Adaptation

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The prospect of being stuck on Mars for a while did not worry Marilyn Godalpin a lot — not at first, anyway. She had been near the piece of desert that they called a landing field when the Andromeda came in to a bad landing. After that it did not surprise her at all when the engineers said that with the limited facili­ties at the settle­ment the repairs would take at least three months, most likely four. The asto­nish­ing thing was that no one in the ship had got more than a bad shaking.

It still did not worry her when they explained to her, with simpli­fied astro­nautics, that that meant there could be no take-off for the Andro­meda for at least eight months on account of the rela­tive posi­tion of Earth. But she did get a bit fussed when she discovered that she was going to have a baby. Mars did not seem the right place for that.

Mars had surprised her. When Franklyn Godalpin was offered the job of developing the Jason Mining Corpo­ration's terri­tory there, a few months after their marriage, it had been she who had persuaded him to accept it. She had had an instinct that the men who were in on the ground floor there would go places. Of Mars itself, as seen in pic­tures, her opi­nion was low. But she wanted her hus­band to go places, and to go with him. With Franklyn's heart and head pulling in oppo­site direc­tions she could have succeeded on either side. She chose head for two reasons. One was lest some day he might come to hold the lost chance of his life against her, the other because, as she said:

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