Journey Between Worlds (18 page)

“I love this!” Alicia exclaimed as we started to drive again. She added wistfully, “I wish today could go on and on forever.”

“So do I,” Alex muttered, not taking his eyes from the bumpy terrain ahead of us.

“Do you like it Outside as much as all that?” I asked him.

“That wasn't what I was thinking of.”

“Oh,” I said unhappily. Endings were always hard, I thought. I shouldn't have come; I should have known it would only draw it out.

Alicia teased, “You better watch out, Mel. Alex would like it if we got stuck out here, and you missed the ship.”

“I wish it were as simple as that.” He threw me a grin. “You trust me, don't you, Mel?”

“Probably I shouldn't,” I said good-naturedly, “but I do.”

“I was right again, wasn't I? Being out here isn't so bad?”

I had to admit that it wasn't. It's funny—with some people, if they're always right, it only makes you resentful. You begin to wish they'd be wrong once in a while! But with Alex I never felt that way, except on rare occasions when we were both mad. He was right, but he wasn't trying to prove anything by it. The warm circle of his confidence spread out to include me, and it was a thing to depend on, not to resist. He made me feel confident, too.

Out there in the sunlight nothing seemed very frightening, and my nervousness was almost gone. From our vantage point the city was breathtakingly beautiful, rising out of the richly colored ground as it did, and there was a certain thrill in being afloat in the Martian wilderness that was more pleasant than I had expected. It would have been a pity not to have come; it's true enough that you miss a lot by setting limits for yourself.

Especially since whatever bounds you set don't really make you secure.

We were called back before the morning was half over. The controller wouldn't tell us anything over the radio; he made it sound like a routine order, as if he needed the car for a priority job or something. When Ground Control tells you to do a thing, you do it, so Alex turned back immediately.

“It's too bad, though,” he complained. “Just when you were starting to enjoy yourself.” Alicia was loudly indignant, though she had enough pictures. I sat silent; inexplicably, the dread of disaster was returning.

When we got into the airlock, we could see through its inner window that another man was waiting with the lock attendant; as soon as the pressure equalized and we got the doors open, he came forward. It was Paul.

I knew something was wrong just from his voice—it was his minister's voice, not that of the friend I'd laughed and joked with so often. He took my arm and led me into the crowded little Ground Control office. “Melinda,” Paul said, “I don't know any way to tell you this except directly. There's been an accident. . . .”

 

 

There are some things you can never be safe against, no matter how well you plan your life. Change is one of them; how young I was when I thought I could live forever at Maple Beach, and never change! Fear is another. And still another is grief.

The
Susan Constant
wasn't hit by a meteor; she was hit by the shuttle during an abortive rendezvous attempt. The people killed didn't die from lack of air. Their death was no worse than any death in a collision, and I've been assured that it was instantaneous. The accident wasn't even unique to space; what happened was just plain equipment malfunction, of the sort that has occurred countless times on Earth since humans first began to have equipment.

It could have been much, much worse. That first shuttle carried more supplies than passengers, and
Susie
herself had only a skeleton crew aboard. All in all, less than twenty people were killed out of the two hundred or more who might have been involved. That was little consolation to me, though, since one of those people was Dad.

There was absolutely nothing anybody could have done about it. As Janet once told me, rather too triumphantly I thought, “it was bound to happen sooner or later.” But not because space is a particularly dangerous place; only because life
is
dangerous. There have always been accidents, and there always will be. They are rarer now than they once were, but the possibility is always there, on Earth or on Mars or anywhere. Knowing that is part of living.

This philosophic view of it wasn't my first reaction, of course. It's something that Paul couldn't get across to me until a great deal later. That first day all I could think of was that once, the very last day on Mars, I'd denied my fears long enough to go Outside with Alex—and look what had happened! I'd been sure that something awful would occur if I went, and it had.

“Don't say that!” Alex told me insistently. “That's completely irrational. It's backward, even; your dad didn't change his shuttle reservation, you did. If you hadn't come Outside with us, you would have been killed, too.”

That was true enough, but it wasn't exactly a comforting thought.

To the Colonies, while the death of twenty people was a terrible tragedy, the loss of
Susie
and of the shuttle was a matter of even more serious concern. The full implications of this didn't hit me until the following day, when I had cried all I could for the time being, and the sedative Alex's mother had given me had finally forced me into more than twelve hours of exhausted sleep.

The previous day had not been my last one on Mars. My last day on Mars had retreated somewhere into the dim, unpredictable future. The
Susie
was not going to Earth and there were almost two hundred people like myself who would be competing for places on the sister ships that would be arriving at rarer-than-normal intervals. Yet compared with the problem of outbound shipping, our plight was not very significant. New Terra, already short of supplies, was going to be still shorter.

The Preston family was discussing this at the lunch table when I dragged myself out of bed to join them. (I'd stayed with them overnight; only when I woke up did I realize that I had been given Alicia's bed and that she had spread some blankets on the floor.) “It's hard to believe,” Ms. Preston was saying. “The
Susan Constant
was an institution. I guess we all expected she'd last as long as the city.”

“I can't bear it,” Alicia said tearfully. “Poor
Susie—
she was such a nice old ship, and it wasn't her fault! I never got to go aboard her. Now I'll never go to Earth in her—” Seeing me, she broke off. Alex scowled at his sister and got up to stand beside me.

Alicia apologized rapidly. “Mel, I'm sorry! I didn't think—that is, I didn't mean—”

I tried to smile. Because I really couldn't blame Alicia; I knew that if that sort of feeling hadn't been overshadowed by my sorrow for Dad, I might have grieved for
Susie,
too.

“I hope you don't think we're all being sentimental over a ship at a time like this,” Mr. Preston said to me. “Our chief concern is for those men and women, naturally. All the same, the destruction of the ships themselves is a real blow because of what it's going to mean here. You realize, don't you, Mel, that they can't be replaced very soon?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak calmly. A spaceship is just not a thing for which a spare can be kept in reserve. A liner like the
Susan Constant
costs billions, and can't be built overnight in any case. Even replacement of the shuttle would be a major proposition, and a shuttle couldn't travel at
Susie
's speed; if a new one started out from Earth right away it wouldn't arrive for more than a year, the current positions of the two planets being unfavorable. Doing without that shuttle was going to be hard on the Colonies, not only because loading and unloading of the remaining liners and freighters would be slowed down, but because exploration of Mars itself would have to be cut back.

Slowly, I took in the fact that I might be stuck on Mars for a long time. Most of the other ships were freighters that used slow, economical orbits or that carried only those passengers authorized by government priority. And though departing liners were normally less crowded than arriving ones, Mr. Preston warned me that there was talk of temporarily converting most of the cabin space on incoming ships to cargo space, to make up for the urgently needed supplies
Susie
would have carried. If that happened, the ship probably wouldn't be converted back for the return trips. For one thing, there wouldn't be the crew or facilities aboard. An extra passenger could be taken on in an emergency, of course, but I wasn't an emergency case; my personal feelings didn't constitute any sort of crisis, except to me.

Dad . . . and now Maple Beach, and Ross, beyond my reach. When the only thing in the world I wanted was to be back there. Gran. If only I could talk to Gran! Or walk on the beach, as I always did when there was an unhappy fact to be faced. At the beach house, the winter surf would be crashing on the sand below and the gulls screeching overhead, and the blue-papered west bedroom would be dark and empty, the lovely old quilt neatly folded across the foot of the mahogany bed. . . .

That afternoon, Alex and I walked along the West Mall away from the Etoile, between the too-neat beds of marigolds and Shasta daisies and other terrestrial flowers, looking up through the dome at the shut-out sky and talking. “Oh, Alex,” I said, “
why
? Why did it have to happen?”

“You don't expect me to give you an answer.”

“No,” I admitted. “I guess I don't.”

“Maybe Paul could make a try at it, I don't know.” He stopped, and turned to face me. “I do know this much, Melinda. It wasn't because you came to Mars. You mustn't ever think that it was.”

“But if we hadn't come, Dad wouldn't have been on that shuttle. Oh, I wish spaceships had never been invented!”

“That's like saying that if firearms hadn't been invented no one would ever have been shot. True, maybe, but meaningless, because who's to say what else would have happened?”

“I suppose you're right.”

“It's not easy to be objective about a thing like this,” he went on, “but all the same you've got to try. Ever since the conquest of space began there have been occasional disasters; yet we can't give up space travel because of that, any more than people abolished automobiles because of the traffic deaths, or stopped using coal because men were trapped in the mines sometimes.”

“I know.”

“Some people will say that we should, especially with all this debate over the Colonial appropriation going on right now. There are going to be some emotional appeals in the Terrestrial press. They won't be pleasant reading, Mel. You'll have to remember that if that kind of thinking's followed through to its logical conclusion, we might as well all live out our lives in our own homes without ever venturing out of the front door. And even there we wouldn't be safe; I seem to remember reading that one of the first men to orbit Earth was injured by a fall in his own bathtub. Lord, I know it's hard to accept! But if you're completely honest with yourself and think of your dad, you know that's what he'd tell you.”

I couldn't argue. That was exactly what Dad would say; I couldn't even imagine his saying anything else.

“Don't be sorry you came, Mel,” Alex pleaded. “Your dad wouldn't want you to be. I know he wouldn't. He told me once how happy he was to have had the chance to come, because seeing Mars had been a dream of his for such a long time. Don't be sorry he got the thing he wanted.”

“My mother wanted to come to Mars, too,” I said slowly. “She couldn't, because of her heart, but maybe if she'd come sooner—before it was so bad—she wouldn't have died from it at all. It's true that there's less heart disease here because of the low gravity, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. They'd be sending heart patients to hospitals here, or anyway to Luna City, if there were a way around the high-g liftoff.”

“In any case,” I told Alex, “I'm not sorry I came with Dad. If I hadn't, we would never have been together at all.” I began to cry again. “Alex, I was never close to him! Not close the way your family is. I wanted to be, but I just couldn't. He was more like a friend than a father.”

“Maybe that was better than the other way around. I've seen a lot of kids who weren't friends with their parents, who won't have the good memories of their dads that you have.” He pressed my hand. “I know that's not going to help. I—I don't know what to say, Mel.”

Reluctantly I drew my hand away and started walking again, swiftly this time. “Don't try,” I said as he caught up with me. “Don't try; there isn't anything anyone can say.”

 

 

The public memorial service for the people who had been killed was held in the City Auditorium, and was conducted by the leaders of New Terra's six major religions. The music was beautiful, the eulogies inspiring, and I sat through it dry-eyed. I didn't feel any emotion at all. It was unlike most Colonial funerals in that there was no need for a closed-circuit TV hookup to the cemetery, which is located Outside within a nearby circle of low hills. There's been a monument erected there since, though, with all the names.

I was much more affected by the private service that Paul held. What surprised me was the number of people there: not just the Preston family, but Dad's business associates and a lot of the church members. None of them could have felt any obligation, for they'd all been at the official memorial service. But they came. The Ethiopian couple, Mr. and Ms. Ortega—even Madame Lin, who I'd been sure was so cool to me. Many of them came up to me afterward and asked if there was anything they could do.