Marsbound by Joe Haldeman

pull it smooth, but my arms were like lead, and I gave up.
    Most of the speed we needed for getting to Mars was “free"—when we left the high orbit at the end of the Space Elevator, we were like a stone thrown from an old-fashioned sling, or a bit of mud flung from a bicycle tire. Two weeks of relatively slow crawling up built up into one big boost, from the orbit of Earth to the orbit of Mars.
    We had to stay strapped in because there would be course corrections, all automatic. The ship studied our progress and then pointed in different directions and made small bursts of thrust.
    It was only a little more than an hour when Paul gave us the all-clear to go explore the ship and get a bite to eat.
    Compared to the Space Elevator carrier, it was huge. From the lander, you go into the zero-gee room, which was about three times the size of our living room at home. The circular wall was all storage lockers that opened with the touch of a recessed button, no handles sticking out to snag you.
    You climb backward down the ladder, in a four-foot-wide tunnel, to get to the living areas, A or B. Both pods were laid out the same. The first level, for sleeping, had the least gravity, close to what we'd have on Mars. Then there was the work/study area, basically one continuous desk around the wall, with moveable partitions and maybe twenty viewscreens. They were set up as fake windows, like the carrier's “default mode"—thankfully not spinning around six times a minute.
    The bottom level was the galley and recreation area. I felt heavy there, after all the zero-gee, but it was only about half Earth's gravity, or 1.7 times what we'd have on Mars, the next five years.
    It had a stationary bicycle and a rowing machine with sign-up rosters. You were supposed to do an hour a day on them. I took seven A.M., since eight and nine were already spoken for.
    Elspeth and Davina found me down there, and we had the first of about two hundred lunches aboard the good ship John Carter . A tolerable chicken salad sandwich with hot peas and carrots. Card showed up and had the same. He made a face at the vegetables, but ate them. We'd been warned to eat everything in front of us. The ship wasn't carrying snacks. If you get hungry between meals, you just have to be hungry. (I suspected we'd find ways around that.)
    It was a lot more roomy than you'd expect a spaceship to be, which was a provision for disaster. If something went wrong and one of the pods became uninhabitable, all thirty-three of us could move into the other pod. Then if something happened to it, I guess we could all move into the zero-gee room and the lander. I don't know what we'd eat, though. Each other. ("It's your turn now, Card. Be a good boy and take your pill.")
    I sat down at one of the study stations and typed in my name and gave it a thumbprint. I had a few letters from friends and a big one from the University of Maryland. That was my “orientation package,” though actual classes wouldn't start for another week.
    It was very handy—advice about where to get a parking sticker, dormitory hours, location of emergency phones and all. More useful was a list of my class hours and their virtual-reality program numbers, so I could be in class after a fashion.
    It was a little more complicated for me than for the kids actually on campus. Up in the right-hand corner of the screen were UT, universal time, and TL, time lag. The time lag now, the time it took for a signal to get from me to the classroom, was only 0.27 of a second. By the time we got to Mars, it could be as much as twenty-five minutes (or as little as seven, depending on the distance between the planets). So if I asked the professor a question at what was to me the beginning of the fifty-minute class, he'd already be halfway through, Earth time. He'd get my question while everybody else was packing up their books, and his answer would get to me twenty-five minutes after class was over.
    Actually, it would be even more