Another Girl, Another Planet Page 2

  “The U.S. admin office there, which coordinates the whole colony, has a staff of ten. The governor, Wilder, relies a lot on his staff …”

  I’ve heard why, I thought.

  While investigating job prospects, I’d asked around a few people who knew something about the space colonies. Governor Wilder’s drinking was legendary.

  “The lieutenant governor left a few months ago, and the Soviets haven’t signed off on his replacement. They like to drag their feet, you know, since we have the colony administration in rotation right now. I just got word that the executive assistant has resigned for health reasons, effective immediately.”

  I cleared my throat. “Would I be working with the governor directly?” I asked.

  “Yes. Because your position doesn’t need Soviet confirmation, you can take it right away. It’s still going to be a few months until a lieutenant governor can find his way there,” the Senator said. “After that, you’ll be the Number Three man. But you start out as de facto Number Two. It will be a great learning experience.”

  I got a heavy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I could take a hint.

  “I’ll help where I can, and go where I’m needed,” I said, my hands in my lap. “If you think I can help there, I trust your judgment.”

  “I don’t think there’ll be any problem,” he said. “I’ll tell them at Admiral Heinlein’s office that you’re my recommendation.”

  We stood up and he gave me what seemed to be a smile of relief and a really strong handshake. I had an insight: he was really a rather diffident man, and was happy I had cooperated and been pleasant.

  I caught a whiff of something that took a moment to register—Cuban cigar smoke. I guess he was more normal than one might think. Right then I could have gone for a smoke, myself.

  “I’ll get my affairs in order so I can leave as soon as needed,” I said. And with that I headed home to prepare.

  * * *

  I was single then, and not seeing anyone regularly, so there wasn’t much preparation needed. My major chore at the time was cleaning my apartment to make sure I got my deposit back. The walls were sparsely decorated, and the floors old hard wood. After a few days of cleaning, every sound seemed to resound. I didn’t know that dust and dirt could muffle so many sounds. I made a special effort to cook up all my food and spices to minimize what I would have to toss out. The apartment smelled like Puglia’s Ristorante.

  A week after my meeting with Senator Greenman, I got the call that I could leave for my new assignment. Within three hours of learning my appointment had been cleared, I was told I could take the Northeast Space Shuttle the next morning.

  There were a half dozen U.S. shuttle ports at the time—Pittsburgh, Cape Canaveral, Dallas, Chicago, Denver, and LA. Going to Florida and the Kennedy Space Center—named for Joseph Kennedy, Jr. who died near the end of World War II testing one of the guidance systems that would eventually go into the nascent U.S. rocket program—would be faster, but I never could sleep on a jet. I was taking the Pennsylvanian overnight from Penn Station to Pittsburgh. I booked a small sleeper.

  The space shuttle had a “24/20” rule for government passengers: you had to be ready to leave within 24 hours with only 20 pounds of personal items. We were considered “deadheads”—free riders. So I only had one small carry-on bag with me on that cold rooftop.

  The spaceship from the Moon to Mars had a much more generous allowance, because the energy needed to lift off from the Moon was so much less. I could buy stuff there to take to Mars, but for the flight from the Earth to the Moon you had to pack light.

  I was so wrapped up in my thoughts as I waited that I jumped back and stumbled when the hover cab honked its horn and descended.

  The air coming off its engines warmed me pleasantly as it blew across the roof and up against me. I pulled open a door and slid into a back seat, tossing my bag ahead of me. The driver was a young black man. It said “Barry” on his license up front; his last name was a jumble to me.

  “Where to?” He reeked of cigarette smoke.

  “Penn Station, I’m catching the Penn Central to Pittsburgh.”

  “Long trip, and one bag,” he said. “Let me guess. You’re taking the shuttle to the Moon?”

  “Sure am; leaving in the morning,” I said.

  “You want to go high or low?” he asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.

  The fare was cheaper if you stayed below 500 feet, but you had to follow the street grid pattern. If you “went high,” you could cut directly to your destination, diagonally if need be, but it cost more.

  “Let’s go high tonight, I want the view,” I said. “I may not be back for years.”

  “You settling on the Moon?” he asked.

  “No, I’m going on to Mars.”

  “Dang,” he said as he flipped the meter, looking truly impressed. “You’ve got a trip ahead of you.”

  He looked back at me in the mirror. “Mind if I smoke?”

  “No, not at all,” I said.

  We lifted up, and headed south.

  He was neatly dressed, but there was a certain fraying around the edges of his clothes. As we lifted off, I could just see his eyes in the rearview mirror. They looked bloodshot, perhaps from the nicotine, maybe he was just tired, but still alert.

  I looked at his license again. It struck me that he looked familiar. “Haven’t I seen you at the university before?”

  “Yes, I’m in the College of General Studies,” he said. “I was raised in Indonesia and received a foreign students’ scholarship to attend Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years, and then I decided I wanted to see the East Coast. I was accepted at Columbia five years ago and I’ve been going part-time ever since. I drive to pay my tuition.”

  We chatted as we headed downtown. I realized this fellow might be the last person in New York I’d have a conversation with for many years. “You wanted to see the East Coast? You sound like you want to travel.”

  He put on a hard smile and forced a laugh. “No, it’s more like I’ve been all around the world already. I’m a one-man United Nations. My mother was from Kansas, my father was from Kenya, I was born in Hawaii. I spent grade school there until my mother remarried and then we went to live in Indonesia,” he said. “Then I went to college in California.”

  “Wow, I grew up in Massachusetts, went to college here, and that’s it,” I said. “You got me beat!”

  He rubbed his nose and the corners of his mouth turned down slightly. I decided I’d let him lead the conversation if he wanted.

  We passed 110th Street and flew over Central Park. There was an NYPD aerostat right above the reservoir, which gave it an excellent view of all the traffic across mid-town Manhattan from 1,500 feet. The lights of the skyscrapers blazed in the dark; the streetlights and the lights along the parkways looked like strands of Christmas tree lights.

  “Why are you going all the way to Mars?” Barry asked. “You look kinda young for a factory manager.”

  I saw in the rearview mirror that he looked away.

  “I’ve gotten a job as an aide in the colony’s administration.”

  He took a hand off the steering wheel and snapped his fingers. “That’s where I’ve seen you! You’re the Republican who ran for Congress, Dave Shuster.”

  “Yep, one and the same.”

  “So it’s just a political job,” he said. I could hear a sneer in his voice.

  “It’s a government job, and the Republicans happen to be running the government.”

  “That will change some day, sooner than later.” He craned his head and cracked his neck.

  “Well, it usually does,” I said. “Governments change. But for the time being, I’m the most loyal Republican a government paycheck will buy.” I thought I was being clever.

  “Ouch, you sound very cynical.” He chuckled.

  “No, but I did lose that election, I need a job, and I’m still single, so it’s easy for me to pack up and go to Mars,” I said rathe
r finally.

  There was a moment of stillness.

  “I voted for Mondale,” he said flatly.

  “I didn’t think you voted for Reagan.”

  He laughed again. “Goldwater is 76, Reagan is 74, and Wallace is 66. The American Party is dying out, and once the split with the Democrats is healed, we’ll have a majority back.”

  I rubbed my hands.

  “Good luck then. Maybe in ten years I’ll be asking you for a job,” I said.

  The conversation ceased for a few minutes and then we began our descent as we crossed Central Park South.

  Barry exhaled rather quietly. “Are you going to miss New York?”

  I thought about that. “You know, what I miss is that I’m not a kid any more. I’m twenty-seven now. It’s time for me to get a real job.”

  “Twenty-seven is a dangerous age,” he said. “Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Ricky Nelson, Rupert Brooke, Robert Johnson—all died at twenty-seven.”

  “You need to go on that new quiz show, Jeopardy,” I said quickly.

  He smiled broadly and his eyebrows danced. “Hah. I’ll take ‘Dead 27-Year Old Artists’ for $200, Alex.”

  We descended between skyscrapers as we passed Times Square. The lights in the offices flashed past us.

  “We’re going to go around the block at least once,” he said. “I can see the cabs are stacked up over the roof.”

  “At this time of night?”

  “It’s Penn Station!” he said with a bit of a double take. “It’s always busy. Besides, it wasn’t designed for flying cars to land on the roof back in 1910. The landing zone is actually pretty small.”

  I could see he was right as we circled above. His radio crackled as the cab air-space controller gave him ongoing updates.

  I opened my window to get the full effect of the descent. The warm air rushed up toward us from the rooftops and streets, and as we got lower, you could smell the mixture of gasoline and diesel fumes, as well as the fumes from a nearby steakhouse’s grill.

  “So you’re taking the train to catch the shuttle in Pittsburgh,” he said. “It would have been more convenient for all of us if they had built a spaceport in the Meadowlands.”

  I glanced at my watch. “Ground’s too marshy, and besides, there’s only so much traffic to the Moon.”

  Barry clicked off his radio. “Or Mars. We’re cleared to land.”

  He kicked on the thrusters and lowered onto the landing platform of the turn-of-the-century structure.

  He opened the door for me, and I handed him the fare, with a generous tip.

  “We’re off,” I said.

  “Give them hell, man!” he said with a forced smile and an ever-so-slightly upraised fist.

  I thought that was a bit strange at the time. A few months later, as things unfolded on Mars, I would think it was a lot strange.

  * * *

  I took the overnight train to Pittsburgh, rather than flying, because I wanted to sleep on the way and I had trouble sleeping in cramped jetliner seats. The concourse of Penn Station still had the shine from its renovation in the 1970s, and I was an hour early for the train’s departure. As it was, I slept very fitfully anyway—I suppose it was a combination of nervousness and excitement. The trains and station also reeked of diesel, which I always found especially clinging. I also realized, when I was at rest, that Barry’s cigarette smoke in the cab had infiltrated my freshly cleaned and pressed clothes.

  I thought a lot that night, as the train rocked through Pennsylvania. I remembered how interesting it was when I was growing up, to see how once and future science fiction writers had influenced the space program.

  Heinlein, the one-time pulp magazine hack, never looked back after he had his commission reinstated by President Wallace in 1946, but his persuasive skills certainly showed as the new space program head. Admiral Rickover put him charge of the Moon project. He rallied the nation behind it—and cooperation with the Soviets—with his Destination Moon film in 1950.

  The next year, we all heard the live radio broadcast as Colonel Chuck Yeager stepped on the lunar surface; a week later, we saw the film footage in the newsreels.

  “The stars are ours,” he said. “Hitch your wagons.”

  Rickover stayed head of the space program, but Heinlein took over the colonial administration. It was pretty much a two-headed beast; Ernie Kovacs making the expression literal in skits with his gaudily-bedecked officer with two heads, Space Admiral Bobrick Hymanlein. Another pulp science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, also changed careers, going straight from his working with Heinlein at the Philadelphia Naval Yard to joining the nascent cybernetics division of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development.

  You have to understand why the Moon looked so attractive to me compared to Mars. Thirty years after its groundbreaking, the central Moon Base was looking positively suburban—it even had a shopping mall and a multiplex cinema. The main city, Pattonville, was named by the Republican post-war Congress to remind the Soviets what might have happened to Russia had President Wallace not recalled the general after the German surrender.

  The Moon’s colonial capital now had a population over 30,000.

  Mars still had only one base and a mere 6,000 people. But in the ten years since it began, it had attracted a dozen manufacturers, using the robots and androids that were banned on Earth.

  The big advantage Mars had was minerals, exposed in the walls and alluvium of the great Valles Marineris, the largest and deepest river valley in the solar system, left dead and dry for millions of years after the planet dried up. It was discovered by the Mariner space probe in 1971, when—spurred on by the success of the Moon colony—a suitable place for similar exploits on Mars was sought.

  The colony itself was set in the Melas Chasma, the deepest and widest part of the valley—eleven kilometers below the surrounding plains, which meant it had the highest natural atmospheric pressure. Water was readily available just below the rock slides along the edge of the canyon, and being on the planet’s equator, it also had a relatively warm climate. Still, the distance, size, and grit of Mars made it a crappy assignment, and I’m sure Greenman knew it, but being jobless and coming off a losing campaign for Congress, I felt I needed to take it. Plus, Greenman was actually offering me something, even if it was to prove party loyalty, and I at least owed it to him to make the best of it.

  Since I really hadn’t slept after I boarded the train, I’d had a lot of time to think about during the days leading up to my departure, the time between when I agreed to take the posting, and that night.

  A lot had happened in that interval.

  Chapter Two

  After my meeting with Greenman at the Roosevelt Hotel, I’d taken the Grand Central shuttle, then hopped the IRT No. 1 line on the West Side. The subways weren’t as noisy as they are today; there were soundproofing ceiling tiles in the stations, and the maintenance yards were diligent in keeping the cars oiled and in good repair. As I waited for my train, my mind wandered.

  I realized with a start, while leaning on a pole, that, because of the timing of my departure, I would be breaking my apartment lease—and I’d lose my deposit. I had done all that cleaning for nothing. I was leaving two weeks too early. So it goes.

  I’d lived in New York City for ten years; the strangeness of my next stop being Mars began to creep over me.

  Suddenly, I realized I was hungry.

  I got off at 79th Street and walked north to H&H Bagels. I could practically hear my nostrils snap open wide as I walked onto the block. The smell of the freshly baked bagels was extraordinary.

  I bought a half dozen raisin bagels and decided to walk the rest of the way home. It was just under three miles to West 111th Street, but in the city it didn’t seem all that far. It was cool and clear, and I thought—as I snarfed down the first of the fresh bagels—that soon all of this would be a nostalgic memory.

  Those were the days when the trendy shops and boutiques were spreading up a
nd down Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue. Someone quipped at the time that a local funeral home had changed its name to “Death ‘n Stuff.” The rejuvenation extended to larger outfits, also, and there were balloons outside a new Goldome Bank branch at 108th Street and Broadway. As I walked past, something grabbed me by the back of the brain.

  It looked like a fairly normal and mundane business Open House, but I knew my subconscious had noticed something. I stopped.

  I have a pet theory—one of my college pals once said I had enough pet theories to stock a petting zoo—that we “see” more than we think we do, and a lot of that goes into the subconscious. Maybe that’s what fuels a man’s hunches or a woman’s intuition. Detectives have certainly found over the years that, under hypnosis, people are often able to recall things they could never reveal consciously.

  I had one of those “dings.” I stopped and looked through a window. And then I saw her, and gasped.

  Desiree Carvalho.

  We had dated very seriously in college, and for a time were deeply in lust with each other. But she came to her senses when she realized I wouldn’t make a commitment to her, and didn’t have many prospects of making much money, either. I hadn’t thought about her for years, and hadn’t seen her in a lot longer.

  I tried to get my breath as I walked through the revolving doors and wiped my palms across my coat. I was almost positive it was her, but …

  She stood there with a tall, well-dressed man. I recalled that I’d heard she married a banker. I think we were both startled when our eyes met, and then she gave me a look of pure hatred, an intense narrow stare as she bit her lower lip.

  I knew it was her.

  My first instinct had been to walk up and say hello casually, as this was an accidental meeting, but that look convinced me her flame for me still burned.

  Like in a crematorium.

  I chickened out. I began to feel wobbly and I got a cold feeling in the pit of my stomach—which seemed all the more incongruous because of the festive Open House atmosphere.

  Given the circumstances of our break-up years earlier, I didn’t want to hang around. She’d probably have the security guards shooting at me.