Read Online Journey Between Worlds by Sylvia Engdahl - Free Book Online

and it felt as if the bottom had dropped out of everything—which was exactly what had happened because there wasn’t any “bottom” or “top” anymore. Zero-g has sometimes been called “free fall” and that’s literally true, for it doesn’t make any difference that the fall’s not toward Earth, but away from it. This condition affects human beings in various ways. Some people love it; it’s the kind of floating that used to be possible only in dreams. Others are just plain sick, and this would include a pretty large group if it weren’t for those antinausea shots. Still others are terrified—after all, as I learned in Psychology I, fear of falling’s one of the two basic fears a baby’s born with—and I suspect that I would have come out in the latter category, except that Alex didn’t let me.
    He raised his seat, then started to undo his straps so that he could reach over and raise mine. The flight attendant rushed right over and started to protest. (She floated through the hatch upside down, as it happened—no wonder their uniforms have pants instead of skirts—and turned so that her feet pointed toward the “floor” more for the passengers’ benefit than for any practical reason.) “Sir, passengers are not allowed to—”
    Alex pulled his card wallet out of his pocket. “Even with this?” he inquired, holding something out to her.
    â€œSorry, Mr. Preston. Certainly you may unstrap.”
    I looked at him and asked, tactlessly maybe, “Are you a VIP or something?”
    He smiled. “Not at all. It’s just that I have a card to show that I know how to handle myself in zero-g.” He released the lock on my seat and it sprang forward so that I was sitting up. “It used to be that they wouldn’t let anyone unstrap on these short hauls, but as the proportion of experienced space travelers grew, so did the protests. Now they honor the cards. I’m afraid that won’t help you or your dad, though.”
    â€œI don’t want to move around!” I declared fervently.
    â€œI won’t argue because they aren’t going to let you anyway. But you’d be surprised at how much fun it is once you get a taste of it.”
    â€œWhere did you learn?” I asked. “You’re not an astronaut, are you?”
    â€œNo. I learned on a trip to Phobos, when I was twelve. All Colonial kids do.”
    â€œFor fun?”
    â€œPartly. You might call it a compensation for the centrifuge, which isn’t so pleasant.”
    â€œCentrifuge, like the way they test astronauts? Why did you have to do that if you weren’t going to be one?”
    â€œBecause I knew that I might want to come to Earth someday. And Earth’s gravity is three times what I was born to.” He grinned at me. “If I hadn’t trained for it, Earth to me would have been something like that liftoff was to you.”
    Slowly I took this in. I’d known Martian gravity was low, but the implications hadn’t struck me before. No wonder he’d moved slowly and deliberately back at the terminal. “How could you train for it?” I asked.
    â€œIn a special gym, under spin. Ever since eighth grade, an hour a day. You work up gradually, of course. It prepares you to accept terrestrial gravity, but not to enjoy it. This is the first time I’ve been really comfortable since I landed last year!”
    â€œI’m glad I wasn’t born on Mars.”
    â€œThat’s one way of looking at it,” he agreed. “But if you had been, you wouldn’t have had to come to Earth; lots of people don’t. It used to be that most families wanted their kids to go sooner or later, the way the early American colonists sent their sons home to England to be educated. But that attitude’s getting to be old-fashioned.”
    â€œYou’re not sorry you came, are