Journey Between Worlds Read Free Page A

appreciated Dad’s wanting to give me a really supercolossal graduation gift to make up for all those years. But I didn’t want a trip to Mars, I wanted to be with him.
    What I didn’t know yet was that Dad had just received an assignment from his firm to investigate the feasibility of their opening a branch office on Mars.

Chapter 2
    I still don’t like to think about graduation day. I still hate to relive that evening, the first evening that I knew we were going to Mars.
    What surprised me most was that Dad was so happy about it. We sat on one of the benches in the quad and talked while I was waiting for Ross to get his car packed. (I’d explained about our date, when Dad wanted to take me out for something to eat.) I held the ticket envelope next to my diploma, my damp fingers making a soiled blotch over the triple globes.
    â€œAren’t you excited, honey?” Dad demanded.
    Excited wasn’t the word for it. Flabbergasted would have been closer. But I was trying to act calm while I got up courage to tell Dad that I’d rather not go to Mars at all.
    It wasn’t that I was afraid to go. I wouldn’t want anyone to get that idea. Or maybe I was and didn’t know it; but if so it wasn’t physical fear, not then. I had as matter-of-fact an attitude toward space travel as most people have, though I had no personal interest in it, not being the scientific type. But going to Mars is not like going to Europe. For one thing, you’re gone longer. At the very least, I would miss two or three terms of college. For another, a different planet is so—well, so foreign.
    Not that I was thinking about those drawbacks then. I was thinking about Ross. Perhaps, after all, it had been wrong not to have told Dad long ago how I felt about Ross. Since I hadn’t, though, it seemed wisest to bring up the educational angle first.
    â€œDad,” I began, “what about the university? I’ve been admitted; I’m supposed to start in September.”
    Dad smiled. “It won’t hurt anything for you to wait, Melinda. You’ll learn more from a trip to the Colonies than from a year at school in any case, but if you want to forge ahead for your freshman exams, you can study on the ship. There won’t be much else to do en route, you know.”
    I was silent. I had never encountered anyone who’d gone on a spaceship as a fare-paying passenger instead of as a crew member. There aren’t many such people, except for the homesteaders, whose fare is paid by the government and whose passage is strictly one way. Dad explained that I’d been right in thinking he couldn’t afford the fare. His company was paying it. If my mother had been living she would have been entitled to accompany him, and since she wasn’t, he’d talked them into sending me in her place.
    â€œThe firm’s anxious to get someone from the home office out there right now,” he told me. “Someone who’ll be back here by next year, when the government appropriation for the Colonies comes up for review again. There’s going to be a lot of public discussion about the value of Mars, and it will be a good thing for at least one of our managers to have some firsthand knowledge of the situation.”
    I tried another tack. “But why do they need you for this job, Dad? Aren’t there other men who’d be willing to go?” I’d always had the impression that Dad was enough of a key man in the organization to have pretty much the last word about his assignments.
    He laughed. “I outrank them, Mel. I’ve waited years for this opportunity, and at last I’m high enough up in the firm to have first crack at it.” He sounded as pleased as if he had just been elected president of something.
    â€œYou—you chose the assignment yourself ?”
    â€œWell, I made the right people aware of how I’d feel if I were offered it.”
    â€œDad,