by Joe Haldeman
I don’t guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were ‘cool,’ joints were ‘grass,’ and so on.
We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We’d be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.
Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we’d get together at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren’t supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.
I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.
Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six-month journey. Cortez didn’t insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.
8
I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable — I made a million k’s from Time-Life/Fax — but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.
I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.
She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War — having moved out in 1980 — and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.
She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl uniform, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.
‘William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.’ Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. ‘Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.’
We got into a groundcar that had ‘Jefferson’ written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid 100k per kilometer for the use of it.
I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises, roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings. We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.
‘Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.’
‘Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.’ That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.
‘Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?’
‘Mostly boring,’ I said automatically. ‘When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.’
He nodded wisely. ‘Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ’vailable anytime after six. Righty-oh?’
‘That’s fine, Carl.’
The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.
‘Gots ta watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerself, Miz Mandella.’
We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. ‘What’s a rider?’
‘Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.’
The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.
‘Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?’ I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand ‘calories’ and I’d used up only half of them.
It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.
When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration books, so they’d made the new currency K’s, kilocalories, because that’s the unit for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalories of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread. So they instituted a sliding ‘ration factor,’ so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories ‘calories’ in an attempt to make things less confusing. Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever … anything but kilocalories.
Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories’ worth of ground beef, costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80K.
I also got a head of lettuce for 140K and a little bottle of olive oil for 175K. Mother said she had some vinegar. Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.
At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.
Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.
Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ’fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his arm.
‘Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?’ I called into the kitchen.
‘As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?’
‘Well … I found the classified section, but no “Help Wanted.” ’
She laughed. ‘Son, there hasn’t been a “Help Wanted” ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs … well, most of them.’
‘Everybody works for the government?’
‘No, that’s not it.’ She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. ‘The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.’
‘Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.’
‘Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?’
‘Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.’
‘No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.’
‘Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy — there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good—’
‘No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t—’
‘But you said you had a job!’
‘I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.’
‘
Hand-me-down? Dealer?’
‘Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Hailey Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000k a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.
‘Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.
‘Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.
‘Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has “Hailey Williams” identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700K, so she gets half that, 1350K, and pays the dealer 135.’
She got a pad and a stylus and did some figuring. ‘So the real Hailey Williams gets 6000K weekly for doing nothing. I work three days a week for 4050K. My assistant works three days for 1115K. The dealer gets 100,000K in fees and 735K per week. Lopsided, isn’t it?’
‘Hmm … I’ll say. Quite illegal, too, I suppose.’
‘For the dealer. Everybody else might lose their job and have to start over, if the Employment Board finds out. But the dealer gets brainwiped.’
‘Guess I better find a dealer, while I can still afford the fifty-grand bite.’ Actually, I still had over three million, but planned to run through most of it in a short time. Hell, I’d earned it.
I was getting ready to go the next morning when Mother came in with a shoebox. Inside, there was a small pistol in a clip-on holster.
‘This belonged to your father,’ she explained. ‘Better wear it if you’re planning to go downtown without a bodyguard.’
It was a gunpowder pistol with ridiculously thin bullets. I hefted it in my hand. ‘Did Dad ever use it?’
‘Several times … just to scare away riders and hitters, though. He never actually shot anybody.’
‘You’re probably right that I need a gun,’ I said, putting it back. ‘But I’d have to have something with more heft to it. Can I buy one legally?’
‘Sure, there’s a gun store down in the Mall. As long as you don’t have a police record, you can buy anything that suits you.’ Good; I’d get a little pocket laser. I could hardly hit the wall with a gunpowder pistol.
‘But … William, I’d feel a lot better if you’d hire a bodyguard, at least until you know your way around.’ We’d gone all around that last night. Being an official Trained Killer, I thought I was tougher than any clown I might hire for the job.
‘I’ll check into it, Mother. Don’t worry — I’m not even going downtown today, just into Hyattsville.’
‘That’s just as bad.’
When the elevator came, it was already occupied. He looked at me blandly as I got in, a man a little older than me, clean-shaven and well dressed. He stepped back to let me at the row of buttons. I punched 47 and then, realizing his motive might not have been politeness, turned to see him struggling to get at a metal pipe stuck in his waistband. It had been hidden by his cape.
‘Come on, fella,’ I said, reaching for a nonexistent weapon. ‘You wanna get caulked?’
He had the pipe free but let it hang loosely at his side. ‘Caulked?’
‘Killed. Army term.’ I took one step toward him, trying to remember. Kick just under the knee, then either groin or kidney. I decided on the groin.
‘No.’ He put the pipe back in his waistband. ‘I don’t want to get “caulked.” ’ The door opened at 47 and I backed out.
The gun shop was all bright white plastic and gleamy black metal. A little bald man bobbed over to wait on me. He had a pistol in a shoulder rig.
‘And a fine morning to you, sir,’ he said and giggled. ‘What will it be today?’
‘Lightweight pocket laser,’ I said. ‘Carbon dioxide.’
He looked at me quizzically and then brightened. ‘Coming right up, sir.’ Giggle. ‘Special today, I throw in a handful of tachyon grenades.’
‘Fine.’ They’d be handy.
He looked at me expectantly. ‘So? What’s the popper?’
‘Huh?’
‘The punch, man; you set me up, now knock me down. Laser.’ He giggled.
I was beginning to understand. ‘You mean I can’t buy a laser.’
‘Of course not, sweetie,’ he said and sobered. ‘You didn’t know that?’
‘I’ve been out of the country for a long time.’
‘The world, you mean. You’ve been out of the world a long time.’ He put his left hand on a chubby hip in a gesture that incidentally made his gun easier to get. He scratched the center of his chest.
I stood very still. ‘That’s right. I just got out of the Force.’
His jaw dropped. ‘Hey, no bully-bull? You been out shootin’ ’em up, out in space?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Hey, all that crap about you not gettin’ older, there’s nothin’ to that, is there?’
‘Oh, it’s true. I was born in 1975.’
‘Well, god … damn. You’re almost as old as I am.’ He giggled. ‘I thought that was just something the government made up.’
‘Anyhow … you say I can’t buy a laser—’
‘Oh, no. No no no. I run a legal shop here.’
‘What can I buy?’
‘Oh, pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, body armor … just no lasers or explosives or fully automatic weapons.’
‘Let me see a pistol. The biggest you have.’
‘Ah, I’ve got just the thing.’ He motioned me over to a display case and opened the back, taking out a huge revolver.
‘Four-ten-gauge six-shooter.’ He cradled it in both hands. ‘Dinosaur-stopper. Authentic Old West styling. Slugs or flechettes.’
‘Flechettes?’
‘Sure — uh, they’re like a bunch of tiny darts. You shoot and they spread out in a pattern. Hard to miss that way.’
Sounded like my speed. ‘Anyplace I can try it out?’
‘’Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.’ He rang a bell and a boy came out to watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.
The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.
He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. ‘Please don’t pick it up until the door’s closed.’ He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. ‘OK. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.’ I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. Doubted I’d even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.
‘No, no,’ he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. ‘Authentic Old West styling. You’ve got to pull the hammer back.’
Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.
The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.
‘I’ll take it.’
He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavil
y armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.
The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.
Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.
I pushed a ‘cab call’ button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.
During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I’d bought the shield.
Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.
I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.
This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.
It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.