Worlds Apart

  (5) JAPAN COMPLETES WORK ON ORBITING FACTORY

  Well, it was June 15, close enough. “I can’t read real good,” Newsman said. He pushed a button and the headlines faded, replaced by a spokesman in a Xerox uniform; he pushed it three more times and got a picture of a storm-wracked coastline. He licked his lips and stared at it “Hap’m here a couple times.”

  Storm made the “stupid” sign behind his back—tongue between lips, thumb striking temple twice. “What do you call that, Newsman?”

  “Hurricane or himmicane. Couldn’t read the name.” He smiled up at Jeff and explained. “It’s always ‘hurricane’ in the headlines. Stupid.”

  “Sure,” Storm said. “If they didn’t have both kinds, where would the babies come from?”

  Newsman frowned at him and nodded slowly. “I guess that’s right.”

  “How long have you…worked here?” Jeff asked.

  “Oh, I was here before the war, twenty years before.” He chewed a nail nervously. “But I wasn’t Newsman then. I was a janitor downstairs. But they showed me how to use the machine, so I could look at it after work.”

  “He was the only one on the Island when we got here four years ago,” Storm said. “He was in this room when they found him.”

  “I kept everything real clean.”

  Jeff had a sudden thought that raised the hair on the back of his neck. “Do you have newspapers in that machine?”

  “Sure, lot of ‘em.”

  “Any from New Orleans?”

  “Dunno.” He laboriously typed in NOOSPAPERS? The machine corrected his spelling and produced a list. One was the New Orleans Times-Picayune.

  Jeff tapped the screen. “That one.” He counted backwards. “I think the twelfth of March, 2085.”

  “Jus’ before the war.” He tapped a button and an arrow moved up the screen to come to rest beside the Times-Picayune. With one slow finger he typed in the date.

  Another list. “Entertainment section,” Jeff said.

  “What’s this all about?” Storm asked.

  “Oh, I…had a friend who said she had her picture in the paper that day. Playing in a band.” O’Hara had been invited to play clarinet for an evening at a place called Fat Charlie’s. She’d been a minor sensation, able to play Dixieland in spite of being white, female, and from another World.

  “That’s her.” Jeff’s voice shook. It was a good picture of O’Hara, back arched, eyes closed, lost in the music.

  “You knew somebody famous?” Tad said.

  “For a day,” Jeff said. “Famous for one day.”

  Newsman adjusted the color, surprisingly deft. “She sure was pretty. Dead now?”

  “Yeah.” Jeff reached past Newsman and pushed the HARD COPY button. A red light came on. “Outta paper,” Newsman said. Jeff shrugged. “Not important.”

  Year Eight

  1 O’Hara

  I was databasing without too much enthusiasm, trying to decide whether we wanted a cultural anthropologist who plays handball or a physical anthropologist who plays chess, when the SAVE light started blinking. I put everything on the holding crystal and opened the channel.

  It was Sandra. “Hello there.”

  “Hello yourself. What’s on?”

  “I need a fast personnel selection job.” She studied her thumbnail. “Twenty people to go to New York City.”

  “What?”

  “Self-help team. We’re in contact with some survivors.”

  “Contact?”

  “Need farmers and doctors and mechanics—I’ll show you the cube. Young, strong people who’ve been to Earth. One track generalist to be in charge. Interested?” I just stared at her. “I’ll assign a pilot for the Mercedes. Let me have the list about 1400. Leave day after tomorrow.”

  “Hold it,” I said. “This is too fast. Go to Earth with a bunch of farmers?”

  “That’s right. You’re far and away the best qualified.”

  “What do you mean? I can’t farm. I couldn’t grow a weed without help.”

  “I don’t mean farming; I mean leading. You have the mix of Policy and Engineering experience and you’ve spent a lot of time on Earth.”

  It was starting to sink in. “Go back to New York City.”

  “That’s right. Nothing like Zaire. No plague, no violence.”

  “Okay. I’ll do it.” I had to, even though it made life suddenly complicated.

  “Good, I knew you would. You have a blank cube in the recorder?” I put one in and she transferred the message from Earth. “See you at 1400.”

  The cube was a five-minute broadcast from a commercial studio in New York City. Like Jeff, they’d found an antenna that was aimed at New New and pushed some juice through it.

  It was a group of about a dozen people in their teens and early twenties. They’d been living out of a Civil Defense shelter in Tarrytown, which was starting to run out of food. They’d found our vaccine months ago—fished the box out of the Hudson—and had been trying to get in touch with us ever since.

  There was plenty of farmland, but they hadn’t been able to do much with it. Did we have anybody who knew dirt farming, or was it all hydroponics up there?

  Dirt farmers, we have. Even before the war, there were plenty of crops that didn’t do too well in zerogee hydroponics. A lot of people had ornamental gardens or grew exotic fruits and vegetables for the gray market. It wasn’t the same as gardening on Earth, since you didn’t have to contend with weather or pests, but that sort of thing would be in books. I hoped.

  Mechanics and doctors were easy. I started calling people and had a complete roster by noon.

  I cancelled my lunch date with Dan, figuring it would be better to go into the inevitable argument with a fait accompli. Too excited to eat, anyhow. With a couple of hours to kill I reran all the recordings of conversations with Jeff, making notes. With any luck, most of it would be irrelevant; he thought the sanguinary Family business was restricted to Florida and Georgia.

  I had to confront the remote possibility that he might be alive. What if there was a way to get to Florida? How would I look for him if I got there? “Healer” would probably be easier to track down than almost anyone else in the state; Jeff’s survival had depended on his reputation spreading.

  But if he was alive he surely would have found some way to contact us over the last two years. To pretend otherwise was simple fantasy. Still, I couldn’t put it out of my mind.

  And the first thing Sandra said when I sat down at her desk was, “No side-trips to Florida, right?”

  “I did think about it. Be chasing ghosts, though.”

  “Wind up a ghost, too. Those maniacs would make Zaire look like a walk through the park.” She took the list I offered and scanned it. “Not that you’re going to New York unarmed. You’ll have the same sort of weapon we used in Africa.”

  “The people who talked to us weren’t armed.”

  “Not obviously. That wouldn’t be very smart. You want to take Ahmed Ten? He’s pretty old.”

  “He’s a good medic. Good thinker, too.”

  She nodded slowly, reading. “Well…since you have these regular doctors, too, I suppose he’s a reasonable choice. One of the few people with experience in this sort of thing.”

  “The anthropology won’t hurt, either.”

  “Sure.” She smiled. “You don’t have to justify your selections to me, Marianne. You’re project head; I just have this incurable nose problem. Who’s Jack Rocke-feller?”

  “He lived in upstate New York as a boy. Had a garden.

  Also tinkers with electronics.”

  “Any relation to the president?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. Great-grand-uncle or something.”

  “Rich kid.”

  I shrugged. “He was here on vacation when the Cape closed down.”

  “He might want to use another name dirtside. No telling who’s being blamed for what.”

  “Good idea.” I wondered how many were still blaming us for the
war. For starting the strike that triggered the blackout that caused the collapse that started the war.

  “So.” She leaned back. “Have you discussed this with your husbands yet?”

  “There won’t be any discussion,” I said slowly. “Not in the sense of debate.”

  “You haven’t asked me how long the project is supposed to last.”

  “No. I…guess I assumed that was up to me.”

  “More or less. There are external factors. Our immunology people don’t think you should eat the food, except for prewar packaged goods. We can send along six months’ rations. Maybe a year’s worth, if you feel strongly about it.”

  “I think I do. Yes. We might be stranded.” She scribbled a note. “Will we have to work in suits?”

  “No, just masks and gloves. You’ll have shots, but we really don’t know what you’ll be up against. There might be any number of weird germs floating around; mutant strains of common diseases if not biowar agents. There’s an element of risk.”

  “Worth it,” I said automatically.

  “I’m not so sure. Hope so.” She looked thoughtful. “You’re taking quite a gamble…physical danger aside, I mean.”

  “My position with Janus,” I said. “One husband, perhaps. Perhaps both. We’ve discussed the possibility before, in the abstract. It is what my training and experience point to.”

  “They said they’d leave you?”

  “Not in so many words. But I don’t think Dan would give up his starship. John would, but he can’t go to Earth.”

  “Well, even if it becomes a permanent thing, you’ll be spending a lot of your time up here.”

  “That’s what I was going to tell them. True or not.”

  2

  I wanted to drop it on both of them together, and in public, so Dan would be less likely to blow up. Our schedules didn’t match for dinner, but we were all free at 2200. We met at the Light Head for a glass of wine and some music.

  Dan didn’t say anything at first. He just listened, chewing on his lower lip. John only smiled and nodded. “You aren’t surprised?” I said.

  “Not really. One of my women was commandeered by Shuttle Division this morning. They wanted to test out the Mercedes, see about modifying it to be hyperbaric at earth-normal pressure. Sounded rather like a trip to Earth was in the works. I’d have been surprised only if you weren’t going to be aboard.”

  “You didn’t want to ask us first,” Dan finally said.

  “We’ve talked about it before.”

  “Not as a certainty; not as a real choice.”

  “She doesn’t really have a choice,” John said. “Do you.”

  I took Dan’s hand. “No, not really. Can’t you see?”

  “You’re throwing away Janus.” He was looking at a point somewhere over my left shoulder. “The chance to be Policy Coordinator aboard.”

  “You know that was never my main ambition. Head stewardess.” Then I thought of something that hadn’t occurred to me earlier. “Besides, I can still spend some time on the project; keep my hand in. It doesn’t make any difference whether my terminal is here or in New York.”

  “That’s true,” John said. “Once you get the self-help operation under way, you could start dividing your time. Cover all your bets.” We both looked at Dan expectantly.

  “What happens when the ship leaves? And you’re still on Earth?”

  “I’ll only be gone six months.”

  “This time. If it works you know it won’t be the last.”

  No percentage in being evasive. “If it works…well, I’ll have a new job. Most likely here, rather than dirtside. But no, I won’t be aboard Newhome. Will you, if I’m here?”

  “I—” He bit off what he was going to say and stood abruptly. “I need time to think.” He tried to stalk out, but in a quarter gee all you can do is mince. He left behind half a glass of wine, which was unusual.

  I divided his wine between us and waited for John to say something. “Maybe I should talk to him,” he said. “Keep him from being impulsive.”

  “No. I want to see what he decides on his own.”

  “It might well be divorce. Or at least a ninety-eight-year trial separation.”

  “We’ll see. What about you?”

  John shrugged with the glass in his hand; some wine flowed out and he carefully moved the glass underneath to catch it. “I’ll stay, of course. I don’t know whether I love you more than Dan does,” he said quietly, “but I need you more. I need you a lot more than I need the diversion of Janus.”

  A telling word choice, diversion. Dan and John were equal in authority in the project, but to John it was ultimately just something to do. Increasingly, Dan lived for it.

  We finished our wine and John invited me up to his flat, even though Thursday was usually Daniel’s. I really wanted to go with him, tenderness as well as cowardice, but that would have made things worse.

  The lights were off in our room. I eased the door shut even though I could tell, with the extra sense married people evolve, that Dan wasn’t sleeping. Left my clothes in a pile on the floor and slipped in beside him.

  After a minute he rolled over, turning his back to me. “Still thinking?” I said.

  “You know I never could argue with you. Anything I say is going to sound selfish.”

  “And anything I say, what? Betrayal?”

  The sheet rustled as he shifted. I could feel him staring at the ceiling. “That’s your word.” He held his breath for a moment. “No. I just…I really don’t know how to say what I feel.”

  I touched his arm; he didn’t respond. “Just talk.”

  “You know how John and I felt when you went down to Africa? How you just disappeared and the next thing we knew…”

  “I didn’t have any choice. We weren’t allowed to tell anyone.”

  “I know, I know; that’s not it. And before, with the quarantine, the strange years you were talking with… Earth—and even before, before we were married, when you first went dirtside. Oh hell. I don’t know how to put it.”

  I’d never heard him talk like this, odd soft monotone. “I don’t think I see what you’re getting at. You were worried—”

  “Worried, yes, but that’s not it.” He suddenly sat up; I could feel him draw his feet up so he was hugging his knees. “One of the last letters you wrote me before the war—no, it was a letter to John—you said that sometimes you had an intuition that—what was it?—that you were somehow fated. You talked about times of change, about Franklin and the American colonies. That from your study of history you saw a consistent pattern, individuals who were caught up by some… inexorable historical force. Who didn’t make history so much as serve it.”

  “I remember. But that was just a girl’s fantasy, an egotistical—”

  “And mystical claptrap besides. So I said. It seems nevertheless to be coming true, year by year. If something happens, you’re there.”

  “I haven’t tried to reconcile the colonies with the home country. I haven’t even invented the lightning rod.”

  “That’s not the point. You haven’t been in a position of power, not yet. But you’re a locus, a nexus. Things happen around you.”

  I laughed, maybe nervously. “I can’t believe this is my rationalist husband talking.”

  “It’s not something that comes easily. Not something that just occurred to me, either.”

  “Have you discussed this fantasy with John?”

  “Not with anyone. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “If it’s bothering you—”

  “It’s not that exactly. I’m just trying to get a handle on…whatever it is. It’s related. Hard to express.”

  “Because it’s complicated? Or because it’s hurtful.”

  He was silent for a minute; smoldering, I guess. “You jump at this damned thing as if it were the greatest gift in the world—instead of what it is, a golden opportunity to go down to the surface of a poisoned planet and risk your life teachin
g ignorant savages how to grow crops.”

  “Someone has to do it, Dan.”

  “Not my wife! But you accept it without question because of this damned sense of personal destiny. Don’t you?”

  Caught me off balance. “That may be part of it. I also want to…to do well—”

  “You’re doing fine right here. You’ve got the Engineering Board wrapped around your finger; you have more day-to-day influence than I have, in Start-up. And you don’t think twice about throwing it away because this stunt is more in line with your destiny.”

  “Don’t shout.”

  “All right. How am I wrong?”

  “It’s not a ‘stunt.’ Normalization of our relations with Earth has to start somewhere. There’s no United Nations.”

  “Still doesn’t mean that you have to do it.”

  “I’m the best qualified.”

  “That could be… if so, why risk our best on another Zaire-type mission? What if what they really want is hostages? What if they plan to kill you all and take the shuttle?”

  “We’ve taken care of that. If anyone else tried to start it they’d turn JFK Interplanetary into a radioactive hole.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Oh, I know.” I wished I could see his face. “I’ll concede that there’s some danger. But we’re well prepared. Better prepared than you are for Newhome. After all…a craft of unproven design using a brand-new propulsion system for a century-long trip to an unexplored planet. I’m just going to New York City. I’ve been there before.”

  “Sure. Give my regards to Broadway.” He rolled over again.

  3

  We left it at that, neither open break nor accommodation. An uneasy kind of truce. I suppose I should have done some deep soul-searching, straighten out how I felt about Daniel, but there was no time in the busy two days that followed. Perhaps I made sure there was no time.

  The Mercedes had room for twenty people besides myself and the pilot. I’d approached over sixty before I got the right mixture of people who were not only properly qualified but also crazy enough to go:

  Anzel, Murray