A, B, C: Three Short Novels

  “Fine, thanks, Captain.”

  “Want to come over here with me and raise a kid?”

  “You’re drunk, Hank,” she said.

  “Not very,” I told her. “I’m serious. Why don’t you chuck Beta-2 City to your next in command, take a shuttle boat over here, and I’ll resign to an advisory position and you and me will live in idyllic free fall in the Center Section for the rest of our natural lives—which may not be very long; so think it over, Lee.”

  “This desert got you down, Hank?”

  “Lee, it’s such a waste! How the hell did we know we were going to run into this sort of nonsense? If we had known, maybe we could have prepared for it. But at this rate we’ll be running through meson fields as thick as this or thicker all the way out, and they eat through the hull just like a file.”

  “Or we could come out of this one in ten minutes and not hit another one the whole time left. We don’t know what’s out there, Hank.”

  “Hell, a purple dragon with crepe-paper wings may be out there too, waiting for jelly beans like us to roll by. But it’s not likely. The only thing that is likely is that we’ll be gnawed up by these damn meson fields until there isn’t a scrap of anything resembling a starship left. The outside viewscope already shows that the hull looks like a road map of the North Atlantic states. Three hundred years of this and we’ll be lucky if a lump of Swiss cheese gets to Leffer. Lee, come over and spend the time with me.”

  “Hank,” she said. (I couldn’t see her. We always talked to each other with our eyes black. I hadn’t seen her in person since she was twenty-two. The idea of her pushing seventy now made me feel funny.) “Hank, suppose we do get out of the desert. I’ve got at least ten years of teaching to do if these kids are to get through the next three hundred years alive and look like something Earth would be proud of. By then we’ll both probably be ready for the Death’s Head.”

  “There’re others to teach them, Lee.”

  “Not enough. You know that.”

  I was quiet for maybe six seconds. “Yeah, I know that.”

  Then she surprised me, and I realized in a moment how much all this sand count business was taking out of her. She said very quickly: “The next time the sand count reaches a hundred and twenty-five, I’ll come to you, Hank.” And she switched off. I feel like a little less than two cents.

  —

  The entry ended and Joneny glanced at the next: “Sand count up to eleven,” and the next, “Sand count down to eight,” and the next, “Sand count down to seven,” then: “Sand count steady at seven.” For almost a month it continued there. Then an alarmed: “Sand count up to nineteen.” “Sand count up to thirty-two.” An hour later: “Sand count up to thirty-nine.” An hour on: “Sand count seventy-nine.” And the next hour:

  How it happened, or why, I don’t know. I’d been watching the needle creep up for the past three hours. Sand count ninety-four; sand count one hundred seventeen. I felt like I was nothing but sweat sherbet, frozen and useless. Then the damn inter-vessel phone was shouting at my elbow. When I punched the switch, I heard Lee’s voice: “Oh, for God’s sake, Hank, what are we going to do? What’s happening? Why?”

  “Lee, I—I don’t know.”

  “Jesus Christ, Hank, sand count one hundred thirty-eight, one forty-nine. Oh, Hank, we had a dream, a dream about the stars! And now we won’t get there. Oh, God, we won’t get there!” She was crying. I was just numb. When I looked at the meter, the needle was moving with the speed of a second hand on a watch.

  “It’s a hundred and ninety-six, Hank. I’m coming over. I’m coming over to you, Hank.” I could hardly hear her for the tears.

  It was at two hundred and nine. “You’re crazy,” I cried back at her. “Even the shuttle boat would be eaten up before you got two hundred miles. Oh, goddamn it, Lee, we won’t make it.”

  She was still crying, “I’m coming to you, Hank,” and the needle soared somewhere up past three hundred. Then—it just reversed itself and whipped back down to zero, pausing for about three seconds at forty-five before it slipped off the other end of the scale. My first thought was that the meter had broken.

  I could just hear Lee trying to catch her breath on the other end of the phone. “Hank?”

  “Lee?”

  “We’re out of it, Hank.” Nothing was broken, except maybe something inside me. “We’re in the sea again. It’s clear sailing, Hank.” Then she said, “I am coming to see you. I won’t stay, but I want to see you.”

  Joneny turned the page and read on.

  For half an hour the exhaust from her shuttle boat was like a wisp of wild hair blowing brightly on the viewscope. She came in with her eyes clear and her ears open and I went down to the tube to meet her. I saw her walk in. She must have seen me and paused for a moment. I think she raised her head, and I saw her brown eyes sparkling, and her black hair shaking to her shoulders. I saw the slightly pugged nose and the clear alabaster skin and the smile on lips just a trifle full. Then she came toward me—and I realized what I had seen.

  “Hank,” she said when she had walked—very slowly—along three quarters of the way. Now I went toward her. Her hair was short, white, her eyes were wide, and there was no smile on her face. She breathed hard. “Hank?” It was as though she didn’t believe it was me. Then she said, “Hank, you’re going to have to get me out of this gravity before I have a stroke.”

  “Huh?”

  “I haven’t been well recently and I’ve been keeping to the free-fall section.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure,” I said.

  “I’m afraid my feet are killing me.” She gave a little laugh.

  The voice was hers. I had followed its aging over the forty years that separated us from Earth. But when I put my arm around her shoulder to help her, the skin was like loose cloth over her bones. We got to the edge of the tube and into the lift. When we reached the free-fall section, she got a hell of a lot more relaxed. Once she stopped and looked at me. “I guess…you’ve come through in a little better shape than I have, Hank. Well, they say pretty women age quickly. And I used to be…be very pretty, wasn’t I, Hank?” She laughed again. “Oh, forget it, Hank. Boy, now I know what it means to have sore feet.”

  “Sore feet?” I asked.

  “Hasn’t that gotten around this City yet? That’s what the kids say now when somebody’s been in free fall too long and they come into a gravity section. Don’t worry. It’ll get here. It’s funny the way we pick up the kids’ expressions. They pick ’em up from us, make up new meanings. Then we get ’em back again. They affect us almost as much as we affect them.” She sighed. “We’ve put so much Earth into them, they want everything to be Earth again. So they keep giving Earth names and Earth phrases to things that belong out here. Do you think we’ll make it, Hank?”

  I didn’t say anything. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. She waited with a smile sitting so strangely on the loose skin of her lips. Then the smile went and she looked down at her wrinkled hands. When she looked up, there was something like fear in her expression.

  “Lee, we’re old now, aren’t we? It doesn’t seem so long.” I said it almost like a question, as though perhaps she could explain to me how it had happened.

  When she did speak, she just said, “I think I better go back now.”

  We exchanged two more words, just at the shuttle boat door, and both of them were “Good-bye.” I took her in my arms, and she held on to my shoulders as tight as she could. But it wasn’t very, and I let her go quickly. Then she was just a wisp of silver light on the view screen.

  I was in a bad mood for the rest of the day and the kids avoided me like plague. But that evening I put in a call to Beta-2 City.

  “Hey there, Captain,” I heard a familiar voice say.

  “Hello, Captain,” I answered, and we laughed. Then we did something we hadn’t done for a long time. We talked for an hour and a half about the stars.

  Joneny closed the book. Sand and desert: meson fields! And “City” wa
s part of the starship’s title. Bright hair: the exhaust from a shuttle boat. Sore feet, eyes black; of course “The Ballad of Beta-2” was from a time much later than that of Hank and Leela, the first captains of the starships. But almost everything, at least in the chorus, made some some sort of sense now. He let the words run through his mind once more, his concentration drifting inward, losing focus upon the dials and screens, even the logbook in his hand:

  Then came one to the City,

  Over sand with her bright hair wild,

  With her eyes coal black and her feet sole sore,

  And under her arms a green-eyed child.

  Then someone said, “Hello.”

  chapter four

  Joneny whirled and nearly tore himself loose from his magnetic couplings with the floor. The book flew from his hand and bounced away.

  The boy was holding the edge of a circular doorway with one hand. Now he reached out with his skinny foot and caught the book in his toes. “Here,” he said, giving the book a shove so that it went floating end over end back to Joneny.

  Joneny caught it. “Thank you.”

  “Any time.” The boy was thin, naked, with luminously white skin. Joneny would have put his age at fourteen or fifteen, except that his hair, fine and pale and long, had receded at the temples like an old man’s, throwing off the whole character of his face. The nose was flat, the lips were thin, and the features were all dominated by immense shell-green eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “Just…eh…looking around,” answered Joneny.

  “For what?”

  “Eh…whatever I can…well, find.” Joneny was surprised and a little put off.

  “You found that?” The boy gestured with his foot toward the book.

  Joneny nodded cautiously.

  “Can you read it?”

  Joneny nodded again.

  “You must be pretty smart,” the boy grinned. “I can read it too, I bet. Give it here.”

  Joneny couldn’t think of anything else to do, so he tossed the diary back. The boy grabbed it with his toes again, opened the cover with his other foot, reached down and turned the first page with his free hand. “This is the Logbook of Gamma-5 City, sole property of Captain Hank Brandt, begun in the year—”

  “All right, all right,” Joneny said. “I believe you.” A thought struck him. “Where did you learn to talk?”

  “What do you mean, where?” the boy asked. His green eyes widened in surprise.

  “Your accent,” Joneny said. “You’re speaking pretty modern English.” It was a lot more modern than the clipped distortions of the robot speaker that had guided him in.

  “I just—” He paused. “I don’t know where I learned. Just”—he looked around—“here.”

  “Where are all the others?” Joneny asked.

  The boy let go of the door and began to turn over slowly in the air, the book still in his toes. “Other what?”

  “The other people.”

  “On the ships,” the boy said. Then he added, “There’re no people on Sigma-9 City or Beta-2 City, though.”

  “I know that,” Joneny said, mustering an imitation of patience. “Where are the people on this ship?”

  “Mostly in the center section, at the Market, in the Fishstore, in the Mountains, or down in the Poolroom.”

  “Will you take me to them?” Joneny asked.

  The boy was almost right side up again. “Are you sure you want to go?”

  “Well, why not?”

  “They won’t like you very much,” the boy said to him. Now he reached with his hand and grabbed back on the rim of the entrance. “They almost killed the last visitors they had. Those stun guns are still pretty powerful.”

  “What visitors were those?”

  “About ninety years ago some people tried to get in.”

  To be sure, thought Joneny, the primary contact from the Federation explorers. Suddenly the boy launched from the ceiling. Joneny ducked back and nearly lost his couplings again. But the boy had aimed to miss him and simply placed the book on the table once more. Tsk went the magnets. The boy grabbed the edge of the desk with one hand and one foot. Those agile, prehensile toes, Joneny saw at close range, were over half the length of his fingers. “Then what are you doing here?” Joneny asked.

  “The robot mechano told me you were here. So I came up.”

  “Isn’t there anybody older than you around, somebody in charge who can perhaps give me some more information?”

  “I don’t think the people in charge are going to help you very much.”

  “Well, where are they?”

  “I told you, down at the Market and in the Poolroom.” He turned to the wall and switched on a dial. “Here, I’ll show you.”

  A gray screen erupted into colors that formed at last into the view of a large chamber. The particular room, Joneny noted, had gravity, though not much. The floor was covered with water that bubbled and lapped in slow-motion waves. Transparent plastic tubes crossed and recrossed the room. Immense bus bars of varying sizes stood in the water, and there was a bank of good-sized waldos along one wall. Through the tubes loped men—or men and women, he couldn’t tell: their eyes were small and pink, probably half blind. They were bald. Their ear trumpets had grown to their skulls. Round-shouldered, with nubby, nail-less fingers, they paused and groped mechanically at instrument dials and nobs, raising and lowering the rods in and out of the pool below them. Suddenly Joneny remembered the description that the Primary Contact had given of the Star Folk. These people were a lot closer to what had been reported than this green-eyed boy with him. Joneny glanced at the boy’s hands and feet. The nails, though bitten, were perfectly in evidence. The boy also had hair, while these…people were completely naked.

  “That one’s in charge.” The boy pointed. As he spoke, the figure on the screen gave one of his companions a blow on the back of the head. The companion staggered away, regained his balance, and went off toward an instrument board. “I don’t think he’d be too interested in helping you. That, incidentally, is the Poolroom. I don’t like to go in there.”

  Joneny looked at the figures all firmly anchored to the floor, then regarded the boy so adept at free fall. “You get sore feet?”

  “You said it.”

  “What are they doing?” Joneny asked, turning back to the screen.

  “Taking care of one of the temporary reactors. It’s got to be kept underwater. It maintains the spin of that whole section of the ship.”

  Like a gyroscope spinning inside a beach ball, reflected Joneny. And an underwater reactor! Just how primitive were these ships anyway? With that many moving parts, it was a wonder they were around at all.

  “Why don’t you look like them?” Joneny asked as the boy switched off the screen. He might as well come right out and ask.

  “I come from another City,” the boy said.

  “Oh,” said Joneny. Apparently, then, this degeneration hadn’t taken place on all the other ships. “Isn’t there anyone around who can help me?”

  “Help you do what?”

  “Help me get some information.”

  “Information about what? You’re not very clear.”

  “About a song,” Joneny said. “A song about Beta-2.”

  “Which song?” the boy asked. “There’re more songs about that City than all the rest put together.”

  “Do you know them?”

  “A lot of them,” said the boy.

  “This is ‘The Ballad of Beta-2.’ It starts off, ‘Then came one to the City…’ ”

  “Oh, sure. I know that one.”

  “Well, what the hell is it about?”

  “Leela RT-857.”

  Could it be one of the descendants of the woman Hank Brandt had been in love with? “Who was she?”

  “She was captain of Beta-2 City when”—he stopped—“when everything—when…I don’t know how to say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “When everything changed.”

&
nbsp; “Changed? What things changed?”

  “Everything,” the boy repeated. “That’s when Epsilon-7 City and the Delta-6 were attacked, and the Sigma-9 was crushed, and we were stuck in the desert and the Market crashed, and…everything changed.”

  “Attacked? What do you mean, changed?”

  The boy shook his head and shrugged. “That’s all I know. I can’t explain it anymore.”

  “What were they attacked by?”

  There was only silence. The green eyes were wide and bewildered.

  “Can you tell me when this happened?”

  “About two hundred and fifty years back,” the boy said at last. “The Cities were still a hundred and fifty years out. And Leela RT-857 was captain of Beta-2 City.”

  “Then what happened?”

  The boy shrugged. “Just like it says in the song, I guess.”

  “And that’s just what I’m trying to find out.” Joneny thought for a moment, again remembering the verses. “For instance, can you tell me who the one-eyed woman was?”

  “Her name was Merril. One-Eyed Merril. And she was…well, one of the One-Eyes.”