We went below, and Kei broke out a bottle of fair whiskey from a cache
behind one of the storage cabinets. He winked at me, cracked the cork
and passed it over.
It didn't take long for the liquor to take hold, and I began to realize
what Kei meant when he said it was an experience every man should go
through once. As you know, when a spaceship is in "free fall," with
no rockets blasting, there is no gravity at all, and you float free in
space. To be drunk in free fall is to add the freedom of the alcohol to
the freedom of space. You float on rosy clouds, not just mentally, but
physically. You swim around in nothing, airily, deliciously. There's
nothing on Earth or Mars like it, because you can experience it only in
space.
I saw, too, why Kei would go to the storage deck to drink, even if he
hadn't kept his private cache there. On the storage deck, your wild
gestures won't hit some vital lever or button--and no one else can hear
your ravings. For there's something about a space drunk that makes you
babble. You talk your head off; you talk your heart out.
A space drunk is a good catharsis for all the mental quirks and
repressions that have been bothering you, and maybe I needed such
a catharsis. Possibly Kei did, too. At any rate, we chattered to
each other like boyhood chums, telling our dreams, our aspirations,
revealing our most secret vices and meannesses.
I was not shocked, but duly sympathetic, to learn that Kei had knifed
his brother to death in his teens, and had taken up space service
to escape the resulting complications. Beside this revelation of
fratricide, my own selfishness and my cold-blooded reasons for
marrying Dori seemed tame. But I made it as strong as I could.
"She thinks I love her!" I shouted, laughing uproariously, and Kei
laughed with me. "Think of that! I'm a brilliant, hard-headed,
practical man, and look at her: nice enough, but washed-out, colorless.
She's useful. She's made me rich. But if I'd pick out a woman to fall
in love with...."
Floating in the air as I talked, I had swung around gradually, and now
my eyes fell on the companionway to the centerdeck above us. Dori was
clinging to it, and from her expression I could tell she had heard
everything I said about her.
Her eyes were enormous from the shock, and her face was as
grief-stricken as though I had stabbed her callously through the heart
without cause. She turned without a word and left the deck.
In my drunken exaltation, it seemed funny to me. I laughed about it,
and made jokes about it to Kei. I felt quite smart and heartless.
Later, during the hangover, it didn't seem so funny, but, on the other
hand, I was so miserable I didn't care one way or the other.
Dori spoke of it to me only once, and that was just before we blasted
down to Mars in the G-boat. She looked at me levelly and said, without
a trace of emotion:
"I hate you, Samlaan. Always remember that."
* * * * *
Mars was a wild frontier planet then, where violence was not out of the
ordinary. The spirit of the adventurer and the pioneer pervaded it,
as it does the outer moons today. But the frontier has its own code,
which makes it safer sometimes than the steel and stone jungles of
civilization.
I had what I wanted now--riches--and I had no desire to be forced to
leave Mars, too. There was no more gambling for me, no more living
on the edge of the law. I bought into several respectable business
ventures, content to add to my wealth slowly.
Dori and I built a home in Syrtis Major near Mars City and lived a
quiet life together. Mars at that time was a man's world; it lacked
divorce laws and similar legal and social machinery for terminating
unsuccessful marriages. I doubt that Dori, being what she was, would
have taken advantage of such avenues, anyhow. She was a good wife to
me; she lacked only that former breathless adoration which had meant so
little to me.
A few years after we arrived on Mars, we were invited to a week-long
house party at the home of a business acquaintance, Leswill Odaan.
Odaan's wealth was comparable to my own, and he lived here, in the
lowland of Lacus Lucrinus.
These house parties are not as common now as they were in the old days.
At that time, they were the major social activity of the rural dwellers
of Mars. One invited one's friends for a week at his private dome in
the lowlands--maybe twenty or forty at once. Then for a year or two
he could expect to be a guest at similar parties every month or so,
scattered all over the inhabited area of Mars. That's why the old homes
of the wealthy out in the lowlands are so big.
Odaan didn't live in West o' Mars; I built it later. He had a square,
sprawling chunk of buildings under a dome out in the center of the
Lacus Lucrinus lowland. It was a crude display of raw wealth in
execrable taste, with 14th century tapestries and neo-modern furniture
mixed up in rooms which might be of Egypto-Cretan architecture. I saw
nothing he owned to excite my envy--until, on a sage-jumping jaunt
across the lowland the second day of our visit, I climbed the western
cliff and saw the desert.
Bleak, lonely beauty has a strong appeal for me, Mr. Peache. Perhaps it
is because it strikes a chord in the bleakness and loneliness of my
own heart. But I never had seen anything before, and I never have seen
anything since, to match the stark beauty of those buttes in the Aeolia
Desert, as seen from the western cliffs of Lacus Lucrinus.
It was then that the conception of West o' Mars, as it could be and
should be, sprang full-blown to my mind. I tell you, Mr. Peache, I saw
this place then in my imagination, just as it is today, with this tower
and this great window that overlooks the desert.