“It’s going to be a big step for the two of us. I wonder what we’re getting into.”
“I’m hoping we won’t have to leave before the term ends,” Ro said. “I don’t like incompletes.”
She stared at me from across the small table, and I wondered if I was going because of her, or Bernie, or to get away from school. Or maybe I just wanted to see far places and do something worth doing; maybe this was what I’d been waiting for all along, without knowing it. Maybe Earth Authority was right—the job had to be done, and the fact that it would inconvenience individuals just wasn’t as important; that’s what happens when you wait too long in solving problems.
“I’m glad we’re going together,” Ro said, touching my hand. “I was sure you’d go. You wouldn’t have been the person I know if you had refused. I know we can’t be one hundred percent sure about doing this—no one could be. But I know it’s right and we’re doing the best we know can be done. What else can anyone do?”
She was right. I pushed my doubts aside. The project sang to me; it would be both exciting and useful.
I was sure enough.
“But why should
you
go?” Dad asked.
The question made me angry. “Maybe some of us should accept responsibility for conditions created by those who came before us—especially when we can change things.” One, two, three.
“What?”
I thought he was going to laugh.
“Joe—you and I had
nothing
to do with this!”
I felt foolish, but I tried to answer him. “Don’t you see? Mercury has been one of the prices of having a Sunspace civilization. It didn’t have to be that way, but that’s what happened. We’ll have a worse future to be responsible for if we don’t act.” I waited.
He grew pale. “That’s a lot of propaganda. It’ll get done without you, Joe. You don’t have to be a hero.”
“I want to go,” I said sternly.
“Do you really?” he said after the delay.
“Look around you,” I shouted, “at all the metal products. The alloy in your tieclip probably started in a furnace on Mercury.”
“Oh, I see,” he replied, ignoring my point, “maybe your friends are going. Girlfriend?”
“I have to go, Dad,” I insisted, clenching my teeth.
“Think for yourself. You don’t have to do what they do.”
“I’m signing tomorrow. Look, Dad, I wasn’t sure about going back to school just yet anyway. It’s a good cause, and I’ll learn a lot.”
A reasonable tone didn’t work on him either. My words caught up with him, souring his expression further.
“It’s my decision anyway,” I added, “even if it’s wrong.” One, two, three.
“Eva will blame me,” he said sadly. “Don’t expect me to call and tell her.”
“Are you worried about me or yourself?” One, two, three.
“That’s not fair, Joe.”
“There was no answer when I called her.”
He was very nervous now. “It may take longer than they say.”
“Take it easy, Dad, I’ll be fine.”
“They’re only delivering bodies,” he muttered, “to fulfill the agreement.”
“But it still has to be done,” I insisted. “People are dying out there, and I want to do something about it!”
“What can you do?” he asked after the pause.
“I’ve learned a few things working.” One, two, three.
He gave me a hurt, hopeless look. “You don’t need my permission,” he said finally, “so why talk to me about it?”
I took a deep breath. “Okay—but you can wish me luck. I’m going for personal reasons and because I want to, because it has to be done. I can’t imagine not going. Can you understand that? There are just too many good reasons. I wouldn’t be the person I thought I was—a person who can make a difference—if I stayed.”
He sighed heavily and nodded. “Get ahold of your mother. And keep in touch.”
There was a defeated look in his eyes as he faded away.
At the Riverbend Courthouse I learned that I had to contract for a year plus travel time and unforeseen delays. I would not be able to quit.
A bored-looking judge took my handprint. The contract was with Earth Authority, which now governed all employment connected with the Mercury agreement. My contract carried a fine of a hundred thousand New Energy Dollars. Acceptable reasons for breaking it were all listed, the judge said, and there were no others. They came down to two things—illness or death.
“Could you pay the fine?” she asked coldly.
“No.”
“Since you cite work experience with Mr. Kristol, I’m assigning you to him. You must accept.”
“That’s fine with me.”
She gave me a stern look. “Name of anyone who could take your place in case of legitimate cancellation?”
I shook my head. “Don’t know anyone who’d want to.”
She thumbed her console. My ID card jumped out at me. “Memorize the numbers.”
As I left the chamber, I imagined the judge checking off another name on her quota list. Five thousand workers. Get them any way that’s legal. Press gangs in the year 2057, or the nearest thing, Dad would have said, exaggerating. But it didn’t matter, I told myself. It couldn’t.
Rosalie met me outside. “You look glum,” she said, taking my arm as we walked toward the bridge. Our four shadows seemed crowded on the pavement. “Think of what we’ll see, things we might never get a chance to know otherwise. A year isn’t anything.”
I felt a bit trapped, but I smiled. “Let’s go make love in zero-g.”
Across the Dark
The Mercury transports weren’t ready to go until the spring term ended, which gave Rosalie a chance to finish but meant more delay for the miners; fortunately, there had been no life-threatening quakes during the wait.
A group of us, mostly student volunteers, gathered at the North Polar Dock on the first Sunday in April. Bernie wanted me to travel with the students, even though officially I was with him and entitled to share more private quarters. We took only small toilet kits; everything else would be provided on the job, they said.
I hung in the zero-g waiting area, looking around to see if I knew anyone, wondering why Mom had never replied to the letter I had left in her message memory when I had not been able to reach her. Maybe she wasn’t checking her mail, or assumed I knew what I wanted and didn’t need advice. Her silence bothered me. I felt a bit lost and lonely. It was strange leaving Bernal, after having wanted to come here so much in the first place.
I turned, and Rosalie was at my side. She seemed strange and dreamy, maybe a bit unsure of herself.
“It’s too late now,” I said as we moved to board the shuttle that would take us out to the big ship. She was silent as we floated in through the hatch and found handholds in the main bay. This was just a big empty area some twenty feet across, where passengers or cargo were put for short hops from dock to ship or between habitats. L-5 factory workers used these to commute from the residential habitats, of which Bernal was the largest.
There was a porthole near my handgrip. I felt a gentle push and watched Bernal move away. It covered the whole view, but then the shuttle turned, and I saw the Mercury ship—five hundred feet of silver teardrop shining in the starry black, growing larger as we crept closer.
The
H. G. Wells
, Number 97 of Earth Authority’s Sunspace Fleet, was bigger than most interplanetary transports. Its pulsed fission-to-fusion nuclear engine was an older design, but still capable of pushing the vessel to velocities of well over 150,000 meters per second. That meant that the solar system from Mercury to Jupiter could be crossed in a hundred days. Mercury, Venus, Mars, never took longer than thirty days, depending on where they were in their orbits relative to Earth. Since Merk was still going to be this side of the sun during our travel time, our trip would take about ten days. Paths taken by this kind of ship were nearly straight lines that cut across the gravitational fields of the planets; its capacity for continuous boost put the ship outside the slowing effects of the solar system’s usual dynamics.
The teardrop covered the whole sky as we drifted into the forward lock. Air hissed as the hatches opened. Ro and I and the others pulled out, passing into the large vessel.
The
Wells
had twenty-five decks, each facing forward, so that during acceleration there would be from a half to one g for passengers; not real gravity, but a steady boost pushing us down on the decks.
We pulled aft through the core passage.
“University volunteers, deck four,” a woman’s voice instructed over the com.
I tugged on the rail and coasted into a brightly lit area. The deck itself was ahead of us, looking like a bulkhead wall with a hundred acceleration couches attached to it. Everyone was talking loudly as they hung on the handrails, which shot across the open space. Some of the faces looked familiar, but there was no one I knew. Most of the blue-green coveralls and boots were stiffly new, I noticed, unlike my own work uniform.
Someone jostled me from behind. “Excuse me,” I said, reaching for a bit of the rail. Rosalie was looking a bit uncomfortable for some reason.
“Joe!”
I turned and saw Linda. She was looking at me as if she had never seen me before.
“What is it?” I asked loudly.
She glanced at Ro before answering. “What happened to you? You haven’t been in school.”
“I needed some time off,” I said.
Kik and Jake floated over, looking friendly. I was almost glad to see them.
“So we’re all going,” Jake said, sounding as if he approved.
Linda was watching me carefully. Kik was smiling.
“Let’s settle in,” Ro said.
We all pulled over to the deck-wall.
“These two, Joe,” Ro said, pointing to the end of the fourth row. I floated over until my back was to the couch and strapped in. Rosalie took the end seat, and we brought them up to a sitting position, but it still seemed that I was sitting with my ass on the wall. The feeling started to disappear as the crowd strapped in and I began to see the surface behind me as a deck; after all, who was I to argue with a hundred people who were clearly sitting on it. When everything is upside down, it all looks normal, unless you’re the exception.
“Mind if I sit here?” Jake asked, taking the couch at my left.
“Go ahead,” I said, glancing down the row toward Linda. She and Kik had taken the other end seats.
“She wants to sit with her brother for a while,” Jake explained. “We’ll switch later.”
“Fine with me.” I glanced at Ro. She didn’t seem to care.
“Thanks.” Jake seemed a bit somber.
The com crackled. “Fasten up—we’ll be boosting in five minutes.” The woman’s voice sounded deeper.
Rosalie and I joined hands. Jake cleared his throat and shifted in his straps. I thought about the letters I had sent Morey. My going to Mercury would baffle him. I took a deep breath. We were all becoming different people.
I wished that he had answered the letters I had left in his terminal.
“Why didn’t they just build better living quarters on Mercury itself?” a girl’s voice asked behind me.
“They couldn’t be sure,” a male voice answered, “not with the way the planet was being torn up. Still is.”
“What do you mean?”
“They might have to mine where they build.”
The quakes, I thought, mention the damned quakes.
“Well, you know, people want what other people have. They see holos of Bernal, and it looks like paradise.”
“If you feel like that, then why are you going?” she asked.
Jake grimaced as I looked over at him.
“The Sun’s real big from Merk.”
“Keep your hands to yourself. You’re making fun of me.”
I tuned them out. A deep rumble grew in my guts.
“Here we go,” Jake said.
Acceleration began to press me into the couch. The forward bulkhead started to look like a ceiling. The rumble reached a set pitch and stayed there.
I looked at Ro. She smiled. We were on our way to make a world, almost from scratch, for those who didn’t have one. It was my dream come true, but from another direction. Sure, there would be plenty of big engineers to run the show, but that wouldn’t make it easy. I had learned enough working with Bernie to have some idea of what it would take, and that it would take longer than expected. I had seen too much of what went wrong on Bernal, day to day, to believe that world building and maintenance was all routine.
“You will be able to move around the ship as soon as we reach one g,” the woman’s voice announced.
The ship was moving across the dark toward the Sun—the open-hearth fusion furnace at the center of our solar system, source of radiant and gravitational energy for the planets, dozens of moons, and countless asteroids.
I saw Sunspace as a vast gravitational maelstrom of matter and light energy …
“That was probably the captain,” Ro said.
“What do you suppose she’s like?” I asked.
“Arrogant, proud,” Jake answered. “They’re above everything, and they love their ships. It’s necessary that they think that way, to keep on top of their jobs. You would too if you ran billions of horses of raw energy across the sky.”
“But they’re not exactly unique,” I said. “There’s also the national space navies.”
“Earth Authority’s Fleet people hate the military. Toy ships are not economically productive. Of course, the military does test a lot of new technology, but—”
“I wish there were a screen in here,” Ro said.
“What do you want from a refitted cargo ship?” Jake asked. “Notice the smell in here?”
Jake no longer seemed as strange to me as when I had first met him.
“What is it?”
“Probably goats,” he replied, “some cows. They shipped breeding stocks in here, for Mars most likely.”
A green light blinked on over the hatch in what was now the ceiling, according to my feet, signaling that acceleration was now stable. A spiral stair wound down from the deck above.
“Decks one to six for passengers,” the captain said. “Please don’t attempt to visit any others.”
I looked over and saw Linda talking intently to her brother.
The lounge and recreation deck, two down, was another large drum-shaped chamber, mostly empty except for storage closets around the edge. A few of the kids were already taking out games, readers, and folding tables when Ro and I arrived.