Podkayne of Mars Read Online Free PDF Page B

a dreadful second I didn’t want to leave at all), but also because about thirty of my classmates showed up (which I hadn’t in the least expected), complete with a banner that two of them were carrying reading:

BON VOYAGE—PODKAYNE
    I got kissed enough times to start a fair-sized epidemic if any one of them had had anything, which apparently they didn’t. I got kissed by boys who had never even tried to, in the past—and I assure you that it is not utterly impossible to kiss me, if the project is approached with confidence and finesse, as I believe that one’s instincts should be allowed to develop as well as one’s overt cortical behavior.
    The corsage Daddy had given me for going away got crushed and I didn’t even notice it until we were aboard the shuttle. I suppose it was somewhere about then that I lost that hat, but I’ll never know—I would have lost the last-minute package, too, if Uncle Tom had not rescued it. There were photographers, too, but not for me—for Uncle Tom. Then suddenly we had to scoot aboard the shuttle right now because a shuttle can’t wait; it has to boost on the split second even though Deimos moves so much more slowly than Phobos. A reporter from the War Whoop was still trying to get a statement out of Uncle Tom about the forthcoming Three-Planets conference, but he just pointed at his throat and whispered, “Laryngitis”—then we were aboard just before they sealed the airlock.
    It must have been the shortest case of laryngitis on record; Uncle Tom’s voice had been all right until we got to the shuttle port and it was okay again once we were in the shuttle.
    One shuttle trip is exactly like another, whether to Phobos or Deimos. Still, that first tremendous whoosh! of acceleration is exciting as it pins you down into your couch with so much weight that you can’t breathe, much less move—and free fall is always strange and eerie and rather stomach fluttering even if one doesn’t tend to be nauseated by it, which, thank you, I don’t.
    Being on Deimos is just like being in free fall, since neither Deimos nor Phobos has enough surface gravitation for one to feel it. They put suction sandals on us before they unstrapped us so that we could walk, just as they do on Phobos. Nevertheless Deimos is different from Phobos for reasons having nothing to do with natural phenomena. Phobos is, of course, legally a part of Mars; there are no formalities of any sort about visiting it. All that is required is the fare, a free day, and a yen for a picnic in space.
    But Deimos is a free port, leased in perpetuity to Three-Planets Treaty Authority. A known criminal, with a price on his head in Marsopolis, could change ships there right under the eyes of our own police—and we couldn’t touch him. Instead, we would have to start most complicated legal doings at the Interplanetary High Court on Luna, practically win the case ahead of time and, besides that, prove that the crime was a crime under Three-Planet rules and not just under our own laws . . . and then all that we could do would be to ask the Authority’s proctors to arrest the man if he was still around—which doesn’t seem likely.
    I knew about this, theoretically, because there had been about a half page on it in our school course Essentials of Martian Government in the section on “Extraterritoriality.” But now I had plenty of time to think about it because, as soon as we left the shuttle, we found ourselves locked up in a room misleadingly called the “Hospitality Room” while we waited until they were ready to “process” us. One wall of the room was glass, and I could see lots and lots of people hurrying around in the concourse beyond, doing all manner of interesting and mysterious things. But all we had to do was to wait beside our baggage and grow bored.
    I found that I was growing furious by the minute, not at all like my normally sweet and lovable nature. Why, this place had been built by my own mother!—and here