Worlds

30. 1,156 Leagues Under the Sea

The transatlantic tunnel is older than the U.S. system by some twenty years: slower, bumpier, noisier. It takes four hours to get from New York to Dover, and you learn not to let your tongue get between your teeth. I took the seat next to Jeff, but we gave up trying to talk after a few minutes. I was never so glad for hangover pills.

The train had a newspaper machine; I splurged on a complete (five-dollar) New York Times. Four hours was not enough time to read it all, even skipping sports.

Yesterday, while I was walking around in a numb haze with Benny, stocks worth ten billion dollars changed hands on Wall Street. Twenty people died in crimes of violence. The residents of Gramercy Park defeated a local referendum that would limit the size of personal pets. The Emir of Qatar and his entourage were scheduled to arrive on a state visit, coming by sea in a yacht that comprised half of the emirate’s navy. Last-minute Christmas shoppers “thronged” the city (it was crowded enough unthronged; the population of Manhattan tripled every workday with commuters from all over the country). The “Entertainment” section listed 480 Stars in 48 different categories, ranked according to Gallup’s daily poll. There was a birthday party for Major Tobias Klass, who at 142 was the oldest living veteran of the Vietnam war. Thirteen pages of referenda to be voted on in various localities. Advertisements covered exactly half of each page, and they were interesting, sometimes for their subtlety. They sponsored the only comic strips in the paper.

There was an interview with a broker who commuted daily between London and New York. She left her London residence at 8:45, caught the 9:00 tube at Dover, got into New York at 8:00, worked until 5:00, caught the 6:00 to Dover, which arrived at 3:00 a.m., allowing her five and a half solitary hours in London before starting over. She said she slept better on the tube than anywhere else, and it was cheaper than maintaining a separate residence in New York, appropriate to her social status. She couldn’t find a decent flat for forty thousand a month?

The “Space” section had no mention of the upcoming referendum in New New. Maybe that had been covered in yesterday’s edition. No editorials, either, which seemed strange. The Times was the most Worlds-aware paper in the city, maybe in the country. They did note that there was a face-to-face meeting between New New’s Coordinators and the Church Council of Devon’s World, the first such meeting in over a decade.

Every establishment on Broadway had a display ad in the “Classified” section. They were marvels of euphemism and double entendre. The individual “personals” were interesting, too: will psychoanalyze your cat, trade boxing gloves & equipment for books, seek male or female for Legendre triune, must be under twenty-five and broad-minded; secrets of the universe revealed, fifty dollars, satisfaction guaranteed; make big money on your phone/ stuffing envelopes/ in your spare time/and save your fellow men from themselves.

I had to admit that New York was a world more complex and exciting than all the Worlds rolled together. In the three months since I stepped out of Penn Station I hadn’t gone more than twenty kilometers in any direction, but I’d done more and had more done to me than in twenty-one years in New New. (Actually, it may have been more than twenty kilometers when Benny and I took the floater up above the city. It looked so peaceful, a medieval vision of the Heavenly City, with all of the graceful post-Worlds sky-scrapers seeming to float on the top of the cloud. What does it do to a person’s outlook to live or work surrounded by that scene?) It occurred to me that this whirlwind tour might actually be a relaxing change, if I kept the right attitude.

It didn’t start out relaxing. The Dover terminus was as big and crowded as Penn Station, with the same sort of determined mindless bustle, like a hive of frenzied insects each bent on his own mysterious assignment. We stood in a stationary knot around our luggage while the tour director went off to find somebody.

“Almost makes you homesick,” Jeff said. Depends on where home is. The population density of New New is higher than any Earth city’s, but you never see so many in one place. I’d gotten used to it in New York, and was ready for it in London, but wanted the rest of England to be slow-paced and, well, dignified.

The director came back and led us down a long slide-walk to the Bank of England, where we made credit arrangements and were issued Temporary Alien blinker cards. At least that was a touch of home; Britain had advanced beyond currency and coins.

Since our passports and luggage had been stamped and inspected aboard the train, we were free to be herded away. We went up three long escalators and stepped out into the night. (It was two in the afternoon, New York time; seven here.) It was very still, not too cold, and a light snow was falling. We filed down a dry raised sidewalk to where a bus, omnibus, was waiting. It was an eight-wheeled double-deck vehicle with a disconcerting number of dents, but brightly polished.

Dover’s famous “white cliffs” were behind us, which didn’t make much difference, since it was too dark to see anything beyond the parking-lot lights. We got aboard and drove through a couple of blocks of nondescript modern buildings, and then out into the countryside, which was probably very picturesque, but unfortunately was not visible. All we could see was a pool of light on the road and vague shadows on either side.

After a few minutes we turned into a driveway and slowly crawled up a hill. The road had a couple of centimeters of snow on it and, from the crunching sound, seemed to be only gravel underneath. A large old house sat on top of the hill, yellow light streaming out of small windows on the ground floor. It was made of stone, covered with dead ivy, and the guides said it had been used as an inn for nearly three hundred years.

Our hostess, a florid fat woman, met us at the door and silently counted the people as they filed in. We were given a packet of information and a bed number; women to the right, men to the left.

Our dormitory was a huge room with, I think, the highest ceilings I’d ever seen. Bunk beds along one wall, two footlockers across from each bed, linen folded neatly on each footlocker. It was cold and drafty.

I was first one into the john, and made a delightful discovery: a bathtub! It was in a little closet separate from the toilets, with a sign-up sheet on the door. There was nobody signed up for the next half-hour (only four women in the room before we invaded), so I put down my name and went back to the footlocker for a towel.

I locked the closet door and slid the blinker card into the paybox, two pounds for thirty minutes. About twenty dollars. I would have paid ten times that. The faucet coughed and began to splash hot water into the plastic tub. Slightly brown water, but it made a great cloud of steam. I undressed and stood in the water while the tub filled, loving the moist heat rising. When it was deep enough I sat into the delicious sting and leaned back. The water shut off and I lay there like a dormant reptile for half an hour. I’d brought the travel packet in but couldn’t get up the motivation to reach for it. The tub started to drain and somebody knocked.

She started the tub while I was dressing—close quarters—and it turned out we were the same sort of outlanders, in a sense, as she’d come to New York from a farm in Kansas, and was also used to baths rather than showers.

Something was nagging at me. It would catch up in a few hours.

There were only a few people in the dormitory room. Most of them were on the back porch, smoking and talking. I would have joined them, for the talk, but didn’t want to go outside with wet hair. The woman on the bunk next to mine asked whether I played chess; we hauled a foot-locker between the beds and set up a board. She was good and I hadn’t played in years; the end game resembled Pearl Harbor.

Her name was Violet Brooks and I liked the apologetic way she enveloped my troops and destroyed them. She was an undergraduate, a senior from Nevada. I was curious about that state but she didn’t want to talk too much about it. Said it wasn’t as bad as most people said, but she was never going back. No taste for anarchy. Not many jobs for English majors, either.

We went into the “common” room, which was warmer and had tea and coffee, and leafed through our information packets. Violet had been to England once before, as a girl, when her mother had brought her along on a business trip. But she had only seen London, and claimed a week was scarcely enough to hit a few high points. We had eight days for the whole country.

Jeff came in with a number of other men, all covered with snow and slightly redolent of brandy. They stood around the stove that was keeping the urns warm, talking loudly and joking. The hostess stuck her head in and gave them a dour look.

They had been engaged in snow sculpture. Violet and I stepped outside for a few seconds to view their handiwork. It looked like a cross between a fat woman and a mountain of snow. They called it “the Venus of Dover.”

Violet and I, it turned out, were the only students along who were not citizens of the United States. So we were free to take a side trip into the Supreme Socialist Union, which would not admit Americans. We decided to look into it—China, at least, was a fascinating prospect—though I suspected it would be too expensive. (Violet had plenty of money; her mother ran a bordello.) No need to decide until February.

They had delayed dinner until ten, for our transatlantic stomachs, which made it only a couple of hours early. Bangers and mash, an authentic English meal, bland sausage with mashed potatoes. I didn’t mind it, but Jeff said he finally understood why the British had roamed the seas to forge an Empire: they were in search of a decent meal.

A few warm beers afterward, and some excited talk about going into London tomorrow, and I went off to bed.

Lying on the hard mattress, under a heavy quilt, I started sweating although I wasn’t particularly hot. Then dizziness and a sudden feeling of rootless horror—and I realized I’d forgotten to take the pill. The Klonexine from lunch had worn off.

I got the bottle from my bag and rushed into the john and washed down a pill. Then I sat in one of the stalls, sweating, teeth chattering, waiting for it to take effect.

I felt like crying out, or just crying, but managed to keep my jaws shut. And think, after a fashion.

I may have made a dreadful mistake. Lulled by the drug. I wasn’t escaping anything, going east, just postponing trouble. I should have gone up instead. This world was no place for anyone with access to another. I should be down at the Cape, waiting for a seat. Going back to Daniel, to peace. Leaving this desperate planet to work out its own fate.

The pill did its magic, corralling all of the norawhatzis into a safe place. I could almost talk myself back down. I had pretty well cut myself off from James and his group. Benny was resourceful. The Cape would be there when I got back. I got very sleepy. The sheet was damp and cold, but I lay very still and it warmed under me.

I dreamed a montage: Benny held down and forced to take pills, my pills. Jacob’s Ladder coming down, hitting New York. Violet looking at me with James’s glass eyes. Jeff tying me up with padded ropes, naked, rampant.