He came into the lobby again and looked up at the twenty-four-hour clock on the wall. It was four in the afternoon. He had four hours before he had to be at the air plant. He went to the nearest exit which led to a sub-park shuttle and boarded a car for the museum. There he wandered around the great halls feeling somewhat lost until it was time to leave for work. He waited until the last possible moment, then put on his mask and boarded the elevator which would take him to the street lock.
There was a stillness in the waiting. The Moon was a white disk over the empty pool, riding low toward the morning. Praeger stood looking up at it through his faceplate, waiting to go off shift. Around the Moon he saw the clouds which would cover it before it set.
On the other side of the Moon, he knew, the Russians had built a grand hotel for their scientists and Moon personnel, a huge structure with gardens and fountains, where the air was very much like that of Odessa in the 1880s. It was rumored that the Russians were mining the first discovered deposits of Moon ice, and bottling some of it as a special mineral water for their more credulous countrymen. The “hotel” was really the living quarters of the large science city located in Tsiolkovsky Crater. He had heard stories of beautiful interiors, filled with red carpets and paintings, grand banquet halls and shiny brass railings, where aging Soviet leaders would go to spend their “longer years” in the one-sixth gravity. The science city itself was devoted to physics and biology and astronomy—generally to the exploitation of conditions which were unique for a variety of research programs. Even the aging bureaucrats could be made useful by entering them as case histories in various medical programs. The educated elite who lived there breathed perfect air; for them the Marxist dream of parks of rest and culture had been fulfilled; for them and those like them, technological men and scientists, would come all the fruits of knowledge, perhaps even immortality. To live on the Moon required all the planning and care which had been denied to those on Earth, and which was being given to the home world very late; but for those who had lived on the Moon for many years and would never come back, perhaps raise sons there, the bitter native land which was Earth was too beautiful in the sky to be in need of help. The American science city was less stylish, more cool and professional, but essentially the same.
On Earth one generation of the overgrown organism which was humanity would have to die off to make the population manageable again. Praeger wondered about the plague proposal made a while ago. A good plague, they had said, would leave everything standing, and mankind would have a chance to get itself back on the right path. Better than a war. Anyway, some would make it, he thought. He wondered about the long-term good of it, and the short-term evil; and the ones who would not understand, the ones who would die to create the compost for the future.
Clouds obscured the Moon and he thought, somehow … we men … were on the way to becoming fully ourselves just a little while ago, getting a grip on ourselves and reality; then we made some horrible mistake which kept us from passing that threshold into becoming something … new …
He stopped thinking and went back inside the plant to take his readings. Someday, he hoped, children would look back at this time as the great depression of the ’90s … what year would be the cutoff point?
The apartment was quiet when he woke up that afternoon. He strained to hear Betty in the kitchen, but there was no sound. Maybe she was sitting at the table sipping coffee? He turned over and looked at her bed. It was neatly made and empty, a dark mass in the faint nightlight.
He got up slowly and stretched, went to the door, opened it, and took three strides to reach the bathroom. He found her note taped to the medicine cabinet mirror. It read: “I left you a message on the recorder.” It was written in big black letters.
He turned and went out into the living room, turning the daylights on with his presence. He walked over to the green sofa and sat down, staring at the recorder on the coffee table. As he turned it on, he heard the front door open and close. He pushed the play button and looked at himself in the large mirror sitting in his pajamas. Behind him Betty came into the room.
“Chris, understand—” her voice on the tape started to say.
“Turn it off,” Betty said in the mirror. He watched her in the glass. She was dressed in a green raincoat cut to look like a jacket and skirt.
“—what I’m going to tell you.” He stabbed at the off button.
“I didn’t want you sitting around like an orphan listening to a voice on a tape,” she said. “I want to tell you myself—I owe you that much.”
He wasn’t going to speak to her, no matter how much he wanted to.
“I’m leaving, Chris. You’re not going to make much more of yourself, you’ll start to slip and we’ll wind up in open housing. I’ll look great when I’m wheezing and bald. I’m not going to sit around and wait for it.”
He was silent, wishing she would just go.
“You’re going to blame me now, aren’t you?”
He shook his head suddenly, no, hoping that she would say it and be finished. There was a trembling in his insides. He felt as if he were in a trance which she would break with her next words.
“There’s someone else and he can help me get what I want—everything we’ll both ever want …”
He looked directly at her for a moment and saw that her lower lip was shaking. Her face was a frightening thing; it repelled him and he looked away. He began to rub his eyes with his hands. She turned and left the room. He heard the front door shut itself automatically behind her. He felt his face become drawn and he felt a great warmth surround his consciousness, as if the room were becoming a furnace; and he heard the sound of his pulse in his ears, the blood pounding behind his eyes.
It began to rain in the late afternoon and continued all night. Toward morning there were huge puddles of water in the empty pool at the air plant. The metal door to the inside jammed and Praeger had to leave it open and wear his mask all night. In the morning he took a chair and sat in the doorway watching the rain come down in the gloom, beating on the pavement. Thousands of hurrying rivulets ran on the concrete and cascaded into the empty pool. The sound of the water relaxed him. He thought of the empty apartment waiting for him, and felt the tiredness creeping into his body. He looked forward to the oblivion of sleep.
Today also the helicopter would not come for him; he was no longer worth the effort, he thought. He was leaving at the end of the week; the copter fuel was more valuable to them.
Just before he had left for work, notification had come from NASA-EUROSOV through the mail readout slot telling him they had a job for him on one of the Earth-Moon sector stations. He was to settle his affairs and vacate his apartment. There had been a word of congratulations on the print-out, and a note asking him if he would waive minimum Earth leave for higher pay.
As a NASA-EUROSOV employee he had regained the right to have children, indirectly, by depositing his sperm; a right which Betty had convinced him to sell. But the sperm bank was a good bet against the future. He had heard of illegal children being readied for a new Earth swept clean by deliberate plague; children hidden away throughout the solar system. Somewhere, he was sure, men were preparing for the stars. He dreamed of unspoiled Earths around far suns, wondering how long it would be before the stardrive breakthrough changed the world and if he would be part of it.
He went off shift and walked up the hill to the Tremont station. The rain ran down his Pyrex faceplate. He wore no hat and his hair was wet. His clothing was waterproof. He tightened his collar to keep the water from running inside. The rain seemed to be coming down harder than before and he could not see very far ahead. He needed a windshield wiper, like the big blades on the police cruiser. The thought tickled him—sweep, sweep! He couldn’t see it but he could feel it: the water was high around his boots as it ran down the hill.
Two men grabbed his arms and twisted them behind his back and a third rippe
d off his air mask, chest tank and all. They pushed him on his back with his head downhill and in a moment they vanished again in the thick curtain of rain.
He got up breathing hard and coughing. The air was heavy and wet in his lungs and he felt nauseated. His wrists seemed sprained. His face was streaming. Water ran in his eyes, blinding him. He screamed and shook both his fists in the rain; the gesture hurt, and the sound was lost against the rush of water in his ears. His eyes began to hurt and he rubbed them, cursing silently now. Then he walked the remaining half block to the subway entrance, coughing without letup all the way.
The entrance was a gaping black hole leading down into the Earth, surrounded by a wilderness of rain. On the platform he took out a handkerchief and tied it around his face.
On the train going uptown he knew the other passengers were all staring at him, secretly pleased that he had lost his mask; but when he confronted their eyes they seemed to lose interest in him. He wondered, did NASA-EUROSOV know about Betty leaving him? Was that why they had mentioned the e-visitation clause, knowing that he would have no immediate ties on Earth? If she had started the divorce action, then central information—CENTIN—would have it in his file, which could have been already tapped by NASA-EUROSOV. He could check it, but it didn’t really matter. The sperm deposit. That, too. If he had gone in to be sterilized, they would have given him money, just like for blood, just like they had sold their right to have kids. But now they would put his sperm in a bank, with the eventual certainty that it would be used. Someone was making all possible bets against the future, making sure that as many different combinations were at least available as possible. He was sure that it was being used as a kind of incentive to go along with his new job.
He thought of the stories he had heard of hidden groups of children belonging to high officials on Earth or on the Moon, children being readied for a new Earth, maybe even the stars? He hoped, perhaps something will happen and we’ll get a stardrive in my lifetime, and if I’m out there working when it happens maybe I’ll get in on it! He felt a wild surge of expectation at the thought, a momentary release from the dark prison of his puny self.
The train reached his station and delivered him into the drenching rain and acrid air, again.
At the end of the week he closed the apartment and took a jet to Nevada, where the whip catapult serving the Earth stations was located. The desert conjured up visions of the sun domes on Mars, green plants growing lush in low gravity, filling the bright space of the dome with oxygen. He did not have to wear a mask here, in Nevada, where the helicopter had left him off. What of Mars, where the desert bloomed … what of Earthlike planets around far suns, unspoiled! How soon, he wondered, will we make the crucial breakthrough which will save us—tip the balance in favor of our dreams? A gust of wind came up from nowhere and blew some sand in his face and made his eyes water.
The spaceport was surrounded by a city of trailers and cabins. They gave him a cabin with a skylight for the one day before his departure for Earth Station One. He lay resting, and then dreaming, in the stillness of half sleep, of sun over treetops, an uncancerous sun, setting; a sliver of daylight Moon; sky deep blue; evening star blazing; wind on the tall grass; shadows of clouds; last spring with no sound in the air …
The last real spring he had known had been in Central Park, years ago. The water of the small lake had been a green mirror, and the white swan had sailed curve-necked toward where the willows washed their branches in the water …
Tomorrow he would be on the shuttle.
The Earth was blue-green below as he recalled yesterday’s thought of being here now. Acceleration was over and he leaned weightless in his straps toward the porthole, knowing that the stars and Moon would look clearer now than from Earth, that bottom of a dirty ocean where he had been born. It was a clean break now. Sunlight flooded the shuttlecraft like a shout. He floated back in his seat and tightened the straps, and dreamed of a healed Earth as it might still be, one hundred … five hundred … years hence, free of its billions and the guilty minority responsible for a century of plunder.
He dreamed he saw parks of rest and culture filled with elegant people, full-leafed trees casting broad shadows; and at night stars would be looking down, bright lights in an empty hall above an Earth abandoned by most of its people.
Assassins of Air
Gloom concealed the city, an obscurity born of dying night and pollutants hanging motionless in the air, a massive shadowy stillness pressing down on the pavement, billions of particles ready to swirl through the stone alleys with the morning wind. Praeger squatted by the iron fence in the alleyway, waiting for Uruba and Blue Chip to come back. He looked at his watch and saw it was one hour to dawn, and he would have to leave if they didn’t return before then.
Suddenly he heard them creep into the alley. They knew where he was and came to squat near him by the fence.
“How many, Chris?” Uruba asked.
“Twenty real old ones,” Christian Praeger said.
“Hey, kid, Uruba and me broke off forty-one pieces of chrome,” Blue Chip said.
“Don’t knock him,” Uruba said, “Chris here is only nineteen, just startin’ out. One fine day he’ll run his own recycling gang, when we’s all rich. He’ll feed the junkman all the old cars on the East Coast, kill them all, help make the air cool and clean again.” Uruba coughed. “Got it stashed all ready to be picked?”
Praeger nodded. It was almost light enough in the alley for him to see Uruba’s black face and the gray scar on his cheek.
“I’ll slap the bread on you tomorrow, Chris,” Uruba said. He clapped Praeger on the shoulder and started to get up.
“I need it now,” Praeger mumbled. “I have to pay for my PLATO lessons. I gotta have it, honest.”
Uruba was standing looking down at him now, and Blue Chip stood up next to him. “I have to,” Praeger said as he stood up with them.
Uruba hesitated, almost as if the request had been a personal insult. Then he smiled. “Sure, kid, how much?”
“Twenty-five,” Praeger said.
The smile disappeared, but he counted out the money. “This one time, kid. Next time you wait like all the other dudes. I pay off, my word is good, right?”
Praeger nodded meekly. He folded the bills into his jeans pocket, trying not to look at their faces. But Uruba and Blue Chip turned from him and walked out of the alley, and he was relieved by the fact that he would not see them for at least two weeks.
He looked at his watch. It would be completely light in less than a half hour. He sprinted out of the alley and up the gray-lighted street toward the subway at 145th Street. He started coughing and slowed his pace to a walk to cut down his need for air.
PLATO, the sign read: PROGRAMMING LOGIC FOR AUTOMATIC TEACHING OPERATIONS. Once the facility had been free, just like chest X-rays. Now students had to pay to milk the machine, twenty dollars a rap, but it was a good teach if you wanted to learn a skill.
Praeger went up the wide steps leading into the library and paid his money at the ticket booth. An usher showed him to his usual booth in the big research hall.
The program was teaching him the workings of the city air filtration system, which was fully operational in Manhattan and slowly expanding. He knew that many technical dudes would be needed to service and maintain it, and he was going to be in on it after he finished clouting cars. The old cars were paying for his lessons, but next year, or the year after, they would be gone—leaving only the safety-cars, public wheels and the electric push to rush people around.
The new electric cars weren’t bad, but there was something in the older people that loved the rush of power. So the old vehicles were slow in going, especially with all the bootleg mechanics servicing them to keep them legal. The old wheels were assassinating the atmosphere, Uruba said. We kill them, recycle the people’s resources and make some bread on the deal, too. Uruba was ri
ght, Praeger thought; he would not have his PLATO lessons without that money. Only Uruba did a lot of other things in the city, like running a supply of young girls to the insular estates outside. Uruba did not care about being right. It was a coincidence, sometimes.
Praeger put on his earphones. The first exam question appeared on the screen and he answered it correctly.
When he came out of the library at two in the afternoon, he saw the old ’74 station wagon growling down Fifth Avenue spewing blue smoke from its tail pipe. It was a contrast to the bulky crashproof Wankels, steamers and slow electrics moving on the street with it. He watched it stop and park near the corner of 42nd Street. The car was only ten years old, so its owner could still get away with it by claiming that it hadn’t fallen apart. He could keep running it legally until it did, but even with its filters it was a polluter. Maybe the owner wasn’t even having it fixed on the side, Praeger thought; maybe it still ran well. As he stood at the top of the stairs, he hated the dirty wheels, hated them as he would a fearful beast that had somehow gotten loose in the world of men.
He waited until the owner left the car, then went to where it was parked and lifted the hood, took out his pocket tool and began removing the spark plugs. That done, he cut a few wires with his pocketknife. He closed the hood quickly and walked away from the car. No one had noticed him. Later tonight someone would strip it down for all of its valuables, Uruba or one of the other gangs. Another one of the old killers was effectively dead. He thought of his dead parents as he slipped the spark plugs into the sewer drain at the corner.
Praeger stood on the roof of his apartment building looking up at the stars hiding on the other side of the air; still, the brighter ones were clearly visible, drawing him away from the Earth to the brightly lit space stations circling the planet and out to the diamondlike Moon domes where men seemed to be doing something worthwhile. He saw Uruba and Blue Chip living in the shadows of the universe, profiting from changes that would happen without them. He thought of the White Assassins, Savage Skulls, Black Warlocks and Conservative Angels—all the night rulers of New York City. He thought of their words, political phrases copied after the Black Lords and Young Panthers, the largest national groups. He thought of his PLATO lessons, which would liberate him from his open-air-intake apartment, take him away from the memory of his parents and public schooling, give him something to do in which he could take pride.
In the Distance, and Ahead in Time Page 3