Alternities

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  “No.”

  “Look, there has to be some reasonable middle ground here—”

  “There is none. You can take them out, or you can watch us drop them into the sea. Sixty days.”

  Indianapolis, Alternity Blue

  The sound of a key in the lock announced the return of Wallace’s roommate. Fowler had a sack of groceries in his arm and a dusting of melting snow decorating his knit cap and coat.

  “How’d it go?” Wallace asked, looking up from the notes and photos arrayed around him on the living room floor.

  Fowler tossed Wallace a keyring in a looping arc. “I tried three different stores, including one in Millersville as large as a General Supply back home. It had everything you could want if you were cooking Spanish or Ukrainian. But the fish was all frozen, the only seaweed was in the aquarium supplies, and they had never heard of Chocos.”

  Fowler had been moaning about the chocolate-glazed cinnamon-filled pastries for weeks. “I hadn’t either, and we call the same world home. Don’t make yourself crazy. Bring some back next time you rotate Home.”

  “That’s not funny. I’m not going to break quarantine.”

  “I guess you’ll just have to adjust,” Wallace said with a shrug. “I’ve had frozen fish. It’s not that bad.”

  “I don’t trust frozen food,” Fowler grumped, stepping past Wallace’s scattered work en route to the kitchen. “It’s just a way of passing off food that didn’t sell five minutes before it spoils.”

  “I don’t think that’s how they do it.”

  “Why not? No one in their right mind would pick frozen over fresh. Anyway, thanks for the use of the car.”

  Smiling to himself, Wallace returned to his work. “How long is it until your next pink card?”

  “Three weeks. Why?”

  “I just want to know how long I’m going to have to listen to you complaining about Choco deprivation.”

  “Oh,” Fowler said, folding the empty sack and tucking it under the sink. “Well, as far as that goes, I think you need to get Home, too,” he volunteered.

  Wallace looked up. “What do you mean?”

  “Just that if you were working as much as you say you are, you wouldn’t need to be catching up on your paperwork the few nights you are here—like now.”

  “Oh.”

  “Not to mention the stupid smile you wear on your face when you are here.”

  The stupid smile appeared on cue. “What do you think it all means?”

  “I think it means you’re bending the fraternization rules,” Fowler said crossly. “Don’t tell me, because I’m not asking. But just because I don’t go out doesn’t mean I don’t know anything. Some of the reports that come across my desk would pass for pornography on the other side of the gate.”

  “Some of what you watch on that television would, too.”

  “I’m not watching for myself,” said Fowler. “I’m trying to assemble a picture for the Guard. This world offends everything we know about how people should live. The things women here do—the things they allow—I would never have believed it. The women who’ve been seduced by the pills and the propaganda, running away from their parents and running out on their husbands.

  “A woman can divorce her husband here for no reason—incredible! They take men’s jobs and ape men’s roles and suddenly they’re as shallow and selfish as the worst of us. Sluts. Seducers. Marriage doesn’t mean anything to them, motherhood doesn’t mean anything to them, morality doesn’t mean anything to them.”

  Wallace had experience with Fowler’s little sermons, and he had learned the best way to shorten them was to say little or nothing. But this time the attack seemed personal.

  “There’s some special women, too,” he said, knowing he should remain silent. “There’s women that can fill a house with music and show you ways of thinking about the world that you never dreamed of There’s women who have so much love and joy inside them that one smile, one look can make you feel like your life has started over again.”

  Fowler stared for a moment, then came and sat on the chair opposite Wallace. “The worst I thought was that you were slopping the whores on Central Avenue or trolling Michigan Street for students. But that’s not what this is, is it.”

  “Who are you asking for? Yourself or the Guard?”

  The analyst squirmed uncomfortably. “Myself.”

  “Are you going to report me to Frederick?”

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble. But I don’t want to see you get yourself in trouble, either.”

  Sighing, Wallace leaned back against the front of the couch. “I already am,” he said.

  “Not yet. Nobody knows. Just stop seeing her.”

  Wallace shook his head. “Did you ever know someone who made the rest of the world go away for you? So that it was just you and her, and nothing else was real.”

  “Don’t try to tell me you love her. God in heaven, you can’t be that stupid.”

  Bristling, Wallace said nothing.

  “How long has this been going on? A month?”

  “About,” he said gruffly.

  “Then you don’t love her,” Fowler said firmly. “Are you slopping her?”

  “Christ almighty, Gary,” Wallace snapped. “Is that the only word you know for it? Is that what you call it when you get romantic with your wife?”

  “That’s the right word when there’s no ring,” he said stiffly.

  “When you touch somebody—when it’s right—” He caught himself and started again. “Shan brings everything she is to her lovemaking. She gives it time, and love, and thought, and energy. She’s so different from—Look, it’s not like what you’re saying at all.”

  “You don’t love her,” Fowler said. “Women use sex as a trap. They make you call those feelings love, make you think you have to have her, when all you have to have is friction.”

  “This isn’t like that,” Wallace said, shaking his head. “And besides—I loved her before I met her.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “She’s Common World.”

  Fowler stared. “Somebody you knew back Home?”

  “My might-have-been. The person I’d think about on those nights when you’re lying wide awake in bed at two in the morning. Think about and wonder if she ever thought of me. Doesn’t everybody have one?”

  “Sweet Baby Jesus—Ray, how could you be so stupid?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. He walked to the frosty window and stared out. “This picture of her in my mind,” he said slowly. “It’s part what she was and part what she is, all mixed in together so I can hardly tell which is which. And there’s all these old feelings that never went anywhere working with everything that’s so good about being with her.”

  “You’ve got to break it off.”

  “Arens had a girlfriend. He was even trying to get her pregnant. Nobody cared. We make our own rules. That’s what he said. What business is it of Frederick’s? Why should he care?”

  “Forget Frederick,” Fowler said. “Forget the Guard. Forget frat rules and quarantine. You’re married, Ray. That’s for keeps.”

  “A life sentence? The way they do it here makes more sense to me, Gary. You don’t have to spend all those years pretending.”

  “You’re making excuses that even you don’t believe. You know it’s wrong. Just a moment ago, you stopped yourself from comparing them. You won’t let yourself think thoughts like ‘Shan’s a better ride,’ because you know how unfair it is.”

  Wallace turned away from the glass. “There’s no way Ruthann will ever know. It stays on this side of the gate. It has to.”

  “It only stays here if you stay here. Don’t you know that you’ll be comparing them, every minute? Ruthann could fail a test she didn’t even know she was taking.”

  “I wouldn’t do that.”

  “Yes, you will. It has to end, Ray. It has to.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “I don’t believe in wha
t you’re doing. It’s wrong—for you, for the Guard, for that little girl you claim you love.” Fowler took a deep breath. “Ray, I know. I know. I made a… a mistake, three years ago, with that kind of woman. I know. Please—open your eyes. You know I’m right.”

  “Are you going to report me? Tell Ruthann?”

  Fowler folded his arms across his chest as he considered an answer. “No,” he said finally. “But if you keep this up, I’m not going to have to. End it. You’ve got to end it.”

  Wallace turned back to the window. “I know,” he said. “I just don’t know if I can.”

  “You can.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know what it’s like to fly.”

  1961 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD—SENATE A3410

  Never Again

  EXTENSION OF

  REMARKS

  OF

  HON. RYAN

  JACOB CRIPPS

  OF PENNSYLVANIA

  IN THE SENATE OF THE

  UNITED STATES

  Tuesday,

  September 18, 1961

  MR. CRIPPS: Mr. President, I am honored to introduce to the Senate for its consideration S.B. 141, the Common Security Act of 1961.

  There may be no legislation this century which less needs introduction and explanation. S.B. 141 has already attracted seventy co-sponsors, and the companion bill, which is to be introduced this morning in the House by Thomas Kuchel of California, has over three hundred. If only its sponsors vote in favor, the Common Security Act will carry resoundingly. President Dirksen has already announced that he will sign it into law.

  But it would be a mistake for us to simply let the rising tide of support sweep us forward to a pro forma approval. For the historical record alone, we are obliged to spell out clearly and carefully what we mean to and why we mean to do it.

  The black scar of Norfolk will be a long time healing. So many of us lost family or friends. We all lost, in great measure, our innocence.

  But the tragedy of Norfolk is compounded by the knowledge that it could have been avoided. Over the last three months, the stories have come out, one after another: The bartender who laughed off a bragging customer. The neighbor who wondered at the late meetings in an upstairs apartment. The librarian who researched odd questions for a cardholder named Diana Harris.

  Again and again, we have heard the plaint: If only we’d known what to watch for. If only we’d known who to tell.

  When I was a boy in Pittsburgh, my neighborhood was victimized by daytime burglars and nighttime muggers. The police did what they could, but they could not be everywhere. They needed help to do their job. My parents and my friends’ parents and our neighbors pulled together to organize a neighborhood sentry program, an alliance of people who cared, protecting the homes and lives they cared about.

  And together, we made our neighborhood a safe place, a happy place again. Not by taking to the streets with guns. Not by usurping the role of professional lawmen. Our weapons were our eyes and our ears. Our strength was our sense of community. And we made a difference.

  In a real sense, this nation is one neighborhood. We have the same problems my old neighborhood had—invaded by lawlessness, assaulted by the ruthless and the selfish. The wolves of crime and subversion prey on us, one at a time, taking advantage of our inattention and isolation.

  But we have the same weapons, the same strengths my old neighborhood had, if only we can mobilize them. Our eyes and ears. Our sense of community. We must become partners in our own protection, assets instead of victims. If we do, we can preserve this neighborhood, this nation.

  The scale of the task is daunting. But sociologists tell us that any one of us is no more than four handshakes away from any other. Or, to put it another way, each of us knows the entire population of the nation through a chain of acquaintances no longer than five links long.

  Within this network of relationships are all our friends, families, colleagues and co-workers. Hiding there, too, are our enemies, the real enemies of America. If we know what to look for—if we know who to tell—we can find them, and we can stop them.

  Just as we could have found Diana Harris and her fellow conspirators and stopped them.

  Remembering Norfolk, I want to call this the “Never Again” Bill. For the key feature of the Common Security Act is the creation of a nationwide citizens’ reporting network, to be known as the President’s Volunteer Watch.

  In high school civics classes and community education programs across the nation, we will teach our people what to look for. And from the graduates of these classes we will draw the membership of the Volunteer Watch, a million Americans mobilised in the service of America. In the defense of freedom.

  Volunteers all.

  Patriots all.

  They are asking us what they can do to help. This bill is their answer.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  Spies and Scholars

  Boston, The Home Alternity

  Rayne Wallace was not surprised to find the woman manning gate control was a stranger. True, when he was running, coming through the gate every day, he had known all the gatekeepers by name and they had known him on sight.

  But much could change when six weeks passed between crossings, and, besides, there were many new faces in the Tower these days. The expansion in Blue had had a powerful ripple effect, with hundreds of people changing jobs and new bodies coming on board to fill the vacancies at the lowest levels. As one veteran runner had dourly observed, “The place is being run by the B team.”

  It seemed that way to Wallace, in any case. Even if some of the new faces were pleasant to look at. “Rayne Wallace, 21618, Blue,” he said. “Standard furlough.”

  The dark-haired gate controller dutifully flipped through her file. “Nothing on your card.”

  That was no surprise, either. Operations no longer had the manpower to debrief every returning agent. It seemed sloppy, compared to the way things had been done in the past. But the Guard was changing.

  “Do you want to schedule a return?” the controller went on.

  “They’re doing that up here now?”

  “The assignment desk was getting swamped handling the busywork and the runners both,” she said, looking up. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

  Busywork. “Let’s.”

  “Plus seven?”

  “Plus seven.”

  “I’ll put you down for 10:45.”

  Wallace nodded. “See you Sunday.”

  The gremlins of change had had their day in the change-out room as well, Wallace discovered. Gone were the waist-high privacy walls, banished to make way for new ranks of lockers. Gone were the individual chairs with valets conveniently mounted on the back, replaced by long benches more suited to the narrower aisles. The changes made the CO feel more like a crowded locker room than a gentlemen’s club.

  There were a dozen or more Guardsmen in the CO, despite the hour and the day. Ignoring them and the noise they were generating, Wallace threaded his way through to his locker. The lock dial spun, the door fell open, and he began to strip off his transit clothes. His face wore a distracted, almost vacant expression that belied the turbulent feelings within.

  It was his second full-length visit home. The first had been even more disastrous than his brief appearance before Thanksgiving. He had come in on New Year’s Day, and within an hour Ruthann had angrily excoriated him for his absence during both Thanksgiving and Christmas. He had tried not to answer back in kind.

  But when she sent Katie to retrieve the presents given her in his name—“Why don’t you show your father what he got you for Christmas,” in a savagely sarcastic voice—all good intentions evaporated, and he found himself sliding down into the muck of charge and countercharge, accusation and evasion, anger and tears.

  Everything he had said had been the truth. That she was using Katie to get back at him. That there wouldn’t have been any money for presents—and, truly, as he saw later, it had been the richest Chri
stmas they’d known together—without his job. That other Guard wives managed to cope with their husbands’ absence without creating a family crisis.

  And everything he had said needed saying. But somewhere in the middle of it, Ruthann stopped listening. And when he was done, she had nothing to say, then or for the next six days. Nothing more than the minimum requirements of politeness. You want a wife who never complains? she was saying. I’ll go you one better and give you a wife that never speaks.

  For half that time, he cherished the silence. But presently the distance between them began to prey on him. It was not the way they had been, not the way he wanted them to be. There was a wall between them in bed a mountain between them out of it. Neither of them dared to climb to the top, for fear of finding themselves alone there.

  And so they circled each other, never touching. In pure self-defense, he had spent most of the last two days with Jason March, fleeing from a frost so deep and hard that it promised to kill any living thing upon which it settled. He wanted no repeat of that.

  Wallace scooped his jewelry out of the cupped hollow on the top shelf of the locker. There were only two pieces. The first was a silver confirmation cross on a time-tarnished chain, more a family memento than religious symbol—an expensive gift from his grandmother. It had become a lesson in the value of things when he lost it playing army in the cornfields. A nighttime search by flashlight, his father, brother, and himself walking parallel rows, had revealed its glint and restored it to him.

  The other piece was his wedding ring, a thick band of gold-plated metal holding a fragmentary chip of diamond. He slipped it on, forcing it past the knot of his knuckle, wondering at how strange its weight and hardness felt there after just five weeks with the finger naked.

  Since joining the Guard he had had the ring on and off so often that any symbolism of permanence or unity had been lost. This last time the ring had come off, it seemed as though he had also lost the substance. Or why else had what happened with Shan been so easy, with the guilt only coming later, and most of that only when he failed so miserably in trying to explain himself to Fowler?