Icehenge Read Online Free PDF

coffee, tea, bread, beef.… They would run out of those things pretty fast. Then it would be the ship-grown stuff, in enclosed plates, with drinks in bulbs. I watched all the precise forking going on around me. It had a Japanese tea ceremony atmosphere.
    â€œYou’ll have to keep accelerating,” I said. “You can’t stay weightless for long, it would kill you.”
    He smiled. “We’ve got forty-two cesium tanks.” I stared at him. “That’s right. This is the biggest theft in history, Emma. At least that’s one way to think of it.”
    â€œIt sure is.”
    â€œSo, we plan to keep a constant acceleration-deceleration pattern, and create half-Mars gravity most of the time.” We walked up to the food counter and punched out our orders. Our trays slid out of their slot.
    We sat down against the wall away from the mirror wall; I don’t like to eat next to the mirror image of myself. The other three walls of the commons were bright tones of yellow, red, orange, yellow-green. It was autumn on Rust Eagle.
    â€œWe’ll keep up the seasonal colors on board the starship,” Swann said as we ate. “Shorten the daylight hours in winter, make it colder, colors all silver and white and black.… I like winter best. The solstice festival and all.”
    â€œBut it’ll just be a game.”
    He chewed thoughtfully. “I guess.”
    â€œWhere will you go?”
    â€œNot sure. No, seriously! There’s a planetary system around Barnard’s Star. That’s nine light-years. We’ll probably check that out, and at least resupply with water and deuterium, if nothing else.”
    We ate in silence for a time. At the next table a trio sat excavating their trays, arguing about the hydrogen-fixing capabilities of a certain Hydrogenomonas eutropha. Engineering the rebirth of breath. At the next table a young woman reached up to capture an escaping particle of chicken. The diminution of it all!
    â€œHow long?” I asked, eating steadily.
    Swann’s freckle-face took on a calculating look as he chewed. “We could go a hundred, maybe two hundred years.…”
    â€œFor God’s sake, Eric.”
    â€œIt’s only a quarter of our predicted lifetimes. It’s not like generations will live and die on the ship. We’ll have a past on Mars, and a future on some world that could be more like Earth than Mars is! You act like we’re leaving such a natural way of life on Mars. Mars is just a big starship, Emma.”
    â€œIt is not! It’s a planet. You can go outside and stand on the ground. Run around.”
    Swann shoved his tray away, sucked on his drink bulb. “Your five-hundred-year project is the terraforming of Mars,” he said. “Ours is the colonization of a planet in another system. What’s the big difference?”
    â€œAbout ten or twenty light-years.”
    We finished our drinks in silence. Swann took our trays to the counter and brought back bulbs of coffee.
    â€œWas—is Charlie one of you?”
    â€œCharlie?” He looked at me strangely. “No. He works for the Committee’s secret police, didn’t you know that? Internal security?”
    I shook my head.
    â€œThat’s why you don’t see him on miners anymore.”
    â€œAh.” Who did I know, I thought unhappily.
    He was looking beyond me. “I remember … about 2220 or 21 … Charlie dropped by one of our labs with one of his police friends. This was in Argyre. We had completely infiltrated the Soviet space research labs, and had requisitioned this particular one for some tests—reactor-mass conservation, I think it was. I was visiting to help with a supply problem. They couldn’t get all the cesium they wanted. And then there was Charlie and this woman, him saying hello how are you Eric, just dropped by to see how you’re doing.… And I could not tell whether the woman was