by Mary Carmen
The doctor took Mattie on December 16, 2086. She was the largest of our babies, and we knew right away she would live at least six months. Almost from the start she resembled Anna in her pretty face and in her mannerisms. I believe Len favored her most of all our children.
The Anthony Waltrop Wing of the Anna Murphy House, Continued
Len kept bringing books to my incomplete library, and frequently he would take Franklin there to show him his latest finds. Len installed a number of locked cabinets to store the most precious of the books and manuscripts, and he showed Franklin how to put on white gloves before removing items for viewing. I was happy to see Len kept the keys to the cabinets out of the boy’s reach.
The item in that library that was most frequently photographed was designed just after Mattie’s birth. Of course, this is the famous kaleidoscope.
The library is in the southeast wing of the house, facing the equator. Len wanted a showpiece in the upper corner that is closest to the equator, something that could be seen from some distance. He asked me if I had an idea, and I suggested a stained-glass window, something Louis Comfort Tiffany might have designed if he had come to Octula.
Len appeared to like the idea, but I was surprised when he brought me, in May of 2086, the design of the seven-foot-in-diameter kaleidoscope. This design of glass, lights, and mirrors was run by a series of motors controlled from a computer on the first floor, and it contained both a calendar and a clock. The designer had decided which colors were best in the various hours of the day and night and in the various seasons, and the computer programmed the displays appropriately.
Pieces of glass from many places were included. The silvery glass from Octula was especially effective at night. The reds and oranges from Earth were my favorites during the day. If I wanted to see something new, the device was programmed to display thirty-two million different selections, holding each for five seconds. If I liked a selection from the randomizer, I could save this selection for retrieval again and again. The device’s mechanics made a soft whirring sound, but I never heard the glass pieces grate against each other.
People came from all over the planet to see it. The view from outdoors at night was especially awe-inspiring. After it was working well, Len and Miss Gasnes conducted tours each month for people, both Americans and Octulians, who wanted to come inside to see it in operation.
My memories of Octula are dimming now, of course, but I remember very clearly how Len worked tirelessly for nearly a year and a half on the installation of this kaleidoscope. He argued with the workmen, made frequent trips to collect glass, tinkered with the computer program, and insisted everybody give an opinion about the tilt and orientation of the main structure.
I often wondered why he did not just install it on the front of his own house. In light of what I learned later, I decided he wanted to make sure I was happy enough to continue making grandchildren. He loved to have all the children following him as he walked over the compound, and I think he would have been even happier with twice as many.
Each phase of your life brings different feelings for God to experience. You may be a tough customer as a young person and a softie as an oldster.
Do not regret the past. God has learned much from those experiences that now cause you pain or embarrassment.
Louella Leaves Us
In spite of Len’s continual expenditures on my wing of the house, we were still quite hungry. Everybody lost weight, especially Louella.
Anna was terribly concerned, and she and Len took Louella to see the highly rated doctor.
“It’s a cancer of the pancreas,” Anna told me. “The doctor has had some success with cures here, but they involve drugs and invasive procedures.”
My beautiful wife was in tears as she spoke. I asked if the doctor was hopeful about the prognosis.
“Not at her age,” she answered. “The cancer will not grow quickly, but it probably has already affected some critical organs.”
“What will we do?”
“Daddy would like to move her to a clinic on Solues, the nearest large planet. They have had some remarkable cures, and the doctor has been impressed with their treatment and their care of other Americans.”
Louella left just after Christmas of 2088. The children were upset, but we assured them their grandmother would be back soon, well and happy again. We were not convinced of this ourselves, but we put a good face on the matter and held each other closely that night.
A few weeks later the doctor confirmed that Louella was gaining strength, and we had reason to hope for her return to Octula.
We also found out we were expecting another child, a boy. Len smiled at the news, and he telephoned Louella on Solues that evening to tell her.
The First Signs of Victory
Just after Louella left for Solues, the naval forces of the Assemblage were able to occupy a large town on the south seacoast, Pex Osmeapt.
After several years of inconclusive military campaigns, Mr. Mipdomp was elated. He declared an increase in food rations for everybody for a week, claiming the victory was a cause for celebration.
Actually, I had recommended a lightening of the restrictions just a month before. The harvest in Nittousi had exceeded all our forecasts, and the Nittousi people themselves were celebrating by feasting, using their guaranteed percentage of food from their farming operations.
This conquest of Pex Osmeapt meant that no populated spot on the planet’s land was more than one thousand miles from a district or a city under the control of the Assemblage. This was about the number of miles an infantry unit could move in one day on Octula. After the conquest of Pex Osmeapt, the strategy for the war changed considerably. The war was not over, certainly, but the ability to move troops was vastly facilitated.
On September 15, 2089, the doctor took Morton. He died the next day.
Len Starts the Theater
Louella’s illness and Morton’s death seemed to redouble Len’s energy for the building project. In early 2090 he showed me his plans for a family theater in my wing.
“Seats twelve. Just enough for the family and Miss Worrell. These benches could hold a couple of the little ones, if Anna’s brothers drop by,” he told me.
“Is this for movies? Plays?” I asked.
“Whatever you like. We have thousands of old movies, from 1890 to 2060, in the library right now. We can play them individually, but this theater would be how we would all watch at the same time. Just like we used to as kids at home,” he insisted.
So he got started on the theater, even though the library was not really complete.
When Anna and I were married, I understood Len was very successful. He worked nearly nonstop on the import and export business, and he had the ear of some of the most influential Octulians.
As our children grew older, he worked less and less, allowing Anna’s four brothers to take over various parts of the business. He received a call from the office nearly every hour, but he was able to quickly handle a question or issue and get back to being a fulltime grandfather.
Maybe he had missed out on being a parent when his own children were young, spending all his time getting his business set up on Octula. Whatever the reason, Len was our children’s favorite playmate, always ready to read a story or help with a list of spelling words.
This continual interest in adding onto the house was a source of amusement to nearly everybody, though. Anna’s brothers looked at the changes every time they came back from their interplanetary trips, shaking their heads in amazement. Even Anna thought the expense might be getting out of hand.
Of course, I was keeping the financial records for the war, and I knew how much Len was being paid for the supply runs. I realized he took in much, much more in net income than the cost of those building projects.
Len dressed like everybody else during those war days, in shabby and loose clothes that had not been replaced since the firing on Grov Tunves. All our textile coupons were spent on the children, and Len was
happy to look the part of the retired businessman with no extra textile coupon to spare. But each craft that landed contained something exquisite for the library or the theater.
He was certainly lonely during those months while Louella was away, but he never took another companion. Indeed, I have never heard any story of marital infidelity about either Len or Louella.
Louella Returns
In February of 2090, the medical people on Solnes discharged Louella from their hospital and sent her home to Octula. Len and Anna accompanied the medical carrier from the spaceport to the compound and put Louella to bed. We made her suite our headquarters for most of 2090, until she was able to walk around her house.
Louella brought her medical report home, and I entered it into the Solnes translator at the office. We found the hospital had replaced many of her vital organs and all her blood. A number of bones had been hollowed out and filled with a substance that made them immune to cancer. The hospital had given her a great deal of medication.
Anna and I also found Louella’s personality had changed. She scarcely remembered the names of her own children, and she sometimes had to pronounce the names of all our children before she came to the one she wanted to address. She could not seem to differentiate between the boys and the girls, referring to Mattie as Franklin or Morris as Eliza. This woman looked like Louella and sounded like Louella, but she was almost a stranger to us.
Len was not upset. He had his grandchildren and his architecture projects. If his wife was an alien, he still was happy to have her home.
We noticed one thing, though: the new Louella was smarter. Anna and I had a very tough time winning at the bridge table after Louella returned.
The Assemblage Suffers a Loss
In April of 2090, just after Mr. Mipdomp had appointed General Jepsy Jammedl as the general-in-chief of the Assemblage’s army, a major campaign took place just south of the equator, at Jasqes’t Gessy in a district of the Assemblage. General Nddmemmap was slowly moving north after defeating the highly regarded Alliance general, Socesv Mee, when his troops were overtaken by the Alliance forces. General Nddmemmap lost an enormous number of his soldiers and a significant amount of food and ammunition.
This defeat was the topic of nearly all conversation for two weeks in New Philadelphia. Mr. Mipdomp was in a terrible depression, visibly shaken and sometimes wiping tears from his eyes in public. He called his generals to his mansion for a meeting about strategy, and he seemed, after that, more composed and cheerful.
Apvievan
Just a month after the meeting at Mr. Mipdomp’s mansion, the bloodiest day of the war occurred at Apvievan, in a district of the Assemblage. This battle between the troops of General Mee of the Alliance and General Nddmemmap was responsible for the deaths of nearly five thousand soldiers and the wounding of many, many more. Because the deaths were rather evenly divided between the two forces, history has not really decided the victor. However, because General Mee retreated to the lands of the Alliance, Mr. Mipdomp decided his army had defeated the great General Mee.
This thought gave Mr. Mipdomp even more to be cheerful about. The publicity about the Apvievan battle was enthusiastic, and the people of the Assemblage were convinced peace was within reach.
When I saw the costs of this battle, I was shocked. The government sent death benefits to nearly twenty-two hundred relatives, and the hospitals were overflowing with the nearly ten thousand wounded soldiers. Since the policy of the Octulians was to return the body of each soldier killed in the war to that soldier’s next of kin, the transportation channels were clogged with the bodies for many weeks. Then, when the hospital bills started to come in, I had to prepare a notice for immediate delivery to the Secretary with an estimate of the huge total medical costs.
It was clear to me the country could not afford to win another battle at this cost. After several weeks, the number of dead soldiers was reported by all the news media, and people of every political persuasion were very upset. In addition, people found out the terrible injuries had maimed many, many young men and women, and the long-term care these people would need might deplete the country’s treasury.
Anna was upset, too. Americans were not allowed to voice opinions in public or in the media about the Octulian government or its policies, but she certainly told Miss Gasnes what she thought. Then Miss Gasnes went home and discussed the facts of the battle of Apvievan with her family.
Reopening the Mines
As the manager of the Assemblage’s war budget, I was called to the Secretary’s office a couple of days after I delivered the estimate of the long-term medical costs for the soldiers wounded at Apvievan. Of course, there was next to no warning before the meeting, just a notice on the daily calendar one hour before the meeting was to start.
I had expected to get called to testify before the Secretary. Before I sent the estimate, I had asked the hospitals to quickly send me their best information about the ten thousand soldiers as to the severity of the injuries. Then I called our excellent American doctor for help in deciding how much care would be required each year for the next five years. The total was more than the Assemblage’s annual budget for normal operations.
My colleagues helped me put all this information into a chart for each year. We showed the payments to the medical institutions for diagnoses and treatments, and we showed payments to each soldier at his or her salary at the time of the injury.
At the meeting the Secretary treated me as if I personally had caused the wounding of each of these ten thousand soldiers. I kept calm and answered each question into the translating machine. Although my Octulan was getting better after nearly thirteen years on the planet, I wanted to make sure my testimony to the Secretary was as perfect as I could make it, so I spoke in English.
I had anticipated the question about how the shortfall could be made up, and my colleagues and I had prepared a list of options. We presented a slide with items for consideration. Some of these came from our agents in the industries, and a few of them came from Len.
One of Len’s ideas involved the fact that he never had enough platinum to sell, even though the Assemblage had closed eight platinum mines in the northern part of the country within the prior year. It took personnel to run the robots that did the actual mining, and trained personnel were in short supply after the buildup of the military forces.
In those days on Octula, people retired at about forty years of age. The people who were available to run the robots were either in the military or on the lists of the retired. Len suggested bringing retired people back to work, training them to run the robots, and getting more platinum out of the closed mines.
Several other options were put forth, too. None of these was as compelling as the platinum mine idea because no other would produce the same high cash flow over the next several years, the same years the Assemblage needed the cash to pay for the medical costs.
I was somewhat reluctant to push too hard on the idea of the platinum mines because Len made a significant profit selling platinum to dealers on eight planets, including Earth. After all, my wife and my own children would benefit directly if Len’s income increased.
But the numbers were too good to overlook.
Furthermore, Len’s buyers were all willing to pay in Universal Gold, the interplanetary monetary unit. Because the Alliance had started to issue its own paper money and people of both countries were starting to become suspicious of all Octulian currency, hospitals were no longer happy to accept anything but Universal Gold in exchange for services.
My colleagues and I gave the Secretary our package of financial details and went back to our office. The meeting continued with the Secretary and the officials who could make decisions.
Two days later Len was back in the platinum business. During the next six months, he and Anna’s brothers made as much money as they had made in the prior year.
Mr. Mipdomp’s Proclamation
With a few months of the terrible victory at Apvievan, Mr. Mip
domp felt confident enough to proclaim that all young people in the districts that had seceded would be eligible for training in the sciences. This was, of course, the famous Efudaviopam Qsodmanaviom.
The history behind this law is fairly simple. The old people in the Alliance did not want their young people to train in the sciences. They wanted the youngsters to stay home and help with the family business, which was, for the most part, agriculture. The young people themselves were anxious to get out of the family home and into the excitement of the sciences. Mr. Mipdomp, then, was speaking directly to the young people of the districts of the Alliance, even though those young people were not at that time part of the electorate. Mr. Mipdomp assumed the young people would not support the Alliance’s war efforts if he told them directly he was guaranteeing their training in the sciences.