Big-bowed white blouse, and black skirt around a well-kept figure. She’d be forty in the fall, but she’d never completely tamed her facial reflexes—which was most engaging, so far as I was concerned. Spontaneity of expression so often vanishes so soon. I could see the sort of child she’d been by looking at her, listening to her now. The thought of being forty was bothering her again too, I could tell. She always kids me about age when age is bothering her.
See, I’m around thirty-five, actually, which makes me her junior by a bit, but she’d heard her grandfather speak of me when she was a kid, before I came back again this last time. I’d filled out the balance of his two-year term, back when Betty-Beta’s first mayor, Wyeth, had died after two months in office. I was born five hundred ninety-seven years ago, on Earth, but I spent about five hundred sixty-two of those years sleeping, during my long jaunts between the stars. I’ve made a few more trips than a few others; consequently, I am an anachronism. I am really, of course, only as old as I look—but still, people always seem to feel that I’ve cheated somehow, especially women in their middle years. Sometimes it is most disconcerting. . . .
“Eleanor,” said I, “your term will be up in November. Are you still thinking of running again?”
She took off her narrow, elegantly-trimmed glasses and brushed her eyelids with thumb and forefinger. Then she took a sip of coffee.
“I haven’t made up my mind.”
“I ask not for press-release purposes,” I said, “but for my own.”
“Really, I haven’t decided,” she told me. “I don’t know. . . .”
“O.K. Just checking. Let me know if you do.”
I drank some coffee.
After a time, she said, “Dinner Saturday? As usual?”
“Yes; good.”
“I’ll tell you then.” “Fine—capital.”
As she looked down into her coffee, I saw a little girl staring into a pool, waiting for it to clear, to see her reflection or to see the bottom of the pool, or perhaps both.
She smiled at whatever it was she finally saw.
“A bad storm?” she asked me.
“Yep. Feel it in my bones.”
“Tell it to go away?”
“Tried. Don’t think it will, though.”
“Better batten some hatches, then.”
“It wouldn’t hurt and it might help.”
“The weather satellite will be overhead in another half hour. You’ll have something sooner?”
“Think so. Probably any minute.”
I finished my coffee, washed out the cup.
“Let me know right away what it is.”
“Check. Thanks for the coffee.”
Lottie was still working and did not look up as I passed.
Upstairs again, my highest eye was now high enough. I stood it on its tail and collected a view of the distance: Fleecy mobs of clouds boiled and frothed on the other side of Saint Stephen’s. The mountain range seemed a breakwall, a dam, a rocky shoreline. Beyond it, the waters were troubled.
My other eye was almost in position. I waited the space of half a cigarette, then it delivered me a sight:
Gray and wet and impenetrable, a curtain across the countryside, that’s what I saw.
And advancing.
I called Eleanor.
“It’s gonna rain, chillun,” I said.
“Worth some sandbags?”
“Possibly.”
“Better be ready, then. O.K. Thanks.”
I returned to my watching.
Tierra del Cygnus, Land of the Swan—delightful name. It refers to both the planet and its sole continent.
How to describe the world, like quick? Well, roughly Earth-size; actually a bit smaller, and more watery. As for the main land mass, first hold a mirror up to South America, to get the big bump from the right side over to the left, then rotate it ninety degrees in a counterclockwise direction and push it up into the northern hemisphere. Got that? Good. Now grab it by the tail and pull. Stretch it another six or seven hundred miles, slimming down the middle as you do, and let the last five or six hundred fall across the equator. There you have Cygnus, its big gulf partly in the tropics, partly not. Just for the sake of thoroughness, while you’re about it, break Australia into eight pieces and drop them about at random down in the southern hemisphere, calling them after the first eight letters in the Greek alphabet. Put a big scoop of vanilla at each pole, and don’t forget to tilt the globe about eighteen degrees before you leave. Thanks.
I recalled my wandering eyes, and I kept a few of the others turned toward Saint Stephen’s until the cloudbanks breasted the range about an hour later. By then, though, the weather satellite had passed over and picked the thing up also. It reported quite an extensive cloud cover on the other side. The storm had sprung up quickly, as they often do here on Cygnus. Often, too, they disperse just as quickly, after an hour or so of heaven’s artillery. But then there are the bad ones—sometimes lingering and lingering, and bearing more thunderbolts in their quivers than any Earth storm.
Betty’s position, too, is occasionally precarious, though its advantages, in general, offset its liabilities. We are located on the gulf, about twenty miles inland, and are approximately three miles removed (in the main) from a major river, the Noble; part of Betty does extend down to its banks, but this is a smaller part. We are almost a strip city, falling mainly into an area some seven miles in length and two miles wide, stretching inland, east from the river, and running roughly parallel to the distant seacoast. Around eighty percent of the 100,000 population is concentrated about the business district, five miles in from the river.
We are not the lowest land about, but we are far from being the highest. We are certainly the most level in the area. This latter feature, as well as our nearness to the equator, was a deciding factor in the establishment of Beta Station. Some other things were our proximity both to the ocean and to a large river. There are nine other cities on the continent, all of them younger and smaller, and three of them located upriver from us. We are the potential capital of a potential country.
We’re a good, smooth, easy landing site for drop boats from orbiting interstellar vehicles, and we have major assets for future growth and coordination when it comes to expanding across the continent. Our original raison d’être, though, was Stopover, repair point, supply depot and refreshment stand, physical and psychological, on the way out to other, more settled worlds, farther along the line. Cyg was discovered later than many others—it just happened that way—and the others got off to earlier starts. Hence the others generally attract more colonists. We are still quite primitive. Self-sufficiency, in order to work on our population land scale, demanded a society on the order of that of the mid-nineteenth century in the American southwest—at least for purposes of getting started. Even now, Cyg is still partly on a natural economy system, although Earth Central technically determines the coin of the realm.
Why Stopover, if you sleep most of the time between the stars?
Think about it awhile, and I’ll tell you later if you’re right.
The thunderheads rose in the east, sending billows and streamers this way and that, until it seemed from the formations that Saint Stephen’s was a balcony full of monsters, leaning and craning their necks over the rail in the direction of the stage, us. Cloud piled upon slate-colored cloud, and then the wall slowly began to topple.
I heard the first rumbles of thunder almost half an hour after lunch, so I knew it wasn’t my stomach.
Despite all my eyes, I moved to a window to watch. It was like a big, gray, aerial glacier plowing the sky.
There was a wind now, for I saw the trees suddenly quiver and bow down. This would be our first storm of the season. The turquoise fell back before it, and finally it smothered the sun itself. Then there were drops upon the windowpane, then rivulets.
Flintlike, the highest peaks of Saint Stephen’s scraped its belly and were showered with sparks. After a moment it bumped into someth
ing with a terrible crash, and the rivulets on the quartz panes turned into rivers.
I went back to my gallery, to smile at dozens of views of people scurrying for shelter. A smart few had umbrellas and raincoats. The rest ran like blazes. People never pay attention to weather reports; this, I believe, is a constant factor in man’s psychological makeup, stemming probably from an ancient tribal distrust of the shaman. You want them to be wrong. If they’re right, then they’re somehow superior, and this is even more uncomfortable than getting wet.
I remembered then that I had forgotten my raincoat, umbrella and rubbers. But it had been a beautiful morning, and WC could have been wrong. . . .
Well, I had another cigarette and leaned back in my big chair. No storm in the world could knock my eyes out of the sky.
I switched on the filters and sat and watched the rain pour past.
Five hours later it was still raining, and rumbling and dark. I’d had hopes that it would let up by quitting time, but when Chuck Fuller came around the picture still hadn’t changed any. Chuck was my relief that night, the evening Hell Cop.
He seated himself beside my desk.
“You’re early,” I said. “They don’t start paying you for another hour.”
“Too wet to do anything but sit. Rather sit here than at home.”
“Leaky roof?”
He shook his head.
“Mother-in-law. Visiting again.”
I nodded.
“One of the disadvantages of a small world.”
He clasped his hands behind his neck and leaned back in the chair, staring off in the direction of the window. I could feel one of his outbursts coming.
“You know how old I am?” he asked after a while.
“No,” I said, which was a lie. He was twenty-nine.
“Twenty-seven,” he told me, “and going on twenty-eight soon. Know where I’ve been?”
“No.”
“No place, that’s where! I was born and raised on this crummy world! And I married and I settled down here—and I’ve never been off it! Never could afford it when I was younger. Now I’ve got a family. . . .”
He leaned forward again, rested his elbows on his knees, like a kid. Chuck would look like a kid when he was fifty. Blond hair, close-cropped, pug nose, kind of scrawny, takes a suntan quickly, and well. Maybe he’d act like a kid at fifty too. I’ll never know.
I didn’t say anything because I didn’t have anything to say.
He was quiet for a long while again.
Then he said, “You’ve been around.”
After a minute, he went on:
“You were born on Earth. Earth! And you visited lots of other worlds too, before I was even born. Earth is only a name to me. And pictures. And all the others—they’re the same! Pictures. Names . . .”
I waited, then after I grew tired of waiting I said, “‘Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn . . .’”
“What does that mean?”
“It’s the beginning to an ancient poem. It’s an ancient poem now, but it wasn’t really ancient when I was a boy. Just old. I had friends, relatives, even in-laws, once myself. They are not just bones now. They are dust. Real dust, not metaphorical dust. The past fifteen years seem fifteen years to me, the same as to you, but they’re not. They are already many chapters back in the history books. Whenever you travel between the stars you automatically bury the past. The world you leave will be filled with strangers if you ever return—or caricatures of your friends, your relatives, even yourself. It’s no great trick to be a grandfather at sixty, a great-grandfather at seventy-five or eighty—-but go away for three hundred years, and then come back and meet your great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson, who happens to be fifty-five years old, and puzzled, when you look him up. It shows you just how alone you really are. You are not simply a man without a country or without a world. You are a man without a time. You and the centuries do not belong to each other. You are like the rubbish that drifts between the stars.”
“It would be worth it,” he said.
I laughed. I’d had to listen to his gripes every month or two for over a year and a half. It had never bothered me much before, so I guess it was a cumulative effect that day—the rain, and Saturday night next, and my recent library visits, and his complaining—that had set me off.
His last comment had been too much. “It would be worth it.” What could I say to that?
I laughed.
He turned bright red.
“You’re laughing at me!”
He stood up and glared down.
“No I’m not,” I said. “I’m laughing at me. I shouldn’t have been bothered by what you said, but I was. That tells me something funny about me.”
“What?”
“I’m getting sentimental in my old age, and that’s funny.”
“Oh.” He turned his back on me and walked over to the window and stared out. Then he jammed his hands into his pockets and turned around and looked at me.
“Aren’t you happy?” he asked. “Really, I mean? You’ve got money, and no strings on you. You could pick up and leave on the next IV that passes, if you wanted to.”
“Sure I’m happy,” I told him. “My coffee was cold. Forget it.”
“Oh,” again. He turned back to the window in time to catch a bright flash full in the face, and to have to compete with thunder to get his next words out. “I’m sorry,” I heard him say, as in the distance. “It just seems to me that you should be one of the happiest guys around. . . .”
“I am. It’s the weather today. It’s got everybody down in the mouth, yourself included.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Look at it rain, will you? Haven’t seen any rain in months. . . .”
“They’ve been saving it all up for today.”
He chuckled.
“I’m going down for a cup of coffee and a sandwich before I sign on. Can I bring you anything?”
“No, thanks.”
“O.K. See you in a little while.”
He walked out whistling. He never stays depressed. Like a kid’s moods, his moods—up and down, up and down . . . And he’s a Hell Cop. Probably the worst possible job for him, having to keep his attention in one place for so long. They say the job title comes from the name of an antique flying vehicle—a hellcopper, I think. We send our eyes on their appointed rounds, and they can hover or soar or back up, just like those old machines could. We patrol the city and the adjacent countryside. Law enforcement isn’t much of a problem on Cyg. We never peek in windows or send an eye into a building without an invitation. Our testimony is admissible in court—or, if we’re fast enough to press a couple of buttons, the tape that we make does an even better job—and we can dispatch live or robot cops in a hurry, depending on which will do a better job.
There isn’t much crime on Cyg, though, despite the fact that everybody carries a sidearm of some kind, even little kids. Everybody knows pretty much what their neighbors are up to, and there aren’t too many places for a fugitive to run. We’re mainly aerial traffic cops, with an eye out for local wildlife (which is the reason for all the sidearms).
SPCU is what we call the latter function—Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Us—which is the reason each of my hundred thirty eyes has six forty-five-caliber eyelashes.
There are things like the cute little panda puppy—oh, about three feet high at the shoulder when it sits down on its rear like a teddy bear, and with big, square, silky ears, a curly pinto coat, large, limpid, brown eyes, pink tongue, button nose, powder-puff tail, sharp little white teeth more poisonous than a Quemeda island viper’s, and possessed of a way with mammal entrails like unto the way of an imaginative cat with a rope of catnip.
Then there’s a snapper, which looks as mean as it sounds: a feathered reptile, with three horns on its armored head—one beneath each eye, like a tusk, and one curving skyward from the top of its nose—legs about eighteen inches long, and a fou
r-foot tail which it raises straight into the air whenever it jogs along at greyhound speed, and which it swings like a sandbag—and a mouth full of long, sharp teeth.
Also, there are amphibious things which come from the ocean by way of the river on occasion. I’d rather not speak of them. They’re kind of ugly and vicious.
Anyway, those are some of the reasons why there are Hell Cops—not just on Cyg, but on many, many frontier worlds. I’ve been employed in that capacity on several of them, and I’ve found that an experienced HC can always find a job Out Here. It’s like being a professional clerk back home.
Chuck took longer than I thought he would, came back after I was technically off duty, looked happy though, so I didn’t say anything. There was some pale lipstick on his collar and a grin on his face, so I bade him good morrow, picked up my cane and departed in the direction of the big washing machine.
It was coming down too hard for me to go the two blocks to my car on foot.
I called a cab and waited another fifteen minutes. Eleanor had decided to keep mayor’s hours, and she’d departed shortly after lunch; and almost the entire staff had been released an hour early because of the weather. Consequently, Town Hall was full of dark offices and echoes. I waited in the hallway behind the main door, listening to the purr of the rain as it fell, and hearing its gurgle as it found its way into the gutters. It beat the street and shook the windowpanes and made the windows cold to touch.
I’d planned on spending the evening at the library, but I changed my plans as I watched the weather happen. Tomorrow, or the next day, I decided. It was an evening for a good meal, a hot bath, my own books and brandy, and early to bed. It was good sleeping weather, if nothing else. A cab pulled up in front of the Hall and blew its horn.
I ran.
The next day the rain let up for perhaps an hour in the morning. Then a slow drizzle began; and it did not stop again.
It went on to become a steady downpour by afternoon.
The following day was Friday, which I always have off, and I was glad that it was.
Put dittos under Thursday’s weather report. That’s Friday. But I decided to do something anyway.
A Day in the Life Page 14