Chapter 2

We’d been talking for twenty minutes and I still didn’t know her name. She wasn’t being secretive or coy or holding out on me because she didn’t trust me as much as I trusted her. I just hadn’t gotten around to asking her, because we were both still talking about what had happened at the bar and it was so closely tied in with what was happening in New York and London and Paris and every big city on Earth--and on Mars as well--that it dwarfed our puny selves--extra-special as the blonde’s puny self happened to be from the male point of view.

I didn’t know whether she was Helen or Barbara, Anne or Ruth or Tanya. I just knew that she was beautiful and that we were sipping Martinis and looking out through a wide picture window at New Chicago’s lakeshore parklands enveloped in a twilight glow.

The restaurant was called the Blue Mandarin and it conformed in all respects to the picture that name conjures up--a diaphanous blue, oriental-ornate eating establishment with nothing to offer its patrons that was new, original, exciting, unique.

But there it was and there it would remain--until Lake Michigan froze solid. For the moment its artificial decor wasn’t important to either of us. Only the Big Lie and what it was doing to the Martian Colonization Project.

“My father was one of the first,” she said. “Do you know what it means, to stand in an empty, desolate waste, forty million miles from home, and realize you’re one of the chosen few--that a city will some day grow from the seeds you’ve planted and nourished with your life blood?”

“I think I do,” I said. “I hope I do.”

“He died,” she said, “when he was thirty years old, from a Martian virus they hadn’t discovered how to combat until two-thirds of the first two thousand colonists succumbed to it.”

“Why didn’t he take you with him?” I asked. “There were no passenger restrictions then. The Colonization Board had great difficulty in finding enough volunteers.”

“My mother refused to go,” she said. “I’m afraid ... most women are more conservative than men. Father died alone, and five years later Mother married a man who didn’t want to be one of the first ten thousand--or the first sixty thousand. He had no problem. He wasn’t like the men we saw tonight.”

“If every man and woman on Earth wanted to go to Mars,” I said, “the Colonization Board would have no problem. A demand on so colossal a scale could not be met--in a century and a half. And laws would be passed to prevent the scheming that’s taking place everywhere, the hatred and the violence. The Big Lie would not be believed.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s when only twenty thousand can go and five million want to go that you have a problem. A little hope filters through, and the five million become envious and enraged.”

I looked at her. I was feeling the glow now, the warmth creeping through the cells of my brain, the recklessness that alcohol can generate in a man with a worry that looms as big as the Big Lie, to the part of himself that isn’t dedicated to combating the Lie. The ego-centered, demandingly human part, the woman-needing part, the old Adam that’s in all of us.

And suddenly I found myself thinking of Paris in the Spring, and the sparkling Burgundies of France and vineyards in the dawn and what it had meant to have a woman always at my side--or almost always--and in my bed as well.

New York, flag-draped for Autumn, London in a swirling fog, the old houses, the dreaming spires, anywhere on the round green Earth where there was laughter and music and a woman to share it with...

All that had been mine for ten years. But now, like a fool, I wanted Mars as well. Mars was in my blood and I could no longer rest content with what I had.

Take it with me to Mars? And why not? It was no problem ... when you didn’t have my problem. A quite simple problem, really. The woman I’d married wouldn’t go with me to Mars.

She seemed to sense that I was having some kind of inward struggle, and was feeling a decided glow at the same time, for she reached out suddenly and took firm hold of my hand.

“Something’s troubling you,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me about it while you’re feeling mellow. Considering the kind of world we’re living in, mellow is the best way to feel. It wears off quickly enough and next day you pay for it. But while it lasts, I believe in making the most of it. Don’t you?”

Should I tell her, dared I? I might have to pay for it with a vengeance, for she’d probably think me quite mad. And I still had some old-fashioned ideas about loyalty and happened to be in love with my wife.

It was crazy, it made no sense, but that’s the way it was.

I looked at the woman sitting opposite me and wondered how a man could be in love with one woman and find another so attractive that he’d been on the verge of coming right out and asking her if she’d go with him to Mars.

I looked at her blonde hair piled up high, and her pale beautiful face and wondered how it would be if I hadn’t been married to Joan at all.

I shut my eyes for a moment, thinking back, remembering the quarrel I’d had with my wife that morning, the quarrel I’d tried my best to forget over four straight whiskies at the spaceport bar late in the afternoon.

It was almost as if it was taking place again, right there at the table, with another woman sitting opposite me who could not hear Joan’s angry voice at all.

“I mean every word I’m saying, Ralph Graham. You either tell them you’re staying right here in New Chicago or I’m divorcing you. I won’t go to Mars with you--tomorrow or next year or five years from now. Is that plain?”

It was plain enough. To cushion the shock of it, and ease the pain a little I stared into the fireplace, seeing for an instant in the high-leaping flames a red desert landscape and a city that towered to the brittle stars ... white, resplendent, swimming in a light that never was on sea or land.

All right, the first Earth colony on Mars wasn’t that kind of a city. It was rugged and sprawling and rowdy. It was filled with tumult and shouting, its prefabricated metal dwellings scoured and pitted by the harsh desert winds. But I liked it better that way.

I wanted to walk its crooked streets, to rejoice with its builders and creators, to be one of the first sixty thousand. With my mind and heart and blood and guts I wanted to be there before the cautious, solemn, over-serious people ruined it for the kind of man I was.

“I mean it, Ralph,” Joan said. “If you go--you’ll go alone. All of my friends are here, all of my roots. I won’t tear myself up by the roots even for you. Much as I love you, I just won’t.”