Robert A. Heinlein by Podkayne of Mars

Author:Podkayne of Mars
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-04-06T01:22:22+00:00

IX

I am now twenty-seven years old.

Venus years, of course, but it sounds so much better. All is relative.

Not that I would stay here on Venus even if guaranteed the Perfect Age for a thousand years. Venusberg is sort of an organized nervous breakdown and the country outside the city is even worse. What little I’ve seen of it. And I don’t want to see much of it. Why they ever named this dreary, smog-ridden place for the Goddess of Love and Beauty I’ll never know. This planet appears to have been put together from the scrap left over after the rest of the Solar System was finished.

I don’t think I would go outside Venusberg at all except that I’ve just got to see fairies in Right. The only one I’ve seen so far is in the lobby of the hilton we are staying in and is stuffed.

Actually I’m just marking time until we shape for Earth, because Venus is a Grave Disappointment-

and now I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Earth will not be a G.D., too. But I don’t see how it can be; there is something deliciously primitive about the very thought of a planet where one can go outdoors without any special preparations. Why, Uncle Tom tells me that there are places along the Mediterranean (that’s an ocean in La Belle France) where the natives bathe in the ocean itself without any clothing of any sort, much less insulasuits or masks.

I wouldn’t like that. Not that I’m body proud; I enjoy a good sauna sweat-out as well as the next Marsman. But it would scare me cross-eyed to bathe in an ocean; I don’t ever intend to get wet all over in anything larger than a bathtub. I saw a man fished out of the Grand Canal once, in early spring. They had to thaw him before they could cremate him.

But it is alleged that, along the Mediterranean shore, the air in the summertime is often blood temperature and the water not much cooler. As may be. Podkayne is not going to take any silly chances.

Nevertheless I am terribly eager to see Earth, in all its fantastic unlikeliness. It occurs to me that my most vivid conceptions of Earth come from the Oz stories- and when you come right down to it, I suppose that isn’t too reliable a source. I mean, Dorothy’s conversations with the Wizard are instructive-but about what? When I was a child I believed every word of my Oz tapes; but now I am no longer a child and I do not truly suppose that a whirlwind is a reliable means of transportation, nor that one is likely to encounter a Tin Woodman on a road of yellow brick.

Tik-Tok, yes-because we have Tik-Toks in Marsopolis for the simpler and more tedious work. Not precisely like Tik-Tok of Oz, of course, and not called “Tik-Toks” by anyone but children, but near enough, near enough, quite sufficient to show that the Oz stories are founded on fact if not precisely historical.

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