Joe Haldeman - Marsbound

Barry relaxed a little at that, and turned his attention back to dinner.

Paul didn’t relax. He stood up slowly and took the vial of white pills from his pocket. He shook out two into his hand and headed for the galley, to pick up a squeeze bottle of water. He took the pills and went back to his seat.

Barry hadn’t seen that, his back to the galley. “You’re not eating,” he said.

“Yeah.” I took a small bite of the beef, but it was like chewing on cardboard. Hard to swallow. “You know, I’m not all that hungry. I’ll save it for later.” I pressed the plastic back down over the top and went over to the galley.

The refrigerator wouldn’t open—not keyed to my thumbprint— so I took the plate and a bottle of water back down to my seat.

Card was reading a magazine. “That food ?”

“Mine, el Morono. Wait your turn.” I slid it under my seat but kept the water bottle. The pilot had taken two pills; I took three.

“What, you scared?”

“Good time to take a nap.” I resisted telling him that if the Mars pilot was scared, I could be scared, too, thank you very much.

I pulled the light blanket over me. It fastened automatically on the other side, a kind of loose cocoon for zero gee.

I reached for the VR helmet, but it was locked, a little red light glowing. Making sure everyone could hear emergency announcements, I supposed. Like “The ribbon has broken; everybody take a deep breath and pray like hell.”

After about a minute, the pills were starting to drag my eyelids down, even though the anxiety, adrenaline, was trying to keep me awake. Finally, the pills won.

I had a nightmare, but it wasn’t about the Elevator. I was with Elspeth, and we were working alongside her parents in the after-math of Gehenna.

Whoever caused Gehenna had started it months before, by contaminating the water supplies of Tel Aviv and Hefa. People who had lived in those cities even for a few days became carriers of the azazel, an initially harmless nano-organism that migrated to the lungs, to wait. It wasn’t even organic, just a submicroscopic machine.

Then the second part came. One minute after the beginning of Passover, thirteen car bombs and suicide bombs exploded simultaneously in Tel Aviv and Hefa and their suburbs. They were relatively small explosions, with a lot of smoke. It was a windy day, and the vapor from the bombs spread quickly.

They called it a “coadjuvent” reaction, which sounds cozy. Dust from the bombs activated the azazels. People’s lungs stopped working. They could breathe in, but couldn’t breathe out.

Respirators could delay death, for the ones who were already in hospitals. Two million others were dead in minutes.

So in my dream, Elspeth and I went from one rigid rotting corpse to another, collecting identification tags. Behind us was heavy machinery, digging a trench.

Mass burial was against Jewish law, or custom. But the smell was unbearable.

I slept about ten hours, with no sense of rest. When I woke up it was right at midnight; the Elevator restarting hadn’t awakened me. The window said we’d gone 2250 miles and we were at 0.41 gee. You could see the whole Earth as a big globe. I took the pen out of my pocket and dropped it experimentally. It seemed to hesitate before falling, and then drifted down in no hurry.

It’s one thing to see that on the cube, but quite another to have it happening in your own world. We were in space, no doubt about it.

I unbuckled and pointed myself toward the john. Walking felt strange, as if I were full of helium or something. It was actually an odd combination of energy and light-headedness, not completely pleasant. Partly the gravity and partly the white pills, I supposed.

I went up the ladder with no effort, barely touching the rungs. You could learn to like this—though we knew what toll it eventually would take.

Probably the last time I’d sit on a regular toilet. I should ask the machine when we were due to hit a quarter gee and switch to the gruesome one. Go join the line just before. Or not. I’d be living with the sucking thing for months; one day early or late wouldn’t mean anything.

My parents were both zipped up, asleep. Several people were snoring; guess I’d have to get used to that.

There were four people I didn’t know talking quietly at the table. Downstairs, two people were playing chess while two others watched. I took the copy of Seventeen from my chair and walked over to the bike machine. Might as well get started on saving my bones.

The machine was set on a hill-climbing program, but I really didn’t want to be the first person aboard to work up a sweat. So I clicked it to EASY and pedaled along while reading the magazine.

So little of it was going to be useful or even meaningful for the next five years. Hot fashion tips! (“Get used to blue jumpsuits.”) Lose that winter flab! (“Don’t eat the space crap they put in front of you.”) How to communicate with your boyfriend! (“E-mail him from 250 million miles away.”)

I hadn’t really had a boyfriend since Sean, more than a year ago. Knowing that I was going to be in outer space and on Mars for six years put a damper on that.

It wasn’t that simple. The thing with Sean, the way he left, hurt me badly enough that the idea of leaving the planet was pretty attractive. No love life, none of that kind of pain.

Did that make me cold? I should have fallen helplessly in love with someone and pined away for him constantly, bursting into tears whenever I saw the Earth rise over the morning horizon. Or did I see that in a bad movie?

There weren’t any obviously great prospects aboard the carrier. They might start to look better as the years stretched on.

And the Gehenna dream was still with me. I did start to cry a little, and the tears just stayed in my eyes. Not enough gravity for them to roll down your cheek. After pedaling blind for a minute, I wiped my eyes on a nonabsorbent sleeve and cranked on. There was an article on Sal the Sal, a hot new cube star that everyone but me had heard of; I decided to read every word of that and then quit.

He was so sag beyond sag it was disgusting. Fascinating, too. Like if you can care little enough about everything, you automatically become famous. You ask him for an autograph, and he pulls out a rubber stamp, and everybody just comes because it’s so sag. Forgive me for not joining in. I bet Card knows his birth date and favorite color.

Pedaling through all that responsible journalism did put me on the verge of sweating, so I quit and went back to my seat. Card had put aside the helmet and was doing a word puzzle.

“Card,” I asked, “what’s Sal the Sal’s favorite color?”

He didn’t even look up. “Everybody knows it’s black. Makes him look 190 pounds instead of 200.”

Fair enough. I handed him the magazine. “Article on him if you want to read it.”

He grunted thanks. “Five letter word meaning ‘courage’? Second letter P, last letter K?”

I thought for a couple of seconds. “Spunk.”

He frowned. “You sure?”

“It’s old-fashioned.” Made me think of the pilot, who seemed to have “spunk,” Space Force and all, but was scared by an Elevator incident.

I sat down and buckled in and got scared all over again myself. He had a point, after all. Accidents could happen on the way to Mars, but nothing that would send us hurtling to a flaming death in Earth’s atmosphere.

Don’t be a drama queen, Dad would say. But the idea of dying that way made my eyes feel hot and dry.

The fear faded as we fell into routine, climbing up toward the Hilton midpoint. We grew imperceptibly lighter every hour, obviously so day by day. By the sixth day, we’d lost 90 percent of our gravity. You could go upstairs without touching the ladder, or cross the room with a single step. There were a lot of collisions, getting used to that.