Jumping off the Planet d-1

by David Gerrold

  And everything else is stars—godzillions of them. Like God's dandruff on night's black velvet, or something like that. The higher you get, the darker the sky gets and the more stars there are to see. The top observation area is kept mostly unlit, except for tiny guide lights in the carpet, so your view isn't hampered by any glare. Up this high, the stars don't twinkle, so they look different.

  Downstairs, the Line points straight down at the Earth; but it doesn't go all the way down, it just disappears into the distance again, so it looks like the elevator is hanging above the world, while this long bar of light drops away beneath you.

  And every time you go downstairs to look, the Terminator Line has crept a little farther west across the world. And each time there's a little more world to see as more of it creeps up over the curving horizon. One half of the world glows with reflected sunlight. The other half is dark, speckled with little city lights.

  But directly below us, the bright swirl of the hurricane covered everything like a big white eye glaring up at us. The hurricane was really pounding Terminus now. All the news reports were bad. The airport would be out of service for days, and they'd probably have to do a lot of track and highway repair too before anyone could get in or out.

  It's supposed to be exciting, a trip up the elevator. But it isn't. Instead, time seems suspended. Everything looks motionless.

  I was standing on the longest tightrope ever. A suspension bridge between a rock and a planet. Caught in the middle, between Mom and Dad, Weird and Stinky. Not a child, not an adult, but something in-between.

  And all alone. More alone than ever.

  CHANCES

  I was heading back to the cabin when I bumped—literally—into J'mee running down the staircase. At first he didn't recognize me, because my head was shaved, but I grabbed his arm and said, "J'mee, hey! It's me, Charles! Where are you going?"

  "Uh, nowhere—"

  "Then why are you going so fast?"

  J'mee looked annoyed. His face clouded. "That wasn't very nice, what you did." He pushed past me down to the lounge. I followed after.

  "I'm sorry. Can we be friends again?"

  "No. You're not a nice boy."

  "Neither are you."

  That stopped him. "Huh—?"

  "You're not a boy."

  "Huh? I'm not—" J'mee started to protest, saw it was useless, and gave it up as a bad effort. "I thought I fooled you."

  "You almost did."

  "How'd you figure it out?" She demanded.

  "The way you changed clothes."

  "You shouldn't be looking at other boys."

  "You shouldn't be pretending to be one."

  She turned away for a minute, staring out the window at the distant edge of sunset. Then she turned back abruptly "So why are you and your brothers and your dad running away?"

  "Huh—? We're not running away. We're on vacation."

  "Don't be stupid, Charles." She tapped her head. "Every time I meet someone, I do a net-search. My dad taught me where to look for all the really good stuff. It's the only way to be safe." She went blank for a moment. "You don't have to worry. They think you're still at One-Hour. They don't think you got out in time."

  "Thanks, " I said. I didn't mean it. I didn't like her knowing so much about us.

  "Your mom and dad are really screwed up, aren't they?" She said.

  Well, yeah, they were, but I didn't want to say so. Not to her. Because they were still my mom and dad. "They're not that bad," I said. "Everybody has problems."

  "Everybody has babies," she said. "Daddy says tube-town people have too many babies. That's why everybody has problems."

  "Well, if no one had babies, then what?"

  "Then maybe we wouldn't have so many people on the planet and things wouldn't be falling apart," she said. "Your mom didn't want to have babies. She wanted your dad to have them. She said that in an interview once. Want to hear more?"

  "No," I said. I thought about telling her that she shouldn't be poking around in other people's privacy. It wasn't nice. But I didn't think it would stop her. So I didn't say anything.

  "So why are you and your family running away?" I asked.

  "We're not running away. We're just ... moving." And then she added, "Daddy says it's not safe to be rich on Earth anymore. That's why we're moving someplace safe."

  "So why do you have to pretend to be a boy?"

  "Because it's a secret that we're leaving Earth."

  "That's running away."

  "No, it isn't."

  "Fine. Have it your own way." That was how I usually ended arguments at home. "Why didn't you shave all your hair off?"

  "I didn't want to. It looks ... cheap."

  "Didn't you see the show about shaving and microparticles and disease?"

  "Oh, that. Yeah. Daddy says that's for other people. Not us."

  "Oh." There wasn't anything else to say to that. At least nothing polite. I knew what my ethics teacher would have said to that. People who negotiate loopholes for themselves are criminals in training.

  He said that most people see rules as some kind of burden that someone else makes them carry—like Mom or Dad—but the rules are really agreements that we make with each other on how to behave so we can all get along. And when we don't follow the rules, it's like breaking a promise to everybody at once. Break enough rules and nobody will trust you anymore.

  But ... he also said that there are people who have so much money that they can buy themselves exceptions from the rules. And that's dangerous, because if you get into the habit of always buying exceptions for yourself, you end up in a bubble with a wall of money between you and everyone else. You won't know how to connect to anyone and they won't know how to reach you. And all the folks around you will be more loyal to your money than to you.

  That was what my teacher said, but I don't think anybody really believed him. Or cared. I think most of us would have liked to have had the chance to prove that we could handle the burden of money, that we would be different. I know I would. Yeah. Given the choice—living in a bubble of money or scrambling for credits in the Tube-Town—we knew what to choose. Poor and self-respecting is a highly overrated thrill.

  But when J'mee said this—"Rules are for other people"—it made me see how big the difference between us really was. It made me queasy. Because all of a sudden I realized just how naked I really was.

  So I just rubbed my head and said, "It's still a good disguise."

  "No, it isn't," she said.

  "Fine. Have it your way."

  "Running away isn't fair to your mom, you know?"

  "What do you know about it? You don't even have a mom!"

  "I know about moms."

  "You don't know my mom."

  "I know she's the one who works the hardest. Your dad doesn't do anything."

  "Yes, he does!" I knew she was right, but I wasn't going to let her be the expert on my family. Besides, if she was right ... then we were wrong to be going up the Line. And even though the Line scared the yell out of me, I didn't want to go back either. Not after coming this far.

  "I know that you're really hurting her."

  "You don't know anything. You don't live with us."

  She tapped her head. "I bet I know more about you and your family than you do."

  "Oh, yeah—?"

  "Yeah." She went blank for a moment, then came back and said, "Your mom and dad are divorced. Your dad filed for bankruptcy six weeks ago. Then he applied for an offworld emigration permit for himself and you and your brothers. His debts were paid off by a private debting company, conditional against a bid he has on file for indentured-service with the Sierra Colony." She went blank and came back again. "Your older brother applied to UCLA under a re-channeling contract, but it wasn't accepted. Your little brother takes medicine to keep him from wetting his bed, but it doesn't always work. And you—" She stopped.

  "Go ahead—" I could feel my anger rising at this invasion of privacy, but I still had to hear
what she knew.

  "Your school record has a note in it that says that you're antisocial and you need emotional therapy." She looked at me with a smug superior expression. "Lots of flow-through kids need help." And then she added, "It's normal for poor kids." Like that excused it.

  I stared at her, astonished. I'd never met any kid so ... spoiled. It was as if an enormous gulf had just opened up between us that could never be bridged again. I could feel my face getting redder and redder—and she just smiled at me like an arsenic-flavored princess.

  I couldn't think of anything to say, so I just blurted, "You're a goddamned nasty little bitch." Then I left as quickly as I could.

  ELEVATOR CLUB

  When I got back to the cabin, all I wanted to do was think about the stuff that J'mee had said, but Stinky insisted on showing me all the tricks he'd taught his monkey. Stupid things—like crotch-grabbing and booger-flicking and pretending to fart and vomit and all the other stuff that little kids think is funny. I guess if I'd been in the mood, I might have thought it was funny, but I wasn't in the mood and I thought it was stupid and annoying. And when I said so, Stinky just looked up at me and said, "You sound like a grownup," which was probably the nastiest thing of all he could have said. If this was what it was like to be a grownup, permanently angry, perhaps I should just open a window and jump out now.

  Instead, I turned on the television.

  Maybe I didn't really want to think about it at all. What J'mee had said was worse than nasty. It was true.

  I flung myself into a chair and flipped through the channels, looking at the views from all the different observatories all up and down the Line, but not really seeing any of them. There were also telescopes mounted in the bottom of the car that you could control yourself to look at anything you wanted, so I was playing with the view from one of those for a while, looking straight down the cable. At full magnification, I could see the next car, 250 miles below, very clearly. It was racing up toward us at incredible speed, but never gaining.

  The views of the Earth were also pretty spectacular. We were high enough now that I could see El Paso from the air. I tried to spot our tube-town, only it was off toward the side, not quite around the curve of the planet, but far enough to make the angle tricky, and I couldn't be sure which one it was anyway. They all looked alike from here, and the atmosphere made everything fuzzy and twinkly, even with digital correction. I did spot the meteor crater again. That was easier. You tell the telescope what to look for and it just slides across the landscape to the target. From here, the Barringer crater looked like a big dimple in the ground. It was even farther away than El Paso and even farther around the curvature of the Earth, but it was big enough to be clear despite any atmospheric interference.

  Finally, Dad looked up from the papers he was working on and said, "All right, Chigger, what is it?"

  "Nothing," I said.

  "No, it is not nothing. The way you're clicking through channels—"

  "I hate being poor," I said.

  "We're not poor."

  "Then why did you file for bankruptcy?"

  He was silent for a beat. "How did you find that out?"

  "It doesn't matter. I found out."

  "Your mother, right?"

  I didn't want to tell him about J'mee and everything she'd said—he'd probably just get mad at me, even though I hadn't done anything. J'mee was wrong about us anyway. I didn't need help. I was fine. If people would just leave me alone. Once we got to Geosynchronous, this whole adventure would be over anyway and we'd all go home—except Dad, so it didn't matter, did it? And I really didn't need to have another one of those "sympathetic conversations"—not now, not ever, and certainly not with Dad. So instead I just said what I was feeling. "Screw the moon. This is another one of your good ideas that didn't happen."

  "Chigger—"

  "Dad, why couldn't you just take us to Disneyland and leave us alone? I don't want any more of your good intentions—"

  The argument was just getting warmed up when Weird walked in, looking weirder than usual. Even for Weird. He looked flushed and upset and scared, but he also looked excited about something—kind of like the time he got off the roller coaster and discovered he'd crapped his pants. He looked at both of us, then retreated hastily to the bathroom without saying a word.

  Dad looked at me—looked at the bathroom—then looked back at me. "We'll talk about this later." He went and knocked softly on the bathroom door. "Douglas? Are you all right?"

  The reply came back muffled. "Yes. No."

  "Do you want to talk about it, Douglas?"

  The bathroom door opened and Douglas stepped back into the cabin. He looked from Dad to me, then back to Dad again, decided it didn't matter, gulped, and nodded. He couldn't even talk. He managed to blurt, "I just joined the Elevator Club."

  Elevator Club—?! Huh? I wondered who the unlucky girl was.

  Stinky was already demanding—"What's the Elevator Club? I wanna join too!"

  I stared at Douglas in amazement—suddenly realizing that my big brother had crossed a line, and even though he was still my big brother, he was finally and irrevocably a grownup too. He finally had the secret handshake. Bobby and I were still children. I turned to Bobby and said very calmly, "You have to be eighteen to join. It's like a driver's license. I can't join either."

  Dad gave me a surprised and appreciative glance. "Thank you, Charles," he said. He patted Douglas on the shoulder. "You want to talk privately?" Douglas nodded and Dad steered him back into the bathroom and shut the door behind them. I thought I heard Douglas stifle a sob, but I couldn't be sure.

  After they were gone, Stinky looked at me. "Well, what kind of a club is it—?"

  "It's a secret. You have to be eighteen."

  "Well, what do they do that's so secret?"

  "That's the secret."

  "But that's not fair!"

  I shrugged. "You're finally starting to get it, Bobby. Nothing is fair. Grownups make the rules—and they make them for grownups, not for kids. And that's the way things are."

  "When I'm a grownup, I'm not gonna be like that."

  "Oh, yes you will. So will I."

  "No, I won't—"

  "Yeah, you will, and I'll tell you why: because when you're a grownup, you'll have waited all your life for your chance to make your own rules, and you aren't going to give it up when you get it. Nobody does."

  "It's still not fair."

  "Yes, it is," I said, and all of a sudden, I could see Dad and Douglas's point of view a lot clearer than I could see Bobby's. I wondered if that grownup thing was starting to happen to me. It's that thing that Dad is always talking about. Personal responsibility. Was this what it felt like? I said a bad word.

  "Umm," said Bobby. "I'm gonna tell."

  "Go ahead. I don't care. Maybe I'll even tell Dad myself."

  Dad and Douglas were in the bathroom for a long time, and when they came out, neither of them looked like anything had been settled—but they were smiling, so at least I knew they were talking to each other again, and that was something.

  But it still didn't solve anything.

  SEÑOR

  " Señor Dingillian?"

  Dad turned around to see who had called his name. We all did. At first, none of us recognized him—he was as shaven as we were—but then Dad said, "Señor Hidalgo, how are you?" and I recognized him as the fat man from the train. He strode over and pumped Dad's hand enthusiastically, as if they were old friends. "You have become quite famous, no?"

  Dad looked worried, but Señor Hidalgo reassured him quickly. "Oh, please, sir, have no worries. I don't think anyone else knows who you are. I only found out by accident myself. And even if anyone else on the car is aware of your ... ah, circumstance, I wouldn't fear. Here, come sit with me—" He indicated a booth in the corner.

  Dad tried to beg off, but Señor Hidalgo insisted, and he had a firm grip on Dad's arm. "Señor Hidalgo—"

  "Doctor Hidalgo," he corrected. "Docto
r of Political Science."

  "Since when is politics a science?" Weird asked.

  Hidalgo laughed. "I've often wondered the same thing myself. Here, you sit next to me, muchacho. Roberto, correct? No? Bobby, si. And you are Charles, yes? And of course, this handsome young man, so tall and skinny, must be Douglas. You have fine sons, Señor Dingillian. I know of your work, of course. You didn't know you were world famous, did you? But the set of recordings you did of ancient Inca music was quite wonderful. I always meant to write you and tell you, but I never found the time. Tell me, do you still work with the Columbia Jazz Quartet? The Coltrane Suite remains one of my favorite recordings. Let me buy you dinner. I want to talk with you, if you don't mind."

  Huh—? I wanted to ask Dad about that last part, but there wasn't time. Dad shrugged off Señor Doctor Hidalgo's inquiries with noncommittal answers, but I could see him mentally counting his pennies. Despite the wad of cash he was carrying, he had to be worried about expenses. He accepted with a nod and dropped into a chair, but not before turning to the rest of us and cautioning us not to eat like pigs, we were guests.

  "Don't be silly, Señor Dingillian. You are my guests. Order anything you like. I'm not paying for it anyway. I will charge it to, let me see ... " He pawed through a fistful of credit cards. "Ah, here we are. These people owe me many favors. And I owe them nothing. They shall pay for your dinner tonight." In explanation, he added, "I have many sponsors. Politics costs money—especially when you are on the side of the poor. The rich can buy as many politicians as they want; the poor have only the leftovers and the castoffs." He laughed, as if this were funny. "Nevertheless, do let me recommend the ceviche. Or the conch. The fish farms are quite good on the Line. Don't look so surprised, young Charles. Do you think that all that water just sits and waits. No, the Line engineers put it to work. Everything works—or it gets tossed over the side. No, no, that's a joke, don't mind me. I have been sampling the excellent wines. No, the Line does not produce its own wine yet, but the vineyards have been designed, and someday they will be built, have no fear. Have you ever had fresh lobster? I'll bet you haven't. Let me recommend the lobster as an entree. Someone has to eat it, son—the more those arthropods travel, the more expensive they get; so eat it now while my sponsors can still afford it. And you, Douglas—?"