Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

We couldn’t go back to using the gravity-operated toilet. Didn’t want us to get used to it again, I suppose. When they fling us off to Mars, it will be zero gee again.

We spent a lot of time sitting around in small groups talking, some about Mars but mostly about who we were and where we came from.

Most of us were from the States, Canada, and Great Britain, because the lottery demographic was based on the amount of funding each country had put into the Mars Project. There were families from Russia and France. The flight following ours would have German, Australian, and Japanese families. A regular United Nations, except that everybody spoke English.

My mother talked to the French family in French, to stay in practice; I think some disapproved, as if it was a conspiracy. But they were fast friends by the time we got to the ship. The mother, Jac, was backup pilot as well as a chemical engineer. I didn’t have much to do with their boy, Auguste, a little younger than Card. His dad, Greg, was amusing, though. He’d brought a small guitar along, which he played softly, expertly.

The Russians kept to themselves but were easy enough to get along with. The boy, Yuri, was also a musician. He had a folding keyboard but evidently was shy about playing for others. He would put on earplugs and play for hours, from memory or improvising, or reading off the screen. Only a little younger than me, but not too social.

He did let me listen in on a bit of Rachmaninoff he was practicing, Rach 3—Piano Concerto no. 3—and he was incredibly nimble. (I studied piano for five years and quit as soon as Mother would let me. I’m an avid consumer of music but will never be a producer of it.)

Our doctor on the way to Mars would be Alphonzo Jefferson, who was also a scientist specializing in the immune system; his wife, Mary, was also a life scientist. Their daughter, Belle, was about ten, son, Oscar, maybe two years older.

The Manchester family were from Toronto, the parents both areologists. The kids, Michael and Susan, were ten-year-old twins I hadn’t gotten to know. I didn’t know Murray and Roberta Parienza well, either, Californians about our age (Murray the younger) whose parents came from Mexico, an astronomer and a chemist.

So our little UN among the younger generation was two Latins, a Russian, two African-Americans, two Israelis, and a Chinese-American, slightly outnumbering us plain white-bread North Americans.

We’d all be going to school via VR and e-mail during the six-month flight, though we started going on different days and, of course, would have class at different times, spread out over eleven time zones. If Yuri had a class at nine in the morning, that would be ten for Davina and Elspeth, eleven for Auguste, five in the afternoon for us Floridians, and eight at night for the Californians. It was going to make the social calendar a little complicated. As if there was anything to do.

Meanwhile, we could enjoy the extra elbow room we got from dumping off the nine tourists. I moved upstairs to sit next to Elspeth, which put Roberta on my right. Dr. Porter rolled her eyes at three young females in a row, and told us to keep the noise down, or she’d split us up. That wasn’t exactly fair, since the little kids were the real noisemakers, and besides, most of our parents were on the second level, too.

But you had to have some sympathy for her. The littlest ones were always testing her to see how far they could go before she applied the ultimate punishment: locked in the seat next to your parents with the VR turned off for X hours. She couldn’t hit them— some parents wouldn’t mind, but others would have a fit—and she couldn’t exactly make them go outside to play, though if she did that once, the others might calm down.

(It was no small trick to get a recalcitrant child back to its place while we were still in zero gee. They’d push off and fly away giggling while she stalked after them with her gecko slippers. Hard to corner somebody in a round room. The parents or other adults usually had to help.)

What finally worked was escalating punishment. Each time she had to strap a kid in, she added fifteen minutes’ VR deprivation to everyone’s next punishment, no exceptions. At ten, they were old enough to do the math, and started policing themselves—and behaving themselves, a small miracle.

We went a little faster on the second half, and it would’ve taken only four and a half days, except we had to stop again while the robot repaired a tear in the tape ahead.

I had a vague memory of watching the news when they started building the two Mars ships eleven years ago. They’d taken the fuel tanks from the old pre-Space Elevator cargo shuttles, cut them up, and rearranged the parts. The first one, the Carl Sagan , was assembled in Low Earth Orbit; the second up at GEO, where the Hilton is now. I guess the Elevator wasn’t available for the first. Anyhow, they both took a long crawl up here, spiraling slowly up with some sort of solar-power engine. The first one took off while they were still working on ours.

The Sagan had made two round-trips, and was on its third, in orbit around Mars now. Ours had only been once, but at least we knew that it worked.

Of course a spaceship doesn’t have to be streamlined to work in outer space, with no air to resist, but the fuel tanks these were built from had gone through the atmosphere, and so they looked kind of like a hokey rocket ship from an old twentieth movie, though with funny-looking arms sticking out on the left and right, with the knobs we’d be living in.

We could see the John Carter a couple of hours before we got there, at least as a highly magnified blob. Slowly it took shape, the stubby rocket ship with those two pods. Once we were on the way, it would start rotating, once each ten seconds.

The carrier slowed down for the last couple of minutes. Strapped in, we watched the spaceship draw closer and closer.

It wasn’t too impressive, only ninety feet long, unpainted except for the white front quarter, the streamlined lander. We were going in through the side of that, a crawl tunnel like we’d used for the Hilton, but with gravity.

The carrier came to a stop, and Dr. Porter and Paul put on space suits to go check things out. They came back in a few minutes and said things were fine, but a little cold. The air that came through the open air-lock door was wintry—colder than it ever gets at home. Paul said not to worry; we’d warm it up.

They opened the storage area under the exercise machines, and we all pitched in, carrying things over. There were some pretty heavy boxes, a lot of it food and water for the trip. “Starter” water, that would be recycled. I’d almost gotten resigned to the fact that a little bit of every drink I took had gone through my brother at least once.

You could see your breath. I had goose bumps, and my teeth started chattering. Barry and his parents were the same way, fellow Floridians. My parents and Card seemed to have some Eskimo blood.

A lot of the stuff we stored in the Mars lander, under Paul’s supervision. Some of it went into A or B, the pods where we’d be living.

That was sort of like the Hilton in miniature. There was a relatively large zero-gee room, a cylinder twenty-two feet long by twenty-seven feet wide. On opposite sides there were two four-foot holes, A and B, with ladders going down. No elevators.

It was all kind of topsy-turvy, with the temporary gravity we got from the Elevator cable’s spin. Up and down were normal in the little spaceship, the lander. Pretty much like an airplane, with seats and an aisle. But carrying stuff back into the zero-gee room, we walked along the wall. We carried stuff down a ladder into B and strapped it into place. Then we waited back in the Elevator while they turned the thing around 180 degrees. Then we could go down A’s ladder.