Podkayne of Mars

Table of Contents

 

 

I went back to my room and closed the door and thought about it. The room was still not made up and still cluttered with dirty dishes. The clumsy, two-decker, roll-around table that had fetched my breakfast was still by my bed, looking like a plundered city.

I took everything off the lower shelf, stowed it here and there in my bath, covered the stuff on top of the table with the extra cloth used to shield the tender eyes of cash customers from the sight of dirty dishes.

Then I grabbed the house phone and told them I wanted my breakfast dishes cleared away immediately.

I’m not very big. I mean you can fit forty-nine mass kilos only one hundred fifty-seven centimeters long into a fairly small space if you scrunch a little. That lower shelf was hard but not too cramped.

Somebody wheeled me off the lift many levels down and shoved me into a corner. I waited a few moments, then crawled out. Two minutes later I was in a taxi . . .

ASSIGNMENT IN ETERNITY
THE BEST OF ROBERT HEINLEIN
BETWEEN PLANETS
THE CAT WHO WALKS
THROUGH WALLS
CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY
THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW
DESTINATION MOON
THE DOOR INTO SUMMER
DOUBLE STAR
EXPANDED UNIVERSE: MORE
WORLDS OF ROBERT A.
HEINLEIN
FARMER IN THE SKY
FARNHAM’S FREEHOLD
FRIDAY
GLORY ROAD
THE GREEN HILLS OF EARTH
HAVE SPACE SUIT—WILL TRAVEL
I WILL FEAR NO EVIL
JOB: A COMEDY OF JUSTICE
THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON
THE MENACE FROM EARTH
METHUSELAH’S CHILDREN
THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS
THE NOTEBOOKS OF LAZARUS
LONG
THE NUMBER OF THE BEAST
ORPHANS OF THE SKY
THE PAST THROUGH
TOMORROW: FUTURE
HISTORY STORIES
PODKAYNE OF MARS
THE PUPPET MASTERS
RED PLANET
REVOLT IN 2100
ROCKET SHIP GALILEO
THE ROLLING STONES
SIXTH COLUMN
SPACE CADET
THE STAR BEAST
STARMAN JONES
STARSHIP TROOPERS
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
THREE BY HEINLEIN
TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE
TIME FOR THE STARS
TOMORROW THE STARS
(ED.)
TO SAIL BEYOND THE SUNSET
TRAMP ROYALE
TUNNEL IN THE SKY
THE UNPLEASANT PROFESSION
OF JONATHAN HOAG
WALDO & MAGIC, INC.
THE WORLDS OF ROBERT A.
HEINLEIN

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

PODKAYNE OF MARS
Published by arrangement with The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust.

Copyright © 1963 by Robert A. Heinlein, 1991 by Virginia Heinlein, 2003 by The Robert A. & Virginia Heinlein Prize Trust.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. ACE and the “A” design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

PRINTING HISTORY
G. P. Putnam’s Sons edition / 1963
Berkley Medallion edition / January 1970
Ace mass-market edition / May 1987
Ace digest edition / July 2005
Ace trade paperback edition / January 2010

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-17136-3

 

For Gale and Astrid

ONE

All my life I’ve wanted to go to Earth. Not to live, of
course—just to see it. As everybody knows, Terra is a wonderful place to visit but not to live. Not truly suited to human habitation.

Personally, I’m not convinced that the human race originated on Earth. I mean to say, how much reliance should you place on the evidence of a few pounds of old bones plus the opinions of anthropologists who usually contradict each other anyhow when what you are being asked to swallow so obviously flies in the face of all common sense?

Think it through—The surface acceleration of Terra is clearly too great for the human structure; it is known to result in flat feet and hernias and heart trouble. The incident solar radiation on Terra will knock down dead an unprotected human in an amazingly short time—and do you know of any other organism which has to be artificially protected from what is alleged to be its own natural environment in order to stay alive? As to Terran ecology—

Never mind. We humans just
couldn’t
have originated on Earth. Nor (I admit) on Mars, for that matter—although Mars is certainly as near ideal as you can find in this planetary system today. Possibly the Missing Planet was our first home—even though I think of Mars as “home” and will always want to return to it no matter how far I travel in later years . . . and I intend to travel a long,
long
way.

But I do want to visit Earth as a starter, not only to see how in the world eight billion people manage to live almost sitting in each other’s laps (less than half of the land area of Terra is even marginally habitable) but mostly to see oceans . . . from a safe distance. Oceans are not only fantastically unlikely but to me the very thought of them is terrifying. All that unimaginable amount of water, unconfined. And so deep that if you fell into it, it would be over your head. Incredible!

But now we are going there!

Perhaps I should introduce us. The Fries Family, I mean. Myself: Podkayne Fries—“Poddy” to my friends and we might as well start off being friendly. Adolescent female: I’m eight plus a few months, at a point in my development described by my Uncle Tom as “frying size and just short of husband high”—a fair-enough description since a female citizen of Mars may contract plenary marriage without guardian’s waiver on her ninth birthday, and I stand 157 centimeters tall in my bare feet and mass 49 kilograms. “Five feet two and eyes of blue” my daddy calls me, but he is a historian and romantic. But I am not romantic and would not consider even a limited marriage on my ninth birthday; I have other plans.

Not that I am opposed to marriage in due time, nor do I expect to have any trouble snagging the male of my choice. In these memoirs I shall be frank rather than modest because they will not be published until I am old and famous, and I will certainly revise them before then. In the meantime I am taking the precaution of writing English in Martian Oldscript—a combination which I’m sure Daddy could puzzle out, only he wouldn’t do such a thing unless I invited him to. Daddy is a dear and does not snoopervise me. My brother Clark would pry, but he regards English as a dead language and would never bother his head with Oldscript anyhow.

Perhaps you have seen a book titled:
Eleven Years Old: The Pre-Adolescent Adjustment Crisis in the Male.
I read it, hoping that it would help me to cope with my brother. Clark is just six, but the “Eleven Years” referred to in that title are Terran years because it was written on Earth. If you will apply the conversion factor of 1.8808 to attain real years, you will see that my brother is exactly eleven of those undersized Earth years old.

That book did not help me much. It talks about “cushioning the transition into the social group”—but there is no present indication that Clark ever intends to join the human race. He is more likely to devise a way to blow up the universe just to hear the bang. Since I am responsible for him much of the time and since he has an I.Q. of 160 while mine is only 145, you can readily see that I need all the advantage that greater age and maturity can give me. At present my standing rule with him is: Keep your guard up and
never
offer hostages.

Back to me—I’m colonial mongrel in ancestry, but the Swedish part is dominant in my looks, with Polynesian and Asiatic fractions adding no more than a not-unpleasing exotic flavor. My legs are long for my height, my waist is 48 centimeters and my chest is 90—not all of which is rib cage, I assure you, even though we old colonial families all run to hypertrophied lung development; some of it is burgeoning secondary sex characteristic. Besides that, my hair is pale blond and wavy and I’m pretty. Not beautiful—Praxiteles would not have given me a second look—but real beauty is likely to scare a man off, or else make him quite unmanageable, whereas prettiness, properly handled, is an asset.

Up till a couple of years ago I used to regret not being male (in view of my ambitions), but I at last realized how silly I was being; one might as well wish for wings. As Mother says: “One works with available materials” . . . and I found that the materials available were adequate. In fact I found that I
like
being female; my hormone balance is okay and I’m quite well adjusted to the world and vice versa. I’m smart enough not unnecessarily to show that I am smart; I’ve got a long upper lip and a short nose, and when I wrinkle my nose and look baffled, a man is usually only too glad to help me, especially if he is about twice my age. There are more ways of computing a ballistic than by counting it on your fingers.

That’s me: Poddy Fries, free citizen of Mars, female. Future pilot and someday commander of deep-space exploration parties. Watch for me in the news.

Mother is twice as good-looking as I am and much taller than I ever will be; she looks like a Valkyrie about to gallop off into the sky. She holds a system-wide license as a Master Engineer, Heavy Construction, Surface or Free Fall, and is entitled to wear both the Hoover Medal with cluster and the Christiana Order, Knight Commander, for bossing the rebuilding of Deimos and Phobos. But she’s more than just the traditional hairy engineer; she has a social presence which she can switch from warmly charming to frostily intimidating at will, she holds honorary degrees galore, and she publishes popular little gems such as “Design Criteria with Respect to the Effects of Radiation on the Bonding of Pressure-Loaded Sandwich Structures.”

It is because Mother is often away from home for professional reasons that I am, from time to time, the reluctant custodian of my younger brother. Still, I suppose it is good practice, for how can I ever expect to command my own ship if I can’t tame a six-year-old savage? Mother says that a boss who is forced to part a man’s hair with a wrench has failed at some point, so I try to control our junior nihilist without resorting to force. Besides, using force on Clark is very chancy; he masses as much as I do and he fights dirty.