Free Podkayne of Mars by Robert A. Heinlein

right.”
    It works; Clark was now as mellow as his nature permits. I suggested companion tumbling—if he didn’t mind being the bottom half of the team?—because I wasn’t sure I could hold him, not at point-five-two gee . . . did he mind?
    He didn’t mind at all; it gave him another chance to be muscular and masculine—and I was certain he could lift me; I massed eleven kilos less than the barbell he had just been lifting. When he was smaller, we used to do quite a bit of it, with me lifting him—it was a way to keep him quiet when I was in charge of him. Now that he is as big as I am (and stronger, I fear), we still tumble a little, but taking turns at the ground-and-air parts—back home, I mean.
    But with my weight almost half again what it ought to be I didn’t risk any fancy capers. Presently, when he had me in a simple handstand over his head, I broached the subject on my mind. “Clark, is Mrs. Royer any special friend of yours?”
    “Her?” He snorted and added a rude noise. “Why?”
    “I just wondered. She—Mmm, perhaps I shouldn’t repeat it.”
    He said, “Look, Pod, you want me to leave you standing on the ceiling?”
    “Don’t you dare!”
    “Then don’t start to say something and not finish it.”
    “All right. But steady while I swing my feet down to your shoulders.” He let me do so, then I hopped down to the floor. The worst part about high acceleration is not how much you weigh, though that is bad enough, but how fast you fall—and I suspected that Clark was quite capable of leaving me head downwards high in the air if I annoyed him.
    “What’s this about Mrs. Royer?” he asked.
    “Oh, nothing much. She thinks Marsmen are trash, that’s all.”
    “She does, huh? That makes it mutual.”
    “Yes. She thinks it’s disgraceful that the Line allows us to travel first class—and the Captain certainly ought not to allow us to eat in the same mess with decent people.”
    “Tell me more.”
    “Nothing to tell. We’re riffraff, that’s all. Convicts. You know.”
    “Interesting. Very, very interesting.”
    “And her friend Mrs. Garcia agrees with her. But I suppose I shouldn’t have repeated it. After all, they are entitled to their own opinions. Aren’t they?”
    Clark didn’t answer, which is a very bad sign. Shortly thereafter he left without a word. In a sudden panic that I might have started more than I intended to, I called after him but he just kept going. Clark is not hard of hearing, but he can be very hard of listening.
    Well, it was too late now. So I put on a weight harness, then loaded myself down all over until I weighed as much as I would on Venus and started trotting on the treadmill until I was covered with sweat and ready for a bath and a change.
    Actually I did not really care what bad luck overtook those two harpies; I simply hoped that Clark’s sleight-of-hand would be up to its usual high standards so that it could not possibly be traced back to him. Nor even guessed at. For I had not told Clark half of what was said.
    Believe you me, I had never guessed, until we were in the Tricorn, that anyone could despise other persons simply over their ancestry or where they lived. Oh, I had encountered tourists from Earth whose manners left something to be desired—but Daddy had told me that all tourists, everywhere, seem obnoxious simply because tourists are strangers who do not know local customs . . . and I believed it, because Daddy is never wrong. Certainly the occasional visiting professor that Daddy brought home for dinner was always charming, which proves that Earthmen do not have to have bad manners.
    I had noticed that the passengers in the Tricorn seemed a little bit stand-offish when we first boarded, but I did not think anything of it. After all, strangers do not run up and kiss you, even on Mars—and we Marsmen are fairly informal, I suppose; we’re still a frontier society. Besides that, most passengers had been in the ship at least from Earth;