I stopped. I wanted to call him a son of a bitch—but he wasn’t; he was the son of a gentle, loving woman who had deserved so much better. “One way or another, you’re going down,” I said. And then it hit me, and I started to feel that maybe there was a little justice in the universe after all. “And that’s exactly right: you’re going down, to Earth.”
Ralph at last did look up, and his thin face was ashen. “What?”
“That’s what they do with anyone whose jail sentence is longer than two mears. It’s too expensive in terms of life-support costs to house criminals here for years on end.”
“I—I can’t go to Earth.”
“You won’t have any choice.”
“But—but I was born here. I’m Martian, born and raised. On Earth, I’d weigh… what? Twice what I’m used to…”
“Three times, actually. A stick-insect like you, you’ll hardly be able to walk there. You should have been doing what I do. Every morning, I work out at Gully’s Gym, over by the shipyards. But you…”
“My… my heart…”
“Yeah, it’ll be quite a strain, won’t it? Too bad…”
His voice was soft and small. “It’ll kill me, all that gravity.”
“It might at that,” I said, smiling mirthlessly. “At the very least, you’ll be bed-ridden until the end of your sorry days—helpless as a baby in a crib.”