Worlds Apart w-2

by Joe Haldeman

  “Marsha? Say hello to Healer.”

  She looked up, her eyes slightly crossed, the pupils very small. Lips parted and wet. “Healer. Squealerdealer. Where’s the wagon, dragon?” Her head lolled forward. “Fraggendragon.” A string of drool dropped from her open mouth. She caught it on the second try and played with it.

  “This is the second day. She woke up with it yesterday. How long?”

  “A week, maybe two. There’s nothing I can do for her.”

  “I know.”

  Jeff shook his head. There had been a short note with the bottles. The death was some sort of virus that was kept in check by a number of factors, the most important apparently being the level of GH in the blood. When the virus began to thrive it reproduced very rapidly, its toxins concentrating in the brain and spinal column. The frontal lobes went first, which caused the “oracular” stage of the disease, but eventually the entire nervous system degenerated. The note said not to waste antibody on anyone who had developed symptoms, because, at best, they would live on as mindless cripples.

  “Let’s go into the living room,” Jeff said. “I have some news.”

  They sat down at the low table. “Can anybody over-hear us?”

  “They’re all out.”

  “Listen…you are not going to get the death. Neither is anybody else in the family. Marsha is the last one.” Tad just looked at him.

  “With the radio, I got in contact with a civil defense computer in Washington.” Jeff didn’t know how Tad felt about the Worlds, and didn’t want to risk the truth. “It told me where I could find a supply of an antibody, a medicine to prevent the death.”

  “Can you…” He looked toward the porch.

  “No. It would only make her die more slowly.”

  “How come, why hasn’t anybody ever heard about this?”

  “They came up with it too late. All the old people were dead or dying, and there was no way to distribute it. No mass communication, to even tell people about it.”

  “Wait, now,” Tad said. “You’re not going to tell people.”

  “I might tell some people like you, nonbelievers, so they can plan ahead. Otherwise, I’ll say it’s for something else, typhoid.”

  Tad leaned back on his elbows. “I see. If I live a couple more years, people will start to wonder.”

  “Even your own family. If I were you I’d stash some supplies out in the woods, then fake the death. Wander off during the night; a lot of people do it. Go someplace and start over.”

  “Hard to leave.”

  “Your decision. I’ve got enough medicine for more than twenty thousand people, so over the next few years I should be able to get almost everyone in the area. Sooner or later people will have to accept the fact that the death was only a disease, and that people aren’t getting it any more. But it may be hard on the first people who live into the mid-twenties. Going against Charlie’s Will.”

  He nodded slowly. “What I could do, I could wander off like you say, wait a few years, and come back. Say I went a little crazy but it cleared up.”

  “That might work.” Jeff pulled over his saddlebags and took out the hypo. “Here, I’ll get you first Rest of the family at dinner.”

  The two men spent the rest of the afternoon trying to fix the auxiliary pump outdoors, but it turned out that a plastic washer was broken, and they didn’t have anything to replace it. Jeff took the pieces and said he would try to find one.

  He felt a little out of place, being the only person with clothes on, but he didn’t want to burn. He enjoyed watching the family work and play, strange contrast to the last bloody time he was with them. The two-headed baby had died, and its mother seemed relieved. Jommy was playing catch with the younger children; they threw the ball slowly so he could manage with one hand. The two boys with typhoid had recovered enough to do light chores.

  “Who takes over after you leave?” Jeff said softly, while they were reassembling the broken pump.

  “Guess it’ll be Mary Sue. She’s seventeen.”

  “Not too bright, though.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that. Downright stupid, actually.” He leaned into the wrench with savage force, then tugged back on it. “Hell. We’ll just be takin’ it apart again…why not you?”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t you take over. The family’d accept you, and you know as much as anybody, and you can look up whatever you don’t know.”

  “I’ve got to get the vaccine out. Have to keep moving.”

  “I don’t see why. Half the people you give it to’d kill you just for the hell of it, if they weren’t afraid. You don’t owe them nothing.”

  “Yeah, but you’ve got to take a long view of it. What’s going to happen to me when I’m really old? If things don’t change. I might have another fifty years left. Maybe a hundred, if we get things going the way they were before the war.”

  “How old are you, anyhow.”

  Jeff hesitated. “Thirty-five.”

  “Wonder if you’re older than Big Mickey, down at Disney World.”

  “He looks a little younger. But he can’t remember when he was born; I talked to him once.”

  “You know, I went to see my great-great-grandfather once. He was 120.1 don’t know if I’d ever want to be that old. He could hardly get around.” He finished tightening the last bolt and stood up. “It really changes your whole way of looking at things. I could live another hundred years too.” He shook his head and whistled.

  Jeff stayed at the farm overnight, working out tentative plans with Tad, and then for three weeks pedaled around Hillsborough County, giving “typhoid” inoculations, ending up back at Plant City. The sun was about an hour from setting as he locked bis bicycle and pulled the wagon down the sidewalk to the hospital entrance.

  Someone had tried to batter in the unbreakable glass doors. They were almost opaque with overlapping white shatter-stars, and a shotgun or scattergun blast had punched a neat round hole in the middle of one.

  Inside, a tile mosaic wall had been defaced with a smeared lopsided cross topped by a C. It smelled recent.

  He rushed upstairs, knowing what he would find. The hunters had not believed his story about the pedal-powered radio in St. Petersburg. They had found the radio room and taken apart every piece of equipment, evidently with a crowbar. Wiring ripped out and cast aside. Circuit boards scattered over the floor, crushed.

  Jeff righted a chair and sat for a long time, thinking. Until dark he sat, considering various things he might do to the boys, but most of them involved wasting ammunition and putting himself in some danger. He forced himself to think practically.

  He ought to go back to Forest-in-Need. Put a wellarmed family between himself and this kind of madness.

  Forget the plan he and Tad had made, forget the antibody; let them have their short furious lives and Charlie’s gift.

  But to be completely realistic, he was probably safer moving on, protected by his Healer pose. If Tad’s family gets attacked every couple of months, and a couple of people die in every attack, how long could he expect to survive? Marianne could work out the probabilities for him.

  That was a factor. If he stayed with the family he would never talk to Marianne again. If he went on the road with the medicine, he might find another working radio. There was a family down by Bealsville that had mules and had offered to trade for his bicycle. A mule could carry a lot of medicine.

  And if he stayed here for another year or two, people might wonder why the grownups he treated never got the death. Logic was a rare commodity in Plant City nowadays, but it would only take one person making the connection.

  It would be good to go farther south, with winter coming on. The days were fairly warm, but last year there’d been two nights of frost. Whatever was happening to his joints didn’t like cold. He would wake up almost immobilized with pain. It was warmer down in the Keys.

  Year Six

  1

  O’Hara found Room 6392, hesitated, and kn
ocked firmly. The door slid open. It was a small room with nothing but a table, two chairs, and a cot. A woman stared at her from the other side of the table. She was an older woman, in her sixties, face a web of worried lines, chin resting on interlaced fingers, no expression in her tired eyes.

  “Come in, O’Hara. Sit down.” She did; the door closed behind her. “Aren’t you happy with your job?”

  “May I ask who you are?”

  “I’m on the Board, of course. I can’t tell you my name.”

  “We’ve met once before. You administered the preferment and aptitude tests to my class, ninth form.”

  She smiled slightly. “Thirteen years ago. You have a remarkable memory for faces. Aren’t you happy with your job?”

  O’Hara settled back in her chair. “I haven’t made any great effort to keep that secret. No, I’m not particularly happy. Is that surprising?”

  “Why aren’t you happy?”

  “It’s not a job for a nontechnical person. It took months for me to gain the confidence of the people whose work I coordinate. Some of them still see me as an interloper.”

  “Would you care to name them?”

  “No. I don’t think they’re wrong.”

  “Yet you haven’t filed for a transfer.”

  “I assumed the Board had a good reason for giving me the assignment.”

  “The Board can be in error. Weren’t you trying to second-guess us?”

  “In a way. I’ve read my profile, of course. It looked like a test.”

  “It was. And you were doing quite well, until yesterday.” She opened a drawer and took out a piece of paper. “This is a request from Coordinator Berrigan’s office, that you be transferred to the Janus start-up program. Did you have anything to do with this?”

  O’Hara closed her eyes and took a deep breath. “On the contrary. One of my husbands suggested it several months ago. I refused because I thought the Board would interpret it as manipulation. I mentioned it to Dr. Berrigan, who is a friend, and she agreed.”

  “That the Board would react negatively?”

  “That’s right. I was going to wait until after this year’s evaluations, and then write up a detailed request.”

  “To be transferred to Janus.”

  O’Hara shook her head slightly. “Just for a position more appropriate to my talents. I expected that the Janus Project would be filled up by then.” She leaned forward and looked at the piece of paper. “Was this request made by my husband?”

  “Not directly; the program that selected you was written by someone else. But both your husbands were consulted as a matter of course.” She sat back and folded her arms over her chest. “Please understand that I personally don’t disbelieve you. But only two other people were chosen from the Policy track, for a project employing over seven hundred. Given the…unique assets that you possess, it wouldn’t be difficult to arrange things so that the program would have to choose you as one of the three.”

  “It sounds as if you should be interviewing my husbands, or whoever wrote the program. Not me.”

  “It may be done. That’s up to the Engineering Board. Right now I have an unpleasant task…” She reached into the drawer and brought out a hypodermic gun and a jar of swabs. “Would you volunteer to be interviewed under the influence of a strong hypnotic drug? You may refuse.”

  “Sure I can.” She rubbed her palms on her thighs. “I don’t have anything to hide. Over there?”

  “Yes. Lie down and roll up your sleeve.” Sharp smell of alcohol when she opened the jar.

  O’Hara lay down on the cot, tense. “I’ve heard of this. But I thought you had to do something really drastic.”

  “Not at all. It’s a standard procedure. Just close your eyes now, it won’t hurt.”

  INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

  Q: How do you feel now?

  A: All right. Sleepy.

  Q: Do you remember when your husband John first mentioned the Janus Project?

  A: Both of my husbands have been talking about it for years. They were both involved in the initial planning.

  Q: I mean, when did he first mention your working on the start-up program?

  A: That would have been sometime last September. We were walking up in the half-gee area, he’d had a month of zerogee and needed exercise, and I guess I was complaining about the Stat group. He thought he could get me transferred.

  Q: But you told him not to do it.

  A: It wouldn’t look good.

  Q: Tell me about John.

  A: He’s funny.

  Q: Amusing? Or peculiar.

  A: Both. He’s always joking, he carries a little notebook to write down the last lines of jokes he hears, but mostly it’s just his outlook. Everything is funny to him. He’s an awful tease.

  Q: He’s crippled.

  A: Yes. He was born with bad curvature of the spine. His parents were too poor to get him corrective surgery, and now he’s too old for it. That’s why he came to New New, to work in the low-gee labs. Gravity hurts him.

  Q: Did you ask him to get you assigned to the Janus Project?

  A: No. He asked me and I said no.

  Q: Do you think he went ahead and did it against your wishes?

  A: I’m going to ask. But that wouldn’t be like him.

  Q: Is John a good lover?

  A: You mean sex?

  Q: That’s right.

  A: (Pause) He’s not very imaginative. Neither is Dan. But they’re both groundhogs, you know.

  Q: Why did you marry groundhogs?

  A: I don’t know. John says I’m a throwback. (Laughs.) Says I only love him because his knuckles drag on the ground.

  Q: Do you love them?

  A: I married them.

  Q: That’s not an answer. (No response.) Do you love Jeff Hawkings?

  A: I think so, if he’s still alive. He wasn’t there the past two months, I’m afraid for him.

  Q: Who do you love more, John or Dan?

  A: I guess… usually John. He’s easier to get along with.

  Q: Who do you love more, John or Jeff?

  A: Jeff, I think.

  Q: But you’ll never see him again.

  A: Maybe not.

  Q: Do you think of Jeff while you make love with your husbands?

  A: Oh yes.

  Q: Of the four men you have formed long associations with, three have been physically unusual: a cripple and two giants. Have you ever thought about why that should be?

  A: Yes I have.

  Q: Why, do you think?

  A: It may be that I want their gratitude. With Charlie Devon, I think maybe it was… I was young and wanted to prove something. Jeff and John, I don’t know. It may be that I see myself as a freak. Or it may have been coincidence.

  Q: You delayed menarche as long as physically possible. Didn’t you like boys?

  A: (Emphatically) No! Especially the Scanlan boys.

  Q: Have you ever had sex with a woman?

  A: That must be in your records.

  Q: Did you like it better?

  A: No, it was just for Charlie Devon’s sake. He wanted me to try everything.

  Q: Is Charlie still alive?

  A: No. He was on Devon’s World.

  Q: Do you miss him?

  A: No.

  Q: Did Dan have you assigned to the Janus Project?

  A: I don’t know. It would surprise me, he’s very regulation.

  Q: But they both have said they want you to work on the project.

  A: Of course they do.

  Q: Would one or both of them work to have you reassigned without first discussing it with you?A: I don’t think so. (Pause) Unless… they’re intelligent men. They might have foreseen this interview.

  Q: Would you like to have the Janus assignment?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Explain why.

  A: It would be more interesting and more important, and I might be better liked.

  Q: You don’t think your coworkers like you?

  A:
They think a mathematician should be in charge of the section. So do I.

  Q: You don’t think your work is important.

  A: Maybe the industrial safety part is, and maybe an occasional surprise epidemiological correlation. Most of it is trivial. I suppose someone has to do it.

  Q: But not someone of your talents.

  A: That’s right.

  Q: Will you tell me which of your subordinates disapprove of your being in charge?

  A: No.

  Q: Because?

  A: I wouldn’t want them to be punished. They’re right, anyhow.

  Q: Very well. If the Janus Project goes through, will you volunteer? Will you go?

  A: No.

  Q: Why not?

  A: I want to go back to Earth… I want to see Jeff again.

  Q: You know that’s very unlikely.

  A: I know.

  Q: All right. Now I want you to take a deep breath, yes, like that, and exhale completely. Again: in… out. Now I’m going to count up to ten, and I want you to keep breathing this way as I count. When I reach ten, you will awaken refreshed, and very pleased with yourself for having cooperated with me. And after you awaken you will remember three things. One, your coworkers admire you. Two, your work is quite important, even when its importance is not immediately obvious. Three, if you find out that either of your husbands has done something wrong, getting you assigned to the Janus Project, you will want to contact the Board and explain it to them. Will you remember these things?

  A: Yes.

  Q: Very good. (Interviewer counts to ten.)

  When O’Hara cleaned out her desk at Public Health she found there were only two things that actually belonged to her, a pen she’d gotten used to and a piece of plastic, silly gift from Jeff. It was opaque from six years of nervous rubbing; you would have to hold it up to a strong light to see the shamrock inside.

  She didn’t have her own office at the Janus Project, just a carrel at the library. She had no underlings and, in a sense, no boss; her job title was Demographics Coordinator. The job, Grade 16, had no formal description: she was to define and evolve her own function in terms of what seemed necessary to the project, as the project grew.

  All the past year’s grinding away at applied mathematics turned out to be useful now. She had to study thousands of pages of preliminary reports that the project had already generated. Most of it came from committees of engineers, and the math was more clear than what passed for prose.