Worlds

12. Down to Earth

A rich tourist can get from New New York back to Earth in a little more than a day. Marianne O’Hara’s trip was going to take two weeks.

Her goodbye to Daniel Anderson was as awkward and contrary to plan as such things always are. (John Ogelby had given her an avuncular kiss the night before, pleading that work pressure would keep him from seeing her off, which wasn’t true.) She boarded the slowboat feeling sad and confused, and slightly ill from all the shots, and not thrilled at the prospect of two weeks of weightlessness.

Actually, her slowboat was a triumph of the electrical engineer’s art Its forebears, which had first made practical the transfer of large masses from high orbit to Earth, were really slow, taking months to spiral in.

The few dozen passengers and their life support system made up barely two percent of the huge vehicle’s pay-load. The rest of the cargo was industrial materials that couldn’t be made on Earth. Light and ultrastrong foamsteel girders from New New. Whisker matrices from Von Braun. Impossibly pure beryllium from Devon’s World, tonnes of it, and exotic alloys from B’ism’illah Ma’sha’llah and Mazeltov. Each weekly flight involved an exchange of money equivalent to the gross national product of a small country.

The people riding on top were baggage, an afterthought The accommodations and food reflected this.

O’Hara spent a lot of her time exercising. Three stationary bicycle contraptions that could be worked with hands or feet stood opposite the only window in the craft Faced with the prospect of walking around for a year in Earth-normal gravity, she exercised her legs most. Also, being strapped on the bicycle was the only opportunity she had to sit down, that posture being unnatural in zerogee. She worked up quite a sweat and got it back in the form of one liter of water per day. for washing.

She slept well, strapped up standing against the wall, and read a lot of books and magazines, and watched more cube than she ever had in her life, and became an expert in the art of the zerogee toilet. She kept to herself. There would be a year of being nice to strangers, groundhogs at that. Mudballers. Earthies. Must forget those words for the time being; must not bristle at being called a spacer. As if there were no difference between a Devonite and a Yorker.

For days there seemed to be no change in the appearance of the Earth: the same face she had seen all her life, as New New marched in lockstep over northern Brazil. Then Africa and Europe peeked over the edge, and the Americas began to slide away. Sere Asia over the vast Indian Ocean. One day there was almost nothing but water, the Pacific framed by little bits of Australia and Alaska. The globe began to grow, and eventually its rotation was perceptible from hour to hour.

A fat nuclear tug was waiting for them at the edge of the Van Allen belts, through which the ion-drive slowboat could not pass. They switched payloads. The outward-bound cargo was mostly hydrogen, food, acids, and a few economy-class passengers, including a dance troupe cursing their tightwad manager.

O’Hara and the others felt acceleration for the first time, a gentle nudge. They cruised into low Earth orbit—the globe now spinning dizzily below them, once each ninety minutes-and the passengers transferred to a small shuttle-craft (the cargo went into large cone-shaped crafts called “dumbos,” which would be robot-guided into splashdowns near the purchasers of each load).

Even though she had taken the required tranquilizer, O’Hara felt growing excitement, along with a little apprehension. In space, almost all transportation is graceful and slow, not to say boring. She knew the shuttle would be fast and violent, though safe: only two had crashed in her life-time.

She strapped herself in and waited. There was no countdown, just a steady growing surge of acceleration. From her window she could see the dumbos shrink away, then sweep out of her field of view as the shuttle tilted to present maximum area to the atmosphere, for braking. She was weightless again, no feeling of motion. Her window showed nothing but stars.

For long minutes nothing happened. Then the curve of the Earth rolled up, stopped, rolled back out of sight, making her a little dizzy. She had seen this on the cube a dozen times and wasn’t scared at all. A high-pitched moan sat at the edge of audibility when the steering jets stopped blasting: the atmosphere slowing them down.

O’Hara might have compared the middle part of the trip to a roller-coaster ride, had she known what a roller coaster was. The craft rolled, pitched, and yawed with controlled violence. When the sky showed, it started taking on color: inky violet brightening to cerulean. The stars faded away.

They came in over the Florida coast to a vista of breath-stopping and, to O’Hara, thoroughly alien beauty. The sun was low in the west, almost dim enough to look at directly, illuminating a spectacular array of high cumulus, crimson and gunmetal against a deepening sky. The ocean was almost black, studded with froth that the sun tinged red. The horizon had lost its curve: for the first time in her life the Earth was not just a planet, however special. It was the world.

From the shoreline to the horizon was a complicated maze of buildings and roads. If you could turn New New inside out and lay it down flat, it wouldn’t cover one tenth part of what was unrolling underneath her, yet this was a small city, she knew.

It changed abruptly at the edge of the spaceport’s territory. Swampland and scrub, mangrove jungle laced with streams and lakes. A wide, bridged river with a queue of huge barges carrying dumbos to be launched and refilled.

They were falling lower, impossibly low, and seemed to be gaining speed. An illusion, she knew, but she tightened her throat against crying out as the ground flashed by underneath and then they hit hard, bounced, and the tires were screaming protest; then braking rockets boomed, pushing her hard against the restraining straps, hard enough to hurt her hipbones and shoulders; then they were rolling, more and more slowly, to a quiet stop. Her eyes filled with tears and she started to laugh.