by Spider
You see? There she goes now, and we’re off and running again. “Yeah?”
“Why are the Monkey Bars blinking on and off?”
At once I rechecked the air bottle, then the Y-joint, hoses, and joins. No, she was getting air. I looked then, and sure as hell the Monkey Bars were blinking on and off in the far distance, a Christmas-tree bulb on a flasher circuit. I checked the air again, carefully, to make sure we weren’t both hallucinating, and returned to our spoon embrace.
“Funny,” I said, “I can’t think of a circuit malf that’d behave that way.”
“Something must have struck the sunpower screen and set it spinning.”
“I guess. But what?”
“The hell with it, Charlie. Maybe it’s Raoul trying to signal us.”
“If it is, to hell with him indeed. There’s nothing more I want to say, and I’m damned if there’s anything I want to hear. Leave the damn phone off the hook. Where were we?”
“Deciding Earth sucks.”
“It certainly does—hard. Why does anybody live there, Norrey? Oh, the hell with that too.”
“Yeah. It can’t be such a bad place. We met there.”
“That’s true.” I hugged her a little tighter. “I guess we’re lucky people. We each found our Other Half. And before we died, too. How many are that lucky?”
“Tom and Linda, I think. Diane and Howard in Toronto. I can’t think of anybody else I know of, for sure.”
“Me either. There used to be more happy marriages around when I was a kid.” The Bars began blinking twice as fast. A second improbable meteor? Or a chunk of the panel breaking loose, putting the rest in a tighter spin? It was an annoying distraction; I moved until I couldn’t see it. “I guess I never realized just how incredibly lucky we are. A life with you in it is a square deal.”
“Oh, Charlie,” she cried, moving in my arms. Despite the awkwardness she worked around in her saddle to hug me again. My p-suit dug into my neck, the earphone on that side notched my ear, and her strong dancer’s arms raised hell with my throbbing back, but I made no complaint. Until her grip suddenly convulsed even tighter.
“Charlie!”
“Nnngh.”
She relaxed her clutch some, but held on. “What the hell is that?”
I caught my breath. “What the hell is what?” I twisted in my seat to look. “What the hell is that?” We both lost our seats on the Car and drifted to the ends of our hoses, stunned limp.
It was practically on top of us, within a hundred meters, so impossibly enormous and foreshortened that it took us seconds to recognize, identify it as a ship. My first thought was that a whale had come to visit.
Champion, said the bold red letters across the prow. And beneath, United Nations Space Command.
I glanced back at Norrey, then checked the air line one more time. “‘No scheduled traffic,’” I said hollowly, and switched on my radio.
The voice was incredibly loud, but the static was so much louder that I knew it was off-mike, talking to someone in the same room. I remember every syllable.
“—pid fucking idiots are too God damned dumb to turn on their radios, sir. Somebody’s gonna have to tap ’em on the shoulder.”
Further off-mike, a familiar voice began to laugh like hell, and after a moment the radioman joined in. Norrey and I listened to the laughter, speechless. A part of me considered laughing too, but decided I might never stop.
“Jesus Christ,” I said finally. “How far does a man have to go to have a little privacy with his wife?”
Startled silence, and then the mike was seized and the familiar voice roared, “You son of a bitch!”
“But seeing you’ve come all this way, Major Cox,” Norrey said magnificently, “we’ll come in for a beer.”
“You dumb son of a bitch,” Harry’s voice came from afar. “You dumb son of a bitch.” The Monkey Bars had stopped winking. We had the message.
“After you, my love,” I said, unshipping the air tank, and as I reached the airlock my last thruster died. Bill Cox met us at the airlock with three beers, and mine was delicious.
The two sips I got before the fun started.
Like Phillip Nolan, I had renounced something out loud—and had been heard.
Chapter 5
I took those two sips right away, and made them last. Officers and crew were frankly gaping at Norrey and me. At first I naturally assumed they were awed by anyone dumb enough to turn off their radios in an emergency. Well, I hadn’t thought of being dead as an emergency. But on the second sip I noticed a certain subtle classification of gaping. With one or two exceptions, all the female crew were gaping at me and all the male crew were gaping at Norrey. I had not exactly forgotten what we were wearing under our p-suits; there was almost nothing to forget. We were “decently” covered by sanitary arrangements, but just barely, and what is commonplace on a home video screen on Earth is not so in the ready room of a warship.
Bill, of course, was too much of a gentleman to notice. Or maybe he realized there was not one practical thing to do about the situation except ignore it. “So reports of your demise were exaggerated, eh?”
“On the contrary,” I said, wiping my chin with my glove. “They omitted our resurrection. Which by me is the most important part. Thanks, Bill.”
He grinned, and said a strange thing very quickly. “Don’t ask any of the obvious questions.” As he said it, his eyes flickered slightly. On Earth or under acceleration they would have flicked from side to side. In free fall, a new reflex controls, and he happened to be oriented out of phase to my local vertical: his pupils described twin circles, perhaps a centimeter in diameter, and returned to us. The message was plain. The answers to my obvious next questions were classified information. Wait.
Hmmm.
I squeezed Norrey’s hand hard—unnecessarily, of course—and groped for a harmless response.
“We’re at your disposal,” is what I came up with.
He flinched. Then in a split second he decided that I didn’t mean whatever he’d thought I meant, and his grin returned. “You’ll want a shower and some food. Follow me to my quarters.”
“For a shower,” Norrey said, “I will follow you through hell.” We kicked off.
There was my second chance to gawk like a tourist at the innards of a genuine warship—and again I was too busy to pay any attention. Did Bill really expect his crew to believe that he had just happened to pick us up hitchhiking? Whenever no one was visibly within earshot, I tried to pump him—but in Space Command warships the air pressure is so low that sounds travel poorly. He outflew my questions—and how much expression does a man wear on the soles of his feet?
At last we reached his quarters and swung inside. He backed up to a wall and hung facing us in the totally relaxed “spaceman’s crouch,” and tossed us a couple of odd widgets. I examined mine: it looked like a wristwatch with a miniature hair dryer attached. Then he tossed us a pair of cigarettes and I got it. Mass priorities in a military craft differ from those of essentially luxury operations like ours or Skyfac’s: the Champion’s air system was primitive, not only low-pressure but inefficient. The widgets were combination air-cleaner/ashtrays. I slipped mine over my wrist and lit up.
“Major William Cox,” I said formally, “Norrey Armstead. Vice versa.”
It is of course impossible to bow when your shoulders are velcro’d to the wall, but Bill managed to signify. Norrey gave him what we call the free-fall curtsy, a movement we worked out idly one day on the theory that we might someday give curtain calls to a live audience. It’s indescribable but spectacular, as frankly sexual as a curtsy and as graceful.
Bill blinked, but recovered. “I am honored, Ms. Armstead. I’ve seen all the tapes you’ve released, and—well, this will be easy to misunderstand, but you’re her sister.”
Norrey smiled. “Thank you, Major—”
“Bill.”
“—Bill. That’s high praise. Charlie’s told me a lot about you.”
/> “Likewise, one drunken night when we met dirtside. Afterwards.”
I remembered the night—weeks before I had consciously realized that I was in love with Norrey—but not the conversation. My subconscious tells me only what it thinks I ought to know.
“Now you must both forgive me,” he went on, and I noticed for the first time that he was in a hurry. “I’d like nothing better than to chat, but I can’t. Please get out of your p-suits, quickly.”
“Even more than a shower, I’d like some answers, Bill,” I said. “What the hell brings you out our way, just in the nicotine like that? I don’t believe in miracles, not that kind anyway. And why the hush?”
“Yes,” Norrey chimed in, “and why didn’t your own Ground Control know you were in the area?”
Cox held up both hands. “Whoa. The answer to your questions run about twenty minutes minimum. In—” he glanced at his watch, “less than three we accelerate at two gravities. That’s why I want you out of those suits—my bed will accommodate air tank fittings, but you’d be uncomfortable as hell.”
“What? Bill, what the hell are you talking about? Accelerate where? Home is a couple o’ dozen klicks that-away.”
“Your friends will be picked up by the same shuttle that is fetching Dr. Panzella,” Cox said. “They’ll join us at Skyfac in a matter of hours. But you two can’t wait.”
“For what?” I hollered.
Bill arm-wrestled me with his eyes, and lost. “Damn it,” he said, then paused. “I have specific orders not to tell you a thing.” He glanced at his chronometer. “And I really do have to get back to the Worry Hole. Look, if you’ll trust me and pay attention, I can give you the whole twenty minutes in two sentences, all right?”
“I—yeah. Okay.”
“The aliens have been sighted again, in the close vicinity of Saturn. They’re just sitting there. Think it through.”
He left at once, but before he cleared the doorway I was halfway out of my p-suit, and Norrey was reaching for the straps on the right half of the Captain’s couch.
And we were both beginning to be terrified. Again.
Think it through, Bill had said.
The aliens had come boldly knocking on our door once, and been met by a shotgun blast named Shara. They were learning country manners; this time they had stopped at the fence gate, shouted “hello the house,” and waited prudently. (Saturn was just about our fence gate, too—as I recalled, a manned expedition to Saturn was being planned at that time, for the usual obscure scientific reasons.) Clearly, they wanted to parley.
Okay, then: if you were the Secretary General, who would you send to parley? The Space Commando? Prominent politicians? Noted scientists? A convention of used copter salesmen? You’d most likely send your most seasoned and flexible career diplomats, of course, as many as could go.
But would you omit the only artists in human space who have demonstrated a working knowledge of pidgin Alien?
I was drafted—at my age.
But that was only the first step in the logic chain. The reason that Saturn probe story had made enough of a media splash to attract even my attention was that it was a kind of kamikaze mission for the crew. Whose place we were assuming.
Think it through. Whatever they planned to send us to Saturn on, it was sure to take a long time. Six years was the figure I vaguely recalled hearing mentioned. And any transit over that kind of distance would have to be spent almost entirely in free fall. You could rotate the craft to provide gravity at either end—but one gee’s worth of rotation of a space that small would create so much Coriolis differential that anyone who didn’t want to puke or pass out would have to stay lying down for six years. Or hang like bolas from exercise lines on either end—not much more practical.
If we didn’t dodge the draft, we would never walk Earth again. We would be free-fall exiles, marooned in space. Our reward for serving as mouthpieces between a bunch of diplomats and the things that had killed Shara.
Assuming that we survived the experience at all.
At any other time, the implications would have been too staggering for my brain to let itself comprehend; my mind would have run round in frightened circles. Unless I could talk my way out of this with whoever was waiting for us at Skyfac (why Skyfac?), Norrey and I had taken our last walk, seen our last beach, gone to our last concert. We would never again breathe uncanned air, eat with a fork, get rained on, or eat fresh food. We were dead to the world (S.I.C. TRANSIT: gloria mundi, whispered a phantom memory that had been funny enough the first time). And yet I faced it squarely, calmly.
Not more than an hour ago I had renounced all those things.
And resigned myself to the loss of a lot of more important things, that it looked like I was now going to be able to keep. Breathing. Eating. Sleeping. Thinking. Making love. Hurting. Scratching. Bowel movements. Bitching. Why, the list was endless—and I had all those things back, at least six years’ worth! Hell, I told myself, there were damned few city dwellers any better off—few of them ever got walks, beaches, concerts, uncanned air or fresh food. What with airlocks and nostril filters, city folk might as well be in orbit for all the outdoors they could enjoy—and how many of them could feel confident of six more years? I couldn’t begin to envision the trip to Saturn, let alone what lay at the end of it—but I knew that space held no muckers, no muggers, no mad strangers or crazed drivers, no tenement fires or fuel shortages or race riots or blackouts or gang wars or reactor meltdowns—
How does Norrey feel about it?
It had taken me a couple of minutes to get this far, and as I turned my head to see Norrey’s face the acceleration warning sounded. She turned hers, too; our noses were scant centimeters apart, and I could see that she too had thought it through. But I couldn’t read her reaction.
“I guess I don’t mind much going,” I said.
“I want to go,” she said fervently.
I blinked. “Phillip Nolan was the Man Without A Country,” I said, “and he didn’t care for it. We’ll be the Couple Without A Planet.”
“I don’t care, Charlie.” Second warning sounded.
“You seemed to care back there on the Car, when I was bum-rapping Earth.”
“You don’t understand. Those fuckers killed my sister. I want to learn their language so I can cuss them out.”
It didn’t sound like a bad idea.
But thinking about it was. Two gees caught us both with our heads sideways, smacking our cheeks into the couch and wrenching our necks. An eternity later, turn-over gave us just enough time to pop them back into place, and then deceleration came for another eternity.
There were “minor” maneuvering accelerations, and the “acceleration over” sounded. We unstrapped, both borrowed robes from Bill’s locker, and began trading neckrubs. By and by Bill returned. He glanced at the bruises we were raising on opposite sides of our faces and snorted. “Lovebirds. All right, all ashore. Powwow time.” He produced off-duty fatigues in both our sizes, and a brush and comb.
“With who?” I asked, dressing hastily.
“The Security-General of the United Nations,” he said simply.
“Jesus Christ.”
“If he was available,” Bill agreed.
“How about Tom?” Norrey asked. “Is he all right?”
“I spoke with Panzella,” Bill answered. “McGillicuddy is all right. He’ll look like strawberry yoghurt for a while, but no significant damage—”
“Thank God.”
“—Panzella’s bringing him here with the others, ETA—” he checked his chronometer pointedly “—five hours away.”
“All of us?” I exclaimed. “How big is the bloody ship?” I slipped on the shoes.
“All I know is my orders,” Bill said, turning to go. “I’m to see that the six of you are delivered to Skyfac, soonest. And, I trust you’ll remember, to keep my damn mouth shut.” Why Skyfac? I wondered again.
“Suppose the others don’t volunteer?” Norrey asked.
&
nbsp; Bill turned back, honestly dumbfounded. “Eh?”
“Well, they don’t have the personal motivations Charlie and I have.”
“They have their duty.”
“But they’re civilians.”
He was still confused. “Aren’t they humans?”
She gave up. “Lead us to the Secretary-General.”
None of us realized at the time that Bill had asked a good question.
Tokugawa was in Tokyo. It was just as well; there was no room for him in his office. Seven civilians, six military officers. Three of the latter were Space Command, the other three national military; all thirteen were of high rank. It would have been obvious had they been naked. All of them were quiet, reserved; none of them spoke an unnecessary word. But there was enough authority in that room to sober a drunken lumberjack.
And it was agitated authority, nervous authority, faced not with an issue but a genuine crisis, all too aware that it was making history. Those who didn’t look truculent looked extremely grave. A jester facing an audience of lords in this mood would have taken poison.
And then I saw that all of the military men and one of the civilians were trying heroically to watch everyone in the room at once without being conspicuous, and I put my fists on my hips and laughed.
The man in Carrington’s—excuse me, in Tokugawa’s chair looked genuinely startled. Not offended, not even annoyed—just surprised.
There’s no point in describing the appearance or recounting the accomplishments of Siegbert Wertheimer. As of this writing he is still the Secretary-General of the United Nations, and his media photos, like his record, speak for themselves. I will add only that he was (inevitably) shorter than I had expected, and heavier. And one other, entirely subjective and apolitical impression: In those first seconds of appraisal I decided that his famous massive dignity, so beloved by political cartoonists, was intrinsic rather than acquired. It was the cause of his impressive track record, I was certain, and not the result of it. He did not seem like a humorless man—he was simply astounded that someone had found some humor in this mess. He looked unutterably weary.
“Why is it that you laugh, sir?” he asked mildly, with that faintest trace of accent.