I am simple, Art almost said, and bit his tongue. Instead he said, “Why me?”
Fort regarded him. “When we acquire a new company, we review its personnel. I read your record. I thought you might have the makings of a diplomat.”
“Or a spy.”
“They are often different aspects of the same job.”
Art frowned. “Did you bug my apartment? My old apartment?”
“No.” Fort laughed again. “We don’t do that. People’s records are enough.”
Art recalled the late-night viewing of one of their sessions.
“That and a session down here,” Fort added. “To get to know you.”
Art considered it. None of the Eighteen wanted this job. Nor the scholars, perhaps. Of course it was off to Mars, and then into some invisible world no one knew anything about, maybe for good. Some people might not find it attractive. But for someone at loose ends, maybe looking for new employment, maybe with a potential for diplomacy …
So all this had indeed proved to be a kind of interview process. For a job he hadn’t even known existed. Mars Acquirer. Mars Acquisition Chief. Mars Mole. A Spy in the House of Ares. Ambassador to the Mars Underground. Ambassador to Mars. My oh my, he thought.
“So what do you say?”
“I’ll do it,” Art said.
William Fort didn’t fool around. The moment Art agreed to take the Mars assignment, his life speeded up like a video on fast forward. That night he was back in the sealed van, and then in the sealed jet, all alone this time, and when he staggered up the jetway it was dawn in San Francisco.
He went to the Dumpmines office, and made the round of friends and acquaintances there. Yes, he said again and again, I’ve taken a job on Mars. Salvaging a bit of the old elevator cable. Only temporary. The pay is good. I’ll be back.
That afternoon he went home and packed. It took ten minutes. Then he stood groggily in the empty apartment. There on the stovetop was the frying pan, the only sign of his former life. He took the frying pan over to his suitcases, thinking he could fit it in and take it with him. He stopped over the cases, full and shut. He went back and sat down on the single chair, the frying pan hanging from his hand.
After a while he called Sharon, hoping partly to get her answering machine, but she was home. “I’m going to Mars,” he croaked. She wouldn’t believe it.
When she believed it she got angry. It was desertion pure and simple, he was running out on her. But you already threw me out, Art tried to say, but she had hung up. He left the frying pan on the table, lugged his suitcases down to the pavement. Across the street a public hospital that did the longevity treatment was surrounded by its usual crowd, people whose turn at the treatment was supposedly near, camping out in the parking lot to make sure nothing went awry. The treatments were guaranteed to all US citizens by law, but the waiting lists for the public facilities were so long that it was a question whether one would survive to reach one’s turn. Art shook his head at the sight, and flagged down a pedicab.
He spent his last week on Earth in a motel in Cape Canaveral. It was a lugubrious farewell, as Canaveral was restricted territory, occupied chiefly by military police, and service personnel who had extremely bad attitudes toward the “late lamented”, as they called those waiting for departure. The daily extravaganza of takeoff only left everyone either apprehensive or resentful, and in all cases rather deaf. People went around in the afternoons with ears ringing, repeating What? What? What? To counteract the problem most of the locals had earplugs; they would be dropping plates on one’s restaurant table while talking to people in the kitchen, and suddenly they’d glance at the clock and take earplugs out of their pocket and stuff them in their ears, and boom, off would go another Novy Energia booster with two shuttles strapped to it, causing the whole world to quake like jelly. The late lamented would rush out into the streets with hands over their ears to get another preview of their fate, staring up stricken at the Biblical pillar of smoke and the pinpoint of fire arching over the Atlantic. The locals would stand in place chewing gum, waiting for the time out to be over. The only time they showed any interest was one morning when the tides were high and news came that a group of party-crashers had swum up to the fence surrounding the town and cut their way inside, where security had chased them to the area of the day’s launch; it was said some of them had been incinerated by take-off, and this was enough to get some of the locals out to watch, as if the pillar of smoke and fire would look somehow different.
Then one Sunday morning it was Art’s turn. He woke and dressed in the ill-fitting jumper provided, feeling as if he were dreaming. He got in the van with another man looking just as stunned as he felt, and they were driven to the launching compound and identified by retina, fingerprint, voice and visual appearance; and then, without ever really having managed to think about what it all meant, he was led into an elevator and down a short tunnel into a tiny room where there were eight chairs somewhat like dentist’s chairs, all of them occupied by round-eyed people, and then he was seated and strapped in and the door was shut and there was a vibrant roar under him and he was squished, and then he weighed nothing at all. He was in orbit.
After a while the pilot unbuckled and the passengers did too, and they went to the two little windows to look out. Black space, blue world, just like the pictures, but with the startling high resolution of reality. Art stared down at West Africa and a great wave of nausea rolled through every cell of him.
He was only just getting the slightest touch of appetite back, after a timeless interval of space sickness that apparently in the real world had clocked in at three days, when one of the continuous shuttles came bombing by, after swinging around Venus and aerobraking into an Earth–Luna orbit just slow enough to allow the little ferries to catch up to it. Sometime during his space sickness Art and the other passengers had transferred into one of these ferries, and when the time was right it blasted off in pursuit of the continuous shuttle. Its acceleration was even harder than the takeoff from Canaveral, and when it ended Art was reeling, dizzy, and nauseous again. More weightlessness would have killed him, he groaned at the very thought, but happily there was a ring in the continuous shuttle that rotated at a speed which gave some rooms what they called Martian gravity. Art was given a bed in the health centre occupying one of these rooms, and there he stayed. He could not walk well in the peculiar lightness of Martian g; he hopped and staggered about, and he still felt bruised internally, and dizzy; but he stayed on just the right side of nausea, which he was thankful for even though it was not a very pleasant feeling in itself.
The continuous shuttle was strange. Because of its frequent aerobraking in the atmospheres of Earth, Venus and Mars, it had somewhat the shape of a hammerhead shark. The ring of rotating rooms was located near the rear of the ship, just ahead of the propulsion centre and the ferry docks. The ring spun, and one walked with head toward the centreline of the ship, feet pointing down at the stars under the floor.
About a week into their voyage Art decided to give weightlessness one more try, as the rotating ring was without windows. He went to one of the transfer chambers for getting from the rotating ring to the non-rotating parts of the ship; the chambers were on a narrow ring that moved with the g ring, but could slow down to match the rest of the ship. The chambers looked just like freight elevator cars, with doors on both sides; when you got in one and pushed the right button, it decelerated through a few rotations to a stop, and the far door opened on the rest of the ship.
So Art tried that. As the car slowed, he began to lose weight, and his gorge began to rise in an exact correspondence. By the time the far door opened he was sweating and had somehow launched himself at the ceiling, where he hurt his wrist catching himself before hitting his head. Pain battled nausea, and the nausea was winning; it took him a couple of caroms to get to the control panel and hit the button to get him moving again, and back into the gravity ring. When the far door closed he settled gently back to the floor, and in a minute Martian gravity returned, and the door he had come in re-opened.