“Stop it!” Rayna Kingman begged the tall, muscular man at her side as she knuckled away tears of laughter and opened the door to her apartment. “Don’t be mean! I only did it once. Besides, I warned you that I wasn’t a particularly good tennis player.”
“Yes,” Keith Daniels responded, “but you didn’t tell me you attack your doubles partners from the rear!” He bent forward, screwed his tanned face into an expression of mock agony and stumbled around the room, groaning and clutching first at his back, then at his head, then at his rump.
“I guess your 37-year-old bones just can’t take it anymore!” she taunted.
He straightened abruptly and turned toward Rayna, his deep-blue eyes tracing the contours of her slender body from head to toe and back again. “C’m’ere, Teach,” he said, as he took her in his arms.
Their lips met in a kiss that melted away all pretense.
Rayna’s long, thin fingers played with the curly locks of light-brown hair at the base of his neck. “I love you, Mr. Attorney,” she told him. “I don’t think I could have gotten through the last few days without you.”
It was a magnificent spring day, and the morning’s tennis match had helped divert her thoughts, but she couldn’t put it off forever. Eventually, she was going to have to open that box.
“How about getting a little light in here?” Keith suggested.
The gloom inside the apartment reminded Rayna once again of the awful hole Al Frederick’s sudden death had left in her life. Wordlessly, she moved to the wall and activated an electronic circuit to countermand the “opaque” instruction she had last given to the sliding glass door that separated her living room from a small patio outside.
“The permastore’s still on the coffee table, I see,” Keith noted, jerking his head toward the environmentally sealed container.
“Right where I left it last week.”
“Yeah,” Rayna nodded numbly. “I haven’t touched it. I was going to open it half a dozen times, but I—I....”
He walked over to where she stood, still facing the wall, and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “It’s been pretty rough on you, hasn’t it, babe? Especially yesterday—going through all his things like that.”
Rayna grunted affirmatively and turned to face him.
“That was the first time I’d been inside Al’s place since it happened. Even with most of his stuff sold off, it was eerie. There were just enough of his personal things to remind me of where I was. But it seemed so...so...so empty. I guess I still find it hard to believe he’s dead.”
Keith nodded. “Yeah, well, you have to expect that sort of thing when somebody dies unexpectedly. It’s not like he’d been sick, so that you could have prepared yourself. Give yourself a chance.”
“But it’s already been more than a month,” she said, exasperated with herself. At 34, she should be able to handle these things better. “Intellectually, I know Al’s dead, but until yesterday, I still had the crazy sense that he was in his apartment, just tending to whatever it is he’s been tending to all these years and waiting for me to visit him again.” She shook her head slowly from side to side and laughed bitterly. “Funny, isn’t it, this inclination to see the world as if it’s a piece of theater. I’m the star of this particular little drama, and I expect all the supporting players—including Al—to be there when I need them.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, Keith,” she said, offering a weak smile.
He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s all right, Ray. We went through almost everything in his apartment yesterday. I’ll just transfer the stuff you wanted to keep to a Trans-Mat storage vault in your name. You can get it anytime you want to.”
Rayna gestured toward the permastore container. “Too bad you couldn’t do the same thing with that.”
Keith pointed to a label on the box:
To be delivered in person upon my death to
MS. RAYNA KINGMAN
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
“Didn’t have much choice. Executors have an obligation to carry out the terms of a will, not argue with them. Even when the executor’s a lawyer...and special friend of the heir.”
He winked at Rayna. “Maybe your friend Al just didn’t like Trans-Mat. Even these days, I guess there are still people who don’t much care for the idea of sending things from one place to another by dismantling them molecule by molecule and then putting them back together.”
Rayna shook her head. “Al was fascinated by Trans-Mat. He wouldn’t use it to travel himself, but....” Suddenly, she chuckled.
“Ah, the joyful sound of laughter once more pierces the oppressive bubble of sadness,” Keith said in pontifical tones. “Mind letting me in on the joke?”
Rayna smiled and shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. Just...well, I was remembering my sixteenth birthday. Al wanted to surprise me with a birthday cake, only he was out of town. So he sent the cake by Trans-Mat. It was the first time I ever saw Trans-Mat in operation.”
“Oh?”
Rayna nodded as the happy memory lifted her spirits. “Our building’s system was installed just few days before that. I remember standing there with my parents and staring at the receiving pod while the shimmer solidified into the shape of a cake. I was absolutely fascinated. Oh, and there was a note, too. It said, ‘These are special good-luck candles. Blow them out, and all your wishes will come true.’”
“So you blew out the candles and won your heart’s desire. Right?”
Rayna laughed. “Not exactly. We didn’t see any candles. We joked about it and figured we would give Al a hard time about getting old and forgetful. He wasn’t even 70 yet—just middle aged, really—but he still thought about ages and life spans in old 20th-century terms.” She hesitated a beat before continuing. “Anyway, when we cut into the cake, we found out what really happened. There was a malfunction in the memory banks. You know. The ones that record the molecular configuration. So the candles materialized inside the cake!”
“Jeez,” Keith breathed with exaggerated solemnity. “That’s enough to make any man’s red blood run cold. Cakes and candles are one thing, but I’d sure hate to have parts of me rematerializing in the wrong places!”
They looked at each other silently for a moment. Then a lascivious smile brightened Keith’s face like a shaft of light spilling into a dark alley. Rayna laughed and pushed at him playfully.
They both knew that a fail-safe mechanism now prevented anything more serious than a shut-down if the Trans-Mat system didn’t pass a pre-transmission power, circuitry and programming check, but Keith rarely passed up the chance for a little good-natured teasing.
Rayna cocked an eyebrow and reflected for a moment. “I suppose the cake foul-up might have left its mark on Al. As I said, he never liked to travel by Trans-Mat himself.”
“Maybe he thought the things in that package were just too important to take a chance,” Keith suggested.
The corners of Rayna’s mouth drooped as she followed Keith’s glance in the direction of the permastore box. “Guess I might as well get this over with,” she sighed. With quiet resignation, she walked to the sofa and sat down on the edge of the cushion, back straight, eyes fixed on the coffee table before her. Moments ticked by.
Keith dropped onto the sofa next to her and waited. “Well?” he said, his tone suddenly harsh and impatient. “You going to open that thing, or are you going to stare at it all day?”
Rayna pressed her lips together and looked at him coldly. She knew her reaction to Al’s death was hard on Keith. He was the type who prided himself on being in total control of his emotions, and he expected the same of others. Sometimes, though, she wondered if that veneer of control wasn’t just his way ignoring things he didn’t want to see—the emotional equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. It was his warm, gentle side that she’d fallen in love with, but every once in awhile....
“Look Rayna,” Keith said uneasily, “I know you were close. Maybe the old guy left you something special in that permastore—something to remember him by.” He ran a hand lovingly along her bare forearm. “Why don’t we go through it together?”
She brushed back a recalcitrant lock of the short, dark hair that framed her fair-skinned face. Pursing her lips, she glanced downward, nodded her head firmly and reached for the box.
“How old was he, anyway?” Keith asked as he handed Rayna his pocket valence-shifter to unseal the bond of the permastore box. “Must have been pushing 80.”
“More than that,” Rayna said as she fingered the valence-shifter distractedly. “He turned 88 on Jan. 30. Eighty-eight years old....”
Her voice trailed off as she continued to toy with the small, rectangular object in her hand. “He was an unusual man, Keith. A caring man. It was as if he personally felt the pain of every hardship, every injustice, every evil he ever heard about. It got especially intense around his birthday.”
“Strange way to celebrate a birthday,” Keith muttered.
Rayna raised her eyebrows and nodded. “I always thought so, too. But that’s how he was. Some kind of personal ghosts seemed to drive him, to make him feel it was up to him to set things right in the world, but around his birthday, it all seemed to overwhelm him, and he’d get depressed.”
Rayna inhaled deeply, then returned her attention to the box. She pressed a switch on the valence-shifter and ran it across the top of the permastore container. Suddenly, electrons that had been sharing the outermost shells of two different atoms retreated to independent paths around separate nuclei, thereby breaking the covalent bond that had sealed the container.
“You must’ve known him a long time,” Keith said.
“Hmmm. It’s funny. I don’t think I remember ever not knowing him. He was always at our family get-togethers. Holidays, birthdays—that sort of thing. Used to be engaged to my Aunt Vickie. You remember. My Dad’s older sister.”
“Sure,” Keith said. “The one who died last year. I remember going to the funeral with you. You introduced me to Al Frederick there. It was a few days after that when he called and asked me to be executor of his will. I was surprised, but—”
“The family scuttlebutt is that Al and Aunt Vickie lived together for awhile,” Rayna said. “Never married each other, though. Nobody ever talks about why.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, Aunt Vickie married Uncle Ted, and Al stayed a bachelor. I always had the feeling that they still loved each other, but....”
Rayna glanced away and began fidgeting with the valence-shifter again. After a moment, she turned back toward Keith. “I’m not sure just how it worked out that way, but Al was like another member of the family.”
Keith cleared his throat, patted the smooth fabric of the rust-colored sofa, and then sniffed the still apartment air. “Kind of stuffy in here,” he said. “How about if I open the patio door?”
Rayna nodded and returned her attention to the permastore box. Standing now, she pulled back the lid and began to shuffle the contents about.
“What in the world is this?” she asked as she dug both hands down toward the bottom of the box. “It looks like....”
“Looks like some kind of scrapbook,” Keith put in, returning to Rayna’s side as the scent of jasmine drifted in on a light breeze from the open door.
“Mmmmm,” she agreed as she extricated the album from beneath several of the other items in the box. She ran her fingers over the sunrise scene that decorated the latigo leather cover. “Looks hand-made,” she observed, leafing through the pages of faded construction paper, bound together by black leather thongs.
“Careful,” Keith warned. “That paper looks pretty fragile. I’d say this thing was sitting around in the open for a long time before it was ever put in there. Otherwise, the preserving environment inside the permastore would have protected it. You never saw it before?”
Rayna shook her head, settling onto the sofa as she opened the album: “Riots Threaten 10 Cities in Wake of Roberts Assassination Attempt” announced the bold, two-line heading of the newspaper clipping pasted on the scrapbook’s first pale sheet of construction paper. Puzzled, she turned the page. A related article caused her to draw in a sharp breath.
“Look at the byline, Keith. My Aunt Vickie wrote this.”
Keith sat down next to Rayna and peered over her shoulder as she continued to turn the pages, most of which contained other news clippings.
There was a story on the first breakthrough with NGRM therapy in 1978, when scientists discovered how to stop cancer in its tracks by restoring and maintaining normal cell growth.
There was a piece on the election of Edward Brooke as the country’s first black president in 1980, detailing Brooke’s amazing political comeback from a 1978 Senate defeat. Along the way, the news story explained, Brooke had to beat back a strong primary challenge from former actor and California Gov. Ronald Reagan. The momentum of that primary success carried Brooke to victory over the Democratic nominee, a former Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter.
Leaning closer, Keith read the Brooke story. “Ronald Reagan almost got the Republican nomination in 1980? My God, you mean he might really have been President?”
Rayna grunted and continued to focus her attention on the scrapbook. It was an odd collection of clippings, covering some of the biggest turning points of the last 50 years, and yet curiously omitting others. Although there were some printouts of CompuNews reports, these more recent stories represented only a small percentage of those in the album.
One page, about halfway through the scrapbook, was different. Mounted on the faded yellow sheet of construction paper was not a clipping but a handwritten letter, addressed to Al Frederick and signed by Rayna’s aunt. Rayna couldn’t quite make out the date on the smudged blue stationery, but she guessed it to be sometime in the 1980s.
“I’ll always treasure the memory of what we once had,” the letter said in neatly formed script. “In that sense, I’ll always love you. But the time for us as a couple is past. I’m married to Ted now, and that’s the way it has to stay. All I can offer you is my everlasting friendship. If you can be satisfied with that, I wholeheartedly invite you to join us at the party.”
Rayna sucked in a deep breath and blew the air out with just the trace of a whistle. Then she looked at the second item on the page, a two-line, undated death notice for someone named Ariana Naylor, clipped from an unidentified newspaper. There was no explanation, but Al had scrawled out a cryptic comment: “Too bad the miracle worker can’t keep his own house in order!”
Rayna scratched her head in confusion.
“Know what we have here?” Keith said, peeking at the clippings on the earlier pages as Rayna held the scrapbook on her lap. “This is 50 years worth of history.”
Rayna nodded. “Maybe that’s why Al left it for me. He knew I like to share authentic pieces of history with my students. Makes the past seem more real to them.”
Keith shrugged in the special way that had so irritated her when they first met three years ago in a UCLA post-graduate course. Egotistical Southern California beach-party type, she’d quickly concluded. Yet, despite herself, she was drawn to him, and that made her dislike him all the more. Only seven months after the demise of a marriage that should have worked but somehow didn’t, she wanted no new complications in her life—especially not with over-age beach boys!
Then they were assigned to work on a class project together, and she learned there was far more to Keith Daniels than good looks and a powerful physical presence.
She glanced at him, a glow of tenderness spreading through her. They were very different, she knew. She was quiet, sedentary, introspective and cautious; he was bursting with energy, athletic, more outward-looking than inward, and quick to try new things. She sought her destiny by searching within herself. He sought his by leaping enthusiastically from experience to experience, as if driven by a mortal fear that he might miss something.
At 37, Keith had earned academic degrees in law, economics and physics; been married and divorced; and had four live-in affairs lasting less than a year each. That their relationship had lasted more than two years was something of a milestone. Maybe what held them together was the appeal of opposites. She didn’t know, and right now, she didn’t much care.
“Ray?” Keith said, looking at her quizzically.
“I’m okay, Keith,” she said, giving his hand a gentle squeeze. She put the scrapbook aside and pulled the box closer to where she now perched on the edge of the sofa cushion. “Let’s see what else is in here.”
“That looks like a 1970s-style audio cassette recorder,” Keith said as Rayna removed a black, rectangular piece of equipment from which dangled an old-fashioned electric cord. “Got a bunch of cassettes in there, too, I see. I just hope good ol’ Al remembered to include a fiber-optic adapter. Otherwise, none of this will do you much good.... Ah,” he said, picking out the adapter and placing it on top of the recorder, “here it is....
“What do you have there?” he asked after a moment’s pause. Rayna was inspecting an envelope bearing her name, inscribed in a shaky hand.
“Maybe there’s some sort of explanation in here,” she said. “That’s Al’s handwriting.”
She opened the envelope in silence. The letter’s salutation and first paragraph were written out in an unsteady longhand, but the rest had been printed using a voice-activated Dictawriter. Rayna was mildly surprised. Al’s romantic soul always demanded the touch of a human hand for personal messages. His handwriting was never very legible, however, and it had grown worse in the past year or so. Rayna was grateful that he had switched to the Dictawriter at last.
“Dear Rayna,” she began reading aloud. “I can’t leave this world without telling you how much I care about you and begging your forgiveness. I never meant to hurt Vickie or your mother or you. But I had to do what I did. Please understand. Maybe these tapes will help explain.”
Rayna paused, her face twisted into a puzzled expression.
“What did he do to you and your mother and your aunt?” Keith asked.
“I don’t know. Oh—well, in the case of Aunt Vickie, it might have something to do with their breaking up. But as far as my mother and I are concerned....” She finished the sentence with a shrug, then returned her attention to the letter.
“I miss Vickie so much,” she read. “I always loved her, you know. All these years. It was hard, seeing her married to another man. I think I could have handled it if she’d been happy, but we both know she wasn’t. When she died last year, it tore me apart. I could have helped her when she started to choke on that piece of meat. I could have saved her if I’d been there. But I wasn’t there, and Ted had gone off in one of his huffs after an argument.” Rayna paused again, her mouth suddenly dry.
“This year would have been our 50th wedding anniversary. Did you know that? We never did set a specific date, but we were going to be married in 1971. I keep thinking I’d do things differently if I could live those years over again, but I’m not really sure it’s true. At the time, it didn’t seem as if I had many choices. I saw it as a question of love versus duty. Though maybe it was really love versus power. I’ll let other people analyze my motives. That’s a lot easier to do when you don’t have all the facts, of course. Complexity is—well, too complex. It doesn’t fit neatly into tidy theories.
“Anyway, instead of celebrating a wedding anniversary, I find myself commemorating the anniversary of Vickie’s death. I feel disconnected from the world. Except for you.”
Lowering the letter to the table before her, Rayna stared straight ahead as she tried to fight off the lump forming in her throat.
“What is it, Ray?” Keith asked. “Is this getting to you?”
Rayna nodded slowly. “I guess so. Damn! I promised myself I wouldn’t let this happen.”
Keith stroked her arm soothingly. “Happens to the best of us sometimes,” he said.
She sat pensively for a moment, then picked up the letter. But her unfocused eyes gazed past the paper to memories of long talks and shared feelings—of all the things that had made up a unique friendship.
“There was something very special about Al,” she said quietly. “He always made me feel good—about myself, my life, even about the whole cockeyed world. Whenever I was down, I knew that if I just talked to Al, everything would be all right. Even if we didn’t talk about anything in particular. God! I’m going to miss him!”
Keith fidgeted in the ensuing silence, his eyes darting around the room nervously. Finally, he put his arms around Rayna and kissed her gently on the forehead.
“How about if I read it?” he suggested.
Rayna nodded appreciatively and handed him the letter. She settled back on the couch, absently hugging herself as she stared blankly in the direction of a window-sized holographic seascape on the wall across the room.
“In some ways, you remind me of the way I was many years ago,” Keith read. “I used to have big ideas—vague dreams of a wonderful world, dreams most people told me to forget. Back then, most people figured you had to do so much just to survive that there was no point in worrying about larger issues. Sure, there was poverty, hunger, war, repression . But you weren’t supposed to worry about that. It’s not that people were cruel—well, not most of them, anyway. They just considered it foolish to dream about things as they could be when you still had to cope with life just as it was.
“Dreams were out of fashion, you see. But no dreams meant no hope, and no hope meant despair. With despair, things just got worse and worse.” Keith paused briefly to rub the back of his neck. “That’s how the world was 50 years ago. But my dreams were stubborn. They hung on. They drove me. They became the central motivating force of my life. And in the process, I lost Vickie.
“You’re a dreamer, too. You may not realize it yet, but I recognize the symptoms. You’re a dreamer. That can be a strength, but it can be a danger, too. Don’t make my mistakes, Princess. Learn from them.
“The tapes in this box add up to a journal of sorts, beginning around 1971. You may find a lot of it hard to believe. I find it hard to believe myself. But please, listen to all the tapes before you draw any conclusions. Then you can decide what to make of it.
“In any case, I hope you won’t judge me too harshly. I loved Vickie Kingman dearly, and I love you. If I had a single wish that could survive my death, it would be for you to be all you’re capable of being and, most of all, for you to be happy.
“Goodbye. Al.”
Keith lowered the letter, a puzzled expression on his face. Rayna glanced at him, then looked away, fixing her moist eyes once more on the holopainting across the room.
“You know, honey,” Keith said cautiously, “this letter sounds almost like a suicide note.”
“No!” Rayna exploded, surprising herself with the intensity of her response. “He wouldn’t kill himself!”
She took a moment to calm herself, then frowned and shook her head uncertainly, eyes downcast. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe, in a way, he did. They were never able to tell me the exact cause of death. It seems as if he just...stopped living.”
A soft, rhythmic buzz from Rayna’s CompuNews/telefax system interrupted her thoughts and began calling insistently for attention. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “Here we go again.”
“What’s the matter?” asked Keith.
Rayna wrinkled her nose in disgust. “I guess I’ve just had it with bad news lately. The bulletins seem so much more negative the last few weeks.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “Like the other day when that guy went berserk over in the Valley and started a fight with somebody over priority for using a Trans-Mat booth. Or that incident at the hospital downtown when they almost refused to admit an emergency patient because he couldn’t find his MediNet card.” She shook her head sadly. “First Al dies, and now everybody seems to be going nuts.”
“I think you’ve been reading too many news bulletins,” Keith said. “I keep telling you that you don’t need 24-hour world-watch service. Local daily coverage and holovision news should be enough current events for any normal person.”
Rayna smiled. This argument was familiar ground. “Come on, Keith. You know how I feel about that. World-watch is very useful to me as a teacher. You may be right about the bulletins, though. At least I can take the system off alert status.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Look, it’s probably just my mood. Nothing seems quite the same since Al died.”
Keith studied her for a moment as the alarm continued to sound. “Well, we might as well take a look,” he said, walking to the nook where the CompuNews terminal and telefax receiver stood.
“Hmmmph,” he snorted as he concentrated on the screen.
“What is it?” Rayna tried unsuccessfully to maneuver her way around Keith in order to get a clear view of the screen, but her 5-foot, 4-inch frame was no match for his much bigger body.
“No big deal. Some Middle East problem,” he said.
“The Middle East? You can’t be serious. There hasn’t been any real trouble there since the Six-Day War in 1967. Just a few rumbles around 1970 or ’71.”
“See for yourself,” he said, stepping aside.
The word “URGENT” flashed on and off in the upper left corner of the screen as Rayna read the story’s lead paragraph:
WHAT BEGAN AS A MILD DISAGREEMENT OVER A SITE NOW THREATENS PLANS FOR A UNITED NATIONS CELEBRATION COMMEMORATING THE 50TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE WORLD BODY’S FIRST MAJOR PEACE-KEEPING SUCCESS—THE ESTABLISHMENT OF PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST.
Rayna pressed the “Acknowledge” key on the terminal console to shut off the alert buzzer, then pressed another key that instructed the computer to display the remainder of the story.
THE DISPUTE—BETWEEN ISRAELI U.N. AMBASSADOR MOSHE BEN-ARI AND AMBASSADOR MUHAMMAD BAWAZIER OF THE PAN-ARAB LEAGUE—GREW SO BITTER THAT IT APPARENTLY PREVENTED THE UNITED NATIONS COMMITTEE ON WHICH BOTH MEN SERVE FROM AGREEING ON ANY SITE AT ALL.
OLD—AND PRESUMABLY LONG-HEALED—INTERNATIONAL WOUNDS WERE REOPENED AS BEN-ARI AND BAWAZIER LOUDLY ARGUED THEIR POINTS BEFORE THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY. BEN ARI WANTED THE CELEBRATION TO TAKE PLACE IN JERUSALEM, WHICH WAS RECOGNIZED AS THE ISRAELI CAPITAL AS PART OF THE HISTORIC AGREEMENT THAT RETURNED CAPTURED ARAB LANDS TO THEIR FORMER OWNERS IN 1971. BAWAZIER, HOWEVER, CLAIMED THAT THE HONOR OF HOSTING THE CELEBRATION SHOULD GO TO ONE OF THE ARAB COUNTRIES.
ONLY THE SECRETARY-GENERAL’S INSISTENT GAVEL, SUPPORTED BY OTHER DELEGATES WITH COOLER HEADS, WAS ABLE TO PREVENT THE DISPUTE FROM ESCALATING OUT OF CONTROL. EVEN THEN, THE HEATED EXCHANGE TRANSFORMED WHAT HAD BEEN BILLED AS A ROUTINE COMMITTEE REPORT ON PLANS FOR THE PEACE CELEBRATION. SOME DELEGATES CLAIMED THE TWO AMBASSADORS WOULD HAVE COME TO BLOWS IF THEY HAD BEEN PHYSICALLY CLOSER TO ONE ANOTHER.
Rayna stopped reading and shook her head sadly. “Well, I guess you can add another one to my list.”
“They’ll work it out,” said Keith. “They always do.”
Rayna wasn’t so certain, but Keith insisted. “Come on, now, honey. You’re making too much of this. I mean, all they’re really talking about here is some fancy international dinner where a bunch of dignitaries get stuck eating indigestible food and listening to a lot of boring speeches.”
Rayna cocked her head to one side and raised her eyebrows. “I guess you’re right, Keith, only....”
“Only what?”
She shook her head doubtfully. “Only I...I have this bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. It’s not just the Mideast thing. There’s more to it.” She hesitated, not quite sure what to say next. “Something seems very wrong.”