Read Online Marsbound by Joe Haldeman - Free Book Online

pilot's chair—we closed off the lander and just let it leak. If Paul had to go in there every day or two, he could put on a spacesuit and go through the airlock.
    It made some of us nervous, too, like being cargo in a ship without a rudder. Okay, that was irrational. But we'd already had one emergency. What if the next one called for immediate action, but Paul had to suit up, waiting for the airlock to cycle through? That took about two minutes.
    In two minutes we covered almost a thousand miles. A lot could happen. And there weren't any spacesuits for the rest of us.
    * * * *
    13. Virtual friends and foes
    I was not the most popular girl in my classes—I wasn't in class at all, of course, except as a face in a cube. As the time delay grew longer, it became impossible for me to respond in real time to what was going on. So if I had questions to ask, I had to time it so I was asking them at the beginning of class the next day.
    That's a prescription for making yourself a tiresome know-it-all bitch. I had all day to think about the questions and look stuff up. So I was always thoughtful and relevant and a tiresome know-it-all bitch. Of course it didn't help at all that I was younger than most and a brave pioneer headed for another planet. The novelty of that wore off real fast.
    Card wasn't having any such problems. But he already knew most of his classmates, some of them since grade school, and was more social anyhow. I've usually been the youngest in class, and the brain.
    I'm also a little behind my classmates socially, or a lot behind. I had male friends but didn't date much. Still a virgin, technically, and when I'm around couples who obviously aren't, I feel like I'm wearing a sign proclaiming that fact.
    That raised an interesting possibility. I never could see myself still a virgin five years from now. I might wind up being the first girl to lose her virginity on Mars—or on any other planet at all. Maybe some day they'd put up a plaque: “In this storage room on such-and-such a date..."
    But with whom? I couldn't imagine Yuri tearing himself away from the keyboard long enough to get involved. Oscar and Murray seemed like such kids, though once they're college age that may be different.
    There would be plenty of older men on Mars, who I'm sure would be glad to overlook my personality defects and lack of prominent secondary sexual characteristics. But thinking of an older man that way made me cringe.
    Well, the next two ships would also be made up of families. Maybe I'd meet some nice Aussie or a guy from Japan or China. We could settle down on Mars and raise a bunch of weird children who ate calcium like candy and grew to be eight feet tall. Well, maybe not for a few generations.
    Nobody talked about it much, but the idea of putting a breeding population of young men and women on Mars gave this project some of its urgency. After Calcutta and Gehenna, any nightmare was possible.
    The mind veers away from it, but how much more sophisticated would the warriors have to be, to make the whole world into Gehenna? How much crazier would they have to be to want it?
    We got into that once on the climber, Dad doubting that it would be physically possible, at least for a long time, and also doubting that the most fanatical terrorist would be that crazy. To hate not just his enemies, but all of humanity, that much. Mother nodded, but she had her bland patient look: I could argue, but won't. Card was kind of bored, familiar as he was with playing doomsday scenarios. Sometimes I think that nothing is really real to him, so why should doomsday be any different?
    Time started passing really fast once we were settled into school, and most of our parents into their various research projects. It was more comfortable than you would expect, with all of us crammed into a space the size of a poverty-level tenement—but the parents and kids seemed to be giving each other more respect, more space.
    Even the little kids calmed down. Mary