Journey Between Worlds (20 page)

“For Pete's sake, what's the matter?” I called to him.

“Mel, come in here!” he shouted at me.

I lifted Charlene into her crib and went back to the living room. Alex scowled at me. “Mel, have you read this thing?”

“What thing?” I asked innocently, though I had a pretty good idea. I hadn't known what issue it would be in, or even if they would publish it; privately, I had hoped they wouldn't.

“You know very well ‘what thing.' Did you see this before it was sent, Mel?”

“Well, Janet did say something—”

“Did you see it?”

“Yes,” I admitted. “I saw it. But I didn't read it through very carefully.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” he demanded angrily, “that you knew that a thing like this had been written, and you did nothing to stop it?”

“There wasn't anything I could do about it, Alex,” I protested. “It was Janet's idea; she wrote it, and she sent it in. It didn't have anything to do with me at all.”

“She's your roommate, isn't she? You could have talked her out of it. You could have—” Suddenly he broke off, staring at me as if I were a stranger. “Or do you agree with Janet?” he asked slowly. “Does this represent your opinion, too?”

“Not exactly. Oh, Alex, you know I don't look at everything just the way you do. I wouldn't express myself the way Janet did—”

“I hope not!”

“But she is entitled to her opinion, after all.”

“You haven't answered my question.”

I took the computer from his hands and read the letter through, line by line. It seemed worse than it had the night I'd first seen it, somehow. Then I had been sleepy, but now I was wide awake. Phrases like “no possible justification,” “duped into tossing away their lives,” and “persistence of human folly” jumped out at me in a way that they hadn't before. Finally I told him, “I don't go along with most of Janet's conclusions. But some of these things are facts that can't be denied. A little exaggerated, maybe, but—well, it's just how she interprets them.”

“Distorts them, you mean. Mel, don't you realize that you or I could sit down and create an equally bad case for anything—the voyage of Columbus, the Plymouth colony, the first trip to the moon, or anything—just by playing around with half truths and emotionally charged words that way?”

“Maybe so. But Janet's got the right to free speech, the same as anyone else has.”

“Legally, yes,” he agreed. “But this isn't honest, reasoned dissent, Mel. It's a very skillful job, one that uses every trick in the book to arouse readers on an emotional level and confuse them with facts that have no relation to the issue. Not subtle enough for some purposes, maybe. She overplays it. But for the average voter it should do quite nicely, I think. Do you want to see a replacement for
Susie
built, or don't you?”

“Do you really think a thing like this could make a difference?” I asked. Somehow I hadn't thought of Janet's letter as having any particular consequences. And actually I don't think Janet did, either; she was just resentful because she hadn't wanted to come to Mars, and that colored her thinking.

“If you mean do I think one letter will swing the balance, probably not,” he admitted. “There will be plenty of others to counter it; I may write one myself. But public opinion's not a thing to play games with, Mel. Stop and think about how many people read
Interplanetary Observer,
people who don't know anything about the Colonies at all.”

Janet had signed herself as “Dr. J. Crane,” I noticed. Technically she was entitled to; she did have a Ph.D. in biology. But to some people those two little letters before her name would make her an authority.

Alex pulled me around, making me look straight at him. “You've heard us talking about how critical this whole business of the new appropriation for the Colonies is ever since you arrived here—since back on the
Susie,
even,” he said. “You heard your own dad talk about it, and you knew what was in the report he was sending back. Yet you didn't even try to stop Janet. You didn't take any stand against this at all.”

“I—I just didn't think of it that way, I guess.”

He let go of my shoulders. “I'll never figure you out, Mel,” he sighed. “I know you don't think much of Mars as a place to live for yourself—no one expects you to. Not everyone's a pioneer at heart. But I thought by now you understood how the rest of us feel well enough to grant us the chance to have a go at it.”

“But I do!”

“Did you tell Janet that? Did you make any effort to get her to see both sides?” Grabbing his computer back, he began to scan the letter. “Listen to this: ‘a parody of living'—is that really what we've got here? ‘Helpless pawns'—anywhere but in this magazine, that would be funny! ‘Material benefits that make living worthwhile'—is that what makes it worthwhile for
you
?”

I thought back. New Terran Christmas, a parody? People like Kathy, helpless pawns?

Janet began with an insinuation that spending time on Mars would in itself “qualify” not only herself, but anyone, to make these assertions. I had spent as much time in the Colonies as she had. Were they also my assertions, by default?

“Mel,” Alex insisted. “How could you possibly read a statement like ‘a whole shipload of people died horribly, for nothing' without challenging it? Is that—”

“Oh, please don't!”

“Is that your reaction to being hurt—to strike out, without caring what you strike at?”

“That's not fair!”

“If it's what you really believe, I feel sorry for you. Or are you too wrapped up in your own little dream world to believe anything at all?”

I turned my back on him. “I don't know, Alex,” I said dully. “I don't know what I believe anymore.”

“Are you afraid to find out?”

Maybe so,
I thought.
Oh, Alex—why do we always argue about Janet when it's not about Janet at all? And why do you always have to be right?
But what I said was, “It isn't really any of your business whether I am or not.”

“Perhaps it isn't,” Alex said. “But Mel, I've got to think either that you do agree underneath with the substance of this, or that you don't agree and yet wouldn't speak out.” Still angry, but with sadness, too, he added, “Either way, I guess maybe we don't have as much in common as I thought we did.”

 

 

That night I dreamed that I was in a boat, back at Maple Beach, only it was a peculiarly shaped boat and there were no oars. Also there was a gaping hole in the bottom. By all rights I should have been drowned, but you know how dreams are; the hole didn't seem to matter, except that it scared me. The tide, surprisingly, was going in and out at the same time—don't ask me how it looked, because I can't describe it, I just
knew
it was. Far away in the distance I could see the shore, and the house, and the big old fir tree wrapped in fog, and wisps of smoke rising from the stone chimney. But out to sea was a tall-masted ship, and I could hear more voices coming from there than from the land; but they were all receding.

In the morning a letter from Ross came. With shaky fingers I downloaded it, hoping that my suspicions would prove to be silly—but knowing better. Ross said nothing direct, but his words left no possible doubt, either. I don't know whether he thought I was idiotically innocent or so “sophisticated” that I wouldn't object. I'm not sure which would be worse.

“Darling,” the message said. “It's all arranged. Within a few days you'll get official notification that you've been given priority passage on the fast freighter
Ares,
which is due into Mars about three weeks from now. By the end of May you'll be home, and we can go right ahead with the wedding as we originally planned. Mom is already starting to make preparations; I assume that's all right with you? We don't have to wait much longer. . . .” At the end there was a postscript: “By the way, this is costing a lot, but my dad's willing to advance it. After all, you'll have plenty once your father's estate is settled.”

As I read it, I began to feel a little sick to my stomach. It hadn't occurred to me before, but Dad had been doing well and was probably heavily insured, besides which he had been traveling for the firm, which must have had a lot of accident coverage. It was true enough that I could now be considered something of an heiress. Ross's assumption about how I'd choose to spend part of Dad's money was bad enough, but beyond that—had he thought about the money before he'd decided to “go right ahead with the wedding”?

I could believe it. It was awful to know how easily I could believe it! It didn't really matter whether it was true or not, because if the idea wasn't a shock to me, it wasn't possible that I could be very much in love with Ross. And somehow that wasn't exactly a shock, either.

I knew, of course, what I had to do. In a case like that there's no question; the thing that looks like a choice isn't a real one. You make all the choices beforehand by being who you are, and the painful part is opening your eyes to the thing you
can't
choose. That, and the worrying before the time comes.

It was a hard letter to write. Not because my heart was broken or anything like that, for actually it wasn't, but because I didn't want Ross to think that the problem was just my not being willing to go along with his shady dealings. I wanted him to understand very clearly not only that I wouldn't be on the
Ares,
but that this was the last letter he was going to get from me, regardless of what ship I went home on. All in all, I must have written about a dozen drafts, but before that day was over I drew a deep breath and sent the thing off, extra-charge rush transmission, so that it would be sure to reach Ross before any money changed hands.

It was a relief. It was the biggest relief I'd ever felt in my life, but I wasn't very lighthearted over it.

I was free now, free to date Alex. Only now there wasn't much chance that he would want to. And that was probably a good thing because there couldn't be any future for us; Alex's life was bound to Mars just as surely as mine was bound to Earth, and there was nothing that either one of us could do about it.

Alex would go on believing in the Colonies and working for them and someday he would become “a city councilor or a governor or something” as Alicia had predicted. I wasn't cut out for that sort of life and I couldn't be anything but a hindrance to him, even if I wanted to stay, which of course I didn't. Sooner or later my name would come up on the waiting list for passage back to Earth, and I would go home to Maple Beach to live with Gran. I would finish college—though not at the university where Ross was—and then I would be busy with my teaching career. I'd have the lifestyle that was right for me. Very probably, I decided, I would never choose to marry anyone.

They had the right idea when they named the moons of Mars! Of course, back in the nineteenth century when they did it, all the newly found heavenly bodies were being named for mythological characters, and nobody thought of them as places to visit. When they called Mars's two little natural satellites
Phobos
(Fear) and
Deimos
(Terror), they were thinking of the horses that drew the chariot of the god of war, not of how someone would feel if he were planning a trip to one of them. But it worked out very appropriately as far as I was concerned.

I'm a great one for getting roped into things. I'd been terribly afraid of space since Janet's hysteria on board the
Susie,
and then after Dad . . . well, I knew that kind of accident wouldn't happen twice in a row, but still . . .

I never went Outside during the weeks following Dad's death, partly because I associated it with that sad morning but even more because my fear was worse than ever. As far as spaceships went, though I was longing for a place on one in order to get back to Earth, I was expecting the trip itself to be something of an ordeal. Yet off I went on a trip to Phobos, an airless planet, wearing a pressure suit, no less!

It was Paul who talked me into going, but I wouldn't be surprised to know that Alex put him up to it. In fact I'm pretty sure he did. But I'm getting ahead of myself; quite a bit happened before the Phobos trip.

A few days after Alex and I had the fight about the
Interplanetary Observer
letter, I moved out of Janet's apartment and in with the Conways. That was Paul's idea—I had gone to him for help in finding another place to live—and I didn't give him any argument, for I was anxious to get away from Janet. The atmosphere was strained between us because I had finally done what I should have done in the first place: I'd told her exactly what I thought of some of her statements.