backhoe shovel, the ceiling sloped and cramped, and the only light coming from a nonmagnetic phosphorescent strip that put out such a pathetic number of weak green lumens that only the edge of Ian’s face was outlined with an ill-defined edge of olive murk. They were like two men in a dark steam bath, only there wasn’t any steam, just the steady hiss of the monitor telling them that solar activity raged outside. At last the radiation passed and they came back out to take their posts at the command console.
Because the five FMC Transit Collective drives were the most advanced AviOrbit had ever built, and were able to accelerate, in theory, indefinitely, the trip sunward was quick, and after six days Gerry and Ian were halfway back to Earth.
But in that six days, a lot happened.
At one point, their life support began to behave erratically. They both huddled around the monitors and watched the temperature plummet, the little blue bar sinking and sinking. Ian went into the background language and tried to write some corrective code, but even as Gerry watched, new Tarsalan-generated code appeared, as if antiphonally answering whatever Ian might try. So at last they got into their CAPS.
Gerry cranked up the heat and heard the little crackling noises of the conduction coils, and merciful warmth caressed his shivering body. But eight hours later he watched the blue bar on the life-support readout rise, and he got so hot, and his ventilation was by this time so riddled with virus, that he took off his CAPS and pressed himself against the polycarbonate pressure windows to keep cool. Ian came up and joined him.
“Remember the time we went to Mexico? That heat wave they were having?”
But all Gerry could truly remember of the Mexico trip was the tremendous amount of tequila they had downed.
The cabin pressure became too high, and his eardrums ached. The alarm dinged and told them that hull tolerances had climbed into the yellow, so they had to vent atmosphere in order to bring the pressure back down. Out the freighter windows Gerry saw a cold, blue cloud of the stuff drift away over the surface of Gaspra, like a tenuous and ill-defined band of ghosts, the color reminding him of the color of the blue marlins his brother caught at Trunk Bay.
Then, as they were nearing Mars, the virus locked the venting system into the open position and the air became so thin that it reminded him of the time he and Neil had climbed Mount Baker, back in the days when they actually still did things together. Ian sat at the console, his fingers clicking over the keys, and his blue eyes were a picture of concentration, predatory and birdlike as he finally managed to reroute air away from the vent manifold and into auxiliary tanks. By this time pressure was so thin that Gerry felt dizzy, and he was wondering if he might be suffering from altitude sickness. They broke out the emergency breathers—they wanted to conserve their CAPS for whatever emergencies might lie ahead.
Once he had his breather strapped to his face, he didn’t feel so light-headed anymore.
They again stopped at Mars, establishing a braking orbit around Earth’s red neighbor, and approached the FMC’s Phobos-Deimos Terminal, an immense structure fabricated out of the planet’s two moonlets, the planetesimals joined by hundreds of luminous skywalks. PDT Control okayed them for rendezvous, stipulating a ten-kilometer limit, and Ian parked the craft in a tandem orbit behind Deimos. The two men got out and were ferried by taxi to a hotel on Deimos for the night. Meanwhile, the Federated Martian Colonies refurbished their ship with the necessary life support to get them the rest of the way to Earth.
Their room, in a hotel that resembled a stack of bubbles, much like the bubble nests Siamese fighting fish manufactured to breed, was made of a one-way material. Outside, looking in, Gerry saw an opaque blue sheen similar in color to a sapphire. But once he was inside looking out, he got a spectacular view of the Martian surface ten thousand miles below. (Phobos had been moved into a considerably higher orbit while Deimos had been maneuvered into a much lower one for the construction of the PDT.) Gerry beheld the red planet with a mix of awe and reverence. Its red, orange, and ochre shades reminded him of the flowerpots Glenda had in their backyard at home. And even though it was a dead world, it was at least a self-supporting world—if worse came to worst, they would always have Mars. He saw the volcanoes of the Tharsis Bulge. He saw Valles Marineris, and the whitish straining of the polar ice cap as it tried to finger its way south. A world without a phytosphere. As beautiful in its way as Earth. He couldn’t help thinking of Luke Langstrom. Somewhere down there, Dr. Langstrom had his home.
Spacecraft occasionally flew by. It was like a scene out of a futuristic dream, and he was thankful, because ordinarily he never would have gotten to see something like this.
It was while they were in their hotel room that Ian again broached the subject of trying to meet someone when he got back to the Moon—as if the future were a certainty, and the precariousness of their situation meant nothing to him.
“I was kind of hoping for Stephanie,” he said. So. Stephanie, after all. “That is, if you don’t mind me moving in on her.”
“Why would I mind?”
Ian stared at the terra-cotta palette that was the Martian surface below. “Because, you know…you and her—”
“There’s absolutely nothing between us, Ian.”
“I was actually going out with her for a while.”
The strain he heard in his friend’s voice unnerved Gerry. “I kind of figured.”
“But when you came along…well…you know…I stepped aside.” And there was an admission in this, as if Ian understood that he must step aside, that his behavior, abominable for so many years by his own reckoning, disqualified his tenuous hopes for Stephanie’s affections.
“Stepped aside? For what?”
“I didn’t want to get in your way. Or in hers.” He reached up and scratched the back of his head.
Outside, a ground-to-orbit launch vehicle, filled with people looking out windows, eased by. “It was just like the Maggie Madsen thing all over again.”
“Ian, I thought we weren’t going to talk about Maggie.”
“Anybody can see Stephanie’s crazy about you, just like Maggie was. Matter of fact… Steph was the one who broke up with me… once she met you, that is. That’s one thing I admire about her. She wasn’t going to two-time me.”
The sophomoric details of this astounded Gerry. “Ian, I had no idea.” Five miles away, across the delicate network of transparent skywalk tubes, he saw Phobos. “She didn’t mention anything to me.”
Phobos looked like an olive with the pimento missing—the Stickney Crater.
“She didn’t?” He seemed to regard this as another indication of his own spectacularly failed personal life.
“No, I guess she wouldn’t.”
“You should have said something.”
“I kind of mentioned it. In a backhanded way. That night I came to your room and broke the mirror.
How you would never steal a girlfriend out from under me again? The whole Maggie Madsen thing?”
“That’s what that was about?”
“In a way… but… that night. I want you to forget about that night. I was going through a lot that night.”
Gerry frowned. “I had no idea you were talking about Stephanie.”
“I didn’t want you to… you know… get distracted from your work. Or feel uncomfortable.”
“Ian, you know me better than that. And I could never go with Stephanie. I love my wife. She’s the single most important thing in my life. I made that a hundred percent clear to Stephanie. She knows there can never be anything between us.”
“So you don’t mind if I move in on her, then?”
His friend seemed to be missing the point, so he let it go. “No… I don’t mind.” He lifted a citrangequat, a hybrid citrus fruit that for one reason or another had become extremely popular among Martian hydroponics growers, and began peeling the skin from the pear-shaped trifoliate, the peel coming off in blaze orange fragments that seemed to highlight the color of the planet below. “And I wish you’d forget about Maggie.”