Worlds

38. Storm Gathering

When I got back to the dorm there was a hand-delivered note in my box. Not from James, to my relief, but from the Worlds Club. Special meeting tonight, about Cape Town, whatever that was.

I might as well go. I’d have to be in New York tomorrow, anyhow, when Jeff got back. I did some laundry and repacked my suitcase, then went down to the Liffey to read until the meeting started. I didn’t want to be in my room.

Reading has always been an escape activity for me, whether the subject matter is light or difficult. This one was difficult but absorbing, an economic history of the United States from Vietnam to the Second Revolution. I immersed myself in it to keep from thinking, by thinking, though it should have been obvious by then that my academic career was over.

Traveling around the world, I wasn’t really aware of the extent to which relations between the Worlds and America had degenerated, and the last three days had been so full of personal terror that I wouldn’t have noticed if the Sun had started rising in the west.

There were only thirteen people at the meeting. Most of them had already moved to Cape Town, but had come back to New York to tie up loose ends. Everyone else was either down in Florida or home in the Worlds. They explained: Nine days before, the United States had put a temporary prohibition on the sale of deuterium for space flight, even at the astronomical price U.S. Steel had been getting.

Steve Rosenberg, from Mazeltov, explained it to me. “New New York found two more CC deposits on the Moon; they may be rather common. So they got a little aggressive. The Import-Export Board increased the price of satellite power. They gave the U.S. a schedule of monthly increases that would continue until the price of deuterium went back to normal. So the U.S. cut it off.”

“Which was no surprise to the Coordinators,” I said.

“I imagine not. But we have enough deuterium in storage to get everyone back, with some to spare. They’re trying to get everyone back as soon as possible, which is why Cape Town.”

I’d learned that Cape Town was a collection of tents and shanties inside the entrance to the Cape. Worlds citizens were going up in order of reservations, and they were up to May first. I could be home in a week.

But it wasn’t quite as orderly and comfortable an evacuation as had been planned. They were using only one shuttle, the high-gee one, to save fuel. People were allowed only seven kilograms of baggage, including clothes. The rest of the payload was seawater.

“Why salt water?” I asked.

“Well, there are valuable chemicals in it, and salt for food. But mainly it’s the heavy hydrogen: deuterium and tritium.

“We found out that all of the water U.S. Steel was giving us was light water’—all of the heavy hydrogen had been processed out of it. That wouldn’t normally make any difference, since it’s always been cheaper for us to buy heavy hydrogen from Earth, than to set up a plant to make our own. It’s different now. Jules Hammond pointed out last week that there’s enough deuterium and tritium in a tonne of seawater to boost forty tonnes to orbit.”

“So we’ve built a plant?”

“It’s not the sort of thing you can do overnight. But they’re in the process. In a month or so, it’s possible we’ll be able to ‘bootstrap’ water into orbit, without using any earth-made fuel.”

“Do the Lobbies know this?”

“Yes… it should make them more cooperative.”

I wasn’t so sure.

The meeting was strained. A lot of talk concerned what to take along as your seven kilograms. I resolved to go naked and barefoot, so as not to leave my clarinet behind. Actually, though, I didn’t have much beyond the clarinet and my diary. I’d fed guilty taking things that were just souvenirs. Some cigarettes for Daniel and some Guinness for John. Benny’s picture. What of Jeff’s?

When the meeting was breaking up, I mentioned that I didn’t want to go back to my dormitory room, saying it had just been painted. The only one who wasn’t going straight to the Cape was Steve Rosenberg; he offered me a couch.

When we were “alone” on the subway, he asked whether I would rather share his bed. I said I was in too complicated an emotional state for sex, and he understood. So I lay awake for some hours on his couch, mostly worrying about seeing Jeff, partly wishing I were in the next room. There’s no better sleeping pill, and Steve seemed gentle as well as pretty.