Did You Ever See a Dream Walking?
Early twentieth-century song title
“MINMEI? MINMEI, WAKE UP; YOU’RE ALMOST HOME.”
She stirred a little; it was a voice she liked, she knew, and it was a message that was wonderful beyond compare. Minmei yawned charmingly against the back of one hand, trying to stretch but restrained by something. Her head was filled with the marvelous images and memories that the word “home” conjured up.
Minmei opened her eyes, recalling that the restraint was the fanliner’s seat belt. Behind her, the steady vibration of the propfan engine drove them along. “Look!” Rick said, pointing.
“Mount Fuji!” she shrilled, happy beyond words. The mountain wore a crown of snow despite the fact that it was midsummer—something that happened very rarely. Minmei took it as a good omen and a welcome home.
Rick cruised slowly past Fuji, giving Minmei a chance to look. Air traffic was being rerouted to give him an unobstructed course; he wondered again what secret deals had been struck just so Minmei could see her relatives and wondered too how soon the Macross City survivors would lose patience with their confinement.
He banked the little aircraft, heading for Yokohama. Though he was happy that Minmei would soon have the joy of reunion, he was despondent that their time alone together was nearly half over. He tried to picture her family and how they would react to their daughter’s status as SDF-1 superstar.
He trimmed the ship and shook his head. There are billions of people on this planet. Why did I have to fall in love with public property?
He took on a bit of altitude; the island chain lay beneath them like so many gemstones.
* * *
In the deepest vaults of the Alaskan base, Lisa Hayes and Henry Gloval sat at a simple, unadorned desk in the middle of a vast hearing chamber. The walls of the chamber were several dozen yards thick; though the pressures of the Earth itself were enormous down there, the room itself was as comfortable, in terms of temperature and air pressure, as any surface garden.
There was a multimedia console, perhaps ten yards away, at the base of the wall before them, and all around were display screens as big as billboards. Lisa and Gloval were still arranging documents and papers on the table, preparing to give their testimony.
Though he said nothing about it and gave no outward sign, Lisa knew that Captain Gloval was absolutely furious. He and his First Officer had been denied the courtesy of a face-to-face meeting with Earth’s governing body and had been shown, instead, to this interrogation chamber.
Lisa knew he didn’t blame her, but she couldn’t meet his eye. She knew that her own father was one of those responsible for this shameful, cowardly treatment.
Suddenly all the screens came to life. There were a half dozen extremely magnified faces glaring down Lisa and her captain. All the faces were male, middle-aged to elderly, and all but two were in military uniform.
It confirmed Gloval’s worst misgivings. Lisa had to remind herself to breathe. Military running the government? This wasn’t what we were fighting for!
Before her, on the center screen, was the towering face of her father.
“Welcome home, Captain Gloval,” said Admiral Hayes. “It’s been a long time since you reported in person.”
Gloval snapped his hand to his forehead in salute, and Lisa followed suit. Others might forget their vows, their obligations; but the one thing that sustained Gloval was the certainty that while he still lived he would never renege on his sworn word. Even if it meant rendering military courtesies to men he no longer respected.
It was a code of conduct few outsiders could have understood; a samurai maybe. Gloval had understood and willingly accepted his oath of allegiance to the new United Earth Government, back when the alternative was racial annihilation. He meant to live up to that oath just as long as he was able.
So he rendered military courtesy crisply.
“Yes, sir,” replied Henry Gloval.
The huge eyes of the projected image, as blue as Lisa’s, turned to her. “You too, Commander.”
“Yes, Admiral,” she said quietly. She gave no outward sign that her heart was breaking.
After her mother’s death, her father had been her only emotional mainstay, until Karl Riber and, later, Claudia, Captain Gloval, and a very few others. And now, Admiral Hayes didn’t even deign to break formality. An embrace and a few tears weren’t military, perhaps, but she’d hoped for them; and, to be sure, she’d come prepared with some of her own.
But instead, the screen face said, “Good. Now, why don’t you both have a seat and we’ll hear your report?”
“Yes, sir.” Lisa and Gloval cut their salutes away smartly, precise and correct. They both sat while Lisa gathered her briefing data, then she stood again. Gloval felt a sudden burn, since she would have to bear the brunt of their inquiry. But the structure of the meeting was traditional and dictated by custom: The First Officer made the presentation because the Captain was sacrosanct and not subject to cross-examination outside of a court-martial.
“We must know everything from the beginning,” said a white-haired man with a snowy handlebar moustache. He was a former political hack who had oiled his way into a direct commission in the Judge Advocate General’s office and made his rise from there. Lisa took one look at the ribbons on his tunic and knew he had never seen a single moment of combat.
She had two decorations for courage under fire as well as numerous other campaign ribbons and medals, but she bit her lip and said, “Of course, sir.”
Lisa arranged the papers in her hands and looked straight into the image of her father’s face. He didn’t look away. All around her were august visages; it was like being in an observatory with televisor screens running from floor to ceiling apex.
Lisa gazed at her father coldly.
“This report presumes that everyone present is familiar with the details of the situation up to the time of the Zentraedi’s appearance in the solar system. Supplementary reports will be made available to you.”
She glared at her father for a second, then went back to her report, happy that Gloval was at her side but ashamed of her own family. She turned instead to a commissioner whose face was displayed to her right, a man who looked like Clark Kent in those ancient Superman comics.
She cleared her throat, looked at the overbearing faces around her, and suddenly felt strong; strong as only people with simple truth and dedication to duty on their side can feel. She could stand up to any of them.
“The following are the abbreviated details of the miscalculated spacefold jump undertaken by the Super Dimensional Fortress One while under unprecedentedly intense attack from hostile alien forces and its consequent actions in returning to Terra.”
That was quite a mouthful, but Lisa took pride in how fascinated and intimidated those enormous, concave faces looked.
These were men who had used the emergency of the Zentraedi’s appearance to take control of Earth. Along the way they had evidently forgotten how terrible and overwhelming the enemy was that currently prowled the dark beyond their tiny planet.
Lisa let herself feel a little vindictive; she figured they had it coming. “At that time, the strength of the alien fleet was estimated at nearly one million ships of a size three or more times larger than our Terran Armor class,” she said with a certain relish.
And before anybody could say anything, Lisa Hayes added, as she stared her father in the eye, “That number has since increased and our best intelligence evaluations indicate the Zentraedi commitment to this war to be in excess of two and a half million ships-of-the-line.”
Nobody said anything, but there was clearly a mental echo running around the sad little rabbit hole of the United Earth rulers: TWO AND A HALF MILLION SHIPS???!
Chew on that! Lisa thought to herself as she went on to the next page, watching out of one eye as the great and the mighty of Earth squirmed in their seats.
* * *
Yokohama was picture-postcard perfect under a blue sky dotted by slender wisps of white cloud.
Minmei tugged Rick along by the hand as they headed for her parents’ restaurant. She stopped in the middle of the esplanade, looking out at the glittering ocean.
“Just smell that beautiful sea air!” She drew in a great breath of it. “Nothing smells as good as Yokohama!”
She took her hands from the guardrail, went on demi-point, pirouetted, and then did a few jetés. “It makes me want to sing, and dance, and carry on!”
Rick, trying not to feel like a secret agent but aware of his responsibility, caught her by the upper arm. “Minmei, would you please stop acting like this? Everybody’s looking at you.”
Shaking off his grip, she spun on him, putting her face up to his furiously. “Listen, I’m happy to be home, and if I feel like singing and dancing, I will! Hmmph!”
Rick was about to mention their obligation to the SDF-1 and the secrecy to which they’d both been sworn for this mission, when Minmei spied a tall, slender structure nearby.
“Look! There’s the New Yokohama Marine Tower!” she squealed, pointing down the esplanade. She took on the reserved voice of the tour guides she’d heard so often while she was growing up.
“‘When it was built, the New Marine Tower, which replaced the first, was the tallest structure in the world; over twenty-eight hundred feet high! It’s an engineering masterpiece.’”
She did another jeté. “It’s the same age as me!”
Rick’s patience was fading. He doubted that the tower had very much longer to live if its life expectancy was tied in to Minmei’s.
“It looks it,” he commented.
She thumped him hard on the chest with her fist. “Doesn’t anything impress you, Rick Hunter? I want you to like my city!”
It was another one of Minmei’s masterful emotional flip-flops: She won him over again in a single moment, as he stared into those enormous blue eyes while she tossed her head, sending ripples of light through her jet-dark hair.
Does she know she has this effect, or is it all unconscious? he wondered. He’d never dared ask the question.
She had her hand in his. “I just know you’re going to like my mother! She’s the nicest, friendliest woman in the whole world! Rick, I’m not kidding!”
She tugged him along. “Come on!”
Who am I to resist? he thought, yielding to the inevitable.
A few minutes later, they came to a torii that spanned the street, inscribed with ideographs. “Hey, this is the local Chinatown!” Rick remarked.
Minmei shook her head in dismay; how could such a brilliant pilot be so dumb about other things? “I know, silly. I’m Chinese; this is where I live. Come on; let’s go!”
She grabbed his hand again and dragged him along, under the torii and into Chinatown.
People stared at them a bit, curious about the trim young man in the circus flier’s outfit and the enchanting young woman who seemed to radiate life and exuberance. “Now, the grocery store is right over there,” Minmei was saying, “right next to the gift shop. And the bakery is still—Rick, have you ever tasted mandarin root? Oh, and I’m so glad they haven’t changed the street signs!”
The signs were in the shape of smaller torii. “You haven’t been gone that long,” he reminded her. What did she expect? Funeral bunting on every corner?
“Right,” she said, barely having heard him. “I hope my house is still the same. Just a minute now…”
He’d stopped as she slowed to a halt.
“Look!” She was pointing to a building facade covered with ideographs and intertwined symbols, gold on scarlet, with a very conspicuous dragon in the midst of it. “We’re here!”
She turned to Rick excitedly, and he found himself returning her smile in spite of himself. “It’s the Golden Dragon, our restaurant, see? Just like the White Dragon is Aunt Lena’s in Macross!”
“It’s very nice,” was all Rick could find to say.
Minmei was close to tears of joy. “I hope everybody remembers my face.”
Rick sighed. “I keep trying to tell you, you haven’t been gone that long!”
“So? Maybe I’ve changed a lot.” She struck a pose; he recognized it from her glamour photos and feared the worst.
Minmei gave a carefree laugh and went dashing into the Golden Dragon. With no alternative, Rick followed after.
“Chang! Chang!” she was shouting into the face of a startled and rather nervous-looking Chinese gentleman dressed in a white waiter’s tunic and matching Nehru hat. “D’ you recognize me? Look! Who am I?” She twirled before him.
Chang, his eyes the size of poker chips, said something in a language Rick didn’t recognize and charged off into the kitchen, crying, “Look! Come look, come look!”
He was back in a moment, dragging a brown-haired, kind-faced woman whose features bore a resemblance to Minmei’s. “Chang, why are you shoving me? What in the world—stop pushing—oh!”
“Don’t you recognize me, Mother?”
She had spied Minmei and stopped, wordless—perhaps close to cardiac arrest.
“Does that mean you do?” Minmei smiled.
“Minmei… we were sure you’d been killed!”
“No; I’m home,” she said brightly.
Minmei’s mother rushed over to throw her arms around her daughter, nearly knocking her down. “I can’t believe it! My darling little girl is home! She wasn’t taken from us!” She was racked with sobs.
“Well, I was, really,” Minmei said, pulled a little off balance by her mother’s tight embrace around her neck. “But they brought me back.”
Her mother suddenly had her at arm’s length again. “Back from where? And who’s this?”
“This is Rick Hunter, Mother. He’s the boy who saved my life.”
Minmei’s mother suddenly clasped Rick’s hand, bowing over it solemnly, again and again. “Thank you; thank you, son!”
Rick scratched his head with his free hand, not knowing what to say. Among other things, he wasn’t at all sure he liked being referred to as a “boy”—especially by the young woman he cared for so much.
“Minmei! We thought you were dead!” A thick-bodied, angry-looking man had appeared from the kitchen. He had dark eyes and hair as black as his daughter’s.
“How could you not contact us and let us know you were alive?” But even though he was scowling, her father touched her face tenderly.
Meanwhile, Rick was having some very troubling thoughts of his own. The G2 Security officers who had briefed him for this oddball mission had been very emphatic that he not discuss any details of the situation on the SDF-1; even Minmei had agreed to be circumspect about revealing any information about the vessel or its mission.
But these people behaved as if the ship had been lost with all hands even though it had been back for over twenty-four hours now.
Rick took the briefing officers’ instructions to heart, deciding to say as little as possible—and to see that Minmei did the same, though that promised to be a chore—until he had a clearer idea of just what was going on here on Earth.