Free Red Lightning by John Varley Page B

wave having sucked the sand out from under the foundations, many of which were later found to be not up to county building standards.
    "Typical Florida," Dad said.
     
    I don't want to be prejudiced here, and I know that, although America got it bad, the Caribbean got it worse. Some little islands were scoured almost down to the rock. The Bahamas were in terrible shape, survivors coming down from the highest ground many days after, starving and thirsty and injured. There were deaths in Africa from Guinea to Morocco, and in the Canary Islands, and Portugal, and even in England and Ireland. There were some passengers from those places, and we commiserated with them just as they did with us. But most of us were from America, born or naturalized, and that's where we looked the most. And again, though water had surged up the Potomac and the Hudson, though the wave had swept through the financial district of Manhattan and killed many people on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, and the coasts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the worst damage was in a horrible swath from the Florida Keys to the Chesapeake Bay. And in the middle of that was Daytona Beach.
     
    Hour by hour we got heavier.
    At first it was easy bouncing up forty decks to the dining room in the morning for breakfast, and just a little bit harder for lunch, and just a tad harder for dinner. But by the time of turnaround (which took ten minutes in weightlessness and resulted in the usual quota of scrapes and bruises) we were up to .75 gee, and breakfast was getting to be a bit of a slog. At lunchtime I was breathing pretty hard by the time I reached the seventieth deck, and even coming down wasn't a walk in the park.
    About the only consolation: Mom was looking a bit haggard, too.
    By breakfast the next morning I was starting to get a bit worried about Dad. He was covered in sweat and almost too tired to eat by the time the waffles and eggs Benedict and bacon was set before him.
    "Which is part of the problem," Mom said quietly, as she dug into her oatmeal. Dad glared at her but didn't say anything. Mom isn't a nagger, I'll give her that, at least not where Dad is concerned. She'll say something like that once, then not mention it again. "He can dig his own grave if he wants to," she once told me, when she was particularly angry about how Dad would slack on the daily exercise.
    Any Martian with any sense will be under a doctor's care during a return trip to the Earth. Dad has sense; it's just that he's like me, he hates to exercise, and since he's an adult without Mom cracking the whip over him, he can get away with it. Last time we went to Earth he worked hard for three months before we boarded ship. This time caught him off guard, and his heart didn't like it.
    The Sov didn't have anything like a fully equipped hospital, designed as it was for trips never taking longer than eight days. But there were two doctors on staff, and three Martian doctors going home for the emergency. We visited every day, as a family, as it was a bit of a cattle call with all the people needing to be monitored. So Mom and Elizabeth and I all got to stand in the diagnostic machines and get a clean bill of health, and we all – plus everybody else who might happen to be standing around – got to hear the doctor tut-tut the way some doctors do and tell Dad he had only himself to blame for his shortness of breath. He wasn't a Martian doctor; a Martian would have been more understanding.
    "You're basically quite healthy for a man of your age, Mr. Garcia," the doctor said on our visit shortly after turnaround. "But you need to lose about twenty-five pounds, and you know that will feel like sixty extra pounds when you get home. You don't need to worry about your heart right now, but if you keep up this way for another ten years, you will. For now, I recommend you take it easy and be sure to get plenty of fluids when you get to Florida. Heat exhaustion is your chief peril."
    What an asshole. Dad stood