The Best of Joe Haldeman

by Joe W. Haldeman

  They look wonderful on the top of a tree.

  ~ * ~

  INTRODUCTION TO “THE MARS GIRL”

  When I wrote the first line of this story I had no idea that I was embarking on a six-year project. The story grew into a novel that grew into a trilogy (Marsbound, Starbound, and Earthbound), which I hope is the best long thing I’ve written.

  Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann had asked me to write a story for their anthology Escape from Earth, which had an attractive premise. Most sf readers my age (and somewhat older and younger) grew up on the Robert Heinlein “young adult” novels—though that particular classification didn’t exist at the time—like Rocket Jockey, Farmer in the Sky, and Podkayne of Mars. Gardner wanted long stories, novellas, written in that vein, though with a modern lack of restrictions on subject matter and expression.

  Getting paid to reinvent Heinlein was irresistible. For research I revisited Podkayne, I guess with the question in my mind, “How would I write this differently?” I didn’t know it would take till 2012 to completely answer the question.

  THE MARS GIRL

  1. GOODBYE, COOL WORLD

  T

  he space elevator is the only elevator in the world with barf bags. My brother Card pointed that out. He notices things like that; I noticed the bathroom. One bathroom, for forty-some people. Locked in an elevator for two weeks. It’s not as big as it looks in the advertisements.

  It wasn’t too bad, actually, once we started going up. Nothing like the old-fashioned way of getting into orbit, strapped to a million pounds of high explosive. We lost weight slowly during the week it took us to get to the Orbit Hilton, where we were weightless. We dropped off a dozen or so rich tourists there (and spent a couple of hours and no money, looking around) and then continued crawling up the Elevator for another week, to where our Mars ship the John Carter was parked, waiting.

  The newsies called it “Kids in Space,” hand me a barf bag. The Mars colony had like seventy-five people, aged from the early thirties to the late sixties, and they wanted to add some young people. They set up a lottery among scientists and engineers with children age nine and older, and my parents were among the nine couples chosen, so they dragged me (Carmen Dula) and Card along.

  Card thought it was wonderful, and I’ll admit I thought it was spec, too, at the time. So Card and I got to spend a year of Saturday mornings training to take the test—-just us; there was no test for parents. Adults make it or they don’t, depending on things like education. Our parents have enough education for any dozen normal people.

  These tests were basically to make us seem normal, or at least normal enough not to go detroit locked up in a sardine can with twenty-nine other people for six months.

  So here’s the billion-dollar question: Did any of the kids aboard pass the tests just because they actually were normal? Or did all of them also give up a year of Saturdays so they could learn how to hide their homicidal tendencies from the testers?

  And the trillion-dollar question is “What was I thinking?” We had to stay on Mars a minimum of five years. I would be twenty-one, having pissed away my precious teenage years on a rusty airless rock.

  So anyhow. Going aboard the good ship John Carter were seven boys and seven girls, along with their eighteen parents and one sort of attractive pilot, Paul Santos, not quite twice my age.

  I just turned sixteen but am starting college. Which I’ll attend by virtual reality and email. No wicked fraternity parties, no experimenting with drugs and sex and finding out how much beer you can hold before overflowing. Maybe this whole Mars thing was a ruse my parents made up to keep me off campus. My education was going to be so incomplete!

  The living area of the John Carter was huge, compared to the Elevator. We had separate areas for study and exercise and meals, and a sleeping floor away from the parents, as long as we behaved. I roomed with my best friends aboard, Elspeth and Kaimei, from Israel and California.

  We spent the first couple of hours strapped in, up in the lander on top of the ship. Most of the speed we needed for getting to Mars was “free”— when we left the high orbit at the end of the Space Elevator, we were like a stone thrown from an old-fashioned sling, or a bit of mud flung from a bicycle tire. Two weeks of relatively slow crawling built up into one big boost, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars.

  We started out strapped in because there were course corrections, all automatic. The ship studied our progress and then pointed in different directions and made small bursts of thrust, which Paul studied but didn’t correct. Then we unstrapped and floated back to the artificial gravity of the rotating living area.

  It would take six months to get to Mars, most of it schoolwork and exercising. I started class at the University of Maryland in the second week.

  I was not the most popular girl in my classes—I wasn’t in class at all, of course, except as a face in a cube. As we moved away from Earth and the time delay grew longer, it became impossible for me to respond in real time to what was going on. So if I had questions to ask, I had to time it so I was asking them at the beginning of class the next day.

  That’s a prescription for making yourself a tiresome know-it-all bitch. I had all day to think about the questions and look stuff up. So I was always thoughtful and relevant and a tiresome know-it-all bitch. Of course it didn’t help at all that I was younger than everybody else and a brave pioneer headed for another planet. The novelty of that wore off real fast.

  Card wasn’t having any such problems. But he already knew most of his classmates, some of them since grade school, and was more social anyhow. I’ve always been the youngest in my class, and the brain.

  It’s not as if anybody had forced me into the situation. I was bored as hell in grade school and middle school, and when I was given the option of testing out of a grade and skipping ahead, I did it, three times. Not a big problem when you’re eight and ten and twelve. It is a problem when you’re barely sixteen and everybody else is “college age,” at least by the calendar.

  I’m also a little behind them socially, or a lot behind. I had male friends but didn’t date much. Still a virgin, technically, and when I’m around older kids feel like I’m wearing a sign proclaiming that fact.

  That raised an interesting possibility. I never could see myself still a virgin at twenty-one. I might wind up being the first girl to lose it on Mars—or on any other planet at all. Maybe some day they’d put up a plaque: “In this storage room on such-and-such a date…”

  About a month out, we developed a little problem, that we hoped wouldn’t kill everybody more or less slowly. The ship started losing air, slowly but surely. We found out it was leaking out of the lander, but couldn’t find the leak. So we just closed the airlock between the lander and the living quarters.

  Paul was not happy about that, having to run things away from his pilot’s console, using a laptop. But it wasn’t like he had to steer around asteroids or anything.

  The six months actually went by pretty fast. You might think that being locked up in a space ship would drive people crazy, but in fact it seemed to drive them sane, even the youngest. The idea of “Spaceship Earth” is such an old cliche that Granddad makes a face at it. But being constantly aware that we were isolated, surrounded by space, did seem to make us more considerate of one another. So if Earth is just a bigger ship, why couldn’t they learn to be as virtuous as we are? Maybe they don’t choose their crew carefully enough.

  Anyhow, Mars became the brightest star, and then a little circle, and then a planet. We pumped air back into the lander and left our home there in orbit. Some people took pills as they strapped in. I wasn’t that smart.

  ~ * ~

  2. DOWN TO MARS

  Someday, 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 jump
ing off with an umbrella and a prayer. Fast and terrifying.

  We’d lived with the lander as part of our home for weeks, and 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 airlock, and said, “Let’s go.”

  We’d been warned, so we were bundled up against the sudden temperature drop when the airlock opened, and were not surprised that our ears popped painfully. But then we had to take our little metal suitcases and float through the airlock 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 toothrattling 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 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 super-cautious the first time they were actually exposed to the Martian near-vacuum. The airlock 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, staying out of the 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. I waited until Paul was on the other side of the airlock 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 and 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. Most people looked like big gray cartoons, the men with a little more detail than I wanted to see.

  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 the chest part was optimistically roomy.

  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 airlock with Paul, and he checked my oxygen tank 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 really 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 airlock, 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 four people waiting at the airlock 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 three 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 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 airlock held four 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.

  We stepped into the greenhouse, a dense couple of acres of grain and vegetables and dwarf fruit trees. A woman in shorts and a T-shirt motioned for us to take off our helmets.

  She introduced herself as Emily. “I keep track of the airlock 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.