Damon Knight - Orbit 19

A klaxon announced five minutes until blast, and at one minute a taped voice began counting down. The return of weight, unlike that provided briefly by the vacuum boat, was instantaneous and continued, a jerk that never tapered off, so that Kalkas could not for a moment repress the emotional certainty that the longrunner was plunging out of control. In a magnetic bottle a hundred and fifty meters astern the fusion bomb had been detonated that would explode throughout most of the next three weeks. The traveler, committed now to his farthest travel, felt at once blank-minded and exuberant, caught up utterly in the wonderful fact of departure.

For twenty minutes or so, while the possibility was greatest that the blast might have to be canceled and rezapped, Kalkas remained on his couch, given up to wandering thoughts of where he had been and where he was going. Once he had been to the Eagle’s Pylon in Tranquilitatis; he guessed, as he read the names and dates etched into the anodized metal, that none of those men had expected to die without seeing a second series of exploratory footprints scuffed in the ancient dust. Once he had been to Pasadena; there the administrative engineer, speaking in the tones of a man who likes his job and wants to continue doing it for a long time, told him that there were enough sulfates in the local ecosystem to keep the cracking plant pouring out water and free oxygen for fifty or sixty years, provided the power were not cut off. Never once had Kalkas been to Boilerplate, the first colony settled exclusively by Spaceborn, but now he was on his way to the Blushing Tunnels, the first colony in whose establishment the Conservancy had taken no part. The range of his travels was implausible. As a young person newly certified by the Canea Institute, he might have joined one of the terrestrial Ministries with fair prospects of becoming sometime a Clerk, a Minister, an appointed Delegate. He had never explained to himself nor had anyone, even Macky, ever asked him why, after a week’s hiking on the fringe of the Rhone Barrens, he had applied for a posting to Space Affairs. Perhaps in another time he would have become an agnostic monk.

After the same voice that had counted down announced the security of the blast, Kalkas released himself from his couch and looked for the stalls; the embarrassingly ingenious apparatus built into the couch, since it had to be emptied by hand, was to be used only when one was strapped down for hours or while weightless. The stalls, meant to be used only under acceleration, were little different from those in any earthbound aircraft. They were both occupied when Kalkas found them.

Within a few minutes a man emerged from one. He looked at Kalkas’ clothes and said, “You must be the Earthborn.” They chatted briefly, and Kalkas, learning that the other traveler came from Mars, agreed to join him for coffee in the common room.

Apparently everyone aboard but the duty crew had foregathered in the semicircular volume a short way around the deck from the supercargo. Twenty people were sitting or standing about, most sipping from mugs or from tall glasses filled with the garish waters that passed for soft drinks. Kalkas presumed that the longrunners still maintained the custom of limiting alcohol to dinnertime.

The Marsman, having gotten coffee for Kalkas and himself, had taken a table near the serving station at the middle of the inner curve. The chatter of conversation did not stop as Kalkas moved to join him, but it did stammer and change pitch for a moment, as it would were a white person to enter a chewing room in Cape Town. Kalkas nodded, pleasantly and casually, to those who turned to look at him, receiving “hi’s” and “harya’s” in turn.

“You show up like flygrass in Noachis,” said the Marsman. “I’m Ed Smith, man Kalkas.”

“Your comrade, man Smith. I find the attention mostly agreeable; it’s difficult, you know, for an individual to be noticed on Earth.”

“The teeming millions, huh? Be rum if we could trade you space for population.”

“It must be one of Finagle’s Laws that the most attractive barters are the ones that cannot be made. You may recall the negotiations about the longrunners just before the Retirement? Everyone involved knew that Trojan Port was the logical choice to hold most, if not all of them, but for one factor: they couldn’t possibly staff them with their own people.”

“Real hard. I don’t know much about it; I was still in studies then.”

“Your field?”

“Exobiology. I’m going to Blushing to do a project on the squirms with Rosenbaum’s team. See if we can find out how they eat X-rays.”

“I’m fascinated. Tell me more.” Kalkas was disappointed. Neither a physicist nor an administrator, Smith probably did not even know Ferenc Troyant, save by name, much less work with him, and so could scarcely provide Kalkas with pertinent information. Kalkas began to give more attention to the other passengers. Marsfolk, no less than Earthfolk, must move more selfconsciously under Lunar acceleration than do those who were born to it. But his observations were made superfluous when Nadya Strode came to the table. She carried a glass full of mauve liquid that Kalkas guessed was meant to imitate grape juice, and a crescent of it stained her upper lip. Seating herself, she asked whether they had realized that they were the only non-Moonfolk aboard.

Kalkas smiled. “Of course: You see how we gravitated toward each other.”

Smith only looked blank, but, surprising Kalkas, Strode grinned and replied, “Light-footed, light-witted.”

“Light-hearted, too, then,” Kalkas added, but that turned out to be an idiom no longer current among the Spaceborn. He had to explain that it named an attitude, not a physiological condition. Ed Smith said that it sounded to him like a way of giving irresponsibility a biophysical excuse.

“Man Kalkas,” asked Nadya Strode, “would it be fair to say that the Earthborn know more about irresponsibility than anyone else?”

“It would be fair—if you added that we have also learned more about responsibility than anyone else.”

“I don’t want you to read this personal,” said Smith, “but you had to learn. You didn’t have an option.”

Having resigned hope of learning much about Martian conditions in general or the Troyants in particular, Kalkas had begun to wonder if he would have no better way to occupy his time in transfer than reading or playing bridge. Now he was certain that he had found a more engaging diversion. Besides the twelve other men among the little crowd in the common room, he could assume two more among the duty crew. Allowing for instances of indifference or distaste and assuming that Strode would, indeed, be in the game, he could expect that she would chum at least six or seven during the transfer, some repeatedly. Kalkas, unlike many Earthborn, had never been fond of competitive venery, but Smith was so model a Marsman that outplaying him at anything would be like old times in Libya Dome.

“ ‘Option’ may be the wrong word,” he told Smith, “if we identify the growth of the Conservancy with our learning process. Some of the institutions that now seem to serve us best, grew up almost accidentally. And no one can certainly predict that the choices we have made and must continually make will prove correct. We may fail in the end.”

“But no one would choose failure,” Smith objected. “Success is the survival factor. You had to try what you could.”

Kalkas practiced a wry smile. “Man Smith, I believe you wish to deny us credit for whatever tentative success we have enjoyed.”

Nadya Strode interrupted: “Man Kalkas, are all Earthfolk ... I can’t think of the word.” She scowled, not, as Kalkas would have, with embarrassment but with simple uncertainty.