Another Girl, Another Planet Read online

  I left quickly, and before I got back to my apartment, I’d eaten all the bagels.

  * * *

  I was shaken by seeing her, and it immediately struck me as a bad omen. Here I was, about to embark on the most ambitious project of my life, and I run smack dab into a reminder of the biggest failure I’d ever had. I threw myself into my preparations for departure to distract myself, and it worked. It’s amazing when you’ve lived in the same place a while how much stuff accumulates and how many things you need to take care of when you move.

  Like I said, it took a week for me to get word that my appointment as Executive Assistant to the U.S. Administrative Office for the Joint U.S.-Soviet Mars Space Colony had been approved. In the meantime, I’d posted all my cheap furniture for sale, and put boxes of books in storage. I was sleeping on a futon.

  After I booked my sleeper on the Pennsylvanian, I decided to have one last hamburger, for old time’s sake, at the corner restaurant, where I had eaten so many meals over the years. I went down the block to Tom’s, the greasy spoon that was a landmark in Morningside Heights. It had been run by the same Greek family since the World War II era, and I had the feeling it was the inspiration for the Saturday Night Live skits with John Belushi where the café only served “cheezborgers,” “cheeps,” and “No Coke, Pepsi!”

  As I walked in, my ears were assaulted by the same combination of clattering dishes and flatware combined with the broken English that one hears in so many New York hamburger shops.

  The smell was always the same, and somewhat reassuring, the same combination of rancid grease, scorched hamburger meat, and burnt coffee. I guess the sameness of the senses put me off guard.

  I sat down and opened a menu; I don’t know why since I always ordered the same thing. I looked up and saw a man facing me in the next booth say something to a woman across from him. She turned around quickly and snarled:

  “What are you doing here?”

  It was Desiree.

  She was close enough I could smell her perfume and even her waxy cherry lipstick. She had raven black hair, and I almost squinted because of the bright blue highlights thrown off by the harsh restaurant lights.

  I opened and closed my mouth once without anything coming out. Then I cleared my throat.

  “I live around the corner,” I said a bit snidely, adding, “Remember?”

  She turned back around in her seat to her husband. “Let’s go!” she snapped.

  I stood up. “No, I’ll leave. I didn’t notice you were here. You two enjoy your dinner,” I said, bearing in mind that there was no reason to get into an argument in front of her husband.

  “Honey, don’t bear grudges,” said her husband. “Dave Shuster, right?”

  I nodded and forced a smile. “Yes, you’re Gene Hausler, right?”

  “Yes,” he said, extending his hand. I shook it. He smiled cautiously but pleasantly.

  “You must be a very smart man, to have the sense to marry a special girl like her. She proved she was very smart when she dumped me,” I said. “I have a lot of rough edges.”

  He seemed like a genuinely nice guy; Desiree was ready to explode.

  “We attended a theater performance at the university,” he said. “We were just catching a bite to eat before heading home. After we eat, we’re talking the LIRR home.”

  I bent down and whispered next to her ear, “I’m sorry, I was a total asshole, and I’m leaving for Mars tomorrow.”

  That last thing caught her off guard. “What?” she said, voice rising.

  I straightened up. “I wanted to have one last cheeseburger and fries here before I headed to Pittsburgh. I’m taking the shuttle to the Moon tomorrow, and then the Orion to Mars. I got a job with the colony administration.”

  “That’s great, I’m happy for you,” said Hausler. “I just started a new job, too.”

  “Yes, I saw you at the Goldome down the street,” I said. “But you had a job before. I was out of work.”

  “You’ll be out of work again soon enough,” Desiree said with a cold, hard stare, “the way you treat people.”

  “Gene, it’s getting real hot in here, I think I’ll head outside,” I said, taking a step back “You understand.”

  “Sure,” he said gently.

  Desiree practically bared her teeth. “I hope you …”

  He shushed her.

  I turned around and simply said, “Sorry.”

  So I then left and went back to the apartment, grabbed my bag, checked that the lights and stove were off, and headed to the roof to hail a cab to take me to Penn Station.

  Since I didn’t get my cheeseburger I bought a soft pretzel in the concourse and nibbled on it in the train as I fell deep into thought. As I sat there, it was hard to imagine how foreboding the encounter seemed. I think that’s the reason I chatted so volubly with Barry, the taxi driver.

  I did not want the last person I talked to in New York to be Desiree.

  * * *

  Instead of pulling down the bed, I ended up dozing in the chair. I read some reference material about the Mars colony, and I think I finally fell asleep about 1 AM. I woke up as the sun streamed through the window. I just had time to catch breakfast in the dining car as we neared Pittsburgh. I was reminded by the view that, while the Soviets used construction of its space ports for new development, the U.S. took advantage of the construction boom for redevelopment, at least in the case of Pittsburgh, which had gone into a decline after World War II and the outbreak of peace.

  The space program didn’t need the kind of steel production required by cannons and battle ships. Putting the Northeast Spaceport in Pittsburgh was a brilliant idea; it provided the city with an enormous construction project, and three sides of the space port faced water. It was at the confluence of the Alleghany, Monongahela, and Ohio Rivers. A giant blast wall separated the launch site from Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle, where businessmen and tourists could watch the twice-daily shuttle launches.

  Because of the relatively constricted location, most of the support services were located in newly-constructed facilities in Cleveland and Youngstown. The Rust Belt was rehabilitated.

  As the taxi drove through the city and toward the tunnel under the blast wall, I began dozing off again. I hadn’t slept well on the train.

  “Hey, buddy, rise and shine,” said the driver. The taxi rocked as it came to a full stop in front of the spaceport terminal.

  “I didn’t know I was asleep,” I said.

  I paid the driver, including a nice tip, and grabbed my bag from the seat next to me.

  “You must work for the space program,” he said, looking at my small bag and making a little clucking sound. “You going to the space station, Mars, or the Moon?”

  “Mars,” I said.

  “Shit, man, that’s a long way,” he said.

  “With the Orion, I’ll be there in two and half months,” I said.

  “Still, it’s a long time to spend in a glorified tin can,” he said with a smile. “Good luck, kid!”

  As he drove away, his calling me “kid” made me wince a bit.

  I walked into expedited customs, where a young transit agent went through my bag. She reached in and pulled out a small box of Henry Clay cigars.

  “Sorry, sir, no use taking these, there’s no smoking anywhere past here,” she said. “From here on out, you’re in a climate-controlled environment.”

  “Oh, sorry, force of habit. I always carry them,” I said. “Give them to your husband.”

  A customs inspector looked over my passport with narrowed eyes. “Going on through to Mars, then?”

  “Yep, I’m joining the colonial base administration.”

  “What GS level?”

  “I’m not GS, I’m a political appointee.”

  He raised his eyebrows.

  “Wow, you’re young. Good luck, it will be an adventure for you,” he said, handing me back my passport.

  Since Pittsburgh had been the first spaceport, it had the
oldest shuttle, the ISS Enterprise, in its fleet, and that was the one I was catching that day. It looked a bit weather-beaten, but it was only 24 hours to the Moon, practically a drive around the block.

  The spaceport had a constant low hum of activity and sound from all the people and vehicles traveling around, and it blended into a special kind of white noise which was rather reassuring.

  “This is what progress sounds like,” I remember thinking to myself.

  I was rather surprised to not smell anything fuel-like, but then I’d heard they had exceptionally efficient exhaust- control systems. I stood at a Plexiglas window and took in the view.

  As I waited to board the shuttle, I noticed some long containers on the tarmac with markings, some I had never seen before. They clearly indicated, “No Oxygen Required,” “Vacuum Allowed,” and “No Living Organisms,” plus one I couldn’t figure out.

  I nodded to a baggage handler wearing the standard gray spaceport coveralls. “What kind of containers are those?”

  “Those are going through to Mars on a speed sled,” he said, pulling a lollipop from his mouth. “Each regular shuttle carries one. It’s released from Moon orbit before the shuttle lands. Travels at 80 percent sub-light speed, and gets to Mars in a week. Carries supplies and raw materials.”

  “Oh, okay, I’ve never seen them before,” I said. “What’s the symbol with the wavy lines?”

  “It’s supposed to be a light wave,” he said. “Shows it can be shipped at sub-light speed.”

  Although the space program had developed a drive that went up to fractions of the speed of light, the accumulation of radiation created by plowing through space like that was fatal to anything living. It never occurred to me that the drive could be used for shipping supplies. Then again, I really didn’t know much about the space program at all, did I?

  The containers had shorthand for the city of origin: BSTN, NYC, PHLDP, etc.

  I nodded in the direction of the containers. “So those will get to Mars a lot faster than us, huh?”

  “Sure will,” said the baggage handler.

  At the shuttle gantry, the co-pilot looked at my pass. “You’re sitting up front so you can disembark quickly. Your Orion will leave an hour after we arrive tomorrow.”

  “What if we’re late?”

  He snorted. “It’s not like we’re going to get held up by the weather.”

  Hmm.

  The interior of the shuttle looked like a normal jetliner, except in this case all the seats were reclined. The only uncomfortable part of the takeoff was the acceleration, which pushed me back in the seat, hard, like a rather small elephant had decided to slowly sit down on my chest.

  As the G-force relented, I relaxed and fell dead asleep.

  * * *

  There were small windows for the passengers—like in a jetliner—and we all watched as the Earth receded and the lights below us grew faint. In a little while I dozed off and I slept clear through dinner time. When I woke up in the morning, I was famished.

  “I saw how soundly you were sleeping last night,” said the stewardess as I shifted in my seat, yawning and blinking my eyes in an attempt to get their focus back. “I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Thanks, but now I’m starving,” I said as my stomach gurgled.

  I think she heard that, and smiled a little.

  “I’ll get you some extra eggs and bacon,” she said. “We’re not full up on this flight, we have plenty of food.”

  Like I said, it was just an overnight trip to the Moon Base, and as we rapidly approached it was amazing to see how much the colony had spread across the surface. The traceries of tunnels and train lines connected a pattern of a dozen settlements, dotted with the large glass geodesic domes that were the staple of space program construction.

  Of course, you could see the blotches of settlement from Earth, but so much more came into view when you got close up. In fact, it was a lot harder to see the cities back on Earth, with all the many colors and clouds. There was no atmosphere on the Moon, so the settlements stood out on the empty surface. The main space port was in the Sea of Tranquility. As I stepped out of the shuttle, a steward pointed toward a corridor.

  “The transport to the Orion Launchpad is that way,” he said. “It leaves in fifty minutes.”

  I don’t know if I was lucky or not. On the one hand, it was good to set right off on such a long journey; on the other hand, I wish I had a chance to see a little of the Moon before I went to Mars. It was like rushing to a connecting flight at Idlewild on the way to Patagonia.

  I also meant I didn’t have the opportunity to do any shopping to pick up more clothes and other personal items to take to Mars. As I mentioned, the weight allotment between the Moon and Mars was higher because of the lower gravity compared to Earth.

  Once on board, a steward showed me to my cabin. It was very small and stuffy. “I don’t have to share this, right?” I asked.

  “No, sir, for the length of this journey it’s best to have your own space,” he said. “Only family members and friends who request it room together.”

  He showed me how the bed folded up from underneath a table. “It’s tight, but cozy. Sorry, there’s no window.”

  “There’s a lounge, right?”

  “Yes, many. Check the map on the wall. For the first week we can get live broadcasts from Earth, in case you want to watch television, then we are out of range.”

  Thankfully, I’m not prone to claustrophobia. The cabin was small and smelled of disinfectant and upholstery cleaner. It was obvious the crew tried to keep it both clean and sanitary. There was a small box with a number of air freshener packets. I ripped open one that was apple-scented and slapped it on a wall.

  With such a long trip ahead, the cabin had a myriad of diversions. There was a cassette player built into a wall, with a small selection of music tapes and a few audio books. I was pleased to see there was a Buddy Holly compilation from his early years, 1957 to 1963, before the Music Wars with the Brits and the Beatles started.

  I always thought that was his best work, and I popped the tape in as I rummaged through a bin of paperback books. I didn’t find anything of interest—there were no science fiction or fantasy—and after reading through the in-flight magazine for the month, I decided to explore the ship.

  An Orion ion propulsion-drive ship always seemed to throb slightly beneath your feet, but it was certainly smoother than the average jet flight I had taken on Earth. The air in the corridors seemed a lot fresher, and cleaner—a by-product, I suppose, of smoking never being allowed.

  There were a number of different lounges. The first one had music coming out. I homed in on that and walked in. It wasn’t a jukebox I was hearing, but a music video machine.

  The Scopitone lounge played song clips as cocktails were served up, and included a beatnik-themed coffee house. I didn’t like espresso, and so, with a nod to a waitress, I moved along the corridor and continued exploring.

  As I passed women in the hall, something dinged in the back of my brain again, until it struck me that none of them were wearing perfume. I later read in the passenger manual that it was strongly suggested they not do so, because of the cramped quarters and the need to recycle the air.

  I found as I wandered around that there were three different television lounges, as well as a fourth with carrels where we could watch an assortment of Betamax tapes. The games lounge had a room for playing cards and another for board games. There was a separate reading room in addition to the library, which was stocked with a large selection of paperbacks.

  Toward the end of the first full day out, I went to the library and found the librarian. She was reading a book—surprise—and looked up at me from the counter. She had black hair, bright blue eyes, and a Slavic accent.

  She smiled and her eyes lit up. “We seldom see anyone come into the library so early in the journey, especially Americans,” she said. “You Americans usually stay glued to your TV, at least while we are still in range
of Earth transmissions.”

  Her friendliness buoyed me up, and I bounced once on my heels.

  “I owned hundreds of books back in New York, but now they’re all in storage,” I said. “What’s popular in your stacks?”

  She squinted at me. “You staying on Luna or going on to Mars?”

  Since I didn’t have a badge, she knew I wasn’t any kind of astronaut and wouldn’t be going to the space station.

  “Mars colony.”

  “First time?”

  “Yes.”

  She walked down an aisle and gestured for me to follow her. “You’ll probably enjoy any of these books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. He wrote almost a dozen books in the Barsoom Series.”

  “But that’s nothing like Mars!”

  She laughed and covered her mouth. “That’s the point. Don’t fill your head with preconceived notions,” she said as she pulled a book off the shelf. “Enjoy yourself.”

  She handed me a copy of A Princess of Mars.

  I smiled at her. “That makes a lot of sense. There’s nothing in these books that will confuse me.”

  We were close enough between the stacks that I could smell her hair spray.

  “Yes, but they will infuse you with a sense of adventure, which is what you probably really need,” she said with a little wink. “Mars is a far-flung frontier now.” She put her hands on the book. “Read it; you will enjoy it.”

  “I will,” I said, laying my free hand on my heart and making a little bow of gratitude. “Thanks for your help!”

  I went back to my cabin, feeling somehow rejuvenated—not that I had been tired before, maybe just bored—and I immediately began to read the book.

  I read through all the Barsoom books during the first two weeks, despite spending some time in the television lounge. Keeping my head buried in a book somehow made the cabin feel cozy instead of cramped. I would have tried to read in a lounge, but there was usually too much noise and distraction. The library itself had no reading areas, just stacks.

  Occasionally, though, I simply had to exit the cabin to walk around and stretch my legs.

  One of those times proved to be very fateful.