Robert Silverberg - Lost Race of Mars

“Us?” Mrs. Chambers asked. “Is there a maximum weight limit for passengers as well as their baggage?”

“No, but we have to know down to the ounce how much weight the ship is carrying at blast-off.”

So they were weighed. Their baggage was ticketed and carted away. Then they finished checking in. It was about twenty past nine.

At nine-thirty, a loudspeaker announcement was heard telling all passengers to report to Gate One for boarding. A Space Corps man was there to lead them out onto the field.

As they passed through the gate Jim and Sally could see the spaceship standing in the middle of a bare field. It stood upright, balanced on its tail, looking like a great gleaming fish as it glittered in the morning sunlight. At its base technicians bustled around, checking the ship as the countdown entered its final hours. Everything had to be just right before the ship would be allowed to leave.

The passengers rode an elevator in a tower next to the ship to reach the entrance, which was nearly twenty feet off the ground. Jim and Sally filed in slowly, following their parents.

Crewmen showed them to the quarters where they would spend the next few weeks. Then all the passengers were called together in a large cabin near the nose of the ship for a briefing session.

There were only twenty-eight passengers. Besides the Chambers family, there were twenty new colonists, two site seers going to Mars for a look around, and two reporters.

For the next hour the crewmen explained what life on the ship was like—how long the trip would take, where and what they would eat on board, and so on.

At eleven-thirty came the signal for all passengers to go to their quarters. The Chambers family settled down in their small but fairly comfortable cabin. At another order from the loudspeaker overhead, they lay down and fastened their safety belts. They were now securely strapped down and padded against the strain of blast-off.

The countdown was proceeding on schedule. Every five minutes a new announcement came:

“Twenty minutes to blast-off ... fifteen ... ten ... five ...”

After that, the count was by minutes, and when it got down to “One minute to blast-off” it continued by seconds. The calm voice counted down the final seconds. “Five... four... three... two... one... mark! ”

Jim felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach. He was flattened back against his seat. The whole cabin seemed to be shaking. He wrenched his head to the left so he could look out the porthole. There was nothing but darkness out there. They had already made the leap into space. The journey was under way.

Minutes after blast-off the ship cut off its engines. The sudden silence was strange after the steady roar of the rockets. The ship had now reached escape velocity and had broken free of the grasp of Earth’s gravity. For the rest of the trip it would simply coast through space,

“falling” in a wide curve toward the place where Mars would be three weeks from now.

The first few days of life in space were fascinating. Outside the ports was the marvelous darkness, broken by the bright, hard dots of light which were the stars. Earth was far behind already, a dwindling blue-green globe. The seas and continents could still be made out, though not very clearly. The moon loomed up, pockmarked with crater and enormous mountains. Then the moon, too, was left far behind. Only the immense glory of the Milky Way, spread out along the sky like a torrent of blazing jewels, was visible—and also the sun, too brilliant to be looked at directly, and the planets.

When Jim and Sally finally grew tired of staring at the stars and planets outside, they were allowed to explore the ship. With half a dozen other children they were taken on a tour of the rocket engine room at the rear, and of the control room in the nose. The spaceship carried a crew of seven, and they were all friendly and willing to answer questions, even the captain.

But by the fourth day out Jim and Sally had explored just about every inch of the ship. They had stared at the stars until their eyes tingled and ached. They had played games in the ship’s lounge until they were tired of games. The ship carried a big library of books and video tapes, and for a few more days Jim and Sally amused themselves with those. But even that grew boring after a while.

“Who would have believed it?” Jim asked. “Here we are, traveling in space, and we’re bored! ”

“It’s almost like being in a prison,” Sally said glumly.

It was. The ship was only two hundred feet long, and once you had explored it from end to end there was nothing else to see. Outside, of course, the was the beauty of space, but that never changed much from one hour to the next. Although the ship was moving Marsward at a terrific speed, it seemed as though it were standing still, just hanging against the backdrop of the skies. Jim wondered how the early space explorers had managed to stand the boredom of being cooped up for seven and eight months at a stretch.

Then one day there came a break in the routine. It was Midpoint Day—the day that the ship reached the point where the gravitational pulls of the Earth and Mars exactly balanced each other. Once the ship had passed this point, it would be held in Mars’ gravitational grip, with no chance whatever of dropping back to Earth. The initial speed of seven miles a second had guaranteed that Midpoint would be reached. If the ship had started out at a lower velocity, Earth would have been able to pull her back.

All passengers were ordered to their cabins while the ship made turnover. The engines were turned on briefly and the ship turned end over end, so its tail now faced Mars instead of Earth. Then the engines were cut off again and the ship resumed its drop through space toward the red planet.

A gong was sounded. “All passengers report to lounge,” came the announcement. The crew waited there, all of them wearing breathing suits. It was time for all greenhorns to be inducted into the Order of Pluto. The ship’s artificial gravity was shut off. As the passengers drifted about, floating in mid-air, the crewmen went among them. The crewmen had magnetic soles on their boots, and so did not float. One by one the floundering passengers were dragged down by their feet and tossed around the lounge. It took only the slightest push to send someone drifting halfway across the cabin.

When the horseplay was over the gravity was turned on again. The new members of the Order of Pluto were given a drink of Spaceman’s Punch, and a membership card that proved the had passed Midpoint and so had escaped from Earth’s gravitational field.

Jim and Sally were allowed to have only one cup each of the Spaceman’s Punch, but some of the grownups had a good deal, and began to get silly and frisky. The party went on for most of the afternoon. It was a welcome change from the daily monotony of the trip.

Mars grew ever closer. It now looked the way Earth had in the days just after blast-off. It was a big disk—dull red, not blue-green as Earth was—with greenish patches here and there, and whitecaps of snow at the poles. As the ship grew nearer, variations in color could be seen. Some areas were vivid scarlet, other yellowish-brown, still others copper-colored. The pale-green patches of vegetation stood out clearly against the various shades of red of the deserts.

From time to time two tiny shapes, barely visible, could be seen flitting rapidly across the face of the red planet. Jim and Sally knew what those were: Deimos and Phobos, the two miniature moons of Mars. Phobos was only ten miles in diameter, Deimos even smaller. The zoomed around Mars like two buzzing little insects, Phobos making two complete circuits every day, Deimos going around once every thirty hours.