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home, and how is that going to look for the whole industry?"
    You notice Dad doesn't spend a lot of time grieving over the potentially dead Earthies. He claims to love 'em, they're his livelihood, but he doesn't expect much of them except rudeness, impossible demands, lack of common sense, and about six concussions per week from refusing to wear their helmets indoors.
    Dad knows a bit about cheap motels. He is the fourth generation in the hospitality industry in our family. My great-great-grandparents opened a little two-story drive-up just down the road from Cape Canaveral and called it the Seabreeze. About the time John Glenn took his first trip into space, they renamed it the Blast-Off Motel. My grandmother inherited it, and my dad spent all his early life there. In that time it went downhill quite a bit. It was never very fancy, but by the time Dad met Uncle Travis and Uncle Jubal, Grandma was about to go bankrupt. And then the whole Red Thunder thing happened, and it changed his life.
    Mine, too. Without that trip, I'd surely be growing up as an Earthie.
    Makes me shiver just to think about it.
    Because when all is said and done, the only place that sucks more than Mars does, is the Earth.
     
     

2
    Reason #2 that Mars sucks: exercise.
    Mom says I shouldn't complain. If I was on Earth, she says, I'd be doing the same thing, only it would be spread out over the whole day, including the nighttime, when I was asleep. Did I say Mom can find the bright side of anything? Well, she can. I mean, she does have a point, but adding in the extra exercise I'd get just by inhaling and exhaling at night as a cherry on the top of the hot fudge sundae of life is exactly what I'd expect of Mom.
    Like I said before, since the chances of you being an Earthie are overwhelmingly better than the chance of you being a sensible person, I'll explain what I'm talking about.
    The fact is, more than once I've run into Earthies who got here and didn't know Mars has less gravity than the Earth does. The surface gravity of Mars is a little more than one-third of a gee. Thirty-eight percent, to be precise. A gee is the acceleration of gravity on Earth. I mass about 180 pounds. That means I weigh about 68 pounds on Mars.
    Mom's point being, if I was on Earth I'd be carrying that full 180 around all day long. Everything would be almost three times as hard to do as it is here. Walking upstairs to the top of the Red Thunder Hotel, twenty stories, would leave most people breathing hard. I thought for a long time that's one of the reasons why so many of the Earthies that come here are real, real fat. It must be tough for them at home, but here they can dance and jump and run... though it's not a pretty sight. Mars must be a delightful place to visit for fat people. I pictured travel agencies advertising for real porkers. But Mom said no, it's just that more Earthies are fat than Martians. (Well, she didn't say Earthies, she never does. Some people think it's an insulting term. She says "People from Earth," or "Earthlings." The funny thing, an Earthie once told me they don't like being called Earthlings. She said it was creepy. Go figure.)
    So by now you're wondering what's the big problem. I'll admit, it's not immediately obvious. I see vids of people walking around on Earth, and they just look... weary. Not their faces; they may be smiling and laughing, having fun. It's their body language. They move like people who are exhausted, plodding along, tromp tromp thud thud . Gravity pulls their faces down. By the time they're thirty, they're starting to look old. Gravity kills, no question about it, and you don't have to fall off a building to know that. Just look at a fifty-year-old Earthie.
    The fact is, if you never went back to Earth – went "back home" as most of the grown-ups put it – it wouldn't be a problem. Get it now? Some people here have emigrated for their health, they'd be dead already if they'd stayed in a one-gee field. They're never going