CV

6

After Newland’s morning bath, Hal Winter carried him back to the hospital bed and began to work on his legs, contracting and straightening them. “Feeling okay?” he asked.

“Not too bad.”

To distract himself from the pain, Newland thought about the fax last night from Marcia Sonnabend. the public relations director of L-5, Inc., in New York. “A good many questions here,” she had written, “about the recent story in the Toronto Star, which has been picked up by wire services here and abroad. I send faxes of stories from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Examiner. At the board meeting Monday there were suggestions that this publicity is damaging to our position and that it should be counteracted soonest. Please give me your thoughts on this. John Howard of the Times, who has always been sympathetic, is willing to do a telephone interview at your earliest convenience; Time and Newsweek are also interested. If you would like to go ahead with this, please let me know so we can set up times.”

One of the stories had been headlined, L-5 GURU WAVERING IN FAITH?

The steward brought in their breakfast, oatmeal and toast for Newland, scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns and fried tomatoes for Hal. “What time is it in New York now?” Newland asked when they were finished.

“Quarter after one.”

“They’ll be out to lunch. Let’s try in a couple of hours.”

Hal carried him back to bed, and Newland sat up with a book on oceanography, not quite seeing the pages. After all, what was he going to tell her? If he gave an interview with all the old ringing declarations in it, would anybody believe them? Did he believe them himself? Newland honestly did not know. He was attracted by the simplicity of the perms, their quiet enthusiasm for Sea Venture. There was a striking difference between them and the space-colony enthusiasts: they lacked the mountain-climbing mystique, the fanaticism; they were simple small-town people whose town happened to be afloat on the Pacific.

He heard Hal talking quietly in the other room; presently he came in and handed Newland the phone. “She’s on the line.”

“Hello, Marcia? How are you?”

"Hello, Paul,” said her clear voice. “You sound as if you’re just around the corner. How’s it going?”

“Oh, all right,” said Newland. “I’ve been getting the grand tour. It’s very interesting, but I may have overdone it a little. Marcia, I’m afraid I’m just not up to any phone interviews right now.”

“I understand,” her voice said after a moment.

“Will you tell the news people that I’ll be in touch when I’m feeling stronger, say in a week or so?”

“Of course. Paul. Look, how would this be? Let me put together a statement and fax it over to you tomorrow morning. Just something to keep the wolves at bay. All right?”

“Yes, fine.”

“Okay,” she said. “Here’s Olivia, she wants to talk to you.”

Olivia Jessup was L-5’s managing director, an old friend. Her voice was scratchy and thin. “Paul, I’m sorry to hear you’re not feeling up to snuff. I won’t keep you, but I just want you to know that Bronson and a couple of the others are making a stink.”

“That’s normal,” said Newland.

“Yes, but it’s serious, Paul. Bronson is politicking to get you voted out. What he’d really like is to expel you from the organization.”

“I know,” he said.

“All right. Do what you think best, but don’t wait too long. Good-bye, dear.”

Newland gave the phone back to Hal and put his book aside, not pretending to read anymore. There was a sour taste in his mouth; he was tired of all the maneuvering, the speeches, the true things that had somehow lost their truth over the years. When had it started to go wrong?

The tickle of uneasiness had begun before he was really aware of it, maybe as long as five years ago. In the beginning they had all been starry-eyed together, a great bunch, wonderful people, brothers and sisters. And now the L-5 habitats were still drawings on paper turning yellow around the edges; what they had instead was the Manned Orbital Vehicles, MOVs, armed with laser weapons.

Maybe that was always the way it had to be. The military, first in Germany, then in the United States and the Soviet Union, had supported rocket research through the long difficult years. You had to take the money, because you couldn’t get it anywhere else. If you wanted to make spaceships, you did what they wanted and kept your eye on the ultimate goal.

An old rhyme came into his head. The rockets go up, the rockets come down. “Dot's not my department," says Werner von Braun.