“No, they’re just dropouts—you know about dropouts?—new name, new life. I got the word through a cousin.”
“Well—well, how’ve you been? Like the country life?”
“That’s one reason I’ve been wanting to get you. Willy, I’m bored. It’s all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.”
“I’m flattered. Pick you up at eight?”
She checked a clock above the phone. “No, look, let’s get a good night’s sleep. Besides, I’ve got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at…the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm…Trans-World information desk.”
“Okay. Make reservations for where?”
She shrugged. “Pick a place.”
“London used to be pretty wicked.”
“Sounds good. First class?”
“What else? I’ll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.”
“Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?”
“We’ll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.”
She giggled. “Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.”
“Fine—uh…Marygay, do you have a gun?”
“It’s that bad?”
“Here around Washington it is.”
“Well, I’ll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they’re left over from Tucson.”
“We’ll hope we won’t need them.”
“Willy, you know it’ll just be for decoration. I couldn’t even kill a Tauran.”
“Of course.” We just looked at each other for a second. “Tomorrow at ten, then.”
“Right. Love you.”
“Uh…”
She giggled again and hung up.
That was just too many things to think about all at once.
~~~
I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.
She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn’t see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed, various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don’t know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.
Whispering: “What are we going to do for three hours?”
She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.
“Um…where are we headed?”
“Don’t ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.”
We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk.
“Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked innocently.
I tried to leer. “Any alternatives?”
She laughed gaily. Several people stared. “Just a second…here!”
We jumped off. It was a corridor marked “Roomettes.” She handed me a key.
That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.
I recovered.
We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.
“William, have you used that thing yet?”
“What thing?”
“That hawg-leg. The pistol.”
“Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.”
“Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?”
I took a shallow puff and passed it back. “Hadn’t given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.”
“Well?”
“I…I don’t really know. The only time I’ve killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don’t think it would…bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?”
“Life,” she said plaintively, “life is…”
“Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass—”
“Oh, William. You sound like old Cortez.”
“Cortez kept us alive.”
“Not many of us,” she snapped.
I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. “I’m sorry, William. I guess we’re both just trying to adjust.”
“That’s okay. You’re right, anyhow.”
We talked for a long time. The only urban center Marygay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.
We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.
And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.
It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were—like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long—at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra k’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.
And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front; sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air—but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.
But this war…the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional—more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.
~~~
You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.
Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so
the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.
The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontinental transport.
We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century…the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb-sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years.
And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.
London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.
The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn’t be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I supposed there were probably sections as rough as Washington.
I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.
Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.
“Oh, it happens often enough,” she said. “Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He’d gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.”
“Bodysnatcher?”
“That’s right. All the commune organizations have them. They’ve got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren’t eligible for relief…people who can’t just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn’t on the government’s fecal roster.”
“So he skipped out before his trial came up?”
She nodded. “It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn’t easy, and going on the dole after a few years’ working on a prison farm; exconvicts can’t get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which they’d put up for bail, but the government would’ve gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.
“So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.”
“And what did the bodysnatcher get?”
“He himself probably didn’t get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn’t have very much—”
“What happens if they get caught?”
“Not a chance.” She laughed. “The communes provide over half the country’s produce—they’re really just an unofficial arm of the government. I’m sure the CBI knows exactly where they are…Dad grumbles that it’s just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.”
“What a weird setup.”
“Well, it keeps the land farmed.” She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. “And they’re eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.”
After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a “cultural translation” of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn’t allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any blurry-eyed nostalgia over it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I’d seen, and some of the physical feats performed were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.
~~~
We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.
It was about 2 a.m. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun-pistol over their heads.
It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.
The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.
The girl looked dazedly around, saw the mutilated body of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.
“What hap—” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Wh-what was he doing?”
I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing…there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy…but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give freely.
Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brain-wipe you!”
She was right. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got light-headed and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.
~~~
Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.
I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.
Still, Britishers called their island “the most civilized country in Europe.” From what we’d heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.
I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States. We could finish the tour after we’d beco
me acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.
The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed. They’d made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.
We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.
Twenty-five
I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.
“Pardon me,” I said, “isn’t this Mrs. Mandella’s residence?”
“Oh, you must be William!” She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. “Beth, look who’s here!”
My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “Willy…what are you doing back so soon?”
“Well, it’s—it’s a long story.”
“Sit down, sit down,” the other woman said. “Let me get you a drink, don’t start till I get back.”
“Wait,” my mother said. “I haven’t even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.”
“I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Beth has told me all about you—one cold beer, right?”
“Right.” She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn’t met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.
“Uh…really more than that, William. She’s been my roommate for a couple of years. That’s why I had an extra room when you came home—a single person isn’t allowed two bedrooms.”
“But why—”
“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren’t, actually; she has—”