Speaking of plumbing, we did have a week or so of roll- up-your-sleeves work before we took off. The large crew who’d set up ad Astra had the hydroponics working as they would in the normal one-gee environment, on the way to Wolf. But it would take at least a week of zero gee before we hooked up with the iceberg, and of course you can’t have standing pools of water in zero gee. They turn into floating blobs. So we had plant-by-plant instructions as to what had to be done to keep root systems and everything moist en route.

(Good practice. We’d be doing it again at the halfway point, since we’d be in zero gee while the iceberg slowly rotated around to start braking.)

Quarantine rules made the transfer into the Space Elevator a little complicated. Every area had to be sterilized after we passed through—from Mars side through the air lock to the hub, then down the extension tube to where the Space Elevator was waiting. It took three trips, awkward in zero gee, especially for our spook pals, who didn’t have a lot of experience. Finding handholds when your hands are full.

It wasn’t too hard to say good-bye to Little Mars, as much time as I’d spent there. It was actual Mars, the Mars colony, that felt like home. Florida was a distant memory. Another world.

We spent four and a half days in the Space Elevator, first at zero gee, but with increasing gravity as we moved out to the end of the Elevator’s tether.

About halfway, I started feeling heavy and depressed. For years, I’d been used to exercising an hour or more a day in Earth gravity, but it was always a relief to get back to Mars- normal. I’d get used to it in time. But it felt like carrying around a knapsack full of rocks, permanently attached.

There wasn’t much to see of ad Astra as we approached, but we didn’t expect anything dramatic. A big flat white box with a shuttle rocket attached. The rocket would maneuver us into rendezvous with the iceberg, then shut down till we got to Wolf, where it would be a landing craft. If the Others let us land.

Going from the Elevator into ad Astra was simple. They coupled automatically, and we walked through two air locks into our new home.

It was stunning. It was huge, at least to my eyes. The line of sight was about fifty meters, over the gym and swimming pool and hydroponics garden. I had trouble focusing that far away, and it made me grin.

Namir, Elza, and Dustin were not smiling. By Earth standards, this was not a big place to be locked up in for a large part of your life. The rest of your life, perhaps.

We stacked our boxes and suitcases there by the air lock, next to the life-support/recycling station, and sent the Space Elevator back down, to pick up our Martians. We went off together to explore.