Reservation
I guess I don't have a lot of reasons not to go to Mars...
Hector sat on his couch in his discomfited bachelor's home, in his shabby clothes, ruminating in a thunderhead of aggravation and embarrassment. He was no longer feeling all that stoned and the wrinkled pamphlet limp between his fingertips suggested he could be paid a fair amount of money–$20,000–to leave this planet behind. Mars wasn't like the place he read about in science fiction stories as a kid. Mars had a Paris right next to a London right next to a New York, all dressed in their Sunday best. Mars had suburbs out of the fifties or, if you preferred, out of the nineties. There was no crime on Mars. There was no war on Mars. Why wouldn't a person want to go to Mars? Why would a person need to be paid to go?
