The Martian Viking Read online

  "Ryan, you've got to talk to Smitty," Ronindella said. "He's . . ." She didn't want to say it aloud, so she gestured for Ryan to come closer. He walked across the room in three steps, and they moved against the wall. There was no place else to go in the effapt, except the bathroom, and there was hardly room for one person in there, let alone two.

  Shooting a warning glance at Smitty, Ronindella then turned away from him and whispered something to Ryan. Smitty watched them furtively, wondering what was going to happen next. He saw Ryan's eyes widen, and then Ryan said: "You don't think I had anything to do with it, do you?"

  Ronindella looked at him with a puzzled expression. "What are you talking about?"

  "I didn't give them to him," Ryan said. He sounded whiny, like a kid who had done something wrong and was afraid he would be punished for it. Smitty had never seen a grown man act like this before.

  "Who said you gave them to him?" Ronindella screamed. "Just what the hell do you know about this?"

  "Nothing." He looked away from her.

  "Did you give it to Smitty?"

  "No, just ask him." Saying this seemed to give Ryan new courage. "Go ahead, he'll tell you." He turned toward Smitty. "Won't you, kid?"

  Smitty stared at Ryan. He simply couldn't understand why Ryan was acting so weird. After all, nobody had said the guy had anything to do with it.

  "Well, go ahead, Smitty," his Mom said. "Just tell the truth. Don't be afraid."

  Smitty took her at her word. "Ryan didn't give it to me," he said. "I found it right over there on the floor, just like I told you, Mom."

  Ryan looked relieved.

  Ronindella glanced at Ryan, but she didn't say anything to him.

  "I didn't mean to make it happen," Smitty lied. "I was just trying to pick up a box, and all of a sudden . . ."

  "All of a sudden, ka-pow!" Ryan laughed nervously. "I'll bet you never had a thrill like that before, Smit."

  Turning on him, Ronindella said: "How come you know so damn much about it, Ryan?"

  Ryan took on a sheepish expression. "Well, I've seen it in Pixine."

  "Yeah, right."

  "I'm sorry, Mom," Smitty said, seeing that the blame had been shifted onto Ryan. "I really didn't mean to do anything wrong, you know. You believe me, don't you?"

  "Of course I do, darling." She went to him and hugged him again. "And I'm sorry I got so upset."

  It would be all right now, Smitty knew. She might even get him some ice cream, if he handled things the right way.

  "We've moved enough of this stuff today," Ronindella said. "Why don't we lock up the effapt and go get something to eat?"

  "Yeah!"

  Ronindella put her arm around Smitty's narrow shoulders and gave him a little squeeze. "Where would you like to go, hon?"

  "You know, Mom. Kwikkee-Kwizeen."

  "Then Kwikkee-Kwizeen it is. Ryan, would you care to drive us there?"

  It was an order, and Ryan knew it. He would do anything right now to stay in Ronindella's good graces. He nodded meekly. "Sure," he said. "I love Kwikkee-Kwizeen."

  "Everybody loves Kwikkee-Kwizeen!" Smitty chimed in, mimicking the projectogram ad. "'Cause it's the place that's really keen!"

  Smitty and Ryan ran upstairs, and were forced to wait for Ronindella on the roof parking lot. Her stately progress, and the lack of a sunshield, required them to get into the broiling flyby and wait for a couple of minutes before the air conditioner cooled off the interior. It was less harmful than waiting bare-headed outside, though.

  There was ample room for two adults in the Akbar, a Saudi make that Ryan had picked up only a year old for three hundred thousand. As Ronindella often attested, it was the kind of deal only a smart man like Ryan made. Smitty didn't quite know why, but he thought this meant more about his Dad than about Ryan.

  The air conditioner was soon blasting away, and, though it was a little crowded with Smitty sitting on his Mom's lap, they were in good spirits by the time they pulled into the sweltering Kwikkee-Kwizeen parking lot.

  Inside, there was a line snaking to the Kwizeen-Karts, where a credit card was all it took to buy all sorts of delicious foods. Ryan popped his credit card into the slot, and Smitty made his selections: fried seaweed sausages, petroshake, soy burger. A little slip of paper came out with the card once the order had emerged from the well in the top of the cart.

  "What's that?" Smitty said.

  "I don't know," his Mom said. "Why don't you take it to the table and see?"

  Smitty snatched it up, and, following his Mom and Ryan to a booth, he sat down and examined it as they ate. He couldn't figure out what it was.

  "Let Ryan see it," Ronindella said.

  Ryan took the paper and looked at it for a while, his brow furrowed. "It's a contest," he said at length, as portentously as if he had deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  "What's a contest?" Smitty said.

  "It's kind of like a game, kiddo. You write your name down and you might win a prize. Here's a pen."

  Smitty took the paper and pen. He knew how to sign his name, but he'd only had to do it a few times in his nine years. The Conglom tax forms, and a few other things were all that needed his signature, important documents like that. It seemed funny to sign something for fun.

  But he did it anyway; maybe he'd win a prize. As he wrote, he realized for the first time how much he hated Ryan Effner.

  SIX

  THEY WERE ON their way to Mars. It seemed odd to Johnsmith, but he knew that it was true. He and Alderdice spent a lot of time clutching onees, but whenever they came up for air the drab interior of the Conglom Interplan ship was always around them, unchanged but for the tiniest details.

  Of course, he could always go and look out the stern transparency at the diminishing Earth. But that depressed him, and besides, the rest of the heavens changed so slowly that it was hardly any fun at all unless you took it in fairly infrequently. Once a week or so was interesting, but no more often than that.

  So it was onee thrill after onee thrill. At first Johnsmith really enjoyed the hallucinatory sights, smells, sounds, and feel of imaginary worlds. None of them were ever quite the same as that watery place he'd fallen into while he was sitting alone in his effapt back on Earth—the sensory definition was lacking. But it was still pretty good, usually. Not quite as all-encompassing as he remembered it, but that was surely because he hadn't known what to expect that first time. At least the hallucinations whiled away the hours, though.

  Johnsmith got in the habit of eating as soon as he woke up, and then grabbed onto an onee for an hour or two. Any longer than that, and his nerves got a little frazzled. He floated around the ship, occasionally talking with Alderdice, until lunch. Sometimes Felicia joined grudgingly in conversation with them, but more often than not she kept to herself.

  The two member interplan crew, a woman and a man, were not as hostile as the shuttle pilot and co-pilot had been. In fact, they were quite friendly—at least the captain was—though most of the time they didn't pay much attention to their human cargo. Johnsmith, Felicia, and Alderdice were still prisoners, but they weren't treated like it on the way to Mars, unless they got in the way.

  "After all, what can we do?" Johnsmith said to Alderdice after a nap. They had been in space a few days, and he was losing track of the time. "We're stuck in this rattletrap spacecraft, and we're already half a million miles from Earth. The crew knows we pose no threat to them."

  "We could hijack this ship," Felicia said from her bunk.

  "Oh, come on, Felicia," Alderdice said out of one side of his mouth while sucking on a bottle of vitasip with the other. "How could we do that?"

  "I'll tell you how," Felicia said in a contemptuous tone. "We overpower these two and seize control of the ship. That's how."

  Johnsmith could hardly believe what he was hearing. "Do you know how to pilot an Interplan ship, Felicia?"

  "I know how to fly a plane. It can't be much different than that, can it?"

  "Of course it
can," Alderdice argued. "It can be a lot different. This is a huge cargo ship designed to go hundreds of millions of miles in space. It will be refueled on Mars, so there's the finite amount of fuel to consider."

  "If we turn it around in the next four months, we'll have enough fuel to make it home," Felicia said. "We should start planning now."

  "But Felicia," Johnsmith asked, "even if we got back to Earth, where would we land?"

  "Trust me. There are places that are friendly to revolutionists, even today."

  They discussed the matter for some time. Johnsmith didn't think there was any merit to the plan, but he enjoyed seeing Felicia enthused and animated. He wondered why she had become so bitter, what her life had been before she became, as she always put it, a "revolutionist."

  Alderdice, however, fell into a funk.

  "Is there something wrong, Al?" Johnsmith asked.

  "No, not really. It's just my conditioning. You know, my programmed cortical implant gets me really disturbed if I'm thinking about doing anything illegal."

  "Oh yeah . . .but didn't that stop you from using onees before? I mean, you're using them now, aren't you?"

  "Yes, but I know they aren't illegal in space. So it's not the programming that's changed, but my perception of the legality of onees."

  "Oh."

  "They've made you into a slave," Felicia said, shaking her dark hair from side to side. "I guess I shouldn't hold it against you, should I? I mean, you really can't help it, can you?"

  "I suppose not," Alderdice said, without a trace of sarcasm.

  "Well, maybe Johnsmith and I could manage to hijack the ship alone," Felicia said.

  "I'm afraid I'd have to try to stop you," Alderdice said. "Unfortunately."

  Felicia's eyes flashed angrily at him.

  "The implant, you know," Alderdice said.

  "Right." Felicia turned away and would say nothing more.

  Time passed with agonizing slowness.

  Seven months later, Mars was looming like a rusty disc on the monitor. They had made no attempt at hijacking the ship, and, since they would be landing in a matter of days, Johnsmith suspected that they never would. Johnsmith and Alderdice had continued their daily routine of sleeping, using onees, talking, and eating.

  The ship's captain, Hi Malker, would occasionally come back to see how they were doing. He was a good-natured guy from North Tel Aviv with an interest in sports.

  "Got a message that the Phillies lost to Osaka in the World Series," he would say. Or, "America has won the Americas Cup," or, "The championship fight is coming up in less than forty-eight hours." Of course, what he meant was that they would get the signal from Earth in less than forty-eight hours. By the time they saw it, the fight would have been over for quite some time already.

  "Captain Hi," Johnsmith said as they drifted over the main cargo hatch one day, "how did you ever get into a profession like this?"

  "There is no profession like this," Hi said earnestly. "It's a one-of-a-kind job, right, Prudy?" he called to his co-pilot, who nodded brusquely. "Piloting the really big ones out to Mars and the Belt. There's adventure, and the pay is good."

  It seemed more like boredom than adventure to Johnsmith, but he didn't want to disabuse Hi of his romantic fantasies. Hi was right about the pay, though, especially considering that it mounted up on the year and a half round trip from Mars to quite a sizable sum. Almost all of Johnsmith's money would go toward feeding and housing him, and to Ronindella back on Earth. At least he would be taking care of Smitty. All this was highly depressing to think about, though.

  "Will we be landing near the north or south pole?" Johnsmith asked, by way of changing the subject.

  "Oh, neither one," Hi said. "We're going to land on the Elysium plain."

  "Elysium?" Johnsmith wasn't even sure what part of the planet that was. "I didn't know there was a settlement there."

  "It's new. In fact, we're carrying a lot of building materials so they can add onto the compound. It's really only half constructed at this point."

  "This is all news to me." Johnsmith said.

  "Conglom security," Hi explained. "Extremely hush-hush.""Where is Elysium, exactly?"

  "Northwest quadrant, a few hundred miles above the equator."

  "What's the weather like there?" Johnsmith asked.

  "Just like the rest of Mars," Hi said. "Cold, most of the time. In the summer, though, it can get up to thirty or forty degrees."

  "Not bad," Johnsmith said. "It might even seem like a relief after all the time I've spent sweltering away in that old city back on Earth."

  The cheerful glimmer left Hi's brown eyes. "For awhile, maybe," he said, "but Mars is no picnic, even at the equator."

  Johnsmith nodded. He hadn't really believed that he would have much fun on Mars, but now he was sure of it. He only hoped that the library and onees might keep him sane.

  The rounded fullness of Mars became more evident in the following days. It no longer resembled a flat disc, and the vague shapes of craters and mountains began to emerge from the orange world's shifting landscapes.

  Johnsmith felt an exhilarating sense of adventure in spite of himself, as he gazed out the port at Mars.

  "You know," he said to Alderdice, "I don't think I really appreciated that we're going to live on another planet—not up until now."

  "I know what you mean," Alderdice said, in an almost reverential tone. "It may only be half the size of Earth, but it's big enough. A whole world."

  "Nothing on it," Felicia said, floating up behind them. "Just a frozen desert."

  "There's a lot on it," Johnsmith argued. "Geologically, it's very interesting."

  "I didn't know you like rocks," she replied sarcastically. "I thought onees were all you're interested in."

  For some reason, her attitude bothered Johnsmith. He always felt that Felicia could be very nice, if she would just try once in a while. But she didn't seem eager to make the effort. What was worse, she always seemed to single him out for her caustic comments. He failed to understand why she was so nasty to him, but he guessed that there was really nothing he could do but ignore her taunts. This seemed to annoy Felicia even more than if he'd fought with her.

  But human interaction was nearly forgotten as they went into orbit around Mars. Wonder and fear were commingled so thoroughly that Johnsmith began to think these two seemingly disparate emotions might be the same thing, after all.

  It was a terrible and yet joyous thing to be drawn to an alien world. They could feel the force of its mass exerting itself on their bodies. And this time they would not resist gravity, as they had upon leaving Earth. This time they would descend to the bosom of the red planet, and Johnsmith, Felicia, and Alderdice would never go home again.

  Alderdice, who had grown a beard in recent weeks, looked at Johnsmith. "Might as well go lie down for the landing," he said.

  "Yeah."

  Captain Hi spoke over the intercom. "We're going to start coming down in a minute. Strap yourselves in."

  They drifted toward their reclining seats, Johnsmith attempting to give Felicia a hand. She slapped his fingers and pushed herself back to her chair unassisted. In a few minutes they were strapped in, waiting to land.

  "Here we go," Hi's voice said from the cockpit.

  The ship shuddered as the retro-rockets were fired. The gravity well of Mars put a strain on the fuselage that made the metal groan and creak inside the cabin. Johnsmith gritted his teeth, afraid that the entire ship might come apart and fling them like so much flotsam into eternal orbit around Mars.

  The engines thundered, and Johnsmith felt himself getting heavier as the ship came ever closer to the Martian surface. A few minutes later, he felt the ship settle and the engines abruptly cut off.

  They were on Mars. It hardly seemed possible, but they were really on Mars.

  "Jesus," Alderdice said, "feel the gravity."

  "It's a lot lower than Earth," Johnsmith said, "but it's been so long since we left home, I feel as
if I weigh a ton."

  "Should have taken more exercise," Co-pilot Prudy said, entering the cabin behind Captain Hi. "It's the best way to compensate."

  "Yeah, but it's too late now." Johnsmith thought of all the time he had spent on the voyage under the influence of onees. He unstrapped himself and stood, the oppressive weight of his body forcing him to lean against a bulkhead for support.

  "Come on," Hi said. "You'll be all right."

  He led them through a hatch to an elevator, which they took down. They got into the pressure suits in the airlock. Hi opened the outer hatch, and they looked out at Mars.

  Johnsmith was reminded of a Western he'd seen once, with lots of sunsets over the desert. Too red, too vast to be real. Unlike the one in the film, though, this desert covered almost an entire planet.

  Somebody was walking toward them from the right, wearing a pressure suit with chevrons on the shoulders. Behind him was a series of low huts, hangars, three big personnel carriers, and a few Martian terrain vehicles. One or two people could be seen seated in wieldos, putting up wallsheets, but other than that the landscape was devoid of all but sand and rocks.

  "Welcome to your new home," a voice crackled inside Johnsmith's helmet. As their greeter came closer, he began to make out a man's face through the clear plastic visor.

  "I'm your supervisor," the guy said, stopping just outside the airlock. "Angel Torquemada."

  Johnsmith took a good look at him. He was a thin-faced man who did not smile as he spoke. His grim manner seemed to fit into his surroundings flawlessly.

  "My co-pilot and I are tired," Hi said. "We'd like something to eat, and some R&R until we leave seventy-two hours from now."

  "Duly noted, Captain," said Angel Torquemada. "Why don't you come with me?"

  Johnsmith was impressed that Mr. Torquemada had come out to greet them himself, instead of sending one of his underlings. Maybe there would be a sense of civility here, after all. He supposed that it was possible a frontier society like this one might be very close knit. He'd find out before long.