other end—dodging human-made space debris and the larger meteors, the ones big enough to track. (Small meteor holes are patched automatically by a little robot climber.)

  The platform was about forty miles offshore, and the long, thin ribbon the elevator rides wasn't usually visible except for the bright strobe lights that warned fliers away. At just the right angle, the sun's reflection could blaze like a razor line drawn in fire; I saw that twice in the hour and a half it took us to cover the distance.

  Paul Collins, the pilot, looked more handsome without the white war paint. He introduced himself to Card and my parents, proving that he could recognize passengers who weren't girls.

  Before we got to the Space Elevator platform itself, we skirted around a much larger thing, the “light farm,” a huge raft of solar power cells. They didn't get power directly from the Sun, but rather from an orbiting power station that turned sunlight into microwaves and beamed them down. Then it gets beamed right back up, in a way. The carrier's electric motors are powered by a big laser sitting on the platform; the laser's powered by the light farm. There's another light farm in the Ecuadorian mountains that beams power at the carrier when it's higher up.

  The platform's like an old-fashioned floating oil rig, the size of an office building. The fragile-looking ribbon that the carrier rides spears straight up from the middle of it. The laser and the carrier take up most of the space, with a few huts and storage buildings here and there. It looked bigger from down on the water than the aerial pictures we'd seen.

  We took an elevator to the Elevator. There was a floating dock moored to the platform. It was all very nautical feeling, ropes creaking as it moved with the waves, seagulls squawking, salt tang in the air.

  Our boat rose and fell with the dock, but of course the open-air elevator didn't. It was a big metal cage that seemed to move up and down and sideways in a sort of menacing way as we bobbed with the waves. If you were sure-footed, you could time it right and just step from the dock onto the elevator. Like most people, I played it safe and jumped aboard as the floor fell away.

  We all had identical little suitcases made of light titanium, with our ten kilograms of personal items. Twenty-two pounds didn't sound like very much, but we didn't have any of the stuff that you would normally pack for a trip, since we couldn't bring clothes or cosmetics. Three people had musical instruments too big to fit in the metal box.

  The elevator clanked and growled all the way up. We clattered to a stop and got out onto a metal floor that felt like sandpaper, I guess some stuff to keep you from slipping. There was a guardrail, but I had a stomach flip-flop at the thought of falling back down the way we'd come. A hundred feet? Hitting the water would knock you out, at the very least.

  Like we didn't have enough to worry about; let's worry about drowning.

  To the salt air add a smell of oily grease and ozone tang, like a garage where they work on electric cars—and pizza? I'd have to check that out.

  A guy in powder-blue coveralls, the uniform of the Space Elevator corporation, checked to make sure we were all there and there weren't any stowaways. We each picked up a fluffy towel and a folded stack of clothes. There was a sign reminding us that the clothes we were wearing would be donated to a local charity. Local? The Society for Naked Fish, I supposed.

  I'd just had a shower at the hotel, but no such thing as too clean if you're going without for a couple of weeks. Or five years, if you mean a real shower.

  The women's shower room only took six at a time, and I didn't particularly want to shower with Mom, so I left my stuff stacked by the wall and went off to explore, along with Card, who was looking a little more human.

  The climber wasn't open yet, which was okay; we'd be spending plenty of time in it. It was a big white cylinder, about twenty feet in diameter and twenty feet tall, rounded on the top. Not a vast amount of room for forty people. Above it was a robot tug, all ugly machine. It would pull us up a few hundred feet, before the laser took over. It also served as a repair robot, if there was something wrong with the ribbon we were riding on.

  "Big foogly laser,” Card marveled, and I suppose it was the biggest I'd ever seen, though truthfully I expected something more impressive, more futuristic. The beam it shot out was more than twenty feet in diameter, I knew, and of course it carried enough power to lift the heavy carrier up out of the Earth's gravity well. But it was only the size of a big army tank, and in fact it looked sort of military and menacing. I was more impressed by the big shimmering mirror that would bounce the laser beam up to us, to the photocells on the base of the carrier. Very foogly big mirror.

  Three other young people joined us, Davina and Elspeth Feldman, sisters from Tel Aviv, and Barry Westling from Orlando, just south of us. Elspe
th looked a little older than me; the others were between me and Card, I figured. Barry was a head taller than him, but a real string bean.

  Elspeth was kind of large—not fat, but “large boned,” whatever that really means. You couldn't help but note that most of us future Martians were on the small side, for obvious reasons. Someone has to pay for every pound that goes to Mars. Mother spelled out the inescapable math—every day, you need twelve calories per pound to stay the same weight: someone who weighs fifty pounds more than you has to pig down everything you eat plus one Big Mac every day. Over the six-month flight, that's eighty-five extra pounds of food, on top of the extra fifty pounds of person. So small people have a better chance in the lottery.

  (They call it a “lottery” to sound democratic, as if every family had an equal chance. If that were true, I wouldn't have lost a year of Saturdays to the cause.)

  Thinking of food made me ask whether anyone had found out where the pizza smell was coming from. No one had, so we embarked on a quest.

  The search led, unsurprisingly, to a shed with a machine that dispensed drinks and food, alongside a microwave in which someone had recently burned a slice of pizza. Elspeth produced a credit card and everyone but my brother tried a slice. He didn't miss much, but we were more after the idea of pizza than the actuality. We didn't know for sure that there wouldn't be any pizza on Mars, but it seemed likely.

  Barry and Card went off to play catch with a Frisbee while the rest of us sat in the shade. Neither Elspeth nor Davina was born in Israel; their family moved there after the war. Like ours, their parents are both scientists, their father a biologist and mother in nanotech, both of them involved in detoxifying the battlefield after Gehenna. Davina started to cry, describing what they'd had to do, had to see, and Elspeth and I held her until it passed.

  Maybe there wouldn't be pizza on Mars, but there wouldn't be that, either. What hate can do.

  * * * *

  6. Fears

  There was no privacy in the shower, and not much water—I mean, all you could see in any direction was water, but I guess the salt would froog up the plumbing. So you had to push a button for thirty seconds of lukewarm unsalted water, and then soap up, push the button again, and try to get the soap off in another thirty seconds. Then do it again for your hair, without conditioner. I was glad mine was short. Elspeth was going to have the frizzies for a long time.

  She has quite a dramatic figure, narrow waist and big in the hips and breasts. Mother describes me as “boyish,” which I think is motherspeak for “titless wonder.” Women built like Elspeth are always complaining about their boobs bumping into things. Things like boys, I suppose.

  I liked her, though. It could be a little awkward, the first thing you do when you meet somebody is cry together and then strip naked and jump in the shower, but Elspeth was funny and natural about the latter. In the desert kibbutz where she spent summers growing up, they didn't have individual showers, and the water was rationed almost as severely as here.

  Light blue used to be one of my favorite colors, but it does lose some of its charm when everybody in sight is wearing it. We left our “civilian” clothes in the donation box and put on Space Elevator coveralls and slippers. Then we went to the media center for lunch and orientation.

  Lunch was a white cardboard box containing a damp sandwich, a weird cookie, and an apple. A bottle of lukewarm water, or you could splurge a couple of bucks on a Coke or a beer out of the machine. I got a beer just to see Card's reaction. He pantomimed sticking a finger down his throat.

  The media center was one room with a shallow cube screen taking up one end of it. There were about fifty folding chairs, most of them occupied by powder-blue people. With everyone in uniform, it took me a minute to sort out Mother and Dad. Card and I joined them near the front.

  The lights dimmed and we saw a mercifully short history of space flight, with an unsurprising emphasis on how big and dangerous those early rockets had been. Lots of explosions, including the three space shuttle disasters that all but shut down the American space program.

  Then some diagrams showing how the Space Elevator works, pretty much a repeat of what we saw at the lottery-winner orientation in Denver a few months ago. Even without that, I wonder if anybody actually ever got this far without knowing that the Space Elevator was—surprise!—an elevator that goes into space.

  It was interesting enough, especially the stuff about how they put it up. They worked from the middle out both ways, or up and down, depending on your point of view: Starting at GEO, the spot that orbits the Earth in exactly one day, and so stays overhead in the same spot, they dropped stuff down to Earth and raised other stuff up into a higher orbit at the same time. That way the whole thing stayed in balance, like a seesaw stretching out both ways at the same time.

  We were headed for that other end, where the John Carter and the other Mars ship had been built and would launch from.

  They spent a little time talking about the dangers. Sort of like a regular elevator in that if the cable snaps, you lose. You just fall a lot farther before you go splat. (Well, it's not that simple—Earth elevators have failsafes, for one thing, and the space elevator wouldn't actually go splat unless we fell from a really low altitude. We'd burn up in the atmosphere if we started falling at less than 23,000 kilometers; above that, we'd go into orbit and could theoretically, eventually, be rescued. But if the cable snapped that high, on our way to where the John Carter is parked, we'd go flinging off into space. Then that theoretical rescue would really be just a theory. There aren't any spaceships yet that could take off and catch up with us in time.)

  There's a lot of dangerous radiation in space, but the carrier has a force field, an electromagnetic shield, for most of that. There are huge solar flares that would get past the shielding, but they're rare and give a ninety-one-hour warning. That's long enough to get back to Earth or GEO. The Mars ships and GEO have hidey-holes where everybody can crowd in to wait out the storm.

  I'd read about those dangers before we left home, as well as one they didn't mention: mechanical failure. If an elevator on Earth develops a problem, someone will come fix it. It's not likely to explode or fry you or expose you to vacuum. I guess they figured there was no reason to go over that at this late date.

  When we left home, a lot of my friends asked me if I was scared, and to most of them I said no, not really. They have most of the bugs worked out. It's carried hundreds of passengers to the Hilton space station, and dozens up to the far end, for Mars launch.

  But to my best friend, Carol, I admitted what I haven't said even to my family: I wake up terrified in the middle of the night. Every night.

  This feels like jumping off a cliff and hoping you'll learn how to fly.

  * * * *

  7. Canned meat

  We walked up a ramp, took a long last look at sea and sky and friendly Sun—it would not be our friend in space—and went inside.

  The carrier had a “new car” smell, which you can buy in an aerosol can. In case you're trying to sell a used car or a slightly used Space Elevator.

  There were two levels. The first level had twenty couches that were like old-fashioned La-Z-Boy chairs, plush black, with feet pointing out and heads toward the center. Each couch had a “window,” a high-def shallow cube, all of which were tuned to look like actual windows for the time being. So there was still sun and sea and sky if you were willing to be fooled.

  There was a little storage bin on the side of each couch, with a notebook and a couple of paper magazines. And that stack of barf bags.

  Three exercise machines, for rowing, stair stepping, and biking, were grouped together where the ladder led up to the second level.

  The woman who was our attendant, Dr. Porter, stood on the second rung of the ladder and talked into a lapel mic. “We have about sixty minutes till lift-off. Please find your area and be seated by then, strapped in, by one o'clock. That's 1300, for you scientists.

  "I'll be upstairs if anyone ha
s questions.” She scampered lightly up the ladder.

  I have a question, I didn't say. Could I just jump off and swim for it?

  My information packet said I was 21A. I found the seat and sat down, half reclining. Card was next to me in 20A; Mother and Dad were upstairs in the B section.

  Card took a vial out of his packet and looked at the five pills in it. “You nervous?” he said.

  "Yeah. Thought I'd save the pills for later, though.” They were doses of a sedative. The orientation show admitted that some people have trouble falling asleep at first. Can you imagine?

  "Prob'ly smart.” He looked pretty much like I felt.

  The control console for the window came up out of the armrest and clicked into place over your lap. On one side it had a keyboard and various command buttons, but you could rotate it around and it was like an airplane tray table with a fuzzy gecko surface.

  Card tapped away at the keyboard, which caused a ghostly message to cascade down the window in several languages: MONITOR LOCKED UNTIL AFTER LAUNCH. I touched one key on mine and got the same message, dim letters floating down in front of the fake seascape.

  "They're just trying to make us feel comfortable,” I said, but it was kind of disappointing. The window would normally be a clever illusion—you could play a game or read a book or whatever, but nobody could see what was on your monitor unless they were right in line with it. Sitting on your lap. From any other angle, it would look just like a window looking outside. It had something to do with polarization; the screen was actually showing two images, but you could only see one or the other.

  With an hour to kill, I wasn't going to just sit and look through a fake window. I joined Barry and Elspeth in trying out the exercise machines, which were mainly for those of us going on to Mars. The others were just tourists going to the Hilton; they weren't going to be in space long enough for zero-gee to turn their bones to dry sticks and their muscles to mush.

  Then we went upstairs and took a look at the zero-gee toilet. We'd sort of trained on it in Denver, in the Vomit Comet, the big ancient plane that gave us fifty seconds of zero-gee at a time—up and down, up and down, all day long. I was able to get my feet into the footholds and lower my butt into place, but that was it. I'd learn about the rest soon enough.