saw the gesture and laughed. “Still there?”
Kaminski nodded. “Good thing, with all these damned PIs.”
“You just keep it there, Ski, out of sight. Ha! Man, we’re gonna clean up when we get back, right?”
“Aw, fer…” Kaminski shook his head. “Why don’t you tell everyone, Slider?”
“Tell us what?” Sergeant Witek, one of the HQ element people, asked.
“Nothin’,” Kaminski said, a little nervous. There wasn’t anything wrong with what he was doing. But the other guys probably wouldn’t understand….
As far back as the Mercury program in the early 1960s, astronauts had carried small and easily transported items with them into space—toy space capsules, coins, even stamped envelopes that could be postmarked in space…items that would be worth a hell of a lot to collectors upon their return. This was a joint venture. It had been Slidell’s idea to take something that might serve as a souvenir…and Kaminski’s idea that the souvenir should be a flag, an American flag. He wore it day and night wrapped around his waist beneath his T-shirt, because if Knox or one of the other senior NCOs found it in his gear locker during an inspection, he’d be cleaning that lavatory cube all the way back to Earth, and likely they’d confiscate the flag, which would be worse. The idea was to have everyone sign it after the mission was over; Slidell claimed he knew a guy in San Diego who could put an artifact like that up for auction. God, a flag signed by fifteen or twenty of the Marines who’d actually been to Mars ought to fetch thousands….
“All right, First Section!” Knox called out. “Hit the hatch!”
Making sure his M-29 ATAR assault rifle was securely strapped to his back, Kaminski joined the other Marines as they single-filed through the hatch and out to the transport pod. “Hey, Slider? What the hell do they want with US Marines on Mars, anyway?”
“Shit, why does the brass ever do anything?” Slidell replied. “To dump on the enlisted guy.”
Which seemed as good an answer to Kaminski as any he’d heard so far.
THREE
WEDNESDAY, 9 MAY: 1705 HOURS GMT
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
1305 hours EDT
Kaitlin Garroway took the second-floor door out of Herb Simon Hall onto the elwalk and headed for Schenley Park. Two exams down, three to go, plus her final project, and then she was off to Japan. She needed to work some more on her project this afternoon, but first she needed to clear her mind. After being closed up all morning, she was eager for the sight of trees and grass and blue sky.
The weather was something she really liked about Pittsburgh, the variety of the seasons, the spectacular explosion of fall colors, the sharp joy of spring after an icy winter. The dull sameness of the weather at Camp Pendleton in Southern California, where her dad had been stationed before his junket to Mars and where she’d lived before she entered college three years ago, had sometimes made her ready to scream. She laughed. Yukio thought she was nuts, but then his part of Japan was a lot like Southern California. Small wonder he hated the winters here.
Resting her hand lightly on the railing, she ran down the steps from the elwalk to ground level and walked down the hill into the park. What exactly did she feel for Yukio? She’d liked him from the moment they’d met last fall, in the Japanese Room of the International Center, and for the past few months, they’d been spending more and more of their free time together. Kaitlin wasn’t scared of the words, “I love you,” and had certainly used them with Yukio, but did those words necessarily imply a lifetime commitment? Was she ready for a lifetime commitment?
Maybe she didn’t need to know. Maybe it was enough to know that she loved him, that she enjoyed being with him and talking with him about everything. Well, everything except politics, but then who does like to talk about politics? Her parents had never agreed on politics—that’s what her dad said, at any rate; her mother had died before Kaitlin was politically aware—and they got along beautifully. She and Yukio had just recently started talking about the possibility of a long-term relationship, and now with their upcoming trip to Japan, she found herself thinking about it a lot.
Yukio wanted to introduce her to his family, and she knew enough about Japanese protocol to know what that meant. She and Yukio both considered themselves to be Internationalists, not in the sense of wanting the UN to take over everything, but in the sense of being citizens of the world. Would Yukio still feel that way if it came to a choice between her…and his family? If his family wouldn’t accept her, would he be willing to live in the States permanently? Come to think of it, suppose they did accept her. Would she be willing to leave her country behind, to make a permanent home in Japan?
She shook her head. Too much serious thinking with nothing in your stomach is a no-good way to make decisions. She really wished she could talk to her dad about this, but somehow she hadn’t been able to tell him about Yukio, and she wasn’t entirely sure why. She hadn’t even told him about the trip to Japan. Not that she needed to, of course. She was of age, she had her own passport, and she was paying for the trip out of money she’d earned. But it had been a long time since she’d kept a secret from her father. She grinned. Usually the two of them kept secrets from others.
She reached her favorite tree, a sprawling black walnut, and sat down, first unhooking her PAD case from her hip belt. Taking her PAD out of its case, she carefully unfolded it and propped it up on her knees, keying it to download her v-mail. The usual departmental garbage—she’d have to check through it later to make sure she wasn’t missing anything important. She still hadn’t been able to write a filter good enough to catch everything she needed to see. She’d once accused Namir, the department head, of deliberately writing department memos so obscurely that a programmed filter wouldn’t be able to extract the substance. “Well, if your filter isn’t good enough, Kaitlin,” he’d said with an irritating twinkle, “perhaps you’d better write one that is.” Naturally, she’d risen to the challenge, but just as naturally, Namir had increased the obfuscatory nature of his memos. She grinned. She’d learned more about self-enhancing systems writing and rewriting those damned filters than she had in three years of classes. Namir’s method was brutal, but it worked.
Hmm, what else? A few vids from friends, nothing critical. Nothing from Yukio, but that wasn’t surprising. They’d planned to meet here after his exam, so the only reason for him to comm her would be to tell her that he couldn’t make it. Notice of the Zugswang meeting tonight. She keyed in a reply, saying that she was planning on being there. A few games of chess would be the best preparation she could think of for her physics exam the next day. More study at this point would only fry her brain.
Ooh, great, a message from Dad. Kaitlin checked her wrist-top for the current time and then tapped a key to give her GMT, the Greenwich Mean Time that all spaceships and all space expeditions ran on. Only four hours difference now that Daylight Savings had kicked in, so it was late afternoon on the Polyakov. He mostly wrote her at night. When he wrote at other times, it was usually because he had something special to say, something beyond the trivia of day-to-day life aboard a cycler bound for Mars. She snorted. As if he didn’t know full well that anything that happened on board the Polyakov was fascinating to her. She’d been space-happy since…since she didn’t know how long. At least since she saw her first Vandenberg launch, but the genesis of her space fever was a lot earlier than that.
She remembered her mother reading to her a lot when she was little. Her dad had told her that a lot of the books her mother read to her were stories about spaceships and other planets and alien beings, books she later devoured for herself. Books by Heinlein and Asimov, Longyear and Brin, Zettel and Ecklar. It was infuriating. Here her dad was going off on a trip she’d give her eyeteeth for, not to mention certain other less mentionable parts, and he didn’t care! He’d rather be on a beach in the Bahamas than on the sands of Mars! She was gonna have to comm that man a lecture. If he didn’t learn to enjoy walking where no human had walked before…well, she wasn’t sure what she’d do