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"Forget it."
"Sure. But you asked me to sit down here with you, remember? If you're going
to-"
"Forget it!" I nodded at the bartender and held up two fingers. "You need
another drink," I said. "The thing is," I said, "Gilvey used to do that."
"What?"
"That cough."
She looked puzzled. "You mean like-"
"God damn it, stop it!" Even the bartender looked over at me that time.
Now she was really mad, but I didn't want her to go away. I said, "Gilvey was
a fellow who went to Mars with me. Pat Gilvey."
"Oh." She sat down again and leaned across the table, low. "Mars."
The bartender brought our drinks and looked at me suspiciously.
I said, "Say, Mac. Would you mind turning down the air-conditioning?"
"My name isn't Mac. No."
"Oh, have a heart. It's too cold in here."
"Sorry." He didn't sound sorry. But I was cold. I mean, that kind of weather,
it's always cold in those places. You know around New York in August?
It hits eighty, eighty-five, ninety. All the places have air-conditioning and
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what they really want is for you to wear a shirt and tie. But I like to walk a
lot. You would too, you know. And you can't walk around much in long pants and
a suit coat and all that stuff. Not around there. Not in August. And so then
when I went into a bar it'd have one of those built-in freezers for the used-
car salesmen with their dates, or maybe their wives, all dressed up. For what?
But I froze.
"Mars," the girl breathed. "Mars."
I began to itch again. "Want to dance?"
"They don't have a license," she said. "Byron, I didn't know you'd been to
Mars! Please tell me about it."
"It was all right," I said. That was a lie.
She was interested. She forgot to smile. It made her look nicer. She said, "I
knew a man-my brother-in-law-he was my husband's brother-I mean my
ex-husband-"
"I know."
"He worked for General Atomic. In Rockford, Illinois. You know where that is?"
"Sure." I couldn't go there, but I knew where Illinois was.
"He worked on the first Mars ship. Oh, fifteen years ago, wasn't it? He always
wanted to go himself, but he couldn't pass the tests." She stopped and looked
at me. I knew what she was thinking. But I didn't always look this way, you
know. Not that there's anything wrong with me now, I mean, but I couldn't pass
the tests any more. Nobody can. That's why we're all one-trippers.
I said, "The only reason I'm shaking like this is because I'm cold."
It wasn't true, of course. It was that cough of Gilvey's. I didn't like to
think about Gilvey, or Sam or Chowderhead or Wally or the captain. I didn't
like to think about any of them. It made me shake. You see, we couldn't kill
each other. They wouldn't let us do that. Before we took off they did
something to our minds to make sure. What they did, it doesn't last forever.
It lasts for two years, and then it wears off. That's long enough, you see,
because that gets you to Mars and back; and it's plenty long enough, in
another way, because it's like a strait jacket. You know how to make a baby
cry? Hold his hands. It's the most basic thing there is. What they did to us
so we couldn't kill each other, it was like being tied up, like being in a
strait jacket, like having our hands held so we couldn't get free. Well. But
two years was long enough. Too long.
The bartender came over and said, "Pal, I'm sorry. Look, I turned the
air-conditioning down. You all right? You look so-"
I said, "Sure, I'm all right." He sounded worried. I hadn't even heard him
come back. The girl was looking worried too, I guess because I was shaking so
hard I was spilling my drink. I put some money on the table without even
counting it. "It's all right," I said. "We were just going."
"We were?" She looked confused. But she came along with me; they always do.
Once they find out you've been to Mars.
In the next place she said, between trips to the powder room:
"It must take a lot of courage to sign up for something like that. Were you
scientifically inclined in school? Don't you have to know an awful lot to be a
spaceflyer? Did you ever see any of those little monkey characters they say
live on Mars? I read an article about how they lived in little cities of
pup-tents or something like that-only they didn't make them, they grew them.
Funny! Ever see those? That trip must have been a real drag, I bet. What is
it, nine months? You couldn't have a baby! Excuse me. . . . Say, tell me. All
that time, how'd you, well, manage things? I mean, didn't you ever have to go
to the you-know, or anything?"
"We managed," I said. She giggled, and that reminded her, so she went to the
powder room again. I thought about getting up and leaving while she was gone,
but what was the use of that? I'd only pick up somebody else.
It was nearly midnight. A couple of minutes wouldn't hurt. I reached in my
pocket for the little box of pills they give us-it isn't refillable, but we
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get a new prescription in the mail every month, along with the pension check.
The label on the box said:
Caution
Use only as directed by physician. Not to be taken by persons suffering heart
condition, digestive upset or circulatory disease. Not to be used in
conjunction with alcoholic beverages.
I took three of them. I don't like to start them before midnight, but anyway I
stopped shaking.
I closed my eyes, and then I was on the ship again. The noise in the bar
became the noise of the rockets and the air washers and the sludge sluicers. I
began to sweat, although this place was air-conditioned too. I could hear
Wally whistling to himself the way he did, the sound muffled by his oxygen
mask and drowned in the rocket noise, only still perfectly audible. The tune
was Sophisticated Lady. Sometimes it was Easy to Love and sometimes Chasing
Shadows, but mostly Sophisticated Lady. He was from Juiliard. Somebody
sneezed, and it sounded just like Chowderhead sneezing. You know how everybody
sneezes according to his own individual style? Chowderhead had a ladylike
little sneeze-it went hutta, real quick, all through the mouth, no nose
involved. The captain went Hrasssh! Wally was Ashoo, ashoo, ashoo. Gilvey was
Hutch-uh. Sam didn't sneeze much, but he sort of coughed and sprayed, and that
was worse. Sometimes I used to think about killing Sam by tying him down and
having Wally and the captain sneeze him to death. But that was a kind of a
joke, naturally, when I was feeling good. Or pretty good. Usually I thought
about a knife for Sam. For Chowderhead it was a gun, right in the belly, one
shot. For Wally it was a tommy-gun - just stitching him up and down, you know,
back and forth. The captain was putting him in a cage with hungry lions, and
Gilvey was strangling with my bare hands. That was probably because of the
cough, I guess.
She was back. "Please tell me about it," she begged. "I'm so curious."
I opened my eyes.
"You want me to tell you about it?"
"Oh, please!"
"About what it's like to fly to Mars on a rocket?"
"Yes!"
"All right," I said. It's wonderful what three little white pills will do. I
wasn't even shaking. "There's six men, see? In a space the size of a
Buick, and that's all the room there is. Two of us in the bunks all the time,
four of us on watch. Maybe you want to stay in the sack an extra ten minutes-
because it's the only place on the ship where you can stretch out, you know,
the only place where you can rest without somebody's elbow in your side. But
you can't. Because by then it's the next man's turn. And maybe you don't have
elbows in your side while it's your turn off watch, but in the starboard bunk
there's the air regenerator master valve-I bet I could still show you the
business, right around my kidneys-and in the port bunk there's the emergency
escape hatch handle. That gets you right in the temple, if you turn your head
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