Joe Haldeman SF Gateway Omnibus: Marsbound, Starbound, Earthbound by Joe Haldeman Page A

half days, except we had to stop again while the robot repaired a tear in the tape ahead.
    I had a vague memory of watching the news when they started building the two Mars ships eleven years ago. They'd taken the fuel tanks from the old pre-Space Elevator cargo shuttles, cut them up, and rearranged the parts. The first one, the Carl Sagan, was assembled in Low Earth Orbit; the second up at GEO, where the Hilton is now. I guess the Elevator wasn't available for the first. Anyhow, they both took a long crawl up here, spiraling slowly up with some sort of solar power engine. The first one took off while they were still working on ours.
    The Sagan had made two round trips, and was on its third, in orbit around Mars, now. Ours had only been once, but at least we knew that it worked.
    Of course a spaceship doesn't have to be streamlined to work in outer space, with no air to resist, but the fuel tanks these were built from had gone through the atmosphere, and so they looked kind of like a hokey rocketship from an old twentieth century movie, though with funny-looking arms sticking out on the left and right, with the knobs we'd be living in.
    We could see the John Carter a couple of hours before we got there, at least as a highly magnified blob. Slowly it took shape, the stubby rocketship with the two pods rotating around it, once each ten seconds.
    The carrier slowed down for the last couple of minutes. Strapped in, we watched the spaceship draw closer and closer.
    It wasn't too impressive, only ninety feet long, unpainted except for the white front quarter, the streamlined lander. We were going in through the side of that, a crawl tunnel like we'd used for the Hilton.
    The carrier came to a stop and Dr. Porter and the pilot Paul put on space suits to go check things out. They came back in a few minutes and said things were fine, but a little cold. The air that came through the open airlock door was wintry—colder than it ever gets at home. Paul said not to worry; we'd warm it up.
    They opened the storage area under the exercise machines, and we started carrying things over. Not as easy as it might seem, in zero-gee. Nothing had weight—if you let go of it, it wouldn't fall—but everything had inertia. If you wanted to move a piano, you'd have to get behind it (with your feet anchored) and shove.
    We didn't have a piano, except for Yuri's little folding one, but we did have some pretty heavy boxes, a lot of it food and water for the trip. "Starter" water, which would be recycled. I'd almost gotten resigned to the fact that a little bit of every drink I took had gone through my brother at least once.
    You could see your breath. I had goosebumps and my teeth started chattering. Barry and his parents were the same way, fellow Floridians. My parents and Card seemed to have some Eskimo blood.
    A lot of the stuff we stored in the Mars lander, under Paul's supervision. Some of it went into A or B, the pods where we'd be living.
    That was sort of like the Hilton in miniature. There was a relatively large zero-gee room, a cylinder twenty-two feet long by twenty-seven feet wide. On opposite sides there were two four-foot holes, A and B, with ladders going down. No elevators.
    Of course we were all pretty good with zero-gee, though there were a few bumped heads.
    I couldn't get warm. Fortunately, one of the things I delivered was a bundle of blankets for "Sleeping A." I was A-8, so I liberated one of the blankets and wrapped it around myself.
    Saying good-bye to Dr. Porter was more emotional than I would have thought. Tears sticking like glue to your eyelashes. She hugged me and whispered, "Take care of Card. You'll love him soon enough."
    She went back to the carrier and the airlock closed. Paul warned us we all had thirty minutes to use the toilet, and then we'd be strapped in for almost two hours. I didn't really need to go, but might as well be prudent, and I was mildly curious about what I'd be putting up with for the next three