Standing on the Brink of Infinity, Looking at My Watch
When they took me out of the iron womb, I couldn’t walk. Nobody was even sympathetic. After all, I’d had nothing to do but sit around, had I? Everybody else had been working. There were a lot of people worse off than me, weren’t there?
Name two.
Only I still couldn’t stand up. Hurst had to carry me out of the mock-up into the jeep, and then out of the jeep into the apartment. He was a big, strong lad, and I didn’t promise to return the favor. Jenny was waiting for me at home, and Hurst disappeared discreetly.
“It’s nice to have friends,” I commented, as he disappeared.
“Him or me?” asked Jenny.
“It’s nice to have more than one friend,” I said, too tired to make meaningless discriminations.
“How d’you feel?” she asked. She really was a one for asking silly questions.
“How the hell d’you think I feel?” I sat down on the couch and massaged myself lovingly.
“You want some food?”
“Damn right. And a cigarette. And a drink. Not necessarily in that order, but all now. Then I’ll feel human enough to take a shower.”
“You don’t have to be human to wash.”
“No, but it helps. Come on, woman, move. Weeds, booze, and food, and don’t waste time.”
She gave me a cigarette and lit it for me. “No drink on premises,” she said. “Blame yourself. I told them to send some around with the food.”
“I thought you’d be only too happy to cook it with your own sweet hands,” I said.
“Housework ruins sweet hands,” she told me. “Don’t you ever watch TV?”
“Not where I was,” I told her. “Beyond even the reach of TV.”
“Next time,” she said, “it’ll be for real.”
“Glad to hear it,” I said. “But not tomorrow morning, please.”
“When do you want to go?”
“I have a choice?”
“All the choice we can give you. As soon as humanly possible, but it’s up to you to decide what’s humanly possible. You’re cleared now. It’s your party from here on.”
I was suspicious. “I don’t really have a choice, do I?” I said. “This is a line. You’re trying to get me to voluntarily take away some of your precious responsibility. You were right a while back when you said it’s easier to be the fall guy than the guy who has to push him over the edge. I’m falling. Like a sack of potatoes. I’m ready when you are, only not tomorrow morning. Please.”
She didn’t say anything for a moment or two. I guess I’d sounded a little sharp. But I’d just been in the maiden for two days, and I was sore.
Finally, she caught my eye and looked hard at me, to prepare me for the fact that what she was about to say was serious. Not that I ever thought any of it wasn’t.
“Monday,” she said.
“It’s not my birthday,” I said. “It’ll do. It’s been Monday all along, hasn’t it? I didn’t really have a choice?”
“We’d have postponed it if you’d said so.”
“No point in hanging around.”
“I don’t think waiting would do any of us any good.”
“No.”
There was a discreet knock at the door. Jenny answered it, and came back with a tray. There was steak and potatoes, but only in very small quantities. The rest was all mush. The booze was beer. I don’t like beer.
“Got to take it easy,” she said.
“So it seems,” I said. “Don’t get the choice, do I?”
She shoved the tray into my lap. I’d recovered enough by now to sit up and make use of the coffee table. It was at an awkward height, but you can’t have everything.
“Tell me,” I said, “one way and another I’ve accumulated quite a cache while I’ve been here. After the flight, I’ll be modestly well off. What can I actually do with my money?”
“Whatever you want.”
“They’ll let me off base, then.”
“Under escort, yes. I’m afraid you’ll have to put up with the company of a Major Hurst or similar for pretty much the rest of your life.”
“They won’t get bored. I suppose the idea is to drive me back into space in order to get away from them.”
“You’ll go back.”
“Do I get a choice about that?”
“Some. But you won’t have much competition in the field of starship piloting. And we will put pressure on you. But I think you’ll ride titan ten without having your arm twisted. And eleven. And . . .”
“I can count.”
“Quite so,” she said.
“I see,” I said. “When I come back, I count. I’m one of the family. I matter. My opinions have weight. I’m not just a pawn. I get promoted to queen. Or thereabouts.”
“Thereabouts,” she said.
“I always wanted to run a Project,” I said.
“All you have to do is come back,” she assured me. Promises, promises.
“I’ll tell you what I do want,” I told her. “I want a crew. I want some choice about the boys I take out with me. I want Judas Dancer and Luis Dalquier. I want Sam and I want Con.”
“You want them all out of the prison.”
“That’s right,” I said. “All of them. Bedbug, too. Will I have the weight to pull that?”
“I think so.”
“The army and the prison won’t stop me?”
“I don’t think they’ll have the weight.”
“The army gets the publicity — Hurst poses for the pretty pictures.”
“That may figure outside the perimeter fence, but inside the base — inside the Project — you’re the man that counts. Mike will back you. If Mike retires, Fred Jacobson will back you. I think it can be done.”
“I’m not fooling,” I said. “I want those men out. All of them. Including Bedbug. No matter how old they are, or in what physical shape. Even if we can’t use them as pilots and/or passengers.”
“We’ll use them,” she promised. “We’ll find a use for them.”
I hoped she wasn’t stringing me along. I really hoped that she meant what she said. I wasn’t making any threats, but I knew in my own mind that I wasn’t going anywhere near the stars if those men were still locked in their filthy dungeon. Once was to try. If it got serious, well then, I could turn my attention to the serious side of life.
“It could be worse being right than being wrong,” I said, absently intruding into the conversation another thread of thought I’d been working on.
“No,” she said. She knew what I meant. She’d thought, too. She’d been thinking for years.
“Mike Sobieski’s dream died with Lindquist,” I said. “The human race can’t have the stars. Not the way he wanted it.”
“You’re a member of the human race,” she told me.
“I wonder.”
“We’ll adopt you.”
“Because you need me. Big deal. All these years an outcast, and then, Come back, Harker — all is forgiven. I don’t even have to forgive. I don’t get the choice. It’s you that hands out the labels. Human, schizo.”
“When you pilot that ship,” said Jenny, “you’re human. You’re carrying Mike Sobieski, and you’re carrying me.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “Are you sure that come next year, or the year after, both you and Mike might not sit down and think: the road to the stars isn’t open. It’s as firmly shut as it was before FMA was ever thought of. Only madmen can go to the stars. Only our filth and our vermin. Do we really want that? Can the human race really permit the stars to be polluted as the Earth was polluted before we invented places like Block C? Do we really want the stars on those terms? Isn’t that the way it’ll be when the truth does eventually leak out? What happens when they begin to line up for their tickets to the stars and they find a notice on the ticket office saying schizoids only? Are you sure that when I come back from Proxima Centauri and I say Hello, how are you, I’ve just conquered the stars, you won’t hate me for it? Are you?”
“I’m sure,” she said.
“And how many others?”
“I don’t know.”
“Quite.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Listen to you. Like hell it doesn’t matter. You could turn around in ten years’ time to the assembled ranks of your starmen, culled from the finest asylums in the country, and you could say: Sorry, boys, the taxpayer has decided that if his little boy can’t be a spaceman he’s damned if he’ll let some punk out of a funny farm be one either. We can probably channel you into sewing mailbags and making road signs, provided that you put up with the environment provided. Otherwise, we could shoot you. How d’you feel?”
“That’s childish,” she said.
“Precisely,” I said. “That’s why it’s such a real possibility. Have you seen your local taxpayer recently?”
“Have you?”
“No. But I have seen that scientists never consider the consequences of their actions. Not the real consequences. Think of the silly bastard who invented the wheel.”
“Now you’re simply retreating into foolishness.”
I finished eating, and I put the knife and fork down very carefully.
“That’s right,” I said. “Put to flight by contemplation of the enormity of it all.”
She poured me a drink and offered it to me. I shook my head, and she sipped it herself instead.
“If I come back,” I said, “will you marry me?”
“What would that prove?” she said. “Either way?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t press for an answer, either. At that particular moment in time, it was a pretty silly question anyway.
“You might wish you were wrong,” I said. “You might.”
“Harker,” she said, “you’re a fool. I hope with all my heart that you come back. And if you come back, we win as well as you. Some of them might hate you, but since when has that been new? No matter how much they hate you, we can’t afford not to make use of you. We need the stars.”
“Don’t we all?” I said. “Don’t we all?”