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CHAPTER SEVEN

ON THE THRESHOLD

The inevitability of gradualness.

—Lord Passfield & Beatrice Webb

Alex Smith, 26 Bi-May, Mars Year vii

U.S.S. Armageddon, in Transit from Earth to Mars

I think Becky was secretly pleased to have been included on the expedition, although I know she wasn’t too happy about our daughter being there. I’d tried to get both of them removed from the ship before our departure, of course, but without any success.

I believe that it was President Bush who’d had the last word on the subject. She’d been influenced by that thrice-damned charlatan, Madame Stavroula, to add the psychics to our group of advisers, over the strenuous objections of both the scientific and military communities.

“Maybe it means nothing,” she said, “and maybe they will add nothing, but right now they seem to have more answers than any of the rest of you.”

“With all respect, Ma’am,” General Burgess had said, “their so-called answers are unverifiable speculations, based on nothing tangible that I or anyone else can discern. This woman means well, I’m sure, but she and her little group of fortune tellers will consume a great deal of our limited supplies of food and water while we’re trying to determine the veracity of their speculations.”

But the real “Madame” got her way, as usual, and so the Sensitives were included among the ship’s company. Even the ex-Governor had to defer to her on such occasions, despite his public blustering.

Mostly, though, I saw very little of them. The women kept largely to themselves. I knew from Becky, their elected representative on the Expedition Advisory Council, that their dreams and visions continued to intensify as we progressed further in our journey through space. Why only certain female members of the species had been affected in this way was the subject of much speculation by psychologists, including Dr. Emil Kürnig, a member of my own group on the expedition.

“Ve see dat the intuitive nature of the Ayesha pershona now ish coming to the foreground,” he would mumble, “und ve undershtand how it is dat dish ting, it ish accompolished.”

Frankly, I hadn’t a clue as to what he was talking about, but he was like that sometimes. He was much more personable when drinking beer, which of course was forbidden on the ship, along with anything else of an alcoholic nature (although I believe that Mindon had somehow smuggled a flask of whiskey on board).

There were also a few children present, all of them over the age of six, and all offspring of other Sensitives; and of course my daughter Mélusine was among them. They seemed to adapt to ship life much more quickly than any of the rest of us.

Mellie would swoop down the corridors of Deck Three, our living quarters, using the hand-holds to swing like Tarzan’s mate up and down the length of the vessel. I had to caution her several times after a couple of near collisions with adults.

A few days later I was paged on the com system to report to the Infirmary, where my daughter was being treated. Becky was already there when I arrived, breathless from having swung myself nearly the length of the ship.

“What happened?” I asked my wife.

I could barely see Mellie strapped to an examination table in the other room, several bloody cloths hanging in the air next to her.

Becky pulled me away from the door hole.

“She started bleeding a few hours ago,” she whispered in my ear.

“Is it serious?” I asked.

My heart was pounding. This confirmed all of the fears that I’d had about bringing the women and children on this voyage.

“Menarche usually responds fairly well to treatment,” she said smugly.

“Menarche? What kind of disease is that?”

“Her first period, Alex,” Becky said.

“But, but, she’s only twelve years old.”

“It happens. Now, I suggest you go back to your pontificating and let me deal with this. I have a little more experience with these things, I think.”

So I did.

That afternoon I was due at a meeting of Expedition III’s Advisory Council. The issue of accountability and chain of command was coming to a head just after the midpoint on our journey. Burgess had created the group from the different constituencies represented in the fleet, including several of the military units. We were able to meet through videoconferencing in the various rooms established for that purpose on each major vessel. I represented the Thinkers, while my wife stood in for the Psychics, Jorys Johns for the Journalists, and Mindon Min for the Scientists, among others.

But Burgess continued to insist on the paramount role of the High Command, which he headed.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he finally said, after a particularly nasty and bruising meeting, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to insist on this particular point. I have the ultimate authority and responsibility for the safety of the men and women of the fleet, and for the success of our mission. I’ve given you my word that I’ll listen to whatever you have to say. In the end, though, my decisions will be final. I have my orders, and ultimately your presence here makes you subject to those orders. Now, I think we’ve talked enough for one session.”

Afterwards, I met with my own little group.

“Who the fucking hell does he think he is?” Anton Chernov, a Russian-American artist, asked.

“The Commander-in-Chief,” I said.

“The overbearing son of a bitch!” came the response.

“He’s got a point, though,” Johns said. “On the battlefield, only one person can be in charge; otherwise, you’ve lost the war before it’s even begun.”

“Each of us is an expert in his own field,” I said, “and the same is true of the members of the other groups. All of us have connections and constituencies back on Earth, and we’ve been guaranteed access to communications facilities even after we arrive on Mars. If there’s information to be gathered or conclusions to be drawn, we’ll find them.”

“But how do we know they’ll even listen?” Chernov asked. “I don’t trust these military types, Alex; I don’t trust them at all. They want easy solutions to everything. The universe is a complex place, my friends. If it was easy to defeat the aliens, we would have done so years ago.”

“Maybe we did,” I said.

“I don’t believe that either,” Chernov said. “I think the Martians still have a few surprises waiting for us out there. Bah!”

Then our meeting broke up. I got together that evening with Mindon and Geoff Alexander, the paleontologist, who’d somehow been added to the expedition at the last moment, by whom or for what purpose I had no idea (he didn’t know himself).

“My people aren’t happy,” I said.

“Mine neither, man,” Mindon said, “but what can you do? I have a tendency to believe that things work out pretty much as they’re supposed to—even if you don’t personally like the outcome.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but a bad outcome in this case could be the end of us all, not to mention our families and colleagues back on Earth.”

“You know,” Alexander said, “when I stumbled on that blasted dino egg back in ’95, I felt like that damn metal spike was sticking right through the middle of me. I had a pretty good idea what it meant, even back then. But I was a lot younger in those days.

“I still go out on digs, but I don’t believe any longer that I can find all the answers buried in the Montana rock fields. Maybe we’ll discover a few more answers on Mars. Maybe we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be trapped too soon by our own fossilized thinking.”

“I’ve spent so much time speculating about the Martians and their motives,” I said, “that I don’t know what’s true anymore and what isn’t.”

“Well,” Mindon said, “I can think of a few things that remain true: 1) the aliens will be waiting for us whenever we get there; and 2) I’m really tired and need to get to bed—or at least what amounts to bed with those stupid hammock thingies.”

We all laughed. Each of us had had problems getting ourselves entangled in the middle of the night in the blasted netting, which seemed to be designed with monkeys in mind, not human beings. I’d banged my head a couple of times on what passed for the ceiling in our small quarters.

Later that night, I talked with Becky as we were quite literally hanging off the wall together.

“What do your people think about all this?” I asked her quietly.

“Madame Stavroula believes that the answers are there for us to find, if we can open our hearts and minds to the possibilities.”

“But what does she really think will happen?”

There was a long silence.

“She hasn’t told me much, Alex,” Becky finally said softly. “She won’t tell me. I have the impression, and it’s only that, that what she’s envisioning isn’t very promising. I think she’s just afraid, and I’m not sure whether she’s more afraid of the aliens or of our own people. Whenever I talk to her, she seems distracted somehow. I’ve never seen her like that before.”

“I have,” I said without thinking.

“What?”

“Hey, can you two please go to sleep?” my dear daughter hissed from the other side of the room. “I’m trying to get some rest over here. It’s bad enough when you do that stuff of yours.”

“Stuff?” I whispered in Becky’s ear.

“You know, like this,” she said, poking me.

“Oh,” I said, squirming. “That! I’d almost forgotten.”

“Poleeeze!” Mellie said. “I’m covering my ears now.”

I didn’t worry about Mars for quite some time. It’s amazing what zero-G can do for your libido.

But before morning bells shook the ship from its slumber, I had the strangest dream.

It was dark. I was floating in a pool of sea water. I could taste the salt spray, and could hear the slight sloshing noise of the small waves as they tiptoed past me. The red weed caressed the underside of my body, tickling me and almost making me giggle. The growth swirled about as if it were animate. Then something grabbed my penis and pulled me down beneath the surface of the pool. I started gasping for air and blowing bubbles in my desperate attempt to get loose.

That’s when I came to the surface again.

“Alex, what’s wrong?” Becky asked, putting her arms around me.

I struggled for a moment to get free, still touched by the fronds of my imagination.

“What’s the matter?”

“The weed,” I managed to gasp. “It’s Mars, Becky. It’s reaching out for me.”

She held me close until I stopped shuddering. I felt like I’d been violated.

“Now you know how I feel sometimes,” she said.